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The Power of Beauty
"You've got to love Nancy Friday. She successfully explored mother-daughter envy in My Mother/My Self [and] female sexual fantasy in My Secret Garden" (People magazine). Now, in The Power of Beauty, she explores a provocative subject: how looks affect our lives, and life affects our looks.
Friday traces the past 25 years of changes in women's attitudes about self-esteem, appearance and sexuality. Using her own life as a springboard, she then takes us through the Patriarchal '50s, Revolutionary '60s, Supersexual '70s, Narcissistic '80s, and Empty Package '90s as she explores the possibility of a future free from the twin obsessions of the power of beauty and the beauty of power and offers sparkling commentary on a dazzling array of subjects. From the runways of Paris to the two-parent nursery, from current movies and watershed media events to the timeless wisdom of some of literature's and psychology's most perceptive thinkers, Friday writes large, creating a canvas as complex and richly colored as her subject.
589 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1996
30 people are currently reading
732 people want to read
About the author
Nancy Friday
19 books211 followersNancy Colbert Friday was an American author who wrote on the topics of female sexuality and liberation. Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood, which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women's true inner lives, and that openness about women's hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She asserts that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for women's and men's benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and free to be accepted for who and what they are.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 19, 2021
"Despite everything we have won, women refuse to see ourselves as owning mother's witchy power, preferring instead the very effective image of little, mistreated people at the mercy of the big, bad wolf" (Friday, 512).
"I have to recant, give up up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone." - Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
"Some feminists argue that an army of powerful women is one that absolutely denies nursery angers, meaning anger at other women" (Friday, 82).
"Most women want what is best for their children. They do not belong to the political women's world, but they are nonetheless reluctant to see men taking from them a role that they and their mothers shared....[B]etween 60 and 80 percent of the women surveyed said they did not want their husbands more involved in child-rearing than they already were" (Friday, 59).
I recently listened to a seminar on sexual shame, delivered a couple of years ago by Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers, therapist and professor of sexuality and marriage and family therapy at Seattle Pacific University. Dr. Sellers proposed an interesting correlation. She observed that most of the students in one of her classes (circa 2015) described themselves as significantly sexually dysfunctional, and also that they had come of age in the heart of former Pres. George W. Bush's abstinence-only education campaign.
It's an interesting idea that merits some modification. With minor effort, one can learn that abstinence was promoted at the federal level in the U.S. from the 80's until shortly after Obama took office (in particular under Reagan and Bush, Jr., but also during Clinton's tenure). This does not discount Dr. Schermer Sellers's observation. She tuned into a real phenomenon, and naturally focused on how it impacted her students right then, but the truth is that several generations have now suffered from this country's attempts to resolve its mind-body civil war using children as the battleground.
In the last few years, I have read more than one report about how little sex Millennials have and, by extension, how many fewer diseases and unwanted pregnancies they have. The latter is meant to make the former seem like good news: "who gives a shit if they are not living full lives, at least in this arena they are not causing their elders more grief." At the same time I witness endless hand-wringing on the part of the kids. I suppose all the pent-up energy has to go somewhere, so it is mashed into breathless treatises concerning the microscopic details of consent, appropriateness, dignity, and any other facet of interpersonal relationships that comes within a mile of sexuality.
I begin to perceive in strident, far-left rhetoric around the body -- and its need to connect with other bodies -- an ironic twinning of the gnosticism of the extreme right. "What is this troublesome flesh thing, and how can I destroy it or encase it in ivory?" What strange, frigid bedfellows our culture's shrillest voices make as they cry out together to protest, arrest, and punish the unruly gestures of our bodies. Mommy would be proud.
The late Ms. Friday storms onto this effete scene in all her jaunty, self-disclosing glory to scandalize and seduce the fuck out of a miserable population that has been hypnotized into thinking they want to be imprisoned in their heads (or, as Ms. Friday would prefer to put it, in the nursery). She climbs up on top of the walls of the garden, flashing her secrets and daring others to smash the crib, grab the genitals, and follow her into power, liberty, self-possession.
