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In our book A Womb of Her Own (Routledge 2017) Susan Kavaler-Adler writes: It is not just the act of date rape we need to attend to. The male rapist defined his female victim before he raped her. She would have surrendered willingly, but then she would have been the “other,” not defined by him. Sherry had to be the Galatea to his Pygmalion before he entered her through persecutory assault. Sherry has to lose her own identity, in his eyes, before he would take her over physically. The man has to possess her mind and image before he possessed (rather than encountered) her body. After the act, tossing her away as a piece of garbage, he defines her further: “You won’t forget me! … I’m your first. But it will be so easy for me to forget you!” Of course he can forget her, because she didn’t exist as a “you.” He dressed her and defined her to make her a reflection of his narcissistic image of an Arab sex slave. Contriving her image is an intimate part of his impulse and act of rape.
How does this kind of male “take over” relate to the female reproductive freedom? The man not only legislates to control the female’s jurisdiction over her own body, but he must define her as well. The malignancy begins with the male definition of the female body. She is treated as Adam’s rib, not as an autonomous female “other,” as this is predominantly threatening to many men. After the Rape: He Defines Her Again Again Sherry’s rapist defines her, when after the rape he encounters Sherry at the same nightclub where they had originally met. He speaks loudly to his friends of his possession of her. She is to listen, as he raises his volume. He defines her in his malicious gossip — right in front of her — as “easy.” He spells out the tale of his “easy” virginal lay, exclaiming loudly so she can be sure to hear it: “That one’s easy! You should take her home. She’ll go with anyone!” Even as he speaks, his contemptuous voice is cold and rapacious, just as his phallus was brutal and cold. Both are trenchantly destructive (and “envious”) of Sherry’s sense of her own being. He creates a negative mirror, to reflect back at her, derisively defining her. After the vicious act, which culminates in forced anal intercourse, Sherry is forced to take off his contrived Arab girl outfit and to leave his apartment, shunned and humiliated. The man again defines her before she leaves. He defines her as the excluded and foreign “other,” in contrasting her to his girlfriend who is about to come home. This is a girlfriend from his own culture, who has also been defined by him. Sherry has no right to her own space in his space, his apartment, his mind. By contrast, the girlfriend is said to have a right there. For her this alien place is called home, even though she has just been betrayed there, and defined by her exclusion too. The girlfriend, who wears the Arab clothing full time, defined by all the men of his culture, can occupy a space in his space, in his apartment. Sherry must shed her contrived garb, which the man invited her into during the rape. Sherry is the “whore”, the “easy” lay, not the girlfriend. The rapist continues to define Sherry as he speaks to his male friends in the nightclub, weeks after the rape. He speaks in his own contrived “image self” outfit. He speaks in a male tone of manic grandiosity and triumph. All the men then gather to define the women. The woman’s greatest downfall is to be cast into the non-personhood role of a victim. This definition of her as the “other” and “victim” is then communally sanctioned by the male peer group. Sherry continues to pursue her goal of becoming a writer, which to Sherry is the avenue to defining herself for herself; by giving vivid emotive voice to her experience in symbolic words. But even when words are supposedly the message, as in the writing group, other things can be going on in the tone and nuance, attitude, and arrogance of interpreting the other, when a group member or an analyst is intending to analyze and relate. The gross physical rape becomes a subtle verbal rape. The verbal behavior impacts through symbolic words, and the voice and the body are behind the words.
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In our book A Womb of Her Own (Routledge, 2017) Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler describes the circumstances of a date-rape. The complete text is available in our book. Her client Sherry comments after a date rape: “He didn’t have to force me. I was like a budding flower, on the verge, just ready to open. His deep sensuous eroticism, his exotic culture, it all was melting me. I never before had felt anyone to be so sensual—that night in the barely lighted club, dancing, the music, his smell, his complements—it was all working on me…When I went to his apartment with him it was because I wanted to. I wanted to yield to him, to shed all my walls, and resistances. I wanted to surrender, but he forced me. He raped me…”
Dr. Kavaler-Adler writes as follows: Sherry dares to desire. She dares for the first time in her life to desire sexual surrender to a man. Her desire is, in part, for an emotional connection. She wants to be ravished by a penetrating male for the first time in her life. He rapes her instead. However, it all starts with him, the erotic stranger, defining her. The Arab male gave Sherry a Muslim female costume to wear, as he wants to define her as a part of his culture before he forcibly entered her, refusing to merge, holding on to an omnipotent dominating control. He tells her: “Now you look as you should, like a young Arab girl.” He then penetrates her in an act of criminal intrusion. It is not just the act of date rape we need to attend to. The male rapist defined his female victim before he raped her. She would have surrendered willingly, but then she would have been the “other,” not defined by him. Sherry had to be the Galatea to his Pygmalion before he entered her through persecutory assault. Sherry has to lose her own identity, in his eyes, before he would take her over physically. The man has to possess her mind and image before he possessed (rather than encountered) her body. After the act, tossing her away as a piece of garbage, he defines her further: “You won’t forget me! … I’m your first. But it will be so easy for me to forget you!” Of course he can forget her, because she didn’t exist as a “you.” He dressed her and defined her to make her a reflection of his narcissistic image of an Arab sex slave. Contriving her image is an intimate part of his impulse and act of rape. How does this kind of male “take over” relate to the female reproductive freedom? The man not only legislates to control the female’s jurisdiction over her own body, but he must define her as well. The malignancy begins with the male definition of the female body. She is treated as Adam’s rib, not as an autonomous female “other,” as