Nancy Friday > Quotes

“No man can be really free in bed with a woman who is not.”
― Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies

“It's Friday; you ain't got no job… you ain't got shit to do ”
― Friday

“Who said “ladies” don’t use words like “fuck” and “cunt,” or that one doesn’t use them around “ladies”? Maybe not when you’re having lunch with a lady, but when a lady’s fucking, she’s not having lunch.”
― Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden

“Do women dress for men or women? I’ve always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval - as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It’s disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn’t matter where it comes from.”
― Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies

“Rape does for a woman’s sexual fantasy what the first martini does for her in reality: both relieve her of responsibility and guilt.”
― Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden

“Our feelings about menstruation are the image of what it is to be a woman in this culture. While menstruation and the fear of revealing evidence of loss of body control bear possibilities of humiliation for women of which men are not aware, it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us. It is, if you enjoy being dependent on someone else.”
― Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

“When the Wicked Queen calls for Snow White’s heart, because her mir- ror has informed her that she has been outstripped in beauty, the fairy tale warns little girls, even today, that there is danger in beauty. Fairy tales carry the wisdom of the ages; that is why they last and are passed down from generation to generation. So long as the most beautiful woman got the most powerful man and men were women’s only source of power, the role of beauty was too crucial to be discussed. It is only since women have de- veloped alternative sources of economic security and identity that the taboo subject of the power of their beauty has begun to be researched and written about.”
― Nancy Friday, Women on Top

“A woman cannot give a man his sense of maleness. He can desire her, but not identify with her. At best, she can give him a negative identification: I am the opposite of her. This can be very thrilling, but still leaves him deprived of an object of positive identification. (..) other men are brought in to fill the void. They provide contact with an element the inventor, consciously or not, knows he needs to assert himself as fully male. (..) By joining in their sexual games, the woman grants absolution and permission. It isn’t so much that these men use women to get to other men as that they need the woman to help break through the guilt barrier that blocks them from their feelings about other men.”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“The image of women making love to women grips the male imagination because it expresses one of the dominant themes of male fantasy: the sexually insatiable woman. Women who masturbate, who make love to other women, (..) who not only initiate sexual action but overpower the man (..) release the man from his earliest inhibitions. He need no longer fear making his proposition, need not fear he may not perform well: The sexually enflamed woman in this myth is so close to orgasm right from the start that nothing is going to hold her back.”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“I would say that until we are independent, we cannot choose to be empathetic. The pivotal word is choice. The empathy an independent person chooses to offer is more reli- able than that of a person who lives through attachments. It is lack of inde- pendence, an addiction to connections, that makes us mean, bitchy, and less than empathetic when we fear that the connection to our best friend/husband/lover is threatened.”
― Nancy Friday

“Nancy, you know I’m not really good at this mothering business,” she says. “You’re a lovely child, the fault is not with you. But motherhood doesn’t come easily to me. So when I don’t seem like other people’s mothers, try to understand that it isn’t because I don’t love you. I do. But I’m confused myself. There are some things I know about. I’ll teach them to you. The other stuff– sex, love and all that – well, I just can’t discuss them with you because I’m not sure where they fit into my own life. We’ll try to find other people, other women who can talk to you and fill the gaps. You can’t expect me to be all the mother you need. I feel closer to your age in some ways than I do my mother’s. I don’t feel that serene, divine, earth-mother certainty that you’re supposed to that she felt. I am unsure how to raise you. But you are intelligent, and so am I. Your aunt loves you, your teachers already feel the need in you. With their help, with what I can give, we’ll see that you get the whole mother package-all the love in the world. It’s just that you can’t expect to get it all from me.”
― Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

“The primary rule is always that a mother can’t go wrong, ever, by encouraging her child after age one and a half to be as individuated and separated as possible. If she was not as good a mother before as she would like to have been, she must get over her guilty desires to overcompensate, and place herself on the side of the child’s developing”
― Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

“Freud called the first stage of life “polymorphous perverse.” At birth infants are so undifferentiated that they have the capacity to receive erotic stimulation at every aperture of the body and any area of skin: from either or both sexes; from animals, food, objects, colors, currents of air, gradations of temperature. As we grow older, become socialized, and develop identity, the satisfactions we pursue become more specific.”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“The undressed male is not presented to the little girl as a seductive figure, but as a scary one. Consequently, in the long pre-sexual years she has no chance to develop the association between a naked man and the erotic. (..) Women’s looking is not powered by the voyeur’s kind of infantile and irresistible longing. (..) In our society, female exhibitionism is a form of seduction, but male exhibitionism is a hostile act. The man who flashes his penis at a woman who has not asked to see it (..) is trying to overcome his feeling of powerlessness (..) Every day, I hear from saddened or angered men about the averted feminine eye, the hand withdrawn as if from a red-hot coal. I would like to ask women readers: How must it feel to be the gender that has a sexual organ considered so nasty that nobody, not even the woman who says she loves you, wants to look at it?”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“They find her, fuck her (..) and forget her, their friendship and feelings of masculinity somehow reinforced at the woman’s expense. (..) What these two men “really” wanted, [psychiatrists] derisively explain, is not so much contact with the woman, as feeling of greater closeness between themselves: the prostitute was used merely as a conduit to communicate emotions to one another (..) Here begins one of the most highly charged (and misunderstood) themes in male sexuality: homoerotic emotions. (..) Coming out of a lifetime of predominantly heterosexual feelings and actions, many men are bewildered, puzzled and dismayed to find themselves heated by notions of including another male in their eroticism. To such a man, the inclusion of a woman in the scene is a sovereign anxiety alleviator.”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“Forever after men sense the forbidding shadow of the primitive, preoedipal mother behind every woman to whom they are attracted. To escape this (..) they are usually attracted to women younger than they.”
― Nancy Friday, Men in Love: Men's Sexual Fantasies: The Triumph of Love Over Rage