This autobiography-cum-therapy session-cum sociopolitical polemic is not without its flaws. I sense, though, that Ms. Friday would not mind. Maybe she relished in the weaknesses of her work. Imperfection, bold mistakes, embracing our power and our fragility are all of a piece of living honestly...living entirely. Yes, she often repeats herself ("I eight my mother"): so be it. Yes, she relies heavily on Freud. Yes, she relies a bit too heavily on the idea of Beauty as behind everything. Yes, she is wealthy and privileged and never emerges from that cocoon to explore alternate perspectives. Yes, her primary realm of expertise is sex --
But wait: far from a weakness, this is in fact the ultimate, transgressive power of Ms. Friday's book. Whereas our society has become so skilled at thrashing every person and idea to dust, then plucking out the singular atom of imperfection that will justify total destruction of that person or idea, we still have not managed to entirely subdue the animal inside us -- the id that will always misunderstand, misexecute, or simply ignore the ego's orders.
Long ago, I attended a private, conservative, Christian college. Most of us were quite skilled at being nice, which is to say that we were often liars and hypocrites. We had all the same appetites and needs, fears and resentments as any other human. We had as many academic and physical gifts as anyone else, but I think the superior skill we all shared was our talent and passion for hiding, not just from others but from ourselves. What pretty, powdered faces we had, what lovely little suits and dresses. Our little rebellions were so earnest, so pathetic, and so ashamed.
While there, I attended a Human Sexuality class - a solitary offering by the Sociology department, which met once per week and which drew an anemic 25 students per semester out of more than 2000 (many of whom, like me, had probably received little or no sex education prior to then). My stand-out memory of this class was that all questions were posed anonymously. While well-intended for we repressed kids, this mechanism also reinforced the shame and silence surrounding our bodies (Later, a fellow student who had obviously not taken this class asked to borrow my textbook the weekend before his wedding).
We were tragically unintegrated, dis-integrated, even, since that college community urged us to think of one another as brothers and sisters, to confess masturbation as a sin, to turn in Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues as if it were a ritual sacrifice. As almost anyone could predict, none of this stopped people from engaging in sexual behavior. It just pathologized it, and it rendered insincere, since endlessly-surveilled, people's relationships to themselves and others.
Ms. Friday would have had a field day doing research at my school, because the social structure overtly manifested the all-seeing parental eye, the all-slapping parental hand. She diagnoses a lot of women's anger at men as displaced. They are, she asserts, angry at their earliest authority, mom, who taught them to distrust and dislike their bodies and who bore a tragic resemblance to themselves. Starting with "get your hands away from there," proceeding to "the curse," and onward into all sorts of envy, shame, and suppression. And all these things, says Ms. Friday, women learn to reinforce among themselves -- keeping one another in line. Do women dress up for men, or for one another? Do they mate to claim and satisfy themselves, or to appease/separate from parental authority? And so on.
Is the diagnosis simplistic? Perhaps so, but also provocative. And when Ms. Friday gets into such intimate territory as, for example, anxiety around identity or body shame or sexual desire, and the impossible mission of a male mate to help a woman love and find peace in herself, the diagnosis feels all the more compelling. Even more convincing is her interrogation of what we are denying to our children by so thoroughly demonizing men and shutting them out from the child-rearing process (and what do all these toxic messages say to boys -- the tiny, vulnerable men who see their own image on the face of today's Satan?)
In treatment for codependency, one learns that finding self-image and security in others is a fruitless pursuit, as is fixating on blaming others. One must find oneself in oneself, one's power and responsibility in oneself, and in the company of a Power even higher than mom or dad...yet our society obsesses over the Man (as an individual, as a sex, as an institution) as what will furnish everything that the Woman needs, or who, in his removal, will resolve all those grievances.
Back again to college. In those days, I became fond of observing, "If you want to know the truth about someone, watch how they conduct themselves in dating." Because with their nice face on, someone might tell you all day what a catch you are and how lucky anyone would be to date you. But would they date you? Today, I would modify my axiom slightly: "If you want to know the truth about someone, watch how they fuck." What matters to a person is displayed by the magnet behind their pelvis. The hips lead. Where do you thrust? That is what matters to you.
The religion-flavored education I received and the endlessly-multiplying "-isms" with which people are browbeaten today on state and private campuses differ only cosmetically. The syntax is the same, the goal is the same: to cut a person in two, His Dark Materials style. To divorce the body from the spirit, to kill the one and to put the other in formaldehyde (perhaps later to be added to an exhibit on the orthodoxy of the day). And the genius, the power-grabbing coup de grace behind all of it is that the powerful in our society continue to do whatever they goddamned want. All these rules? They are created, then exploited, by those at the top, to keep everyone else out of competition while they have their way in the world. Just like the clique in school. Just like mom or dad's "do as I say, not as I do."
