Batteries Not Included

By MARGARET CARLSON

WOMEN ON TOP by Nancy Friday

Simon & Schuster

460 pages; $22

Nancy Friday's latest compilation of musings from women who responded anonymously to her sex questionnaire -- about as representative a group of people as those who call radio talk shows -- would not be quite so annoying if Friday didn't insist on patting herself on the back for her courage in pasting them together. Oh, the relief and gratitude women feel now that the Truth Can Finally Be Told by the dauntless Friday, selflessly taking on "the sex haters who will stop at nothing" to silence her.

Pity poor Friday, who has had to endure the hostility of several women friends who cannot stand her success or "bear seeing pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, in another." She has also had to give up being taken seriously by all "the enemies of sex," like the TV anchorman who sits next to her at a dinner party and hastens to tell her that he has not bought her book. "Was he afraid," she asks, "that I might think he'd purchased my book and then gone home to masturbate, he, an opinion maker who appears nightly on millions of TV screens?"

All this sacrifice in the cause of bringing us the four-page fantasy of Tara, who dreams of being restrained for an entire night by a man performing acts that produce intense pain, require plastic sheets and extra-absorbent , diapers and include an invasive medical procedure usually confined to a hospital and the intake of a gallon of ice-cold liquid. Hannah's imagination, to take another example, embraces one horse, one dog, two women, four men, one bottle and two electrical appliances.

Women's fantasies have changed, Friday maintains, since her 1973 book, My Secret Garden, in which the leitmotiv was submission. The 150 responses culled from the thousands Friday says she received this time demonstrate that there has been another sexual revolution. Women are now in charge, "on top," as the title says, in sexual posture and every other way. "I will never forget these women," vows Friday, "for they have swept me up in their enthusiasm and taught me, too. 'Take that!' they say, using their erotic muscle to seduce or subdue anyone or anything that stands in the way of orgasm."

Among the findings that have swept Friday up is that many women like sex as much as, if not more than, men. The last time the opposite was true was in the 12th grade, but Friday finds the phenomenon so surprising that she devotes an entire chapter to it. Another change Friday sees from the fantasies of Garden to those of Women on Top is the replacement of victim-of-rape fantasies with aggressive perpetrator-of-rape fantasies; but this is belied by the frequency of bondage and bestiality in the new book. Women nowadays, it seems, aren't so much dominant as mutually sadistic.

Gone are the appealing men, comfortable settings, clean sheets and room service of prefeminist fantasies. There is no intimacy, comfort or consolation from the sex these women dream of, no momentary sensation of not being alone in the universe. Instead Friday's courageous respondents' heads are filled with thoughts of prisoners, children, animals (farm, zoo and domestic) and so much equipment that batteries ought to be included.

Forget finding anything erotic here. Much of what Friday recounts is so unfathomable -- the body has neither the openings nor the agility for it -- that it is hardly titillating. The book ends up being ridiculous when it isn't repetitive and boring, having the effect of an affidavit rather than an aphrodisiac. Still, if Friday hadn't padded her pages with psychobabble about women claiming their sexual destiny, and Simon & Schuster hadn't been willing to print anything to make a buck, Women on Top would be available only by mail and would arrive in a plain brown wrapper.