Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  I can’t recall the exact chronology of my theories, but I do know that during my teenage years I read widely on the subject and at one point or another came up with various explanations, some of my own making, others personal versions patched together from ostensibly expert theories—each time hoping that this one would be the magic key which would liberate me from these damned fantasies.

  One theory explained it all as Longing for the Absent Father-Figure; that is, I yearned for his nonexistent attention and care. Since fatherly attention and care most often expressed itself as authority and discipline (classic patriarchal role), it must follow that I longed psychosexually for such discipline—i.e., for the father.

  Another theory was that the entire theme was simply one of Flesh-Loathing—fantasy punishment linked of necessity to flesh-enjoyment. Another was Self-Loathing; I must hate myself to wish such release via humiliation.1

  There was the Sexual Guilt Theory: “I’m afraid of sex and must be relieved of responsibility for sexual enjoyment by the projected forceful figure who rapes.” There was of course the Helene Deutsch-Marie Robinson theory: “It’s in my nature, it’s natural to all women to be sexual and emotional masochists—we love pain.”

  There was the Physical Reality Theory, based largely on my reading of Karen Horney’s work. Horney, grappling with the subject as an early feminist psychiatrist, rejected the Freudian notion that female sexuality perforce was masochistic, although she did note that women were socially pressured to act passively, and she suggested that various objective realities might bolster this conditioning—factors such as women’s being generally of less weight, height, and physical strength than most men, and of women’s vulnerability to greater bodily changes (sometimes painful ones): menarche, defloration, childbirth, and menopause. Horney posited, too, that masochistic fantasies in women could be tied in with feelings of repressed rage and guilt about the mother—a reverse projection in which a daughter fantasizes violence done to herself rather than to that archetypal female figure with which she so identifies and about which she is so passionately ambivalent. This theory, touching as it does on the emotional and sexual cathexis between mother and daughter, has held my interest for a long time, and its influence can be spotted in quite a few of my poems, including “Matrilineal Descent” in Monster2 and “The Network of the Imaginary Mother” in Lady of the Beasts.3

  There was even the Self-Indulgent Theory, also known as the Will-Power Approach: “This whole thing is ridiculous and overanalyzed; if I wish these fantasies to cease then I simply must stop having them and dissecting them.”

  Each of the above hypotheses was far more intricate than I have space or concern for here. But the difficulty was that none seemed satisfactory, none rang true, and none, in terms of exorcising the fantasies or making me feel comfortable with them—worked.

  In my late adolescence and early twenties I got even more sophisticated about the fantasies. For one thing I began to write about them. “The Improvisers,” a long poem written in 1962,4 was the first time I had dared, in print, to deal with the subject so graphically. During this period I encountered the work of Frantz Fanon, the black Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary who was among the first to place certain aspects of the psyche in a political context. His studies of psychoses in colonized peoples, his theory of an evoked and required identification with the colonizer, his charting of this process—all this work seemed to open up a whole new approach to analyzing my fantasies. It was necessary to “translate,” of course. Fanon’s unflinching consciousness positively cringed when it came to the subject of women. But women develop the skill of such translation (for Algerian, read female—because the author assuredly will not extend his insights in your direction) and I was already fairly accomplished at reading my invisible self into the “mankinds” of everyone from Confucius to Sartre. From this translation emerged a number of absorbing questions. Were masochistic fantasies in women, then, a sexual “psychosis” evoked and required by the patriarchal system? Was this a response—in a deliberate code of “madness”—to oppression? Was it then capable of transformation through varying the characters, i.e., the symbols of political power and powerlessness?

  I began to recast my fantasies, to play at an intentional reorganization of them. At first I did the obvious: I tried to reverse the roles of dominant and submissive—I would be the master and the faceless male figure the slave (or: teacher/student, parent/child, sultan/favorite, rapist/victim, etc.).5 No flicker of interest there, despite repeated attempts to will such a response. I felt stymied. Then I thought of lifting the scene whole-cloth into the area of homosexuality, which hitherto had played only a small part in my fantasy life; it was a piquant condiment for now and then, but not a staple, like bread. Aha. Here, with an all-woman cast, the reversal (myself as dominant character) worked! Startling. So it was considered by my subconscious permissible to dominate another woman but not a man! Did this mean that an all-female context provided me with an organic freedom of possibility, a lessening of general inhibition? That would be a positive gain. Or did it mean that basically I had contempt for my own people, that I saw women in effect as submissive inferiors, and could project myself as such onto another woman but never onto a man? A debasing insight, that.

  I tried playing the submissive role in the all-woman fantasy. Sometimes it “took,” more often not. Hmmm. I tried absenting myself entirely, reforging the scenario into one with myself as voyeur. In this approach the following were most effective, in declining order: Male-dominant/female-submissive; All-male cast, both roles; All-female cast, both roles; Female-dominant/male-submissive. Omigod, I thought. A certain pattern is beginning to emerge.

