"Non-Oedipal Sexuality"

( "In Freudian terms, the sexuality we will now discuss is called "pre-Oedipal," or "pre-genital." But, our feminist critic will observe, this has the effect of normalizing and legitimating the Oedipal process, heterosexuality, and the role of the father. She will tell us that these are all matters that should be challenged, since they inevitably lead to patriarchy and its system of domination. For the purpose of our argument, I will adopt terminology that will avoid her objection. Rather than referring to this alternative sexuality as "pre-Oedipal," I will call it non-Oedipal, meaning here that the internalization of the father, characteristic of the Oedipal phase, has not happened, rather then saying that it has not happened yet. This terminology contains no judgment about what sort of sexuality should be normative. My business now is to explore, rather than evaluate.")

"Chasseguet-Smirgel’s interest in sexuality grew out of her study of perversions. Whether one wants to call such practices "perverse" is, perhaps, a matter of judgment. Let us put it aside for the moment, however, and attempt to be purely descriptive.

 Characteristic of the male perverts she studied was an underlying fantasy she called the denial of difference. This is a fantasy that the mother has a penis, and is therefore sexually complete. The meaning of this fantasy, for the little boy, is that it means that he is, even with his immature sexual apparatus, a suitable partner for his mother. He thus avoids the inferiority that would come from comparing himself with his father and can maintain the fantasy that he can supplant his father in her life. Reinforced in this view by his mother, who typically does prefer him to his father, he thus denies the difference in the generations. As well, he denies the difference between true adult endeavor and the kind of pretended endeavor that a child can manage, which then comes to be the specific perversion. In this way, he can maintain his narcissism, the fantasy of fusion with the perfect, omnipotent, primordial mother.

 I have discussed the consequences of this male development elsewhere (Schwartz, 1996). For the present, what is more important is the course of non-Oedipal sexuality in the girl. For Chasseguet-Smirgel, this again represents a fusion with the primordial mother. But there is a difference. For the boy, the fantasy of fusion involves taking the place of the father. For the girl, what is envisioned is not a partnership with the primordial mother, but establishment as the primordial mother herself. The omnipotence, then, which is the defining characteristic of the primordial mother, will be hers. But omnipotence has the corollary that the father is a usurper who may be gotten rid of. In her fantasy, then, she can have children, with which she also identities, by herself, and without male participation:

The companion to the boy’s perverse deception regarding the difference between the sexes and between the generations, which installs him as mother’s partner, would be, in the girl’s case, the denial that the child needs to have a father. (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985: p.35)

And she continues:

Indeed, the bearing of children without the male playing any role is written into the S.C.U.M (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto: "Reproduction of the species is technically possible without any need for a man. Women could henceforth reproduce only women" (Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M Manifesto). (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985: p.35)

And what does that tell us about her sexuality? If she identifies with the omnipotent, primordial mother, and if the aim in sexuality is fusion with the primordial mother, who does she have sex with? The answer can only be that she has sex with herself. To the extent that she can make sense of having sex with others, they will have to be those with whom she identifies completely. These may be other women, into whom she has projected herself completely and without reservation; or they may be men, if she can strip them of their masculine difference and identify them with herself. Alternatively, she can have sex with men but not make sense of it. She may experience this sex as an act of abuse by a person whom she resents and despises, but whom she continues seeing as a result of a part of her personality for which she assumes no responsibility. In either case, the basic psychodynamic fact remains. The central figure in her psyche is herself, identified with the primordial mother. Under this identification, there is no one else that it would possibly make sense to have sex with. Perfect is perfect, and who could ask for anything more? In fact, to the extent that sex implies a connection with an other, she does not have sex at all. She is not sexual, but erotic. More precisely, she is autoerotic. As we shall see, this is an important key to our puzzle.

The idea that she is having sex with herself, that she is autoerotic, and that this underlies her basic approach to the world, may seem strange, but it is in fact a mainstay of feminist writing. It reaches, perhaps, its most explicit formulation in the work of Luce Irigaray.

Irigaray

Irigaray (1985) takes sexuality as the core of all human relations, and takes autoeroticism as the model of sexuality. She looks there for the difference between male and female sexuality. She maintains that the phallic sexuality of the male, which has until this point dominated Western culture, has given woman only a subordinate, instrumental function, replacing the hand in male masturbation:

Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of male parameters… For the clitoris is conceived as a little penis pleasant to masturbate so long as castration anxiety does not exist (for the boy child), and the vagina is valued for the "lodging" it offers the male organ when the forbidden hand has to find a replacement for pleasure-giving.

In these terms, woman’s erogenous zones never amount to anything but a clitoris-sex that is not comparable to the noble phallic organ, or a hole-envelope that serves to sheathe and massage the penis in intercourse: a non-sex, or a masculine organ turned back upon itself, self-embracing.(p. 23)

Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies. That she may find pleasure in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man. (p. 25)

The loathsomeness of this phallic sexuality, as Irigaray experiences it, is apparent in the way it plays out in culture.

The more or less exclusive – and highly anxious – attention paid to erection in Western sexuality proves to what extent the imaginary that governs it is foreign to the feminine. For the most part, this sexuality offers nothing but imperatives dictated by male rivalry: the "strongest" being the one who has the best "hard-on," the longest, the biggest, the stiffest penis, or even the one who "pees the farthest" (as in little boys’ contests). Or else one finds imperatives dictated by the enactment of sadomasochistic fantasies, these in turn governed by man’s relation to his mother: the desire to force entry, to penetrate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of this womb where he has been conceived, the secret of his begetting, of his "origin." (pp. 24-5)

She contrasts this contemptible stuff with female sexuality, evidently a higher type:

… woman’s autoeroticism is very different from man’s. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman’s body, language … And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman "touches herself" all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two – but not divisible into one(s) – that caress each other.

Her model of relationships follows along with this. Male relationships, characterized by possessiveness and modeled on property ownership, are based on the singularity of the penis. Woman, however, understood in her own right, resists objectification. She is diffuse, fluid, several.

Woman always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is already within her and is autoerotically familiar to her. Which is not to say that she appropriates the other for herself, that she reduces it to her own property. Ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign to the feminine. At least sexually. But not nearness. Nearness is so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible. Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either. (p. 31)

But what can it be with which she can be so near, with which she can be autoerotically bound, which is within her, but which is not her, and with which her whole world, consisting of her and her relationships, can be made? What can this student of Lacan[20] be referring to other than her reflection? We have here the story of Narcissus, the story of the way in which one’s self and one’s own self-admiration can constitute the whole world for oneself. This, according to Irigaray, is the pure feminine perspective. It is the perspective of the virgin.

And how does male sexuality look from this virginal perspective:

This autoeroticism is disrupted by a violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis, an intrusion that distracts and deflects the woman from this "self-caressing" she needs if she is not to incur the disappearance of her own pleasure in sexual relations. (p. 24)"