Female children turn to their fathers for physical affection, nurturance, or pleasurable emotional intensity—a turning that is experienced as “sexual” by the adult male, precisely because it is predicated on the female’s (his daughter’s) innocence, helplessness, youthfulness, and monogamous idolatry. This essentially satyric and incestuous model of sexuality is almost universal. It is reflected in marriage laws and practices, and in the rarity with which rapists, child molesters, and frequenters of prostitutes are legally prosecuted. This model of sexuality is mythologically Olympian in origin: Zeus, the father, made a habit of seducing, raping, and impregnating as many Virgin Maidens as possible. The Catholic Father apparently preferred virgins for his divine offspring also.
Daughters don’t turn to their mothers for “sexual” initiation, or, as Freud would have it (but couldn’t explain it), they specifically turn away from them, for a number of reasons. Mothers are conditioned not to like women and/or the female body They are phobic about lesbianism; they are jealous of their daughters’ youth—rendered so by their own increasing expendability. Also, mothers must be harsh in training their daughters to be feminine in order that they learn how to serve in order to survive. This harshness traditionally characterizes fathers’ training their sons to be masculine. Any society with sex-role stereotypes implies an often crippling harshness between adults and children of the same sex. However, bio-patriarchal culture is still essentially a male homosexual one—in spirit and/or in practice. It is neither lesbian nor bisexual in spirit or practice.
The way in which female children grow up—or learn how not to grow up—is initiated by the early withdrawal or relative absence of the female and/or nurturant body from their lives. Nurturance-deprivation, and the sexual abuse of female children are possibly the two most important factors involved in making female children receptive to “submission” conditioning—at a very early age. Female children move from a childhood dominated or peopled by members of their own sex to a foreign “grown-up’” world dominated, quite literally, by members of the opposite sex. Male children graduate from a childhood dominated or peopled by members of the opposite sex (women) to a “grown-up” world dominated by members of their own sex. Unlike women, they can safely go home again by marrying wives, who will perform the rites of maternal, domestic, and emotional nurturance, but who are usually younger, economically poorer, and physically weaker than themselves.
In patriarchal society, the basic incest taboo (between mother and son and father and daughter) is psychologically obeyed by men and disobeyed by women. One-quarter to one-third of female children are raped or molested by their fathers or by adult male relatives in our culture; maternal incest is a far rarer occurrence. Psychologically, women do not have initiation rites to help them break their incestuous ties. While most women do not commit incest with their biological fathers, patriarchal marriage, prostitution, and mass “romantic” love are psychologically predicated on a sexual union between daughter and father figures. Psychologically speaking, in a matriarchal or Amazonian society, the incest taboo would have another purpose entirely, and women would not violate it. The taboo would function as a way of keeping sons and husbands away from daughters—who would be their mothers’ only heiresses. This particular distance is precisely what is breached by patriarchal mores: the breach immediately tells us which sex is dominant, i.e., which sex controls the means of production and reproduction.
The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character…. If motherhood is the highest fulfillment of woman’s nature, what other protection does it need save love and freedom? Marriage but defiles, outrages, and corrupts her fulfillment. Does it not say to woman, Only when you follow me shall you bring forth life? Does it not condemn her to the block, does it not degrade and shame her if she refuses to buy her right to motherhood by selling herself? Does not marriage only sanction motherhood, even though conceived in hatred, in compulsion? Yet, if motherhood be of free choice, of love, of ecstasy, of defiant passion, does it not place a crown of thorns upon an innocent head and carve in letters of blood the hideous epithet, Bastard? Were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love.—Emma Goldman
Contemporary women are “free” slaves: they choose their servitude for “love.”
当代女性是 "自由 "的奴隶：她们为 "爱 "选择了她们的奴役。
A study by E. Zigler and L. Phillips, comparing the symptoms of male and female mental hospital patients, found male patients significantly more assaultive than females and more prone to indulge their impulses in socially deviant ways like “robbery, rape, drinking, and homosexuality.”11 Female patients were often found to be “self-deprecatory, depressed, perplexed, suffering from suicidal thoughts, or making actual suicidal attempts.”
This may still be true. However, an increasing number of female adolescents and adults have increasingly engaged in drinking, drug-taking, and in physically aggressive behavior toward others. But in general, most women display “female” psychiatric symptoms such as depression, frigidity, paranoia, suicide attempts, panic, anxiety, and eating disorders. Men display “male” diseases such as sex addiction, alcoholism, drug addiction, personality disorders, sociopathic personalities, and brain diseases (see Table 1). There are still fewer men hospitalized for “male” diseases than women hospitalized for “female” diseases. Typically female symptoms all share a “dread of happiness”—a phrase coined by Thomas Szasz to describe the “indirect forms of communication” that characterize “slave psychology.”
