The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [183]
He also found in the love of self-actualizing people the tendency to more and more complete spontaneity, the dropping of defenses, growing intimacy, honesty, and self-expression. These people found it possible to be themselves, to feel natural; they could be psychologically (as well as physically) naked and still feel loved and wanted and secure; they could let their faults, weaknesses, physical and psychological shortcomings be freely seen. They did not always have to put their best foot forward, to hide false teeth, gray hairs, signs of age; they did not have to “work” continually at their relationships; there was much less mystery and glamour, much less reserve and concealment and secrecy. In such people, there did not seem to be hostility between the sexes. In fact, he found that such people “made no really sharp differentiation between the roles and personalities of the two sexes.”
That is, they did not assume that the female was passive and the male active, whether in sex or love or anything else. These people were all so certain of their maleness or femaleness that they did not mind taking on some of the cultural aspects of the opposite sex role. It was especially noteworthy that they could be both active and passive lovers, and this was the clearest in the sexual act and in physical lovemaking. Kissing and being kissed, being above or below in the sexual act, taking the initiative, being quiet and receiving love, teasing and being teased—these were all found in both sexes.24
And thus, while in the conventional and even in the sophisticated view, masculine and feminine love, active and passive, seem to be at opposite poles, in self-actualizing people “the dichotomies are resolved and the individual becomes both active and passive, both selfish and unselfish, both masculine and feminine, both self-interested and self-effacing.”
Love for self-actualizing people differed from the conventional definition of love in yet another way; it was not motivated by need, to make up a deficiency in the self; it was more purely “gift” love, a kind of “spontaneous admiration.”25
Such disinterested admiration and love used to be considered a superhuman ability, not a natural human one. But as Maslow says, “human beings at their best, fully grown, show many characteristics one thought, in an earlier era, to be supernatural prerogatives.”
And there, in the words “fully grown,” is the clue to the mystery of the problem that has no name. The transcendence of self, in sexual orgasm, as in creative experience, can only be attained by one who is himself, or herself, complete, by one who has realized his or her own identity. The theorists know this is true for man, though they have never thought through the implications for women. The suburban doctors, gynecologists, obstetricians, child-guidance clinicians, pediatricians, marriage counselors, and ministers who treat women’s problems have all seen it, without putting a name to it, or even reporting it as a phenomenon. What they have seen confirms that for woman, as for man, the need for self-fulfillment—autonomy, self-realization, independence, individuality, self-actualization—is as important as the sexual need, with as serious consequences when it is thwarted. Woman’s sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.
Psychoanalysts have long suspected that woman’s intelligence does not fully flower when she denies her sexual nature; but by the same token can her sexual nature fully flower when she must deny her intelligence, her highest human potential? All the words that have been written criticizing