this is predominantly threatening to many men. Again Sherry’s rapist defines her, when after the rape he encounters Sherry at the same nightclub where they had originally met. He speaks loudly to his friends of his possession of her. She is to listen, as he raises his volume. He defines her in his malicious gossip — right in front of her — as “easy.” He spells out the tale of his “easy” virginal lay, exclaiming loudly so she can be sure to hear it: “That one’s easy! You should take her home. She’ll go with anyone!” Even as he speaks, his contemptuous voice is cold and rapacious, just as his phallus was brutal and cold. Both are trenchantly destructive (and “envious”) of Sherry’s sense of her own being. He creates a negative mirror, to reflect back at her, derisively defining her. After the vicious act, which culminates in forced anal intercourse, Sherry is forced to take off his contrived Arab girl outfit and to leave his apartment, shunned and humiliated. The man again defines her before she leaves. He defines her as the excluded and foreign “other,” in contrasting her to his girlfriend who is about to come home. This is a girlfriend from his own culture, who has also been defined by him. Sherry has no right to her own space in his space, his apartment, his mind. By contrast, the girlfriend is said to have a right there. For her this alien place is called home, even though she has just been betrayed there, and defined by her exclusion too. The girlfriend, who wears the Arab clothing full time, defined by all the men of his culture, can occupy a space in his space, in his apartment. Sherry must shed her contrived garb, which the man invited her into during the rape. Sherry is the “whore”, the “easy” lay, not the girlfriend. The rapist continues to define Sherry as he speaks to his male friends in the nightclub, weeks after the rape. He speaks in his own contrived “image self” outfit. He speaks in a male tone of manic grandiosity and triumph. All the men then gather to define the women. The woman’s greatest downfall is to be cast into the non-personhood role of a victim. This definition of her as the “other” and “victim” is then communally sanctioned by the male peer group. Sherry continues to pursue her goal of becoming a writer, which to Sherry is the avenue to defining herself for herself; by giving vivid emotive voice to her experience in symbolic words. But even when words are supposedly the message, as in the writing group, other things can be going on in the tone and nuance, attitude, and arrogance of interpreting the other, when a group member or an analyst is intending to analyze and relate. The gross physical rape becomes a subtle verbal rape. The verbal behavior impacts through symbolic words, and the voice and the body are behind the words. Perhaps you may remember the movie called Looking for Mr. Good Bar. It depicts the story of a woman who is attracted to a demon lover. In our book A Womb of Her Own (Routledge, 2017) Dr. Kavaler-Adler discusses this phenomenon very poignantly in her account of the psychological vulnerability to rape when certain factors are present in a woman’s early background.
Dr, Kavaler-Adler writes as follows: When in addition to early pre-oedipal maternal deprivation, the woman’s father has also been traumatizing, the demonic aspect of the chosen male is often significantly compounded. In the female version of the demon-lover complex, the god-father male forces submission, and he averts or precludes surrender by the woman. He attacks the woman with a manic erotic intensity and sadism that may or may not be explicitly sexual. And, when he has forcibly conquered the woman who craves merger with his power, he both imprisons his female victim under his omnipotent control, and then – emotionally or literally abandons her. Often the demon-lover sadistically attacks his female prey with a sexualized lust, which can result in rape, beating, torture, or sometimes even murder. In the literary examples of the demon-lover complex that women like Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, Edith Sitwell, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and others have written about, death is the inevitable fate of the woman who is attracted to her demon-lover .This is true whether this death is achieved through murder by the male’s manic erotic intensity and sadism – as in Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights– or by the woman’s overt suicidal act – as in Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, and Virginia Woolf (see Kavaler-Adler 1993a, 1996, 2013b). Suicide often comes at the point when the lady has given herself to the demon-lover, both sexually and psychically, and then feels murderously betrayed. In the case of Sherry, as we will discover here, the murder is not literal, but psychological, as it occurs through rape. Yet Sherry becomes obsessed with the writings of Marquis de Sade after her date rape by the hyper-masculinized, manic-erotic, narcissistic man. She reads about how Marquis de Sade raped, tortured, and abused his female victims to the point of death. And she becomes fascinated! Nevertheless, due to the therapeutic process in which the early pre-oedipal mother has been dealt with through a critical “developmental mourning process” (Kavaler-Adler, 1992, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2003, 2005a, 2005b, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2006d, 2007, 2013a, 2013b, & 2014)—the young lady suffering date rape will be seen to survive psychologically. She will take her psychological power back from the man. A therapeutic writing group milieu becomes part of Sherry’s healing process, as will be seen in her case. We will witness here that during this healing process, Sherry projects her male demon-lover rapist onto Harry, a man in one of my therapeutic writing groups, when Harry makes some comments that had re-triggered Sherry’s horrifying rape trauma. (This re-traumatization is frequent with PTSD, but it cannot always be talked about, as it could be in this therapeutic atmosphere.) In an object relations view of the demon-lover complex, men who stir up oedipal lust in women for a powerful, aggrandized, and seductive father figure are also magnets for a re-enactment of the tragic lack of both maternal attunement and paternal protection, both of which condition a life from its infancy. The demon-lover complex always involves a woman’s destruction by a malignant man, where the woman is unable to assert her power with a man due to early pre-oedipal failings in mothering. When the demon-lover complex is seen in the context of well-known women artists and writers, who express the complex in their work, there is always a woman yearning to merge with an idealized male figure, who takes on the grandiose aspect of their own split-off power, and who is seen as an omnipotent god-like figure (Kavaler-Adler, 1993a & 1996).
