PENIS ENVY: FACT OF ARTIFACT?
In Freud’s prudish and bigoted Vienna, many a little girl wished she were a boy, for this was the only, though imaginary, way of escaping discrimination. Young men could do whatever they pleased and choose an occupation they liked, but girls were their father’s possession until he agreed to transfer them to their future husbands. Marriage was, therefore, the only way of escape from the father’s tyranny, but the marital oath committed women to love, cherish, and obey their new masters. Most women preferred new masters to old ones, and some of them slyly outsmarted their marital bosses.
In the Victorian era, marriage was the only acceptable social role for women. Unmarried women were called “spinsters.” They were ridiculed and blamed for remaining single. When a girl preferred an active and independent life, she was called a “tomboy,” “amazon,” or monstrosity. To be feminine meant to become a hybrid of infantile dependence and motherly protectiveness. Women were expected to practice and enjoy the three great “feminine” K’s— K?che, Kirche, Kinder (kitchen, church, and children).
In Freud’s time masculinity and femininity could have been described as follows:
When you say ‘masculine’ you mean as a rule ‘active,’ and when you say ‘feminine’ you mean passive. . . . The male sexual cell is active and mobile; it seeks out the female one, while the latter is stationary and waits passively. This behavior of the elementary organism of sex is more or less a model of the behavior of the individuals of each sex in sexual intercourse. The male pursues the female for the purpose of sexual unity, seizes her and pushes his way into her (Freud).
Freud did not invent penis envy but discovered this culturally determined phenomenon. The more restrictions were imposed on girls, the more frequently they wished to escape their yoke.
Penis envy was never a general feeling common to all women at all times; certainly the Tschambuli or Arapesh women never had the reason for such an envy. In Arapesh, men and women shared household and child-rearing responsibilities, and among the Tschambuli, women were the dominant sex. (Murdock)
Freud’s observations of penis envy in women who were reared in an atmosphere of discrimination and subjugation must be interpreted in light of another hypothesis brought forward by Freud, namely, the tendency of the child to identify with the “strong aggressor.” In patriarchal families, the father was the absolute ruler, and the male and female children were proud to identify with the father rather than with the mother. It is small wonder that
Freud noticed the preference for a masculine, father-based superego (Fenichel; Freud).
One therefore must interpret penis envy in girls not as an envy directed to the male organ of their playmates or brothers, but rather as a wish for the possession of the father’s penis and with it, father power. Penis envy does not seem to be a general and universal element of female psychology but must be interpreted as the feminine protest against male domination. The penis, as a cherished symbol of power, was envied by women not because of its sexual significance, for vaginas undoubtedly can procure as much and often more sensual pleasure than penises; it was the penis as the power symbol which elicited the justifiable envy (Homey; Kelman; Millet; Unger and Denmark).
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