"Publishers were intrigued however, for it was a time in history when the world was suddenly curious about sex and women's sexuality in particular. Editors were frantically signing up any writer who could help flesh out this undiscovered continent called Woman.

"I remember vividly the first publisher who rejected My Secret Garden. When I mentioned the outline I had drawn up along with a sampling of fantasies, he salivated, pleaded for me to send them to his office. 'Women's sexual fantasies!' he juicily exclaimed, and then before the day was over, they'd been returned, double-sealed, to my apartment. What had he expected? I'll never know, but the ritual was repeated by almost every publisher in New York. Let me quickly add that women editors as well as men hated the evidence of what women's sexual fantasies actually were.

"As for the behavioral world, the dozens of psychologists and psychiatrists I interviewed informed me that I was on a dead-end street. 'Only men have sexual fantasies,' they told me. As late as June 1973, the same month My Secret Garden was published, permissive Cosmopolitan magazine printed a cover story by the eminent and equally permissive Dr. Allan Fromme, stating, 'Women do not have sexual fantasies ... The reason for this is obvious: Women haven't been brought up to enjoy sex ... women are by and large destitute of sexual fantasy.'

"Finally after three years of research, My Secret Garden was published. After publication there was a final salvo from the media accusing me of inventing the entire book, having made up all the fantasies.

"But within months it seemed that women's erotic reveries had been with us always, so much so that advertisers were using 'fantasy' as a selling tool before the year was over. It is fascinating when you think about it, how quickly women's fantasies have been incorporated into the universal understanding of women." ......(cont)