Not only is the power of the woman split-off, but the sexual and aggressive impulses that the woman has trouble containing can also be split-off and projected onto the man, lending to the woman an exaggerated form of innocence. Some Victorian literature that talks about this is referenced in Auerbach’s (1982) treatise on Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. In this literature, the repression of female sexuality lends to the woman a contrived aspect of being a “lady,” which drives her to seek an overly aggressive male, demonic figure, to usher instinctual life into the woman’s own repressed and neutered being. In the twentieth century, this mythic “lady” can be seen in the theme of the Stepford wife. In the demon-lover complex, the lady’s yearning to merge with the male figure has various levels of psychological motivation. Since the lady yearns for a maternal nurturance from a male figure, this kind of female yearnings is more oral than genital, although they are often acted out genitally. These female object needs are more like hungry craving than heartfelt yearning. They are constituted by insatiable oral hunger merged with a diffuse and eroticized oedipal instinctual lust. In addition to her cravings for a mother, the woman with the demon-lover complex also craves the erotic thrills of oedipal-level lust arousal, and its adolescent and adult instinct evolutions. In this state of combined oral craving and oedipal yearning, the woman projects all her power onto the man. However, since she psychologically merges with the man (as opposed to marrying a whole object-differentiated man), she tries to own the idealized man’s power, while she also projects the power of her own into her idealized male image, which then must inevitably turn demonic, as the projected and introjected power begins to possess her undeveloped infant feminine self. Then the lady wants the man as an aggrandized sexual object. She also wants him to offer her the compassion and maternal empathy of a highly attuned lover. Yet tragically, the early trauma of her pre-oedipal maternal failings inevitably reoccurs with the man to whom she has chosen to surrender. Surrender becomes submission as she endows the man with a hyper-masculinized (and even god-like) power. She projects her instincts (erotic and aggressive) that become combined with her idealized images, onto the man to whom she addictively attaches. In the woman’s mind, the man then becomes a reflection of her own psychic fantasies. Women’s psychological vulnerability in a date-rape situation is well-described by Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D. in our book A Womb of Her Own (Routledge, 2017.)
Dr. Kavaler-Adler writes as follows: In the four decades of psychoanalytic practice, I have frequently worked with women who are trapped by an internal world situation in which they are defined and controlled by a primal father inside of them, interacting with the dynamics of an inadequate, relatively absent, or abandoning mother figure. This situation always influences the way these women interact with, submit to, or fight with men in their current adult lives. In this chapter, we will look into the case of Sherry, a woman who suffered the ultimate seduction and control of a malignant man, a seductive male stranger, who defined her as part of his own psychic ritual in the prologue to raping her. The woman’s susceptibility will be discussed in terms of early life trauma, as well as the character disorder pathology of both her parents. It should be kept in mind that her susceptibility is also symptomatic of a wider cultural dynamic of men defining women as a means to controlling them, which has mushroomed into the political polarization and polemics of the “pro-choice” female reproductive freedom issue. This chapter engages not only the issues of male dominance, but it will offer the psychoanalytic perspective on what allows a woman to develop a psychological capacity for choice. In discussing psychological development, we will zero in onto psychological reparation of “developmental arrest” trauma, as only this reparation could allow a woman to choose. Only when a woman is psychologically evolved as a separated and individuated autonomous person, can she fully embrace the “pro-choice” stance and be responsible for her body and for her own reproductive rights. The Demon-lover Complex When we look at how women may become aroused by and attached to malignant men, the interplay between the pre-oedipal and oedipal becomes profoundly important. The contributions of Melanie Klein and Ronald Fairbairn to the psychoanalytic literature illustrate how a powerful attachment to a bad object can take place. Melanie Klein’s theory helps us to understand the woman’s fantasy of the man as an idealized figure, which can flip to the side of the man as a demon, a “bad object” figure. This view is presented by Melanie Klein in her writings on the “paranoid-schizoid position,” as opposed to the integrated view of the man that would be possible in the “depressive position” (Klein, 1935). In the meantime, Ronald Fairbairn spoke of the attachment to the “bad object” (Fairbairn, 1952) as related to a primal attachment to an inadequate and/or abusive mother. In