What if Freud Were Phyllis? – Gender Switch in a More Classical Sense

Propping gender-roles on ear, this interesting little take on “What if Freud were Phyllis?” is something to read… and put your two cents in on.

The text is by:
Steinem, 1994: 32,33,35,36,48-50,51,52,69

and is taken from:

Nelson, E.D. & Robinson, B. (1999). Excerpt from Chapter 2: Biological, psychological, and social psychological perspectives (pp. 52-73). In Gender in Canada. Toronto: Prentice-Hall Canada.

The following presents a speculative fictional gynocentric rewrite of Freudian theory, placing women centre stage and men at the problematic margins of social and psychological life.

It’s important to understand that when Phyllis was growing up in Vienna, women were considered superior because of their ability to give birth. From the family parlor to the great matriarchal institutions of politics and religion, this was a uniform belief…

Women’s superior position in society was so easily mistaken for an immutable fact of life that males had developed exaggerated versions of such inevitable but now somewhat diminished conditions as womb envy. Indeed, these beliefs in women’s natural right to dominate were the very pillars of Western matriarchal civilization…

In addition, men’s lack of firsthand experience with birth and nonbirth—with choosing between existence and nonexistence, conception and contraception, as women must do so wisely for all their fertile years—severely inhibited their potential for developing a sense of justice and ethics. This tended to disqualify them as philosophers, whose purview was the “to be or not be” issue, the deepest question of existence versus nonexistence, that dominates serious human discourse. Practically speaking, it also lessened men’s ability to make life-and-death judgments, which explained their absence from decision-making positions in the judiciary, law enforcement, the military, and other such professions. True, one or two exceptional men might ascend to a position requiring high moral judgment, but they had been trained to “think like a woman” by rare contact with academia or because they had no sisters and their mothers were forced to burden their tender sons with matriarchal duties.

Finally, as Phyllis Freud’s clinical findings showed, males were inclined toward meanness and backbiting, the inevitable result of having been cut off from the coveted sources of life and fulfillment to which their mates had such ready access within their bodies…

After life-giving wombs and sustenance-giving breasts, women’s ability to menstruate was the most obvious proof of their superiority. Only women could bleed without injury or death; only they rose from the gore each month like a phoenix; only their bodies were in tune with the ululations of the universe and the timing of the tides. Without this innate lunar cycle, how could men have a sense of time, tides, space, seasons, movement of the universe, or the ability to measure anything at all? How could men mistress the skills of measurement necessary for mathematics, engineering, architecture, surveying—and so many other professions? In Christian churches, how could males, lacking monthly evidence of Her death and resurrection, serve the Daughter of the Goddess? In Judaism, how could they honor the Matriarch without the symbol of Her sacrifices recorded in the Old Ovariment? Thus insensible to the movements of the planets and the turning of the universe, how could men become astronomers, naturalists, scientists—or much of anything at all?…

As Phyllis observed…there was “yet another surprising effect of womb envy, or the discovery of the inferiority of the penis to the clitoris, which is undoubtedly the most important of all…that masturbation…is a feminine activity and that the elimination of penile sensuality is a necessary pre-condition for the development of masculinity.”

In this way, Phyllis Freud wisely screened all she heard from her testyrical patients through her understanding, still well accepted to this day, the men are sexually passive, just as they tend to be intellectually and ethically. After all, the libido is intrinsically feminine, or, as she put it with her genius for laywoman’s terms, “man is possessed of a weaker sexual instinct.”

This was also proved by man’s mono-orgasmic nature. No serious authority disputed the fact the females, being multiorgasmic, were better adapted to pleasure and thus were natural sexual aggressors. In fact, “envelopment,” the legal term for intercourse, was an expression of this active/passive understanding. It was also acted out in microcosm in the act of conception itself. Consider these indisputable facts of life: The large ovum expends no energy, waits for the sperm to seek out its own destruction in typically masculine and masochistic fashion, and then simply envelops this infinitesimal organism. As the sperm disappears into the ovum, it is literally eaten alive—much like the male spider being eaten by his mate. Even the most quixotic male liberationist will have to agree that biology leaves no room for doubt about intrinsic female dominance.

What intrigued Freud was not these well-known biological facts, however, but their psychological significance: for instance, the ways in which males were rendered incurably narcissistic, anxious, and fragile by having their genitals so precariously perched and visibly exposed on the outside of their bodies. Though the great Greek philosopher Aristotelia had been cruel to say that men were simply mutilated women, men’s womblessness and the loss of all but vestigial breasts and odd, useless nipples were the end of a long evolutionary journey toward the sole functions of sperm production, sperm carrying, and sperm delivery. Women did all the rest of reproduction. Thus it was female behavior, health, and psychology that governed gestation and birth. Since time immemorial, this disproportionate reproductive influence had unbalanced the power of the sexes in favor of women.

Finally there was the unavoidable physiological fact of the penis. Its very existence confirmed the initial bisexuality of all humans. All life beings as female in the womb as elsewhere (the only explanation for men’s residual nipples), and the penile tissue had its origin in the same genital nub, and thus retained a comparable number of nerve endings as the clitoris. But somewhere along the evolutionary line, the penis had acquired a double function: excretion of urine and sperm delivery. Indeed, during the male’s feminine, masturbatory, clitoral stage of development before young boys had seen female genitals and realized that their penises were endangered and grotesque compared to the compact, well-protected, aesthetically perfect clitorises—it had a third, albeit immature, function of masturbatory pleasure…

It was almost as if Father Nature himself had paid “less careful attention” to the male. His unique and most distinctive organ had become confused. Was the penis part of the reproductive system or the urinary tract? Was it intended for conception or excretion? How could males be trusted to understand the difference?…

Nonetheless, Freud continued to extend her “anatomy is destiny” thesis beyond previous boundaries. With the force of logic in combination with clinical evidence of men’s greater tolerance for physical as well as psychological pain, she demonstrated that the suicide run of tiny, weak male sperm toward big, strong female ova was the original paradigm of male masochism. There was also the chronic suffering caused by burning urine forced through the residual clitoral nerve endings within the penis. For the next century and perhaps the future of womankind, Freud had brilliantly proved why the pleasure/pain principle of masochism was a hallmark of masculinity. (Though, as she well knew, it also occurred in females who were put in a masculine position.)…

Male sexuality became mature only when pleasure was transferred from the penis—which was desensitized and rendered unpleasant by its dual function anyway—to the mature and appropriate areas: the fingers and the tongue. Immature penile orgasms had to be replaced by mature lingual and digital ones…

…after her mother’s death, Phyllis Freud had realized that all children feel hostility toward their parents and want them to die… As she wrote, “in sons this death wish is directed against their father, and in daughters against their mother.” It was not only a comforting confirmation of her own normalcy but the moment many Freudian scholars have pinpointed as the discovery of the Electra and the later-discovered less important Oedipus complex.

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