  At this point I remember I was so disheartened at what I thought was the inevitable core motivation (a deep-lodged feeling of justified inferiority to men) that I retreated into the Will-Power Approach and refused to let myself fantasize any more. This precipitously reduced my capacity for orgasm, which was, I decided, even more depressing, and as I feared myself approaching a near-frigid state, I “capitulated,” feeling like an alcoholic gone back on the bottle.

  It wasn’t until a few years ago, in my early thirties, that I attempted yet another analysis in this (pathetic? amusing? brave?) life experiment. Exorcism be damned. If the fantasy-theme seemed enjoyable to me, I was not about to punish myself with guilt for that pleasure. But I did still want to feel comfortable with it, and most of all to understand it.

  The gradually rediscovered areas of women’s history, the increasingly reexamined (and newly validated) theories on matriarchal origin, and the reconsideration of the power (and reality) of myth began to come together for me, to pattern themselves into a possible explanation of what these fantasies meant, in their political metaphor, for myself and other women. This explanation is offered here because for me it works, makes sense, feels right as no other theory has, and because it consequently has helped me to understand something (which may be the only real freedom available to sentient life after all). I hope it may be of some use to other women who, like me, have agonized over their own desire—never even knowing what that desire meant, or how it was deserving of their pride.

  II: THE TERMS

  TO CONSTRUCT a political analysis of the occurrence, let alone the frequency, of sado-masochistic fantasies among women we must venture to use the tools offered us by mytho-history. By mytho-history I mean that area of serious scholarship explored, for example, by Robert Graves in The Greek Myths and The White Goddess, and by Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God, as well as by Murray, Frazer, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, Bachofen, Briffault, Harrison, and other key anthropologists, mythographers, and historians. This necessitates leaving behind us a rigid adherence to what is claimed as historical fact; it requires an admission that what is fact one day may be discovered the next to have been bias, and what had been considered myth may actually have been fact (depending on who writes the books and runs the academies; male-dominated scholarship, we now realize, just as w
hite-dominated scholarship, has not been as value-free as one would have wished). A mytho-historical approach requires of us at one and the same time a suspension of disbelief and a dedication to truth—or else it would descend into sloppy thinking and sentimentality. It frees us to discover what we may discover, without preconceived assumptions or denials or even ideals—but then we must admit what we discover. (This is one definition of a real “scientific method.”) Last, a mytho-historical approach necessitates a sensitivity to metaphor. By that I mean a willingness to decipher the code of myth—which may, for example, have cast the thawing of the Ice Age into the biblical story of the Flood, which may have translated the building of the pyramids into the Tower of Babel, and which certainly anthropomorphized (and does, to this day) mystical ideas, emotions, and concepts into “gods.”

  It has been said, and I think correctly, that myth is the very “stuff” of poetry. It may also be the very stuff of pre-history, of that time for which we have no written record except a few cave paintings of abiding splendor, certain circular configurations of stones, some burial ornaments resonant with possibilities of interpretation, and that other record—shared, verbally bequeathed and embroidered and elaborated on, created and preserved by what Jung called the “collective unconscious”—that encoded record of events and their effects on humankind and the planet itself: myth. What was yesterday’s magic is today’s science. It seems as likely that what was seen through a glass darkly yesterday as myth forms the basis for what tomorrow will be understood as history.

  Some caveats are necessary before we approach the parable of sado-masochism in women. The first is that I am examining fantasies on the theme. This is where my own experience has lain, and it is this subject which I have discussed at length with other women. I know next to nothing about “real-life” acts of sado-masochistic sexuality. I have never sought such situations or participated in them, and what knowledge I have of them is vague and second-hand. It may be that an extension of the theory advanced here (about the fantasies themselves) would be applicable to the real acts. I honestly don’t know, nor have I given that possibility much attention. Actually, it seems irrelevant to me, since I know that I myself (and most of the women with whom I share the penchant for such fantasies) would never seek their reality. In fact, if forced to encounter that reality, we would be turned off sexually by it. Our disgust would be genuine, and we would all probably fight like hell to free ourselves from real pain and real degradation. Ah, but the fantasy which one controls oneself, in the safety and privacy of one’s own brain and body! That is another matter, and that is my concern here. Should others wish to attempt relating my theory to sado-masochistic practice itself, they are welcome. The results might be interesting. For me however, and for this essay, the world of such actual practice and that of the fantasy are totally separate.

  It should further be stated that I am not exploring what I might call emotional sado-masochistic tendencies. I mean by this the disposition of some women to become involved in relationships which are masochistic in a broad sense of the word—where the partner may never seem to dominate her and may never touch her except lovingly, but is nevertheless emotionally sadistic. As one woman put it, “Masochistic fantasies don’t turn me on erotically, but I certainly have got myself into masochistic relationships!” Such relationships, while peripherally related to the theory offered here, are still as tangential to our present concerns as are physical sado-masochistic sexual practices. The emotional quotient is definitely present in our construct—but as an erotic ingredient, not as a separated psychic expression.