Ms. Nancy Friday, God rest her soul and her brazen, burning mind and loins, would have had none of it. This delightful, intoxicating book follows her through her own life as she compares it to life in general. The reader is treated to her childhood self-discovery (and shame), ups and downs, sexual awakening, aging, near-literal purification by fire, and embracing the very real power not just of womanhood but of age and experienece.
Roddy Piper, and later Duke Nukem, used to say, "I'm here to kick ass and chew bubble gum." Well, Nancy Friday was here to fuck, to gestate, to give birth. It's not as catchy, I suppose. She would have found a better way to say it. But Ms. Friday performed a great service for our society, one that I desperately hope others will take up in her stead.
She helped modern men and women come back down into their bodies after a long (valuable! necessary!) season in their heads. After the marches and the court cases, she helped us disrobe, get comfortable, and get hot and heavy. She helped us drink of the rivers of life that flow from all of us. Far from crass, in her hands bodies start to feel holy again. Needful. Desirable. Long live the spirit of this fully-minded, fully-bodied nymph.
"I have to recant, give up up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone." - Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
"Some feminists argue that an army of powerful women is one that absolutely denies nursery angers, meaning anger at other women" (Friday, 82).
"Most women want what is best for their children. They do not belong to the political women's world, but they are nonetheless reluctant to see men taking from them a role that they and their mothers shared....[B]etween 60 and 80 percent of the women surveyed said they did not want their husbands more involved in child-rearing than they already were" (Friday, 59).
I recently listened to a seminar on sexual shame, delivered a couple of years ago by Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers, therapist and professor of sexuality and marriage and family therapy at Seattle Pacific University. Dr. Sellers proposed an interesting correlation. She observed that most of the students in one of her classes (circa 2015) described themselves as significantly sexually dysfunctional, and also that they had come of age in the heart of former Pres. George W. Bush's abstinence-only education campaign.
It's an interesting idea that merits some modification. With minor effort, one can learn that abstinence was promoted at the federal level in the U.S. from the 80's until shortly after Obama took office (in particular under Reagan and Bush, Jr., but also during Clinton's tenure). This does not discount Dr. Schermer Sellers's observation. She tuned into a real phenomenon, and naturally focused on how it impacted her students right then, but the truth is that several generations have now suffered from this country's attempts to resolve its mind-body civil war using children as the battleground.
In the last few years, I have read more than one report about how little sex Millennials have and, by extension, how many fewer diseases and unwanted pregnancies they have. The latter is meant to make the former seem like good news: "who gives a shit if they are not living full lives, at least in this arena they are not causing their elders more grief." At the same time I witness endless hand-wringing on the part of the kids. I suppose all the pent-up energy has to go somewhere, so it is mashed into breathless treatises concerning the microscopic details of consent, appropriateness, dignity, and any other facet of interpersonal relationships that comes within a mile of sexuality.
I begin to perceive in strident, far-left rhetoric around the body -- and its need to connect with other bodies -- an ironic twinning of the gnosticism of the extreme right. "What is this troublesome flesh thing, and how can I destroy it or encase it in ivory?" What strange, frigid bedfellows our culture's shrillest voices make as they cry out together to protest, arrest, and punish the unruly gestures of our bodies. Mommy would be proud.
The late Ms. Friday storms onto this effete scene in all her jaunty, self-disclosing glory to scandalize and seduce the fuck out of a miserable population that has been hypnotized into thinking they want to be imprisoned in their heads (or, as Ms. Friday would prefer to put it, in the nursery). She climbs up on top of the walls of the garden, flashing her secrets and daring others to smash the crib, grab the genitals, and follow her into power, liberty, self-possession.
This autobiography-cum-therapy session-cum sociopolitical polemic is not without its flaws. I sense, though, that Ms. Friday would not mind. Maybe she relished in the weaknesses of her work. Imperfection, bold mistakes, embracing our power and our fragility are all of a piece of living honestly...living entirely. Yes, she often repeats herself ("I eight my mother"): so be it. Yes, she relies heavily on Freud. Yes, she relies a bit too heavily on the idea of Beauty as behind everything. Yes, she is wealthy and privileged and never emerges from that cocoon to explore alternate perspectives. Yes, her primary realm of expertise is sex --
But wait: far from a weakness, this is in fact the ultimate, transgressive power of Ms. Friday's book. Whereas our society has become so skilled at thrashing every person and idea to dust, then plucking out the singular atom of imperfection that will justify total destruction of that person or idea, we still have not managed to entirely subdue the animal inside us -- the id that will always misunderstand, misexecute, or simply ignore the ego's orders.
