Nancy Friday Quotes

“After sex, men fear too much intimacy; they want to separate again. Women want to talk, to continue the merging, melting fusion into one.

Postcoital conversations keep the woman's power alive. Through unconscious severance, by falling asleep, the man regains his self.”

“All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.”

“Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.”

“Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.”

“Dreams are the expression of the unconscious while we are asleep.”

“Fantasy isn't something you run out of.”

“For instance, in group therapy, I'll have people stand up, show off, give a speech about themselves as though they've just died and have to give a eulogy.

Even with this explicit permission – even an order – to say something nice about themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.”

“I like the company of men. I've never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that.”

“I think biologically we are attracted to more than one person, but given society and our needs, monogamy works better.”

“I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together, and manners hold a family together; in a way, they hold the world together.”

“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 reliable than that of a person who lives through attachments.

It is lack of independence, an addiction to connections, that makes us mean, b*tchy, and less than empathetic when we fear that the connection to our best friend/husband/lover is threatened.”

“I'm sure it's why I'm such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I've always been equally fair to men.”

“If women really want equality, we have to wipe the slate clean. It no longer matters in the largest sense what men did to us for the last 200 or 300 years.”

“In a baby's first months, the earliest patterns of intimacy or distrust are forever grooved into his soul.”

“Oh, I know all about my mother and me, you may say. All that business with my mother was over years ago.

You don't and it wasn't.”

“Our culture raises us to seek success but we are not taught how to live with it.”

“Separation is not the end of love; it creates love.”

“Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society.”

“Spontaneous love admits errors, hesitations and human failings. It can be tested and repaired.”

“The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.”

“When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.”

“When is enough enough? In envy's eyes, enough never is. Somebody else always has something we want.”

“Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Forever after men sense the forbidding shadow of the primitive, pre-oedipal mother behind every woman to whom they are attracted. To escape this they are usually attracted to women younger than they.”

“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.”

“Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.”

“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.”

“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 mast*rbate, 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 org*sm right from the start that nothing is going to hold her back.”