Nancy Colbert Friday (August 27, 1933 – November 5, 2017) was an American author who wrote on the topics of female sexuality and liberation.
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.
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.
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.
Fantasy isn't something you run out of.
Dreams are the expression of the unconscious while we are asleep.
Spontaneous love admits errors, hesitations and human failings. It can be tested and repaired.
If you believe in the maternal instinct and fail at mother love, you fail as a woman. It is a controlling idea that holds us in an iron grip.
When is enough enough? In envy's eyes, enough never is. Somebody else always has something we want.
No man can be really free in bed with a woman who is not.
Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.
In a baby's first months, the earliest patterns of intimacy or distrust are forever grooved into his soul.
Our culture raises us to seek success but we are not taught how to live with it.
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.
Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.
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'm sure it's why I'm such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I've always been equally fair to men.
Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society.
To say something nice about themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.