Back to home page
INT FORUM PSYCHOANAL 1:98-103, 1992
PERVERSION, EATING DISORDERS AND SEX ROLES
J. Michael Russell, Fullerton, CA, USA
Perversion is presented as a fascination with something we also
regard as repugnant. A perversion like exhibitionism is a metaphor
illuminating the stereotypically masculine. An eating disorder such
as bulimia provides a metaphor illuminating the stereotypically
feminine. It also fits the account given of perversion. Stereotypes
for masculine and feminine, though cultivated in social
expectations, are rooted in the infant fantasy world. One is
fascinated with the fate of what one has ejected (projected). This
contributes to a groundwork for masculinity and exhibitionism.
One is fascinated and ambivalent about what one takes in
(introjects) which contributes to a groundwork for femininity and
bulimia. Genitalia are discovered subsequently, as appropriate
representations of these options. Our capacity to be socialized into
gender roles, and our discovery of our genitalia en route to this
socialization, are foreshadowed by these deeper and earlier styles.
Sugar and spice and everything nice; that's what little girls are
made of.
Snips and snails and puppy dog's tails; that's what little boys are
made of. (English nursery rhyme.)
This paper will consider some implications of the sex role
stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, and what these have to
do with perversion and with eating disorders. Then I will set these
observations in a context of speculation about infant fantasy life
and how this sets the stage for sex role socialization.
The general outline of the stereotypes is pretty familiar:
girls are supposedly sweet, nice, virtuous, fastidious, polite, cute,
pretty, and grow into women who are subservient, caretakers,
nurturers, valued for their appearance, expected to have bodies
which are sexually attractive to men. Boys are supposedly dirty,
competitive, into mischief, and grow into men who are rough,
domineering, who are sexually preoccupied, swear, belch, take
pride in passing gas, and are generally crude. The unmistakable
nuance of the quoted nursary rhyme is that boys are rather
disgusting. When they grow up, maybe they'll be perverts,
eventually, dirty old men with lecherous interest in young girls. The
female's prospects are equally dismal. One might respond with
disgust to the excessive sweetness of the image of little girls: when
these girls grow up they can look forward to eating disorders and
plastic surgery. If they can get their bodies to conform to the
prevailing standards men will want to "get inside them." Later on,
when they are no longer attractive to men, they become bitches
and old bags. Within this portrait I am struck with how we seem
ready to think of perversion as a male phenomena, though, of
course, women can display the characteristically male perversions.
Similarly, we seem ready to assume that eating disorders are more
a phenomenon of women, even though men can and do have
eating disorders.
Louise Kaplan, in Female Perversions,[1] has recently deliniated
masculine and feminine perversions. Drawing from Kaplan, and
also from Robert Stoller's Perversion: The Erotic Form Of
Hatred,[2] I am finding it helpful to think of masculine perversion
as a sort of angry caricature of a masculine stereotype.
Exhibitionism, or "flashing", is a particularly good example of this
parody of crude and disgusting masculine sexuality prophesized in
the nursury rhyme account of what little boys are made of. Kaplan
includes eating disorders on her list of the "feminine
perversions,"[3] and it strikes me that anorxia, bulimia, and obesity
may all represent dramatically "perverse" statements about the
expectation that one be ones body as a sexually attractive
container for the male's crude desire. My suggestion, then, is that
both masculine and feminine perversions represent a mix of
fascination, anger, and repugnance about something related to the
expectations of ones sex role.
The authors of the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual -- III
Revised[4] elected to replace the pejorative term "perversion" with
the less plainly judgmental term "paraphelias." But the fact is that
we think of "perversions" in the same breath with "sick",
"disgusting", "revolting", and "abnormal." The last is clearly the
weakest of these terms, and it is far from clear when and whether
not being normal is a bad thing or a good thing. Of course Freud,
in his Three Essays On Sexuality[5] contended that perversion is
normal, that we are all "polymorphously perverse": the whole
gamut of perverse inclinations is ubiquitous in infancy. But
something rather central is lost if we try to bypass the element of
evaluation in perversity by presenting it as normal. Perhaps part of
Freud's motivation for highlighting the "normalcy" of perverse
inclinatations was to move us away from the judgmental aspect of
the term, but then we lose a key strand of the meaning of the
concept and of the phenomena the concept seeks to cover.
Perversions generally are an eroticized fascination with the
repugnant; they have to do with being drawn toward something the
agent also finds repellent or repugnant.