Fairbairn’s theory the internal “bad object” is not just a fantasy that is only partially related to the actual parent, but is based on an internalization of an actual bad mother parent; or one perceived in a distorted way due to the limitations of infant and childhood perception, but still related to the actual parent. Both the bad mother as an internal fantasy object and as a real internalized part object, can become compounded by the internalization of a bad father parent object. Such internalization of a father can be merged with the internal mother or it can be differentiated from the internal mother to varying degrees. Building on Klein’s and Fairbairn’s ideas, I speak of my theory of the “demon-lover” attachment, within one’s internal psychic world, and of its manifestation in the external world as a “demon-lover complex” (see Kavaler-Adler, 1993a, 1996, 1998, 2003a, 2003b, 2005b, 2013a, 2013b, & 2014, and others). This theory of the demon-lover complex is particularly pertinent to a woman like Sherry, the heroine of this chapter. Sherry was unconsciously drawn to narcissistic and psychopathic men like her father, after just having repaired a fragile self-structure from her primal inadequate mothering. In the case to be discussed, we will see how the choice of a man, in the real life drama to be described, is compelled by unconscious demon-lover attachment, even though the woman’s behavior could look, to the world at large, as a free choice, or even as a consensual sexual act. After all, Sherry becomes the victim of rape, after consenting to go to a man’s apartment! We must also note that the Jungians speak of a demon-lover archetype that addresses the development of a demon-lover complex, from the view of a component in the “collective unconscious” (Jung, 1981), as opposed to seeing the overt contribution of the actual mother, father, siblings as the primal components of the internal eroticized bad object, which is the object relations point of view. But, the psychic magnet of Jungian demon-lover archetype is quite consonant with my object relations approach. An addiction to an internalized bad object, at a primal level, in the actual parental and family set up, can certainly interact in the unconscious psyche with a demon-lover archetype, which may or may not originate in a separate unconscious area of the collective unconscious. My first book on women writers, The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists (Kavaler-Adler, 1993a) explicitly relates the object relations components of the “demon-lover complex” to the Jungian theory of the demon-lover archetype form of complex. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was the first who acknowledged the role of the mother-infant dyad in pre-oedipal development. Some of his significant American and British followers in infant and child research are Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann; Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergmann; Donald Stern and Donald Winnicott. Freud (1931) first expressed his awareness about the crucial role of pre-oedipal development in his paper on “Female Sexuality.” Despite his other failings in attempt to understand women (as he had admitted in his famous quote: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”), Freud unearthed the Rosetta stone of pre-oedipal derivations of the oedipal dynamics in women. In this paper, Freud had suggested that mother-deprivation (as well as the insatiable primal desire for suckling at the breast, and the primal hunger for maternal nurturance in general) affects the core psychodynamics related to women’s desires for the father, as well as for father figures. Freud further indicated that severe problems at the early oral mothering stage could result in an overly adhesive tie to the father, which would be consistent with vulnerability to indiscriminate attachment to father figures. By extension then, a sadistic father could be a source of a woman’s intense erotic desires for sadistic men, especially when seduction arouses both oedipal and pre-oedipal cravings. Such thinking is in line with my writings on the demon-lover complex, and with its clinical manifestation, as will be seen in the case of Sherry that follows. From our book A Womb of Her Own (Routledge 2017) Kristin Davisson, Psy.D. writes as follows:
Women’s bodies and selfhoods are inexorably tangled in a cultural and relational matrix that degrades our autonomy as well as our safety. Our bodies are vessels to be penetrated, objectified or possessed. Our minds and choices are infiltrated by those persons and systems which hold over us the power to subjugate our existence. Sexual trauma, both implicit and explicit, is all too common a plight for the female gender. Like many women, my personal feelings about this reality contain deeply held anger, fear, disillusionment and often, shock at the lack of progress we have made. These feelings are held in sharp contrast to my everyday selfhood as a woman, often perceiving to be in possession of her safety and enjoying the trust and company of others. How can both realities exist? This identity of “double consciousness” is often the result of “looking at oneself through the eyes of others,” unable to reconcile