Long ago, I attended a private, conservative, Christian college. Most of us were quite skilled at being nice, which is to say that we were often liars and hypocrites. We had all the same appetites and needs, fears and resentments as any other human. We had as many academic and physical gifts as anyone else, but I think the superior skill we all shared was our talent and passion for hiding, not just from others but from ourselves. What pretty, powdered faces we had, what lovely little suits and dresses. Our little rebellions were so earnest, so pathetic, and so ashamed.
While there, I attended a Human Sexuality class - a solitary offering by the Sociology department, which met once per week and which drew an anemic 25 students per semester out of more than 2000 (many of whom, like me, had probably received little or no sex education prior to then). My stand-out memory of this class was that all questions were posed anonymously. While well-intended for we repressed kids, this mechanism also reinforced the shame and silence surrounding our bodies (Later, a fellow student who had obviously not taken this class asked to borrow my textbook the weekend before his wedding).
We were tragically unintegrated, dis-integrated, even, since that college community urged us to think of one another as brothers and sisters, to confess masturbation as a sin, to turn in Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues as if it were a ritual sacrifice. As almost anyone could predict, none of this stopped people from engaging in sexual behavior. It just pathologized it, and it rendered insincere, since endlessly-surveilled, people's relationships to themselves and others.
Ms. Friday would have had a field day doing research at my school, because the social structure overtly manifested the all-seeing parental eye, the all-slapping parental hand. She diagnoses a lot of women's anger at men as displaced. They are, she asserts, angry at their earliest authority, mom, who taught them to distrust and dislike their bodies and who bore a tragic resemblance to themselves. Starting with "get your hands away from there," proceeding to "the curse," and onward into all sorts of envy, shame, and suppression. And all these things, says Ms. Friday, women learn to reinforce among themselves -- keeping one another in line. Do women dress up for men, or for one another? Do they mate to claim and satisfy themselves, or to appease/separate from parental authority? And so on.
Is the diagnosis simplistic? Perhaps so, but also provocative. And when Ms. Friday gets into such intimate territory as, for example, anxiety around identity or body shame or sexual desire, and the impossible mission of a male mate to help a woman love and find peace in herself, the diagnosis feels all the more compelling. Even more convincing is her interrogation of what we are denying to our children by so thoroughly demonizing men and shutting them out from the child-rearing process (and what do all these toxic messages say to boys -- the tiny, vulnerable men who see their own image on the face of today's Satan?)
In treatment for codependency, one learns that finding self-image and security in others is a fruitless pursuit, as is fixating on blaming others. One must find oneself in oneself, one's power and responsibility in oneself, and in the company of a Power even higher than mom or dad...yet our society obsesses over the Man (as an individual, as a sex, as an institution) as what will furnish everything that the Woman needs, or who, in his removal, will resolve all those grievances.
Back again to college. In those days, I became fond of observing, "If you want to know the truth about someone, watch how they conduct themselves in dating." Because with their nice face on, someone might tell you all day what a catch you are and how lucky anyone would be to date you. But would they date you? Today, I would modify my axiom slightly: "If you want to know the truth about someone, watch how they fuck." What matters to a person is displayed by the magnet behind their pelvis. The hips lead. Where do you thrust? That is what matters to you.
The religion-flavored education I received and the endlessly-multiplying "-isms" with which people are browbeaten today on state and private campuses differ only cosmetically. The syntax is the same, the goal is the same: to cut a person in two, His Dark Materials style. To divorce the body from the spirit, to kill the one and to put the other in formaldehyde (perhaps later to be added to an exhibit on the orthodoxy of the day). And the genius, the power-grabbing coup de grace behind all of it is that the powerful in our society continue to do whatever they goddamned want. All these rules? They are created, then exploited, by those at the top, to keep everyone else out of competition while they have their way in the world. Just like the clique in school. Just like mom or dad's "do as I say, not as I do."
Ms. Nancy Friday, God rest her soul and her brazen, burning mind and loins, would have had none of it. This delightful, intoxicating book follows her through her own life as she compares it to life in general. The reader is treated to her childhood self-discovery (and shame), ups and downs, sexual awakening, aging, near-literal purification by fire, and embracing the very real power not just of womanhood but of age and experienece.