Let us amplify this notion of the repugnant. It is common in
adolescence, when one youth shows a romantic interest in another,
and the advance is not wanted, that the derogatory response will
be to say or imply that the suitor "nauseates me." There is a kind of
a chilling and ultimate rejection in saying that something or
someone is disgusting. Persons, deeds, inclinations, things utterly
reprehensible, all may be met with, "That makes me sick." This is
understood as the ultimate in judgementalness. If there is negation
in the human unconscious, nausea captures it. Nothing could be a
more natural language of the human body's expressing its utter
rejection of something than to treat it as something to be expelled
by vomit [6]. To vomit something is to treat it as repellant, and to
declare, "This is
utterly foreign to me. I do not want this in me. I do not want this to
be a part of me. I cannot and I will not digest it. I want nothing to
do with it." My proposal is that when we say of someone that they
are inclined toward something perverted we are suggesting they
are drawn toward something which they themselves regard as
repulsive, and/or are drawn to it because they themselves reckon
that it is so regarded by others and they are drawn to it (partly) for
this very reason.
So, what is repugnant? Paradigms here are excrement, spit, urine,
blood, and intestines. An interesting fact about this family of items
is that they are all ordinarily contained within the body. Further,
they are typically unproblematic to someone who contemplates
them, so long as they are contained where they are supposed to
be. None of us is offended by the existence of intestines, for
instance, provided that they are where they belong. We know that
creatures have guts, intestines, and that's fine: but an animal
squashed on the highway is disgusting; we don't want things that
are supposed to be inside the skin to get outside the skin. That is
my clue to the disgusting: it pertains to circumstances where that
which is supposedly inside the skin is not in the container.
Consider saliva as a good example of stuff which is alright when it
is where it is supposed to be. None of us minds the saliva of our
own mouths, and yet would be appalled at the prospect of putting
our own saliva into a glass and then sipping on it. This is an
interesting fact, worthy of attention. None of us-- who are happy
enough to have mouths in which there is saliva-- would really
suppose something awful has happened to this stuff while it has
been in a glass, but now the idea of it is repellant. Or, when we
consider another person: few of us who are adults are repelled at
the prospect of kissing, or deep kissing someone to whom we are
attracted. This involves an exchange of saliva, which doesn't seem
to stop us. We don't give it a lot of thought, but neither does it
come as news to us that this is what is at stake. I think we would
have every bit as much a reaction of revulsion to the idea of
sharing somebody else's saliva, by the intermediary of a glass, as
we would to reimbibing our own saliva from a glass. Saliva is
alright as long as it is contained, but as soon as it's out of the
container it becomes revolting. Equally, we would be revolted at
the idea of a deep kiss with someone to whom we felt no
attraction. If, on independent grounds, we find a person
unattractive, the thought of their saliva is all the more repugnant.
(So there is more to the phenomenology of the revolting than that it
is what is not contained within skin as it should be.) Children will
show these lines of connection very clearly. They will shirk from
touching something that a hated sibling or schoolmate has touched,
fantasizing that they may have "gotten germs on it," that it "has
cooties" (perhaps "cooties" is uniquely American slang) or spit on
it. It appears that disgust is a fantasy about someone's insides
getting outside.
Erotic passion exists like a dare on the edge of the repulsive. The
lover declares "I would do anything for you" and seeks to prove it
by trying to imagine and offer something "kinky" enough to
demonstrate the level of sexual excitement. The point is made by
the ubiquitous fellatio scenes in the pornographic movies, in which
the woman is portrayed as taking delight in ingesting the man's
visibly spilled semen: she is to be excited by what another might
regard with disgust. (Kaplan [7] has observed that the feminine
perversions have their counterpart "pornography" in the romantic
novels. The key fantasy, I think, is "Love me for the good that is
inside of me, in spite of how I look. Don't be put off by the
physically unattractive, nor preoccupied with attraction. The
masculine fantasy, perhaps, is "Be excited by me in spite of what is
inside me that you might find repellant.")
And yet, to reiterate, disgust is learned. Like the sex role that
implies that there is something about masculinity which puts one at
risk of being found disgusting, these are matters into which, it
would appear, we are socialized. I doubt that the phenomena of
disgust and nausea make much of an appearance, if any, in infancy.