the repeated oppressions occurring on a psychosocial level (Du Bois, 1903). Whether we are direct victims of violence, harassment, lower pay, reproductive control or we live in constant awareness of these limitations on our gender, our lives as women are shaped by the irrevocable risks and inequities we face. It also bears mentioning that for women of color, this reality is a “double bind,” increasing the insidiousness of the acts perpetrated against them and reducing the resources for healing and justice. The authors in this section focus on the specific experience of sexual trauma, the violation of the female body and psyche, as well as the systems, institutions and cycles of interaction that maintain and condone such abuses. Katie Gentile considers the direct and repeated sexual assault of young women on college campuses and the systemic failure to institute restorative justice and measures of protection. She examines the process by which institutions separate themselves from the “perpetrator,” and thus, the violation itself, removing any accountability for repair, protection or change. She illuminates the concept of community and bystander interventions, creating accountability and preventive efforts for the system as a whole. As a former counselor in numerous college counseling settings, this chapter resonated with me as it highlighted the tragic oversights as well as the opportunities for change reflective in most institutions of higher learning. The second chapter takes on the answer to the question, what of women that aren’t direct victims of sexual violence? How are they impacted by the exposure, knowledge and narratives of the suffering around them? The preliminary research I summarized in this chapter suggests that secondary exposure to trauma results in conflicts in self, identity and object-relatedness for women “witnessing” sexual violence. The qualitative interviews give specific voice to the conflicts and emotional challenges women face as they support a close friend after her assault. The emotional words of these women linger with me as they suggest a lasting impact on our existential selfhood and sense of safety in an often harsh and threatening world. Lastly, Susan Kavaler-Adler emphasizes the complex interplay of intrapsychic factors that increase a woman’s susceptibility to (male) object choices which further victimize, oppress or subjugate her. In a poignant case, she provides an example of a woman trapped by introjects that disallow her a true object choice. This dialogue addresses the multifaceted interplay between societal, interpersonal and intrapsychic factors leading women to accept deferential status to a malignant partner. This method of understanding provides a bridge between interpretation and victim-blaming, offering an avenue for self-empowerment, insight and autonomy, ultimately providing an escape from the oppressive internal and external forces that constrain our choices as women. All three authors use psychoanalytic theory to make sense of a patriarchal society whose structures and institutions create and reinforce gender inequities, serve as obstacles to justice and communicate to women their subservient status. Further, psychoanalytic understanding is used to gain perspective on a gendered experience which at its core must accept, or at the very least acknowledge, the daily threat to its own body and autonomous self. With roots to Freud, the relationship between psychoanalytic understanding and sexual trauma has been a tumultuous one. With the abandonment of seduction theory for his theory of infantile sexuality, Freud changed the direction of analytic inquiry away from listening to the abhorrent wrongs perpetrated against women and towards pathologizing their unconscious motivations. Of note, Freud himself appeared conflicted about this and continued to battle with the significance of sexual trauma for the remainder of his career (Freud, 1905; 1915). Psychoanalytic feminist voices such as Nancy Chodorow and Juliet Mitchell have set the tone for utilizing such ideas to examine the construction of gender roles and critique patriarchy itself (Chodorow, 1978; Mitchell, 1974). In their wisdom, they suggest keeping the integrity of psychoanalytic ideas while considering the context in which they were shaped as well as the intended or even, misunderstood impact of their time. Authors in this section follow in their footsteps by considering psychoanalytic theory as a way to conceptualize not just the problem, but also the resolutions to the overwhelming and sinister nature of sexual trauma As these injurious circumstances occur with excessive frequency in the lives of women, we can come together as survivors, witnesses, clinicians, scholars, volunteers, first responders, friends, allies and partners to strengthen the fabric of our communities and change the dialogue around this issue. The successful working out of these negotiations, early in the treatment – that our shared and positively affirmed identity as gay men did not preclude the need to uncover and explore their couple and family dynamics, and did not imply an alliance against women – remained essential to our work throughout the treatment. I worked with Tom, Rick, and Mike for four years.
