What help can there be? The writer of this plea must be convinced that she wants something else. She is already too well aware that such desire she describes is not supposed to exist. When she is fifteen she will have become convinced that it doesn’t. On the other hand, this child’s problem is tailored for solution:
I am the plain Jane in our family and just long for beauty. When I go to the pictures and see the beautiful girls it makes me nearly cry to think I’m so unattractive. Can you give me any beauty hints?4
This girl’s uneasiness and shame are the result of the steady erosion of her personality. She is poised on the brink of a lifetime of camouflage and idiotic ritual, full of forebodings and failure which may be momentarily allayed while she is young and courted only to return with redoubled ferocity when that brief time is over. During the period of puberty the outward manifestations of conflict which may have existed from infancy become more conspicuous—irritability, nightmares, bed-wetting, giggling, lying, shyness, weeping, nailbiting, compulsive counting rituals, picking at sores, brooding, clumsiness, embarrassment, secretiveness.
There is no parallel in the young female groups, limited usually to the school situation, for the intense polymorphous genital activity which characterizes male puberty. The growing girl is encouraged to use her feminine charm, to be coy and alluring, while ignoring the real theatre in which such blandishments operate. Her strong desires become dissipated in passive fantasies, while their connection with sexuality is effectively underplayed or obscured. Kinsey’s statistics that ninety per cent of males masturbated while sixty-two per cent of women have done so at least once, give a very imperfect idea of the actual difference in the auto-erotic activity of boys and girls.5 In this critical period a girl is expected to begin her dealings with men, dealings based upon her attractiveness as a sexual object, dealings which can only be hampered by any consideration of her own sexual urge. In these palmy days of the permissive society this situation has given rise to some perversions which are extremely depressing. It is not uncommon for a girl seeking ‘popularity’ or approbation from boys to allow boys to take extraordinary liberties with her, while neither seeking nor deriving anything for herself. The phenomenon of girls agreeing to massage boys to orgasm, or even to let them have intercourse with them in rushed and sometimes squalid or public conditions is an unlooked for but not uncommon result of the inert force of inculcated passivity in the permissive society. Any Saturday afternoon in a provincial English town one may see groups of girls clad in the uniform of their accepted image standing about the streets feigning to ignore the groups of boys who express clear scorn for them. Their susceptibility combined with insipidity and dishonesty offers them no ground for genuine intercourse with their male contemporaries. Ironically, the conditioning for femininity which ought to increase the market value of the sex object can and does become the worst devaluation.
When a girl fails to manipulate her sexual situation, as she often does, she turns to guidance for the answer cannot come from herself. James Hemming studied the correspondence sent to a weekly periodical magazine, noticing that twice as many letters came from girls as from boys, and most of them, unlike the boys’, were concerned with problems of personal adjustment. He gives a number of reasons:
What accounts for the sex difference is not clear. It may be that boys find it easier to adjust to a society which is still predominantly controlled by men in spite of the growing emancipation of women. It may be that problems exist for the girl which the boy escapes because parents are more anxious about their adolescent daughters than about their adolescent sons. It may be that she is more disturbed by the existing confusion of values than are boys. It may be that the girl’s greater facility in expressing herself in words makes her more willing to write about personal problems. Or it may be that what Dr James Suttie called ‘our tabu on tenderness’ makes boys shy about sharing their problems in case this should make them appear ‘soft’. Whatever the reason, all research into problems of adolescence produces more problems of adjustment from girls than boys.6
All the cases that Hemming mentions are products of the root cause: the necessity for the adolescent girl to adopt the role of the eunuch. Her seeking guidance is one essential symptom of her abandonment of her autonomy. She has always been subjected to more control and supervision than her brother, and now she is required to adopt the proper feminine passivity and continue her own repression by herself. It is a delicate operation, 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 personality changes have taken place in adolescence…(2) the onset of these changes coincides with menstruation.7
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 feminine 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 endurance instead of filling them with fears’.8 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 decoy is painful and halting. Waiting for the telephone to ring, learning not to seem too eager, pretending that she doesn’t care, the girl applies a self-discipline which can become radical. On very rare occasions 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] n
othing to have been in this but mere Wantonesse of youth—rigidas prurigine vulvae. Juven. Sat. 6 (129).9
We no longer subscribe to the notion of the heated lust of the marriageable virgin, except in its etiolated form in the Lolita syndrome; 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
The Psychological Sell
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 continual 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 women have been subjected to conditioning which is improper to their biological function, which is the breeding of children and supportive work in the home.1 The woman who seeks academic guidance from psychologists might indeed find that some of the more galling conflicts 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.2 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 women. 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.3
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 challenged 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.4 The corner-stone of the Freudian theory of womanhood is the masculine conviction that a woman is a castrated man. It is assumed 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.5
Unfortunately, the suspicion must have remained unhealthy, for it never flourished into a new theory. Psychoanalysts went on believing in the genital trauma despite evidence. Faith is not after all dependent upon evidence. The Freudian scheme sets out that the development of little girls parallels that of little boys with the complication 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 resistance 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 uniformity 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.6
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 aggressiveness and femininity with masochism.7
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 masochism, 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.8
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; on
ly 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 protection 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 femininity and later motherhood. That women frequently remain entangled 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.9
Helene Deutsch’s priorities are obvious. If intellect impedes feminization, 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, intelligent 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 characteristics alone, but must be construed as importantly conditioned by the culture-complex or social organization in which the particular masochistic woman has developed’.10 But she never got far enough to see that she herself was a phenomenon of the same complex, making an important contribution to its maintenance at the expense of women.
The Female Eunuch Page 9