Roddy Piper, and later Duke Nukem, used to say, "I'm here to kick ass and chew bubble gum." Well, Nancy Friday was here to fuck, to gestate, to give birth. It's not as catchy, I suppose. She would have found a better way to say it. But Ms. Friday performed a great service for our society, one that I desperately hope others will take up in her stead.
She helped modern men and women come back down into their bodies after a long (valuable! necessary!) season in their heads. After the marches and the court cases, she helped us disrobe, get comfortable, and get hot and heavy. She helped us drink of the rivers of life that flow from all of us. Far from crass, in her hands bodies start to feel holy again. Needful. Desirable. Long live the spirit of this fully-minded, fully-bodied nymph.
April 1, 2016
It was a struggle to finish this. Friday has a whiney tone throughout - her mother didn't think her beautiful, her father abandoned her, she was an awkward adolescent and so on. This informs her theory of beauty and of feminism. She largely lets men off the hook, blaming other women instead. She also sees all women as being like her - affluent, white, straight, American - which is obviously not the case. Full of personal observations which she extrapolates from as if they were scientific. Very annoying.
March 22, 2014
So disappointed. I thought this would be full of intelligent, well supported arguments about beauty and shifts in gender relations, but was met instead with a book of Friday's personal reflections and so much anecdotal evidence I couldn't finish.
November 26, 2023
- A very honest book, also a very vulnerable book. Quick background on Friday: Friday gained enormous amount of fame through her book My Secret Garden which was published in 1973. In the book, Friday published many of the women's fantasies that are deemed taboo even to this day: for instance, "being raped/savaged" was a very common theme among women's fantasies (to the immature readers here, no - women don't want to get raped. There's a difference. Women want the fantasy of being wanted, taken control of, "savaged" by people they trust. They want the ability to stop any time they want. Whereas the actual rape in the world gives women insane amount of danger - often life or death (yes, women do believe their livelihood is in danger when they are in danger of getting raped). To reverse roles: imagine this. A guy would NOT want to live in a dangerous, drug gang infilled ghetto, not knowing if he would die through a stray bullet the next hour or not. But a guy COULD want to play a video game of the same theme - called it Grand Theft Auto. The guy could pause the game whenever they want, they could engage in dangerous activities whenever they want, knowing he could abandon the whole thing since it's all just make-believe)
- The book opened with a very blunt passage elegantly phrased by Friday (rephrased by me): in essence, Friday states that all women wants to be seen (it's like oxygen for women, stated Friday). The kind of women who whines about it and believe it's "unfair" either are 1) ugly, or 2) lost her prime
- However, Friday quickly went into a very vulnerable role: she then states that 1) she was never beautiful, 2) she crave to be beautiful, and to be seen and 3) she has a huge daddy issue steam from not knowing her dad growing up
- The roles of men: traditionally, women simply don't have the luxury to pick "handsome" men because women can't make their own money. Thus, women have long deprived of their sexual fantasies (because what good is a handsome men if such men can't provide?)
- However on the other token, because men's "provider" role, many men, post retirement, lost his identity and doesn't know what to do in life (in addition, many women lost interest when a man lost his provider role)
- A fantasy of women's is a man who is a good provider, in addition is also a good communicator. Women feel sadden that post sex, men wants to fall asleep. Women on the other hand, wants feel connected emotionally
- Friday also states that the reason why women dislike male masturbation is because it also innately hinted that a man doesn't need woman to be satisfied: in essence, a man's penis is in competition with a woman
- The more financially secure a woman is, the more likely she would be aiming for a man who is beautiful (and himself financially secure)
- The end of the book, Friday believes that with time, men will gradually understand the power of beauty and will claim the power of the beauty as women did: men will dress nicer, take care of themselves better (which I think Friday is surely disappointed, considering this is what we're dealing with nowadays:
)
- The book opened with a very blunt passage elegantly phrased by Friday (rephrased by me): in essence, Friday states that all women wants to be seen (it's like oxygen for women, stated Friday). The kind of women who whines about it and believe it's "unfair" either are 1) ugly, or 2) lost her prime
- However, Friday quickly went into a very vulnerable role: she then states that 1) she was never beautiful, 2) she crave to be beautiful, and to be seen and 3) she has a huge daddy issue steam from not knowing her dad growing up
- The roles of men: traditionally, women simply don't have the luxury to pick "handsome" men because women can't make their own money. Thus, women have long deprived of their sexual fantasies (because what good is a handsome men if such men can't provide?)