Disgust seems more to be an experience that flourishes in latency,
as an outcome of the resolution of oedipal conflicts. I am
convinced that both the masculine and the feminine perversions
receive their central and decisive stamp from oedipal issues and
reaction formations that develop during latency. Thus as Freud [8]
believed, the fetish can be understood as an object of sexual
excitement representing a displacement that allows the fetishist to
avoid the anxiety of castration [9] experienced in connection with
the sight of the female genitalia and the absence of the maternal
phallus. Or, to consider the exhibitionist, he may be understood in
terms of a stratagy of seeking to establish before a parental
substitute evidence that he still has his penis. Sadism and
masochism may be understood in terms of mastering castration
anxiety, by subserviating the other or oneself. And so on. Among
the feminine perversions, specifically the eating disorders, we may
illuminate the anorexic's behavior as a solution to whether or how
to sexualize and desexualize ones relationship with Father. While
highlighting oedipal conflicts we may allow that we are socialized
into our sex roles, and as part of this we acquire complex ideas
about what to regard as disgusting and how to make use of our
fear that we may evoke disgust. Since I think that perversions,
eating disorders, and sex roles, all are organized around oedipal
conflicts, if I turn my focus to speculation about very early
pre-oedipal development this is not because I think it is more
important, but just because at this point in time I am finding this
very engaging. The fact is that the target phenomena of this paper
-- perversion, eating disorders, and sex roles -- can each be
clarified from the perspective of any of the classical Freudian
psycho-sexual stages (in reverse order) of latency, the Oedipal
conflicts of the phallic stage, the anal stage, or the oral, and equally
from each of the stages of separation and individuation delineated by Mahler [10].
I have another reason for wanting to turn to the pre-oedipel. I do
not find it credible that the sexual identity of males and females can
be attributed to their discovering the presence, absence, or
prospect of losing a penis. I do find it plausible that the phallus
serves as a solidifying symbol of sex roles, an organizing motif for
the roles into which we are socialized. But it seems to me that the
encouragement of society, and the vicissitudes of intrapsychic
conflict, must take hold of earlier developmental features. So we
should ask what is it that socialization manages to foster, in such a
way that we can become as responsive to stereotypic roles as it
seems we are.
Melanie Klein [11] has maintained that from birth the infant is
engaged in a relationship with the maternal breast which she
describes in terms of projection of feelings outside of oneself and
into the breast, getting rid of those feelings which are presumably
unpleasant, and introjecting or taking in of experiences which are
good, which Klein describes as an infant fantasy of scooping out
and devouring the contents of the breast. These sorts of ideas
which attribute such seeming sophistication to the mind of the
newborn are, of course, matters of very considerable controversy
among psychoanalysts. It would fall beyond the scope of this
paper to try to argue in any depth a liberal position with respect to
these issues. But I can present in dogmatic form a few premises
which are in some sympathy to Klein's views, without assuming
too much that is too radical about infant fantasy or about how
much or little sophistication we should attribute to infants.
Elaborate defense of these claims will have to wait for another
occasion.
The infant presumably attempts to take in or incorporate what feels
good, and expel or get rid of what feels bad. Inhaling, sucking,
ingesting, digesting, relaxing, attending, enjoying -- these may all be
thought of as prototypical forms of taking in. And expelling may be
captured in terms of exhaling, spitting, vomiting, tensing, excreting,
hating. I propose that tacit (cf. Polyoni [12]) or unreflective (cf.
Sartre [13]) discriminations of "me" and "not-me" evolve through
repeated experiences of taking in and ridding of affective
experience which evolves into an affective representation of that
which is other than oneself, which holds or contains that which one
ejects. I am thinking of a representation as an organized
experience of a thing, possibly in the absence of that thing;
representations need not be "visual images"; they can be any sort
of remembered experience of a thing, in the absence of that thing,
including visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile, or affective
reenactments. This representation Klein describes as the breast,
and this breast-source-container provides the grounding for what
will become the experience of Mother. We put our bad feelings
into Mother. [14]
Paradoxically, it feels good to get rid of bad feelings. This provides
a dimension of infantile ambivalence, and part of the foundation for
that perverse trait that we may feel drawn toward something of
which we have sought to rid ourselves. This sort of voluptuous
attention to something which we want to expel can be found in the
fascination with trying to dig out a splinter, expressing a pimple, or
compulsively picking away at rough spot on the furniture. There is
a reciprocal paradox in the fact that taking in what feels good leads
to satiation and then disdain. So ambivalence has an early start,
when we consider how readily good turns to bad and bad turns to
good. At this juncture I postulate that we take interest in that which
contains what we get rid of, and interest in the contents tacitly
assumed to have been put into that container. This, I think, is
sexual interest: it is a fascination with the fate of what we have
gotten rid of, and an inclination to expropriate it.
