Forbidden Femininity by Colin Crawford

Author:Colin Crawford [Crawford, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780429852640
Google: HqybDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-08-20T03:40:14+00:00

However while there is copious evidence attesting to feminine sadistic perversion, usually cloaked in the guise of respectability or morality, the feminine sadistic impulse may be more commonly turned toward the self,5 that is to say perversely. (One view can be that sadistic impulses are vented on the self if they do not have alternative avenues of expression.)

The conflict in females between their innate, profound experienced sexuality, in the ‘internal’ world, and the internalised/socialised proscriptions and expectations, of the external world, are immense. Young girls in particular can be placed in a position of apparently irresolvable contradiction between the internal sexual reality of self, and the expectations of the external5 social audience, who implicitly and explicitly demand conformity to a feminine ‘ideal type’.

The social imperative of female purity and virtuosity, becomes internalised through super-ego function, interceding at times viciously, against sexual transgression, or even thought. This is central to the matrix of conflict into which young girls are placed, the conflict between id dominated libidinal impulses and drives, and super-ego responses dedicated to their suppression and denial. While we can understand and comprehend these forces, in the context of their social and internal pathology, the force, and commonly the effect of anti-libidinal tendency within both girls and women would suggest an even deeper and more primal factor. The Jungian concept of the collective unconscious would appear to have a possible relevance here.6’7 That the libidinal impulse toward sexuality is countered by an antilibidinal impulse, experienced internally and collectively, regulated through the society of women acting out their inheritance of disallowed sexuality and “endogenous” guilt. This finds expression in repression and perversion, in the punishment of sexuality internally, within themselves, and in other women, and maternally with their children, most of all, with their female children.

8 While the castration complex in boys results in fear, a fear of losing the penis at the hands of a jealous father, the castration complex in girls would appear as viable a threat, both in history, and in the treatment of women in contemporary society.9 However while the castration complex in boys involves fear, and by association, passivity, the actual (perceived) castration of the female must involve rage, and by implication, aggressiveness. Bear in mind that this comes as the third psychical trauma borne by females, which does not similarly effect their male counterparts, i.e., the necessary transfer of affection and erotic desire from the original love object, the mother, ‘displaced’ on to the father; the original ‘assault’ on female sexuality, the fact that she is dispossessed of a penis, giving rise to penis envy,10 and finally the fact that her self, her sexual self, is disallowed and unaccepted.

It would be difficult to envisage that such a loss of ‘sexual love’, sense of sexual inferiority, and discountment of the true self, would be met by any response other than ‘ego anger’ and aggression. However even this has to be subordinated and repressed under super-ego ascendancy. This clearly involves the potential for massive psychical conflict, in what are “normal” and “ordinary” circumstances, for the female.

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