Telescoping for purposes of this paper, Tom and Rick’s parenting was loving, but lacked predictability and structure, which – as Mike came in time to articulate – had long left him hurt, angry, needy, and at loose ends. Mike loved his fathers and was not homophobic. Compounding the family dynamics, however, Tom and Rick both perceived Mike – comfortable in his male, securely heterosexual identity – as overly feminine. They saw Mike as “soft,” and too expressive of his emotions. They themselves, like a sizable number of gay men (Nardi, 1999), emphasized if not overemphasized their masculinity. I hypothesized with them that their unstructured and unpredictable parenting and their view of Mike as feminine were linked, and essential or us to explore. They dismissed my speculation, but, again grudgingly, were willing to consider and explore it when I said I thought this would be productive. In my meetings with Mike, I found him reflective and likable. His values were positive and prosocial; he aspired to become a high school teacher. His transference to me was positive. He saw me as a gay male object who, unlike his fathers, understood him, empathized with him, and did not reject him. He spoke openly about his frustrations and anger with his fathers. He described feeling too chronically upset with his home situation to focus fully at school, and frequently provoked by criticisms from his fathers at home that – to use the words he used – he “acted like a faggot, like a girl.” He wanted more contact with his mother, but was afraid that voicing the request would escalate his fathers’ belittling and emotional aggression. As we explored the roots and workings of the family and – at my insistence, at first – couple dynamics, Tom and Rick both increasingly came to vent overt, considerable misogyny. They expressed belittling views of their own mothers, whom they described having experienced as too preoccupied with their own needs (both worked outside the home and were in marriages where it was assumed they would do all the housework and childcare) to be, as they saw it, sufficiently attentive to Tom and Rick during their developmental years. They felt their mothers should have intuited their emerging sexual identities and attendant needs for understanding and support, though, when I asked about this, both admitted they had dated heterosexually as adolescents and had assiduously hidden any trace of expression of gay interests or emerging identities. They projected their subjective feelings toward their mothers into a broader, and deeply entrenched, contempt for women and for any characteristics they perceived as female (Holland, 2006). Their attraction to each other, it emerged over time, had initially been driven by a desire for refuge from the women in their lives. This in turn, we learned together, stemmed from internalized homophobia that took the form of hatred of aspects of themselves they perceived as feminine. Their macho presentations served a defensive function; we uncovered powerful fears that any divergence from tra Still, my work with Tom, Rick, and Mike was not superficial. The shifts to which it gave rise took place primarily on tectonic levels. To my thinking, tracing these shifts evinces the deadening effects of misogyny on gay men in our times. The changes Tom and Rick achieved in therapy were also reflective of constraints on gay male development – individual and collective (the issues Tom and Mike presented were not the result of individual or family aberrations, so much as of ways their development had commonalities with the personal trajectories of gay men in a homophobic US society) – that our collective turning away from feminist lessons and insights leave us unable to overcome. Concluding Thoughts: Toward Transformative Action As The New Normal portrayed in sharp focus, many gay men who parent through adoption or surrogacy do so not informed by a feminist appreciation of the complexity of women’s reproductive lives. Perhaps understandably, studies of gay male parenting have tended to focus on children’s positive psychological development in households headed by gay men (Martin, 1993; Patterson, 1992), not on how gay men’s parenting affects women who act as surrogates or whose children are placed in foster or adoptive care. The charged question of how gay male adoption or parenting through surrogacy affects birth mothers’ already complex experience (Hushon, Sherman & Siskind, 2006; Wadia-Ellis, 1995) has not yet entered the research agenda or general psychological and psychoanalytic discourse. But it needs to do so. Perhaps the failure, to date, to analyze how gay men’s parenting affects women, and women’s reproductive rights, is among the implications of the disjuncture that has arisen between the contemporary gay movement and feminism. As long as this goes unchallenged, therapists working with gay male parents or potential parents have a stark choice: leave our gay male patients’ groundingly misogynist beliefs and choices unexplored, or embrace a model of therapy (necessarily informed by feminist notions of psychoanalytic psychotherapy [Benjamin, 2013; Eichenbaum & Orbach, 1983; Mitchell, 1974; Prozan, 1992]) that takes our gay male patients’ covert and overt misogyny on. Several implications flow from this. One is that much theoretical and clinical work needs to be done to better understand the intertwining between internalized homophobia and misogyny in gay men. While we have more than two decades of theoretical, clinical, and empirical work on the deleterious effects of homophobia on gay men (Greene & Herek, 1994; Plummer, 1999), we do not, as yet, have extensive psychological and psychoanalytic understandings of the links between internalized homophobia and gay men’s misogynist views of women – as were evidenced to play key roles in the case of Tom and Rick. We need to have a better understanding of misogyny in gay men, both to help our individual gay male patients, and those with whom they interact if they assume parental roles, and to help the contemporary gay movement move past its overly narrow agenda and recover more of its original vision of liberation. A corollary is that exploratory and not just affirmative/psychoeducational/supportive directions are needed in therapeutic work with gay men who are coupling, marrying, and parenting in new ways. This involves working with our gay male patients to understand deeply