Men In Love Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“(..) 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

“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