- However on the other token, because men's "provider" role, many men, post retirement, lost his identity and doesn't know what to do in life (in addition, many women lost interest when a man lost his provider role)
- A fantasy of women's is a man who is a good provider, in addition is also a good communicator. Women feel sadden that post sex, men wants to fall asleep. Women on the other hand, wants feel connected emotionally
- Friday also states that the reason why women dislike male masturbation is because it also innately hinted that a man doesn't need woman to be satisfied: in essence, a man's penis is in competition with a woman
- The more financially secure a woman is, the more likely she would be aiming for a man who is beautiful (and himself financially secure)
- The end of the book, Friday believes that with time, men will gradually understand the power of beauty and will claim the power of the beauty as women did: men will dress nicer, take care of themselves better (which I think Friday is surely disappointed, considering this is what we're dealing with nowadays:
)
December 30, 2010
I just couldn't bring myself to finish this. I was looking for something more science-y, I guess, rather than Friday's personal observations... And I got tired of hearing about her mother.
October 13, 2016
Probably not for me. Free copy from Palo Alto library.
Skimmed & abandoned. In the recycle pile.
Skimmed & abandoned. In the recycle pile.
January 29, 2023
A weird mishmash of the author’s opinion on men, women, and appearance based solely on her own experience backed up by random quotes from various heavies from psychology and philosophy meant to reinforce her self-centred take on it all. To be avoided, really; just nonsense. I bailed.
December 2, 2023
I did not finish this book. This was in large part because family health issues have led to me needing to cut back as much as possible on the number of automatic withdrawals being taken out of my bank account. So, I canceled my subscription to Scribd where I was reading the book.
Also, this book seems to be primarily a philosophy/psychology book about the interaction between mothers and infants. Since I only read about a hundred pages of what seems to be a 900 + page book, there is doubtless much more in here, but the same health issues that had me canceling my subscription have led to me being impatient with anything that seems about to drag on for a long time without being that interesting. That was another reason I didn’t finish it.
It's not that the book was completely without interest. The value of eye contact between mother and child is something I have read about in other places, and that is probably worth exploring further. But this is not what I expected out of this book, so I had to let it go. I have many other books that I think I will find more interesting.
I found this book on Scribd. Scribd has changed. Only documents remain on Scribd. Books and similar items have moved to a different app called Everand.
Also, this book seems to be primarily a philosophy/psychology book about the interaction between mothers and infants. Since I only read about a hundred pages of what seems to be a 900 + page book, there is doubtless much more in here, but the same health issues that had me canceling my subscription have led to me being impatient with anything that seems about to drag on for a long time without being that interesting. That was another reason I didn’t finish it.
It's not that the book was completely without interest. The value of eye contact between mother and child is something I have read about in other places, and that is probably worth exploring further. But this is not what I expected out of this book, so I had to let it go. I have many other books that I think I will find more interesting.
I found this book on Scribd. Scribd has changed. Only documents remain on Scribd. Books and similar items have moved to a different app called Everand.
Read
June 19, 2015I love this book and the way it helped me understand certain relationships in my life. There were points where I threw this book across the room because of what it brought to light. It also helped me understand, therefore move forward. It also talks about a positive way that women can use their beauty. Great read especially for young women.
February 29, 2008
Nancy Friday explores the statistics and mostly anecdotal evidence of how male-female relationships have changed since the Feminist Agenda. It is well thought out, but like her other books relies too much on people's testimonies rather than
July 26, 2011
While I quibble with Nancy Friday's conclusions and assumptions sometimes, I love her writing and exploration of themes in other people's experiences. This one contains a lot of autobiographical reflection as well. An author with a big, sexy brain.
July 1, 2008
my first "feminism" book. quite an eye-opener.
Read
June 15, 2015Here is a proper look at competition between women and envy amongst friends. This is a really taboo and confronting topic to discuss amongst friends.
October 19, 2016
I found the stories very clearly written, and intriguing the extensive writing regarding relationship between and among any three women. It's been almost 20 years since I read this.
January 14, 2016
Nancy writes about "the ambivalence of mother love, jealousy and envy". All good stuff. Recommended.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews