In addition, most of us believe (cf. 78) that, although they can be stirred by pornography, women are less voyeuristic, and voyeurism is an essential quality of pornography. Although some admit nowadays to staring at men’s pants, women are never Peeping Toms. This may not reflect a biological difference in the sexes but our society’s inhibition of a little boy’s right to sexual looking and a little girl’s training that she is not to permit that looking, which implies to her that it makes no big differ-
*My impression at this point, before studying the question carefully, is that fewer types of perversion are represented in women’s pornography, which, besides the gentle masochism-sadism romances, seems to consist most often of endless variations on the favorite-harem-girl-of-the-Sultan oedipal-masochism tale or the supergirl-frustrating-droves-of-roaring-studs reparative-sadism fantasy.
ence to anyone if she looks or not. It may also develop that, as routine heterosexual pornography becomes available to them in a more lenient society, more women will discover a taste for such products. To the extent that penises become a forbidden but prized vision for girls as breasts are for boys, women will be drawn to penis pornography.
I have stressed the obvious, that what is pornography for one person is not so for another with a different life history and psychodynamics. Looking at the repetitive, unvarying stories of transvestites, the nontransvestite finds his mind wandering and quickly becomes unable to read any more. One day I asked a transvestite to bring in pornography suited to his transvestism; he told me that stories he had already shown me that I had been too bored to read were in fact the pornography. Similarly, what women may find exciting in books and movies will make men in the audience restless as they wait for the story to pick up its interest again.
It is also obvious that politicians today, when legislating on pornography, will tend to define as pornographic only those things that excite themselves and as obscene only those productions that make their own gorges rise.
Societies fear pornography as they fear sexuality, but perhaps there is also a less sick reason: they respond intuitively to the hostile fantasies disguised but still active in pornography. And so, pornography will be loathsome to the person responding to it (who, in responding, makes it pornography rather than foolish prose); the word “loathsome,” like “disgust,” implies not only forbidden sensuality but also fear that the hostility may be released.
Chapter 6
Hostility and Mystery in Perversion
Other factors besides hostility, risk, and reversal of trauma to triumph—on which this study concentrates— are also necessary for perversion formation. A whole book on the role of unconscious and conscious guilt, for instance, would be invaluable. But there is no point in repeating what has already been established or in speculating on others’ speculations; all those ideas will have to be background for this book’s limited discussion. I wish only to underline that the study of perversion is the study of hostility more than of libido. This book does not—is not intended to—reveal a complete theory of perversion. My decision, for instance, not to paraphrase in depth the work of others on the importance of oedipal conflict in the creation of perversion is purposeful; it serves to save time and lets me concentrate on the more controversial issues of the preoedipal period.
Still, it will be useful to review briefly Freud’s thesis about perversion and then continue our earlier discussion (chap. 2) of the arguments against it in this new day of advancing sexual research. Freud said that sexual aberration was the product of constitutional (biological) and accidental (interpersonal) factors. He felt that there
were rare cases in which the aberrant behavior was almost purely the product of biological factors and others in which it was the product of nonbiological, psychic influences, but that the greatest number were due to a mixing of both these elements (24). Recognizing that understanding of the innate factors lay outside psychoanalysis and was still beyond the reach of the laboratory, his main interest—and his tremendous contribution— was to discover how the “accidental” led to perversion. It does so, he said, in the same manner that neurotic symptoms are produced: an instinctual drive from the id meets an imperative “no” in the superego or in reality; this makes the ego create a compromise formation that will (partially) gratify the instinctual wish while placating the superego or reality demand that the wish be gone. The “no” is backed with threat: Freud also postulated that perversion was—to use my concept—a gender disorder; that is, perversion resulted from the attempt either to prevent castration or, in females, to make reparation for the “fact” of castration. And so the oedipal conflict and its resolution in males and females was part of the explanation, and in time, some beginning elaboration of the importance of preoedipal wishes was also introduced. Of the many additions and refinements that filled out this explanation, perhaps the most important historically is the concept of “splitting.” Freud describes how the child in a conflict between a "powerful instinctual demand” and “an almost intolerable real danger”
replies to the conflict with two contrary reactions, both of which are valid and effective. On the one hand, with the help of certain mechanisms he rejects reality and refuses to accept any prohibition; on the other hand, in the same breath he recognizes the danger of reality, takes over the fear of that danger as a pathological symptom and tries subsequently to divest himself of the fear. It must be confessed that this is a very ingenious solution of the difficulty. Both of the parties to the dispute obtain their share: the instinct is allowed to retain its satisfaction and proper respect is shown to reality. But everything has to be paid for in one way or another, and this success is achieved at the price of a rift in the ego which never heals but which increases as time goes on. The two contrary reactions to the conflict persist as the centre-point of a splitting of the ego. (35)
While Freud is speaking here only of fetishism, there is reason, both in what he says and in subsequent work of others, to extend the concept of splitting to all perversions.*
The Implication of Moral Responsibility
Before looking more at the role of hostility, I must take up a moral issue inherent in every aspect of psychoanalytic theory but especially visible in discussions of overtly sexual and overtly aggressive behavior: the problem of free will; it is at the root of the connotations of “perversion” and is also with us as we create theory. To explain pathological behavior as due to conflict and to say it employs such mechanisms as repression, denial, disavowal, or splitting is to say, via the concept of the superego, that willed decisions—informed decisions— are being made logically by “agencies” of the psyche performing the tasks for which these “agencies” were constructed. Much of this activity occurs unconsciously, which mitigates but does not end responsibility. That the conflicts arise at first from dangers in the outside world —the customs of a society passed through the neurotic idiosyncrasies of parents—again only mitigates the sense