“Voyeurism is a general term for people who get sensual satisfaction from looking, often with the knowledge, consent, and even full participation of the sexual object. (..) the eye is one of the organs of love. (..) Voyeuristic fantasies reverse the woman’s power, it passes from her to the eye of the man. By keeping himself hidden or invisible, the voyeur imposes his will on the woman. She has lost her ability to say no; has been unknowingly frozen into the position of an indulgent mother who allows the boy everything he wants. (..) Wanting to see, but afraid to look, men invent voyeuristic fantasies to heal a paradox, the conflict in themselves.”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“The Freudian fetishist is defined by the fact that his desire is not primarily for the woman. (..) fetish is a “transitional object” – helping the toddler bridge his fear and loneliness. Having this unconsciously remembered evidence of mother’s warmth and reassurance with him, he is encouraged to go forward into sexual pleasures. (..) Another fascinating aspect of fetishistic thinking is the extraordinary amount of detail connected to the object. The fetish is lovingly described, lingeringly examined.”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“Perhaps you ducked out of the competition over looks so many years ago that you can't remember. But once you did want to be seen, taken in, and loved. If you don't today, consider that it might be because you tried and lost. Lost to your brother or sister; maybe get lost in the abyss of invisibility, a parent demanding that all eyes be on her or him. Who wants to remember such pain? Perhaps, instead, you won and were hated for it. Envy can be a killer.”
― Nancy Friday, The Power of Beauty

“would be like if he were to fondle and kiss my breasts with his moustache rubbing across my nipples.”
― Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies

“The undressed male is not presented to the little girl as a seductive figure, but as a scary one. Consequently, in the long pre-sexual years she has no chance to develop the association between a naked man and the erotic. (..) Every day, I hear from saddened or angered men about the averted feminine eye, the hand withdrawn as if from a red-hot coal. (..) How must it feel to be the gender that has a sexual organ considered so nasty that nobody, not even the woman who says she loves you, wants to look at it?”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“Love is not an indivisible emotion,” says psychoanalyst Richard Robertiello. “Our job as adults is to separate out the elements in this big package we got from mother which she called love, and to take in what she did give us, and to look in the real world for those other aspects we did not get from her.”
― Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity

“(..) the psychoanalytic notion that going down on a man is symbolically similar to breastfeeding; that it is a regressive form of sexuality. (..) the notion that a woman who likes to perform fellatio is “really” in search of maternal succor (..). Perhaps a Freudian case might be made for the unconscious wish on some women’s part to drink a man’s semen in order to take into themselves the status the male is given in our society.”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“I think variety is the key to the whole thing, and the reason so many marriages go stale is that they just do the same thing over and over.”
― Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies

“Classic psychoanalytic thinking was that during the so-called latency years of six to ten, sex went to sleep so that other parts of the psyche would grow. Child psychiatrists now think sex is not so much slumbering as it has learned to hide itself more successfully from mother’s anxious eyes. Note how many men (..) cite the ages of eight and nine as the time of their first masturbation, fantasy, or sexual sensation.”
― Nancy Friday, Men In Love

“The self-centered person did not get the attention he needed as an infant and so must manufacture it for himself. He is unable or reluctant to take a realistic view of himself as just another person in the world, sometimes playing a star role, sometimes not' most often, neither star nor audience, but a human being getting on with life like any other. Self-centered people forever need to wrest attention from everyone else. They are preoccupied with their importance or lack of it, always looking in mirrors, talking about their friends and never interested in yours. Ironically, the hypochondriac, always telling us about his ulcers, his weight problem, the pimple on his nose, is self-centered too. The clue to the self-centered personality is whether he is telling you how big and marvelous he is, or how small and near death, he must always keep himself the focus of conversation, the center of attention. People often say he has a "big ego". The fact is that he has very little "ego" at all.”
― Nancy Friday, Jealousy and Envy

“I am a woman who needs to be seen. I need it in a basic way, as in to breathe, to eat. Or not to be seen, that is the lifelong preoccupation of finding myself in others' eyes, the need to be taken in so that my existence is noted.”
― Nancy Friday, The Power of Beauty

“My latest and most unusual fantasy is that I am both a woman and a man and that I am having sexual relations with myself. I imagine that I am able to give myself all the sexual satisfaction I have ever desired. It is a complicated fantasy to work out, but I think eventually it will work.”
― Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies