Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (72 page)

Deutsch's belief in the fundamental rightness of rape as an archetypal female experience rested primarily on her view of sexual intercourse as an essentially painful encounter for an essentially passive woman. This attitude was in keeping with the Victorian times in which she and Freud lived and may well have reflected the kind of sex these pioneers of psychoanalysis privately experienced. Deutsch maintained in her writings that women put up with the pain of intercourse and even taught themselves to find a bit of pleasure in it, if they were genitally mature, because of the female's historic mission of reproduction, or as she put it, "service to the species." Service to the species was a holy mission fraught with pain from beginning to end, but most particularly at the moments of labor and birth, and it was clearly a mission any right-thinking person would shirk were it not for a conveniently built-in female masochism.

There is just enough reality in Deutsch's somber view of sex

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and its reproductive consequences for me to consider granting her a point or two, but then I remember the intense social pressure put upon women to perform this "service to the species" and how the end does often justify the means, and I conclude that a woman does not need any special attraction to pain to want to conceive and give birth.

But let us go back to the sex act, or to Helene Deutsch's picture of it. In true Freudian fashion she quickly disposes of the clitoris.
It
is "inadequate" compared to you-know-what, and when it is seen in combination with the vagina, it is an "overendow

·
ment" from which a woman "suffers." The vagina itself, Deutsch believed, had "physiologically determined pleasure sensations" ( odern physiologists would disagree ) , but she has to admit that the erogenous "transfer" from clitoris to vagina is "never com pletely successful." With this as background, she then goes on to describe the actual act:

The "undiscovered" vagina is-in normal, favorable instances eroticized by an act of rape. By "rape" I do not refer here to that puberal fantasy in which the young girl realistically desires and fears the sexual act as a rape. That fantasy is only a psychologic prepara tion for a real, milder, but dynamically identical process. This process manifests itself in man's aggressive penetration on the one hand and in the "overpowering" of the vagina and its transformation into an erogenous zone on the other.

That is quite a view of the act of sex. Deutsch bases it, she says, on the biology of a "completely passive vagina" that must await the male sex organ so that it may be "awakened." Ergo, women have "a deeply feminine need to be overpowered." But there is also this aspect: "Woman's frequent fear of coitus origi nates in the fact that it implies an injury to her physical integrity." And this, from another page in another chapter: "Woman's entire psychologic preparation for the sexual and reproductive functions is connected with masochistic ideas. In these ideas,
·
coitus is closely associated with the act of defloration, and defloration with rape and a painful penetration of the body . . . . The rape

fantasy reveals itself as only an exaggeration of reality."

So, rape is her dramatic definition of intercourse. He tries to conquer, she flees his wooing-and must gradually be won or over-

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powered by him. Deutsch elevates her theory by ascribing it to man's evolutionary triumph over the apes:

It
is no exaggeration to say that among all living creatures only man, because of his prehensile appendages, is capable of rape in the fuJI meaning of the term-that is, sexual possession of the female against her will.

But apes, too, play a part:

Every time I see one of the humorous pictures in popular movies or magazines showing an anthropomorphous ape or a powerful bear like masculine creature with a completely helpless female in his arms I am reminded of my old favorite speculation: thus it was that primitive man took possession of woman and subjected her to sexual desire.

Deutsch is thinking of King Kong ( a male mythic figure if ever there was one) , the hairy ape who is part destroyer and part misunderstood protector. She conjectures that copulation was originally an act of male violence that women, being weaker, could not successfully resist. Through the ages the mighty embrace and violent penetration, "perhaps accompanied by wooing and ca resses," gradually came to be accepted by women as sexual enjoy ment: "The powerful embrace of the prehensile arms, combined with the defensive counterpressure, induced strong pleasure sensa tions in the woman's entire body."

From apes it is but a short flight back to swans. Deutsch offers as evidence the Greek myth of Leda, tricked and seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan. She vividly pictures the god-as-swan envelop ing Leda in his plumage, which suggests to the analyst "the femi nine wish to feel the seducer's might with the whole surface of her body." This is, she admits, "a phylogenetic hypothesis," but titilla tion over the entire skin surface could be a happy transfer from the unsatisfactory female genitals.

In support of her theory that it is the pleasure-pain principle that gives female sexuality its masochistic character, Deutsch speaks of ten of "the pain of defloration." The very word "defiora tion" has a Victorian ring today as virginity assumes its rightful place of unimportance. (There have always been cultures, in areas little exposed
to
Christianity, where female virginity has never

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mattered. ) The act of defloration has been of greater psychologic importance to men than it has ever been to women, for as codified by the Hebrew patriarchs in Deuteronomy, proof of virginity was a requirement of the marriage contract. When a husband "de flowered" his wife on their wedding night, in terms of his prag matic ideology he was breaking open a pristine package that now belonged to him-private property-and he wanted tangible proof of the mint condition of his acquisition. The blood on the sheet and the cry of pain were the proof he demanded.
If
the tokens of virginity-telltale spots of blood-were missing, there were dire consequences for the Hebrew maiden. She was stoned to death and shame befell her father's house. But female pragmatism in the virginity matter must have asserted itself at some point, for the evidence could always be faked. Wonderful tales have passed down through the ages of anxious mothers or loyal servants wh.o sprin kled a bit of chicken blood on those nuptial sheets in advance of the climactic moment.

My own "deflowering" was so unremarkable (no blood, no pain ) that the young man, a wag from the campus humor maga zine, brightly inquired if this was really my "first go-round." The question irked me for some time-it had more to do with his expectations than mine-but years later when my consciousness raising group discussed virginity one evening, it turned out that seven of the eight women present had experienced no discomfort on their first go-round. The eighth had a rough time, and perhaps down through the ages it has been women like her who set the mark. Is the highly touted hymen fast retreating as a vestigial membrane ( in which case this is important news and I would like some biologist to formally note its passing) or was its guarding function always exaggerated? I favor the second theory. We can say fairly certainly that as the woman-as-property concept fades and virginity lessens in importance, the "pain of defl.oration" appears to be going out of style, as all of woman's special gynecological pain seems to be going out of style, from menstrual cramps to the agonies of labor. Or to be more precise, the modern effort is to downplay, control or alleviate the pain, rather than to humbly accept it as a woman's due.

Offering further evidence that the basic and correct stance of females is a "passive-masochistic attitude . . . toward men and life as a whole," Deutsch posits that the fantasy life of young girls is

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filled with conscious and unconscious thoughts of rape. Rape fan tasies often remain on the unconscious level, Deutsch writes, but they "evince their content" in dreams:

In dreams the rape
is
symbolic: the terrifying male persecutor with knife in hand, the burglar who breaks in at the window, the thief who steals a particularly valuable object, are the most typical and frequently recurring figures in the dreams of young girls. They are connected with fear, not with pleasure, and thus differ from the boy's puberty dreams.

Girls and women, as we know, have objective reasons to fear hostile, violent men-the burglar, the mugger, the wanton, sense less killer, not to mention the rapist-and this may find justifiable expression in dreams. There is no need to ascribe such fears to "rape fantasy." Recently, af ter a series of mugging stories in the papers and some firsthand reports from unfortunate friends, I had a dream in which I ran with grea t strides through the streets with my wallet in my hand, pursued by an unidentified youth. ( I got away.) Now this dream could have been a rape fantasy with my wallet repre senting my hidden, intimate sexuality, or it could have been a straightforward anxiety dream about the real danger of mugging on the city streets, with my wallet representing my wallet.

Freudian dream interpretation, in which a host of plausible, real-life situations are assigned sexual symbolism, can certainly add to one's insecurity. Years ago I once had a dream in which I walked up the stairs to my apartment and was about to open the door when a male figure emerged from the shadows and struck out at me with a hammer. Inundated with popular Freudian psychol ogy, I was distressfully convinced that this dream had to represent a hopeless fear of men and sex-until my Adlerian analyst drew from me the informa tion that I hadn't paid my rent that month and had gotten a dispossess notice from the landlord!

Deutsch was not alone in her faith that young girls' dreams are crowded with symbols of rape. The courageous Karen Horney, who did so much to disabuse her associates of the doctrine of inherent female masochism, got stuck on this idea, too. Dr. Homey cared little for Dr. Deutsch, and Dr. Deutsch cared little for Dr. Horney. The brightest females in the Freudian constellation, one settled in