the roots in feminist theory and practice of the ways coupling and parenting can be and are being re-conceptualized in our times (Goldner, 1985; Jackson & Scott, 2004; O’Reilly, 2008; Silverstein & Goodrich, 2003). Not to weave in the necessary lines of therapeutic work would imply failing to recognize that gay men have male privilege, and often attendant misogynist values, that have potential to mis-shape the marital and other forms of relationships we choose to enter (Brod & Kaufman,1994; Rothenberg, 2004; Wolfson, 1993, 2007) and how we approach the vicissitudes of parenting (Goldberg, 2010). A farther shore is that clinical work along the lines proposed here has lessons that need to inform social and political debates. Gay men embracing marriage and parenting have a historical debt to be paid in the present. Once we deepen our appreciation of feminism’s essential role in the birth of the gay liberation movement and today’s emergent gay possibilities, gay male couples seeking to parent, and gay communities collectively, need to take responsibility not to be a safety valve for the currently precarious reproductive rights of women, and the still-damaging impact on women’s parenting of ongoing patriarchal social and economic discrimination. Instead, we need to take action as women’s staunch allies, in the protection of women’s rights to reproductive freedom, now under mounting attack (Faludi, 2009). Gay men’s desire to parent must ground itself in feminist thought and feminist practice. If that takes us from the nurseries to consulting rooms, the courts, and the streets, then that is where we need to be. It’s as simple, and as urgent, as that. In an excerpt from our book A Womb of Her Own (Routledge 2017) Dr. Richard Ruth writes as follows:
The men I will call Tom and Rick, a gay male couple in their thirties, originally sought couple and family therapy for help with their adolescent son, who I will call Mike,. They described Mike as defiant at home and achieving poorly in school. Tom and Rick had been together nine years when our work together began. Tom became Mike’s father in a previous heterosexual marriage. He entered into the marriage though he knew he was “mostly gay” at the time. He told me he had spoken about this with the woman who, by the time of the therapy, was his ex-wife, before they married, but I learned that they never had explored the implications deeply. Tom assumed sole parental responsibility for Mike, his only child, with the consensual dissolution of the marriage and with the formal and legal agreement – again, not deeply considered together – of his ex-wife, who had a history of psychiatric problems, when she and Tom negotiated their divorce. Tom spoke about his ex-wife in disparaging terms, with an overtly misogynist cast, referring to her as “crazy,” “dysfunctional,” and “hysterical,” sourcing these traits in her femaleness. In our early sessions, he never narrated how he had come to care for her and to marry her, nor how it had come to be that he had made no overtures toward including her in parenting decisions and the parenting process with Mike, either at the time of the divorce or in the subsequent years. Tom showed signs of bipolar disorder, though this had not been diagnosed at the time the couple began their four years of work with me. He equated his inattentiveness, periods of elevated mood, forgetfulness, and rejection of others’ social expectations of him with the degrees of freedom from conventionality he assumed as an out, gay man. Tom was out to the members of his working-class family of origin, who lived in another state and with whom he wished, and had, little contact. He also was out to his co-workers, and preferred to socialize almost exclusively with other gay men. Rick became sexually active with other males as a teenager, but he did not begin identifying as gay until after he had been with Tom, his first and only committed partner, for two years. Unlike Tom, he was from a middle-class family and had a college education. He described himself as “out to himself” and to a few close friends, but not to his co-workers or to his family of origin. He liked going to gay bars, sometimes with Tom and sometimes on his own, and participated in social organizations in the gay community. In his personal manner, and in his behavior in sessions, however, I found him anxious, introverted, and quite shy. In their initial meetings with me, Tom and Rick assumed that the gay solidarity they correctly perceived to be present among us would leave important questions and assumptions unexplored. They wanted help with Mike’s “problem behaviors”; they did not want to explore their early histories, their inner lives, their dynamics as a couple, or their relationships with Mike’s mother or with anyone else. I negotiated with them that this could not be so in meaningful psychotherapy; they warily and grudgingly agreed, ceding me authority as “the doctor” that I experienced as investing me with an element of male and heteronormative privilege (that they knew I was gay did not seem to be an obstacle to the unfolding of this process, which I understood as a kind of projective identification). Rooted again in their perception of what they felt gay solidarity with me brought with it, in early sessions Tom and Rick would make “humorous” comments putting down Mike’s mother and other women, and assumed I would share their bemusement. I let them know they were welcome to speak freely with me, but that I did not share their perspectives on women, and hoped they would explore with me how they had come to hold their attitudes toward women. I told them these attitudes might be more relevant than they thought to their difficulties with Mike. They were skeptical. Currently, the gay liberation movement has largely given way to a gay civil rights movement (D’Emilio, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2014; D’Emilio, Turner & Vaid, 2000; Marcus, 1992; Mohr, 1995; Vaid, 1995; Valocchi, 2001; Wolfson, 1993). This has led to important advances, such as the elimination of anti-sodomy laws, the widespread (though still not universal) enactment of anti-discrimination laws for gay men and lesbians (and, to a lesser extent, for transgender persons), election of gay men to public office, the elimination of de jure bars to gay men serving in the military, changes in cultural values, and, increasingly, the right to gay marriage.