In summary, Klein's views on the early infant's means of defending
against strong impulse by projection and introjection gives us a
model for speculating that there are two sorts of psychological
prototypes present in all persons, both genders, one being the
cluster of traits having to do with getting rid of something from
oneself and putting it into the other, the second having to do with
taking something from the other, seeking to incorporate it, take it
into oneself. These provide us with a theoretical framework
suggesting basic psychological styles or formats or prototypes,
within which to understand stereotypic sex roles of the masculine
concern for aggressively seeking to penetrate and appropriate the
other, to control the other by ejecting into her, and understand the
alloted feminine project of nurturing, nourishing, containing. I
assume all of us have all of these capacities, but that as we are
brought more and more into a world of sex role expectations we
conform more and more to one role or the other; we are originally
androgynous but come to think of ourselves as more masculine or
feminine. Each of these psychological prototypes carries within it
seeds of opposition, paradox, so that any of us who is encouraged
to specialize in one role at the expense of the other is liable to
remain fascinated with and drawn to the other. This conflict can be
expressed in all manner of ways, but my suggestion is that it is
expressed in terms of masculine and feminine perversions, where
the perversion is constituted by a fascination with something about
ones sex role expectations that one finds radically unacceptable,
and toward which one is drawn.
Of these, the masculine perversions, epitomized by the exhbitionist,
the flasher, take some aspect of oneself that the pervert himself
regards as liable to be found repellant, as repulsive, and flaunts this
as if daring the other person, the container, to accept that repelled
part of oneself. The male pervert has found means to externalize
his internal contents, and then dares the other to accept (or reject)
this. In contrast, the feminine perversions rebel against being
assigned the lot of an attractive and nurturing container. They make
a mockery out of this, by shopping addictions, obsessive
housecleaning, feminine exhibitionism, kleptomania, delicate
self-cutting (Kaplan's term for certain subtle forms of harming ones
body) and the various eating disorders. (By feminine exhibitionism
I mean a kind of daring to be found worthwhile in spite of being
attractive, perhaps manifested by the expectation that one's eyes
not take advantage of an unbuttoned blouse or carelessly crossed
legs. In contrast, masculine exhibitionism dares the other to not be
rejecting in spite of the exposure of something repulsive.) The
feminine perversions make a mockery out of the expectation that
one be a consuming, attractive, nurturing container. Bulimia
captures the point well, as an enshrinement of ambivalence about
whether to take in not only Mother and Mother's food, but the
whole role expectation that Mother represents. So the bulimic
stuffs her container as a caricature of containment, purges herself,
as a caricature of rejecting that expectation, is drawn toward the
social expectation of thinness out of a passion for being attractive,
and has a ravenous appetite out of a passion to fill her emptiness
with "junk" [15] which endangers the appearance of the container.
Given parental encouragement toward one sex role over another,
the infantile invitation to be an intruding, demanding, aggressive,
protruding phallus cultivates in the child a form of organization in
which the penis is eventually discovered as an instrument which
happens to serve well the interest of entering another and leaving
something of oneself in that other. Similarly, the woman can
discover the capacity to be regarded as a container. Perhaps the
breast is the first fantasy container, and really should be thought of
as an oriface through which are ejected bad feelings, so that one
can subsequently evolve a curiousity about the fate of these
contents and a desire to reappropriate them. Eventually the vagina
comes to represent a means of entry. Here the central point is that
we discover our genitals in light of the sex roles that we have,
rather than the converse, whereby our sex roles would somehow
follow from the discovery of our genitals. It is, of course, true, that
the sex roles assigned us by others are done on the basis of
observable genatalia. If "anatomy is destiny" this is because of how
we are destined to be regarded by others: our discovery of our
anatomical differences comes after we have well developed
"masculine" and "feminine" prototypes available to us equally as
males and females. Either of these prototypes, should it become
linked with something radically repellant, sets the stage for some
form of perverse interest. [16]
Footnotes
1. Louise Kaplan, (1991a), Female Perversions (New York,
Doubleday).
2. Robert J. Stoller (1975), Perversion: The Erotic Form of
Hatred (New York: Pantheon).
3. Kaplan's (op. cit.) book jacket lists male perversions of
fetishism; transvestism; sexual masochism; sexual sadism;
exhibitionism; voyeurism; pedophilia; necrophilia; zoophilia, and
female perversions of kleptomania; homovestism; extreme
submissiveness ("Women Who Love Too Much"); mutilations
including delicate self-cutting (in contrast to more flagrant
self-injury), surgical addiction, trichotillomania; female
impersonation; anorexia; the incest wife.