The analogy between “slave” and “woman” is by no means a perfect one. However, there is some theoretical justification for viewing women, or the sex-caste system, as the prototype for all subsequent class and race slavery.Women were probably the first group of human beings to be enslaved by another group. In a sense, “woman’s work,” or woman’s psychological identity, consists in exhibiting the signs and “symptoms” of slavery—as well as, or instead of, working around the clock in the kitchen, the nursery, the bedroom, and the factory.
Traditionally, depression has been conceived of as the response to—or expression of—loss, either of an ambivalently loved other, of the “ideal” self, or of “meaning” in one’s life. The hostility that should or could be directed outward in response to loss is turned inwards toward the self. “Depression” rather than “aggression” is the female response to disappointment or loss. The research and clinical evidence for any or all of these views is controversial. We may note that most women have “lost”—or have never really “had”—their mothers; nor is the maternal object replaced for them by husbands or lovers. Few women ever develop strong socially approved “ideal” selves. Few women are allowed, no less encouraged, to concern themselves with life’s “meaning.” (While this may also be true for many men, it is certainly not untrue for most women.) Women lose their jobs as “women,” rather than any existential hold on life’s meaning. In a sense, women can’t “lose” what they’ve never had. Also, as I’ll discuss in Chapter Ten, women are conditioned to “lose” in order to “win.”
According to the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center on Women’s Mental Health, during the postpartum period, about 85 percent of women experience some type of “mood disturbance” or Postpartum Depression (PPD). Symptoms may appear within 48 to 72 hours of childbirth. This form of the “blues” is mainly short-lived and quite normal. New mothers may feel sad, guilty, exhausted, and unable to concentrate; they may experience mood swings, an eating disorder, anxiety, tearfulness, and irritability; they may also suffer from a sleep disturbance and have suicidal thoughts. This usually passes within a few weeks. Interestingly, many women who exhibit these symptoms also suffer from certain risk factors. For example, they experienced depression in the past, either during a previous pregnancy or in general; they recently were very stressed; or they are suffering from marital discord and an absence of social support. Ten to 15 percent of women develop more “significant symptoms of depression or anxiety,” which last longer. About 1 to 2 per 1,000 women suffer from postpartum psychosis in which they suffer from delusions such as hearing voices that tell them to kill themselves or their infants. Short-term therapy may help with postpartum depression but not with postpartum psychosis. The right medication may be needed in both instances.
In the past, men commited actions; women commited gestures. Both sexes were imprisoned by separate vocabularies. “Manfully,” men kill themselves, or others—physically. Women attempt to kill themselves physically far more often than men do, and fail at it more often. Suicide is not an apolitical occurrence: the politics of caste (sex and race) shape American patterns of suicide. One study found that sixty-nine percent of attempted suicides in America are female and, conversely, that seventy percent of completed suicides are male.23 They also found that housewives comprised the largest single category of both “attempted and completed suicides” and, further, that about five times as many widows commit suicide as attempt suicide (twenty percent vs. four percent). Twice as many widowers commit suicide as attempt suicide (six percent vs. three percent). A government pamphlet entitled Suicide Among Youth documented that attempted suicide is far more frequent among student-age females than males but that student-age males complete more suicides.24 Nonwhite males between fifteen and twenty-five have the highest suicide commitment rate.
Physical action—even the exquisitely private act of taking one’s own life—is very difficult for women. Conditioned female behavior is more comfortable with, and is defined by, psychic and emotional self-destruction. Women are conditioned to experience physicality—be it violent, destructive, or pleasurable—more in the presence of another, or at male hands, than alone or at (their own) female hands. Female suicide attempts are not so much realistic “calls for help” or hostile inconveniencing of others as they are the assigned baring of the powerless throat, signals of ritual readiness for self-sacrifice. Like female tears, female suicide attempts constitute an essential act of resignation and helplessness—which alone can command temporary relief or secondary rewards. As we have noted, however, women who try to kill themselves are not necessarily treated very kindly. Suicide attempts are the grand rites of “femininity”—i.e., ideally, women are supposed to “lose” in order to “win.” Women who succeed at suicide are, tragically, outwitting or rejecting their “feminine” role, and at the only price possible: their death.
It is important to realize that schizophrenia, or madness, is crucially different from female symptoms such as depression or anxiety. Schizophrenia, in both women and men, always involves opposite as well as same-sex behavior. For instance, female schizophrenics are more openly hostile or violent, or more overtly concerned with sexual and bisexual pleasure, than are female “depressives.” Both groups of women still share many “feminine” traits such as mistrusting their own perceptions, feeling inferior, helpless, and dependent. Just as schizophrenia is no entree into power for women, neither are “female” diseases such as depression, promiscuity, paranoia, eating disorders, self-mutilation, panic attacks, and suicide attempts. Such “disorders,” whether hospitalized or not, constitute female role rituals, enacted by most women. As we shall see, whether and what kind of “treatment” is afforded these rituals is a function of age, class, and race.
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