Sexual Politics

Official governmental suppression does not fully explain the counterrevolution, however. Rather, the primary cause is the fact that the sexual revolution focused on the bigger picture (often larger politics targets) without addressing socialization. While society shifted on a surface level, patriarchy’s foundations remained intact. Support arises in “the emerging social sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology—the most useful and authoritative branches of social control and manipulation” (177-78).

Within these emerging disciplines, Sigmund Freud is “beyond question the strongest individual counterrevolutionary force in the ideology of sexual politics during the period” (178). A central problem of Freud’s analysis is that he does not “accept his patient’s symptoms as evidence of a justified dissatisfaction with the limiting circumstances imposed on them by society, but as symptomatic of an independent and universal female tendency” (179) labeled “penis envy,” in which women believe that “to be born female is to be born ‘castrated’” (180), or inferior. This theory fails to adequately explain why women consider the absence of a penis—the absence of this supposed “maleness”—to be a mark of inferiority, and instead rests on Freud’s prejudices presented as biological fact. For Millett:

One cannot separate Freud’s account of how a child reasons from how Freud himself reasons […] the subjectivity in which all these events are cast tends to be Freud’s own, or that of a strong masculine bias, even of a rather gross male-supremacist bias. (182)

Freud then takes these ideas and, instead of identifying “the effect of male supremacist culture on the ego development of the young female,” instead defines her oppression with biology. These explanations then allow “masculine sentiment to take the offensive again as it had not since the disappearance of overt misogyny when the pose of chivalry became fashionable” (189).

Perhaps the key problem with Freud’s approach to female psychology comes from his failure to “separate two radically different phenomena, female biology and feminine status” (190). He suggests instead that feminine status is as natural as female biology instead of addressing it as a symptom of one’s place in society. In general terms, he “defines and identifies the masculine with activity, the feminine with passivity” (190), presenting these as inherent, natural characteristics. He also assumes that “masculine and feminine are analogous to male and female, and deviance from either norm is regarded as symptomatic of mental malady according to degree” (192). Within this, he assumes that women inherently have “very low libido” (192), taking the prevalence of “female frigidity or hyposexuality” (193) as evidence of this without enquiring into the “social implications, not merely those of guilt or a negative attitude toward sexuality, but those of female resistance as well” (193-94).

Freud suggests that some of the most important traits of “female personality” are “passivity, masochism, and narcissism” (194). Millett admits the merit of this approach if these terms remain purely descriptors. As description, they address what happens to women who are socialized into rigid, limiting roles under patriarchal rule. However, Freud ignores such social matters, instead suggesting that these are inherent characteristics on par—or equal to—femaleness. This tendency grows more pronounced in his increasing commitment to the idea that “the female character is a static thing ordained by Nature and the unalterable laws of her anatomy” (198). He presents a supposed transition from an immature sexuality focused on the clitoris to “accessing ‘normal’ or ‘mature’ sexuality through the vagina, renouncing the clitoris” (198-99) as “consum[ing] so much of [women’s] productive youth that their minds stagnate […] [in] “sexual limbo” (199) while they await their first penile-vaginal sexual encounter. He extends his ideas to suggest that “women live at a low cultural level because this is the only one of which they are capable” (200). He supports this by suggesting that men contribute to civilization because they have developed “a strong super ego goaded on by fear of castration—as a result of possessing a penis—and the fear of losing it” (200). Females who are unafraid to lose a penis they do not have thus have “far less super ego than the male” (200), and so are incapable of contributing to civilization on the same level.

Freud’s theories, then, help to reinforce old patriarchal ideologies of sexuality, sex, and gender, using “jargon—‘passivity,’ ‘low libido,’ ‘masochism,’ ‘narcissism,’ ‘undeveloped super ego’” to give “the old myth of feminine ‘nature’ a new respectability” (203). That is, through these theories, “it can be said scientifically that women are inherently subservient, and males dominant, more strongly sexed and therefore entitled to sexually subjugate the female, who enjoys her oppression and deserves, for she is by her very nature, vain, stupid, and hardly better than a barbarian, if she is human at all” (203).

Although some post-Freudians have considered the role of socialization in relation to Freud’s theories, others have taken his notion of the “natural” female character to even greater extremes. For example, Marie Bonaparte goes as far as to argue that “the female cell is primordially ‘masochistic’” and that “what the small boy apparently yearns to accomplish is an anal, cloacal, intestinal penetration of the mother; a bloody disemboweling even” (204). Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, meanwhile, suggest that “both feminism and the feminist were ‘an expression of emotional sickness, of neurosis . . . at its core, a deep illness’” (207). Erik Erikson takes a different approach in his theory of “Inner Space,” holding to a “Freudian or psychoanalytic theory of female personality and the notion that this is innate” but also “suggesting that ‘femininity’ is politically useful” (210). Blaming males for bringing humanity to “the brink of destruction” (210), he then appeals to women to use their supposedly innate character and maternal drive to save us. The result is an “uneasy, even contradictory, tone” that flits between “Freud’s chauvinism and a chivalry of [Erikson’s] own” as he insists “both that female anatomy is destiny (and personality as well) yet at the same time pleads that the preordained historical subordination of women be abridged by a gallant concession to maternal interests” (212).

The move towards “functionalism” in the social sciences marks a tendency to “turn from political or historical considerations to focus […] attention upon social structures” (220), highlighting patterns and statistics that show a system or pattern to be “functioning.” This is important because it allows social sciences to further normalize and legitimize traditional behavior: “having found traditional behavior functional, functionalists could now prescribe it: have found the status quo operable, they could proceed to find it ‘natural’ hence biologically ‘necessary’” (221). This represents an aspect of a broader shift in the social sciences towards prescribing models of behavior and normalizing understandings of innate male and female characteristics and characters through the suggestion that these are ordained by “nature.”