Kaplan describes "homovestism as an impersonation of the
idealized phallic parent of the same sex to overcome shameful and
frightening cross-gender identifications." (Page 546, footnote to
page 250.) She credits this concept to the work of George
Zavitzianos (1967), "Problems of Technique in the Anbalysis of a
Juvenile Delinguent," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 48:
439-47; _____ (1971), "Fetishism and Exhibitionism in the
Female
and Their Relationship to Psychopathy and Kleptomania;"
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 52: 297-305;
_____(1972),"Homeovestism: Perverse Form of Behaviour
Involving the Wearing of Clothes of the Same Sex," International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 53: 471-77; _____(1977), "The
Object in Fetishism, Homeovestism, and Transvestism,"
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 58:487-95.
Also see Louise Kaplan (1991b), "Woman Masquerading as
Women", in Gerald Fogel and Wayne Myers, Perversions and
Near-Perversons in Clinical Practice (New Haven, Yale University
Press), pp.127-152.
4. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (3rd
edition, revised, Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric
Association) 1987.
5. Sigmund Freud [1905] (1953), "Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality," in Standard Edition, 7:125-245.
6. Freud dsecribes vomiting as a substitute for moral and physical
disgust. [1895] (1953), "Studies on Hysteria," Standard Edition
(London, Hogarth Press), page 131.
7. Louise Kaplan, (1991a) op cit, chapter 10.
8. Sigmund Freud [1927] (1953), "Fetishism," in Standard Edition
21:152-57.
9. Joyce McDougall holds that "the leading theme of the neosexual
plot is invariably castration. ...In every case the unconscious
meaning remains the same. These are all substitute acts of
castration and thus serve to master castration anxiety in illusory
fashion..." (1981), Theaters of the Mind (New York, Basic
Books).
10. M. Mahler, F. Pine, A. Bergman (1975), The Psychological
Birth of the Human Infant (New York, Basic Books).
11. For instance, Melanie Klein, [1946] (1975) "Notes on Some
Schizoid Mechanisms," in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume
III: Envy And Gratitude (New York, Macmillan), pages 1- 24.
12. Michael Polanyi (Marjorie Grene, ed.) (1969), Knowing and
Being (Chicago, University of Chicago).
13. Jean-Paul Sartre (1956), Being and Nothingness (New York,
Philosophical Library).
14. See Joseph Sandler and Anne-Marie Sandler [1978] (1986),
"On the Development of Object Relationships and Affects,"
reprinted in Peter Buckley (editor), Essential Papers On Object
Relations (New York, New York University Press), pages
272-92. Sandler and Sandler are highly critical of Klein's views on
very early unconscious fantasy, but I find the way I would want to
read Klein, and the way I would want to develop an account of
what a representation is -- namely as an affective organization
which need not be linked with anything like a mental image -- gets
me reasonably close to Klein's perspective, and yet also comes
close to language Sandler and Sandler employ. For instance, "If
we stretch the concept of `object' a little furtherthan usual, we
could say that the first objects of the child are the experiences of
pleasure and satisfaction on the one hand, and those of unpleasure
and pain on the other." (Page 285.) In a footnote on this same
page Sandler and Sandler say, "These primary affective objects
are relatively chaotic masses of pleasureable feelings and
sensations on the one hand and unpleasurable ones on the other."
They go on to distinguish their view as "a view very different from
the Kleinian theory of extremely early unconscious fantasy." In this
paper I am understanding "fantasy" to mean what I suppose
Sandler and Sandler mean by "primary affective objects."
15. Marion Oliner (1988), "Anal Components in Overeating," in
Harvey Schwartz (1988), Bulemia: Psychoanalytic Treatment and
Theory, (Madison, Connecticut, International Universities Press),
pages 227-253: "Also, almost invariably, the food that is the
object of such binges is described as junk or garbage, thus
implicitly transforming the person who contains it into a receptacle
for noxious products." (Page 227.)
16. The heart of what I am calling the feminine stereotype comes
from identification with the Mother who contains us (our
projections). That capacity to identify with the container is itself
founded upon earlier experience of being a container, of taking in
experience; but it would seem to be the identification with Mother
that is really the key to the feminine role. This being so, we might
conclude that although we are all psychologically androgynous, we
are first of all male, if the male prototype is this active controlling of
the universe, including taking in and also getting rid of experience.
It seems to me we all start off with this (what is to become the
ground for the) "masculine" stance, and then subsequently come to
identify with that -- the feminine -- which contains us. So in this
light I take exception to Stoller's (op. cit) notion of primary
femininity, and would prefer to say that what is primary is
masculinity, and from this evolves a capacity to identify, and then,
in agreement with Stoller, the first identification (and symbiotic
relationship) is with the feminine.
Professor Michael Russell
Jmrussell@fullerton.edu
Philosophy and Human Services
California State University
Fullerton, California 92634
(714)278-2752
about me - vitae - articles - home - classes I teach - links - ideas in progress