The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [187]
Recently, Helene Deutsch, the eminent psychoanalyst who went even further than Freud in equating femininity with masochistic passivity and, in warning women that “outward-directed activity” and “masculinizing” intellectuality might interfere with a fully feminine orgasm, threw a psychoanalytic conference into an uproar by suggesting that perhaps too much emphasis had been put on “the orgasm” for women. In the 1960’s, she was suddenly not so sure that women had to have, or could have, a real orgasm. Perhaps a more “diffuse” fulfillment was all that could be expected. After all, she had women patients who were absolutely psychotic who seemed to have orgasms; but most women she saw now did not seem to have them at all.
What did it mean? Could women, then, not experience orgasm? Or had something happened, during this time when so much emphasis has been placed on sexual fulfillment, to keep women from experiencing orgasm? The experts did not all agree. But in other contexts, not concerned with women, analysts reported that passive people who “psychologically feel empty”—who fail to “develop adequate egos,” have “little sense of their own identity”—cannot submit to the experience of sexual orgasm for fear of their own non-existence.31 Fanned into an all-consuming sexual search by the popularizers of Freudian “femininity,” many women had, in effect, renounced everything for the orgasm that was supposed to be at the end of the rainbow. To say the least, they directed quite a lot of their emotional energies and needs toward the sexual act. As somebody said about a truly beautiful woman in America, her image has been so overexposed in the ads, television, movies, that when you see the real thing, you’re disappointed. Without even delving into the murky depths of the unconscious, one might assume it was asking a lot of the beautiful orgasm, not only to live up to its overadvertised claims, but to constitute the equivalent of an A in sex, a salary raise, a good review on opening night, promotion to senior editor or associate professor, much less the basic “experience of oneself,” the sense of identity.32 As one psychotherapist reported:
One of the major reasons, ironically, why so many women are not achieving full-flowering sexuality today is because they are so over determined to achieve it. They are so ashamed if they do not reach the heights of expressive sensuality that they tragically sabotage their own desires. That is to say, instead of focusing clearly on the real problem at hand, these women are focusing on quite a different problem, namely, “Oh, what an idiot and an incompetent person I am for not being able to achieve satisfaction without difficulty.” Today’s women are often obsessed with the notion of how, rather than what, they are doing when they are having marital relations. That is fatal.
If sex itself, as another psychoanalyst put it, is beginning to have a “depressive” quality in America, it is perhaps because too many Americans—especially the women sex-seekers—are putting into the sexual search all their frustrated needs for self-realization. American women are suffering, quite simply, a massive sickness of sex without self. No one has warned them that sex can never be a substitute for personal identity; that sex itself cannot give identity to a woman, any more than to a man; that there may be no sexual fulfillment at all for the woman who seeks her self in sex.
The question of how a person can most fully realize his own capacities and thus achieve identity has become an important concern of the philosophers and the social and psychological thinkers of our time—and for good reason. Thinkers of other times put forth the idea that people were, to a great extent, defined by the work they did. The work that a man had to do to eat, to stay alive, to meet the physical necessities of his environment, dictated his identity. And in this sense,