Quotes from Nancy 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.

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.

Rape does for a woman's sexual fantasy what the first martini does for her in reality: both relieve her of responsibility and guilt.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.