Life & Wisdom Quote by Nancy Friday

Self-praise, Nancy Friday suggests, feels more obscene than nudity. The line lands because it flips our usual morality: bodies are supposed to be private, ego is supposed to be manageable. Yet in her telling, the real taboo is naming your own worth out loud. That inversion is classic Friday: she made a career out of mapping what people desire, fear, and censor, especially when it comes to women taught to be visible but not self-authorizing.

The joke has teeth. "They'd rather take their clothes off" isn’t just a saucy punchline; it’s a diagnosis of a culture that finds physical exposure legible and even marketable, while emotional or psychological self-affirmation reads as suspect. We live in a world where you can be seen, styled, rated, and consumed, but claiming competence or pride risks the social penalties of arrogance, vanity, or being "too much". Friday is pointing at how shame gets outsourced: we can perform sexuality (or at least appearance) because it comes with scripts, but we stumble when asked for an unscripted declaration of value.

Context matters: Friday wrote through decades when second-wave feminism was wrestling with the policing of women’s desire and speech. Her line reframes modesty as a control mechanism. The deeper subtext is that self-knowledge and self-regard are still treated like boundary violations. Nudity can be a costume; confidence, in her view, is the real striptease.