The Female Eunuch (12 page)
and, given the stresses that have sprung from it since her infancy, it is not surprising that puberty appears as the breaking point.
In analysing women with neurotic troubles or character disturbances, one frequently finds two conditions: (1) although in all cases the determining conflicts have arisen in early childhood, the first per- sonality changes have taken place in adolescence…(2) the onset of
these changes coincides with menstruation.
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Karen Horney follows this observation by listing the main types of disintegration to be found in these neurotic characters—sexual guilt and anxiety, the fear that they do not measure up to the femin- ine ideal, deep defensiveness, and suspicion and antagonism. In considering her own observations, Horney finds that she must deny some of her own earlier Freudian opinions, and risk heterodoxy. The traditional argument was that what puberty aggravated was the individual’s inability to accept her natural, proper sexual role, femininity miscalled womanhood. What Horney found was that femininity itself produced these aberrations, although she hardly dared say so in so many words. She closed her paper with a tentative admonition that it is better ‘to educate children in courage and en-
durance instead of filling them with fears’.
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Even so grudging a
conclusion takes the weight of guilt for inability to adapt to the feminine role from the shoulders of those who suffer most by it.
But what is the use of courage and endurance when the whole point of a woman’s existence is to be exploited by Mr Right? A girl finding that she is only valued in the dating situation for qualities which her school training sought to devalue must make a damaging decision either way. The adoption of the attributes of the sexual de- coy is painful and halting. Waiting for the telephone to ring, learning not to seem too eager, pretending that she doesn’t care, the girl ap- plies a self-discipline which can become radical. On very rare occa- sions she may find
herself in a situation where these curbs are not absolutely necessary. Those theorists who deny female sexuality ought to have seen as many pop concerts as I have, when thousands of girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen respond savagely to the stimulus of music and male exhibitionism. It is a commonplace in the music industry that the stars stuff their crutches, and that the girls wet the seat covers. The savagery and hysteria of the phenomenon is in direct relation to its rarity. The distortion is the same that the outlawed Bacchantes practised when they tore Pentheus to pieces.
There’s a little girl called Laetitia
and she writes the most amazing letters to the cardboard cutout heroes
of pubescent fantasy inviting rape by proxy a carnal correspondent
she’s the undisputed teenage queen of pop pornography.
Roger McGough, ‘S.W.A.L.K.’
The strength and concentration of the sexual desires and energies of young women has not always been denied as stoutly as it was by the Freudians. Women might learn something from the form of fantasy gratification used by seventeenth-century maidens.
Young wenches have a wanton sport which they call moulding of
cockle-bread
; viz. they get upon a Tableboard, and then gather up their knees and their coats with their hands as high as they can and then they wabble to and fro with the buttocks, as if they were kneading dough with their arses, and say the words, viz.
My dame is sick and gone to bed, And I’ll go mould my cockle bread
Up with my heels and down with my head, And this is the way to mould cockle bread.
I did imagine [Aubrey comments] nothing to have been in this but
mere Wantonesse of youth—
rigidas prurigine vulvae
. Juven. Sat. 6 (129).
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We no longer subscribe to the notion of the heated lust of the marriageable virgin, except in its etiolated form in the Lolita syn- drome; we do not believe in the green-sickness, but we do accept that puberty is a kind of natural disease of inorganic origin, which is a supposition no less arbitrary. What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.
To be sure he’s a ‘Man’, the male must see to it that
the female is clearly a ‘Woman’, the opposite of a ‘Man’, that is, the female must act like a faggot.
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, p.50
Women are contoured by their conditioning to abandon autonomy and seek guidance. It ought to be the
a priori
evidence of the synthetic nature of our concept of womanhood that it is so often expounded. The number of women who resort to the paternal guidance of the psychoanalyst is indicative of the same fact. The existence of continu- al strain in the feminine situation cannot be concealed so it must be explained; in explaining it, traditional psychology, like the Captain in Strindberg’s
The Father
, assumes as arbitrarily as he did that wo- men have been subjected to conditioning which is improper to their
biological function, which is the breeding of children and supportive work in the home.
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The woman who seeks academic guidance from
psychologists might indeed find that some of the more galling con- flicts are lessened as a result although this is a dubious conclusion. What she actually discovers is that the conditions against which she chafes are sanctioned by a massive structure of data and theory which she can only adapt to for there is no hope of shifting it. It takes another psychiatrist to explain to her the function of observer bias,
and the essential conservatism of psychology.
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As far as the woman
is concerned, psychiatry is an extraordinary confidence trick: the unsuspecting creature seeks aid because she feels unhappy, anxious and confused, and psychology persuades her to seek the cause in
herself
. The person is easier to change than the status quo which represents a higher value in the psychologists’ optimistic philosophy. If all else fails largactil, shock treatment, hypnosis and other forms of ‘therapy’ will buttress the
claim of society. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix wo- men. Actually they don’t even manage that: one Eysenck study (1952) reported that of patients treated by psychoanalysis, 44 per cent improved; of those who were treated by other methods (drugs, shock, etc.) 64 per cent improved; and of those who received no treatment at all 72 per cent improved. The subsequent reports of Barron and Leary, Bergin, Cartwright and Vogel and Truax bear out
these negative results.
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So much for the authority of psychoanalysis and the theory of personality. For the woman who accepts psychoanalytic descriptions of herself and of her problems there are specific perils far greater than the effects of personality prejudices on the other half of the community.