But, in the context of the focus of this chapter, here’s the rub: The gay civil rights movement (as it now frames itself) largely turns away from the feminist critique of marriage as an institution (Auchmuty, 2005; Echols, 1989; Josephson, 2005), and feminist thought and the feminist agenda more broadly. An emerging literature critiques what has been lost in the gay movement’s turn away from the politics of liberation toward a narrower, and differently oriented, politics of civil rights (Bersani, 1995; Crimp, 2002; D’Emilio, 1997, 2014; Munoz, 2009; Warner, 1999). Yet much of this critique looks inwardly, toward dynamics and politics within gay communities and movements, and concerns itself less with gay men’s interactions with other communities and social currents. It does not take up the broader problem of the gay movement’s divergence from feminism (Halberstam, 2008; Weed & Schor, 1997), and the implications of this turn at the current juncture. I first got in touch with this disturbingly pervasive, insidious trend when a colleague convinced me to watch The New Normal (2013), a series that ran on NBC from 2012-2013. Its main protagonists were two white gay men (an obstetrician and a television producer), living privileged lives in an opulent California home. The show intermixed humorous moments, moving flashbacks to the protagonists’ childhood rejection, depictions of their on-going family-of-origin tensions, and narration of the main characters’ class and male privilege. A meandering plot line traced the two gay male protagonists’ decisions to have a child to be carried by a surrogate, and to marry. The protagonists often voiced the happy line, in common parlance among gay men today preparing to become fathers by surrogacy, “We’re pregnant!” But they were not pregnant; their child’s birth-mother-by-surrogacy was. The protagonists’ playful dismissal of the surrogate mother’s role was rooted in misogyny – treated playfully, but unmistakable. Over time, they came to develop some respect and fondness for the woman who was giving birth to the child they intended to raise, but they originally cast and treated her as an inconvenient means to their desired ends, and their dismissive, insensitive, and often hostile attitudes toward women kept breaking through. That such a product of popular culture could so explicitly mark the turn in gay men’s perspectives away from feminism, and any sense of collective alliance between gay men and women’s rights to reproductive freedom, got me thinking. In the ways of psychoanalysts who see possible clues to broader social phenomena in themes that arise in our clinical work (Craib, 1990; Danto, 2005; Gaztambide, 2012; Layton, Hollander & Gutwill, 2006; Nguyen, 2012; Stake, 1978), I began reflecting on my clinical experiences with gay men, and what they might reveal. Like many radical movements, the gay liberation movement faced the challenges of surviving oppression’s assaults, maintaining its momentum, broadening its appeal beyond narrow circles, and avoiding cooptation (Jay & Young, 1992; Power, 1995; Sears, 2005; Thompson, 1994; Valocchi, 2001). The dynamics and implications of this shift are complex, and largely lie beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the largely white and relatively affluent nature of the early gay movement (Barrett & Pollack, 2006; Bernstein, 2002; D’Emilio, 1997, 2000, 2002; 2014; Richardson, 2005; Valocchi, 1999b); the fear-inducing impact of government repression against the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Churchill & Vander Wall, 1990); and conformist pressures in gay culture (Connell, 1992; Milton & MacDonald, 1984; Taywaditep, 2002) have been implicated in the early moves away from a more expansive view – closer to the feminism that had given rise to the gay liberation movement – of gay male possibilities.
Political and ideological tensions in gay communities and the gay movement were refracted, in the early 1980s, through the devastating effects of the coming of AIDS (Armstrong, 2002; Herek, 1999; Herek & Greene, 1995; Jonsen & Stryker, 1993). Thousands became fatally ill – not only gay men, but largely gay men – with a disease whose causes were unknown. The medical establishment was slow to mobilize desperately needed research efforts (Herek & Glunt, 1988) and reluctant or unwilling to provide needed healthcare (Grmek, 1993). The intense homophobia that shaped early reactions to AIDS is difficult but important to remember. Evangelical Christian voices welcomed AIDS as God’s way of ridding society of gay men (Fetner, 2008), and voices in the gay movement felt the epidemic must have arisen as a product of a government conspiracy against gay men (Ross, Essien & Torres, 2006). Anti-gay hatred, and fear, fueled danger, and had their impact. Activist organizations, such as the Aids Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) (Gould, 2002),` and community-built and -run organizations in which gay men and our allies cared for people with AIDS (Kayal, 1993) necessarily became the focus of organizing efforts in gay men’s communities. A largely untold aspect of this period involves the many feminist women who helped take care of gay men, when the gay male community’s resources were taxed by the political and human demands of the early phases of the epidemic. I received my first HIV test from one such lesbian feminist woman, who helped me overcome my terror. I do not know her name, but I owe her my life. The discovery of protease inhibitors was a direct result of AIDS activists confronting the political and scientific establishments and insisting on new research directions and access to healthcare, and mental health and social services, to combat AIDS (Gould 2002). With this and related discoveries, AIDS is now, for those with access to care, a chronic, manageable disease (Fee & Fox, 1992). These welcome advances were, in significant part the result of efforts of radical elements of the 1980s gay movement. But AIDS before protease inhibitors also brought with it the loss of thousands of the first gay male activists. The impacts – social, political, and psychological (Jonsen & Stryker, 1993; Morin, Charles & Malyon, 1984) – have been heavy. For a time, the politics of survival overcame the politics of possibility, and such changes, once established, are difficult to shift. |
Ellen Toronto is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Spring, Texas and has been practicing since 1980. In 2017, she was elected a Fellow in Psychoanalysis by the American Psychological Association. In 2016, Dr. Toronto's practice was recognized as one of the top Ann Arbor Psychology practices. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Toronto is married to Robert Toronto, Ph.D., and together they have four sons and eleven grandchildren. |