  It is also necessary to explain why the parable is couched solely in heterosexual terms. I believe that, moving from the obvious to the less obvious, (1) sexism is at heart an issue between women and men, (2) heterosexuality is numerically the largest and culturally the most influential form of sexual expression in patriarchal culture, (3) this last requires of “sexual minorities” (by enforced laws or by equally enforced social pressure) an imitation of the modes of the reigning sexuality (i.e., “husband-wife” sex roles among some homosexual couples). In other words, through no fault of its own, the homosexual subculture often finds itself mirroring the dominant culture (patriarchally heterosexual), with the very standards which oppressed that homosexual subculture in the first place now being adopted by it. (See “On Women as a Colonized People,” p. 160.)

  Thus, the occurrence of sado-masochistic fantasies and/or behavior among lesbians, and the far more prevalent occurrence of both fantasies and practice among faggots,6 are, to me, a function of the enforced identification of the homosexual with heterosexual roles in a patriarchal culture.7 It is therefore those roles which we must examine. It is to the nexus we must return, to the battle between the sexes. For no woman today can escape living in a patriarchal world, whatever her sexuality, just as no man can escape the responsibility of his power and privilege, whatever his sexuality. Sexism is, after all, the attitude which describes the fact of male supremacy, and until we engage the subject at that level and therefore between the female and the male, we are avoiding the real issue.8

  Last, I should explain why I am here examining the politics of sado-masochistic fantasies only when the woman experiences them. Surely men have such fantasies, too—what of them? Do they fit in with the analysis offered here, or would a pat reversal of this analysis suffice for them? Hardly. My replies to these questions would have to include the following: I am concerned primarily with women (if we are not for ourselves, who is for us?) and consequently have focused my study on women.9 This was made at once more organic and more imperative by my own experiential—and female—reality. But there is another, and more objective, reason for the female emphasis.

  Sado-masochistic fantasies are themselves symbols for realities of dominance and submission, which are in them selves metaphors for power and powerlessness. In patriarchy men have power. In patriarchy women are powerless. These are facts. It is also a fact, though perhaps a less evident one, that he who has power can do what he likes, including playing at powerlessness in a manner never available to the powerless. For him it can be an experiment, a game, a fad, a fake (or even genuine) attempt to divest himself of his power, or a mere kicky new experience. It can be whatever he likes or imagines it to be, because it is his choice, by nature temporary and dismissible the instant it no longer amuses him. That men should sometimes fantasize themselves as masochists therefore strikes me as ironic but not surprising (perhaps it is merely a novel break from the real-life sadism patriarchy both requires and permits of them).

  Some politically co-optive men even have claimed their masochistic identification is “woman-identification” and that it is meant as evidence of sympathy with feminism—which shows how abysmal is their understanding of women and feminism. But that any men should wish to experience what they think women experience—this is old news, as old as Pentheus’ curiosity (and as rooted, I think, in envy). Men who see themselves as relatedly masochistic, “femme,” feminine, etc., obviously are insulting the female (in person and in principle). If they grovel to a male master they are mimicking (for fun) an experience all women in patriarchy are in some way or other forced to endure in reality. If they cower before a female “dominatrix,” they are superficially reversing, and therefore trivializing, real women’s real oppression. The one act literally makes fun of the pain of our reality by ignoring our powerlessness; the other act mocks the reality of our pain by denying our powerlessness. Both are vicious, expectable, and for the purposes of our investigation, irrelevant.

  But the context does bear repeating: In patriarchy men have power. In patriarchy women are powerless. It is from this viewpoint, this fact, that we can start to imagine how we got here, to understand why, and thereafter to invent the way out for all of us. For we are our species; its story is our story, your individual life-story, and mine.

  III: THE PARABLE

  Ontogeny Recapitulates Philogeny Progeny Recapitulates History

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sp; ONCE THE FREEDOM and power of Woman knew no shame. All acts of sexuality were inseparable from those of sensuality, and all these were within her definition and command.

  This I remember. My cells remember this.

  Man, driven by a sexuality seemingly more exterior to himself,10 thought he could not understand Woman’s integrity of sex, emotion, control, power, freedom, sensuality, shamelessness; he thought that perhaps he could not understand Woman’s sexuality at all. He became afraid and impatient to learn.

  What if she is wrong about me? What if I am not as she is?

  For millennia (one entire lifetime), Woman has been saying, “Understand me. Learn me. Know me.” This last she means in all senses, including that profound pun in the biblical use of “know.” She has sought her consort, her challenge. This is the original quest of Atalanta, of Hippolyta, of Clorinda—for the Man who is capable of acute sensitivity to her desire and vast tenderness for her need, but also capable of strength equal to her own.