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother. He is not its only begetter, and subsequent structures of theory have chal- lenged as well as reinforced his system. Probably the best way to treat it is as a sort of metaphysic but usually it is revered as a science. Freud himself lamented his inability to understand women, and became progressively humbler in his pronouncements about them. The best approach to Freud’s assumptions about women is probably the one adopted by Dr Ian Suttie, that of psychoanalysing Freud
himself.
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The corner-stone of the Freudian theory of womanhood is
the masculine conviction that a woman is a castrated man. It is as- sumed that she considers herself to be thus deprived and that much of her motivation stems either from the attempt to pretend that this is not so, typical of the immature female who indulges in clitoral sexuality, or from the attempt to compensate herself for this lack by having children. Basically the argument is a tautology which cannot proceed beyond its own terms, so that it is neither demonstrable nor refutable. Ernest Jones, himself a devout Freudian, began to suspect that something was wrong with the basic hypothesis because he took the trouble to observe the sexuality of female children:
There is an unhealthy suspicion growing that men analysts have been led to adopt an unduly phallocentric view of the problems in question, the importance of the female organs being correspondingly
underestimated.
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Unfortunately, the suspicion must have remained unhealthy, for it never flourished into a new theory. Psychoanalysts went on believ- ing in the genital trauma despite evidence. Faith is not after all de- pendent upon evidence. The Freudian scheme sets out that the de- velopment of little girls parallels that of little boys with the complic- ation that the girl discovers that she has lost her penis. Her infantile sexuality is essentially masculine, with important qualifications:
As we all know
[
sic
] it is not until puberty that the sharp distinction is established between the masculine and feminine characters. From that time on, this contrast has a more decisive influence than any other on the shaping of human life. It is true that the masculine and feminine dispositions are already easily recognizable in childhood. The development of the inhibitions of sexuality (shame, disgust, pity, etc.) takes place in little girls earlier and in the face of less res- istance than boys; the tendency to sexual repression seems in general to be greater, and where the component instincts of sexuality appear, they prefer the passive form. The auto-erotic activity of the erotogenic zones is, however, the same in both sexes, and owing to its uniform- ity there is no possibility of a distinction between the two sexes such as arises after puberty. So far as the auto-erotic and masturbatory manifestations of sexuality are concerned we might lay it down that
the sexuality of the little girl is of a wholly masculine character.
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This must be nonsense. The concepts of sameness and difference are without meaning. The description of personality regulating itself in a mysterious way towards repression is likewise not informative. What comes out strongly is only that Freud believed that all libido was male libido. We learn something about his linguistics, but nothing about the reality to which they refer.
The dualism of masculine—feminine is merely the transportation into genital terms of the dualism of activity and passivity; and
activity and passivity represent unstable fusion of Eros and Death at war with each other. Thus Freud identifies masculinity with ag-
gressiveness and femininity with masochism.
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If we are to achieve a stable relationship between the forces of creation and destruction, we will have to abandon the polarity. We cannot survive in the environment of male sadism and female mas- ochism, a universe of aggressors and victims. Freud himself admitted this, but he did not link this insight with his own assumptions about the essential character of women.
Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another down to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself
with his equally immortal adversary.
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Freud wrote this long before Hiroshima and the concept of the megadeath. He did not suggest that one way Eros could recruit his forces would be by re-endowing women with their sexuality, their fealty to Eros. Instead, he and his followers elaborated the concept of female masochism as divinely ordained by biology.
The woman who resists her sexual role and ignores the message of her vaginal bleeding, that she should be bearing children, remains fixated in an infantile, aggressive state of penis envy. She may be sexually active but her response is still masculine, attached to her clitoris, and not originating in the receptive orifice, the vagina. The mature woman’s masochism stems from her desire to submit to the aggression of the appetent male, and it is only controlled by her protective narcissism which causes her to impose moral, aesthetic and physical conditions. During the necessary interval between maturity and mating she expresses her sexuality in
passive fantasies; only when impregnated is she completed, for the child signifies her lost genital and her achievement, the fantasies fade, the masochism-narcissism is replaced by energy in the protec- tion and socialization of the child. It is quite a neat description of an existing mechanism, and it has proved seductive even to female theorists, who did not dare to counterpose their subjective experience against what seemed to be objective fact. Besides, it had a moral weight. The woman who knew that all her orgasms originated in the clitoris was shamed by the imputation of immaturity and penis envy. The woman who pursued active goals was by definition ill- adapted to her real role, and probably infantile.
The essentially sound activity and the social and intellectual energy developed by the young girl who renounces her fantasies often blight her emotional life and prevent her from achieving complete femin- inity and later motherhood. That women frequently remain en- tangled in infantile forms of emotional life while their minds and activities are extremely well developed is an interesting fact that still requires explanation. It appears that the development from fantasy life into fully mature femininity is a psychologic achievement that
can be inhibited by intellectualization.
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Helene Deutsch’s priorities are obvious. If intellect impedes fem- inization, intellect must go. Her psychoanalytic theory could not supply her with an answer to her interesting academic problem, because the answer lies in the social context in which active, intelli- gent women exist. To suggest that neither the wife-to-be nor the spinster schoolteacher ought to be inventing compensatory activities because they are not involved in childbearing would upset the whole applecart. Both examples, the feminine and the pseudo-masculine, represent castrations. Even Deutsch came to reconsider her basic theory of feminine masochism, and argued feebly that it ‘cannot be related to factors inherent in the anatomical-physiological character- istics alone, but must