Women, Sex, and Madness

Notes from the Edge

Breanne Fahs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429874956
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Covering a wide variety of subjects and points of inquiry on women's sexuality, from genital anxieties about pubic hair to constructions of the body in the therapy room, this book offers a ground-breaking examination of women, sex, and madness, drawing from psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.

Breanne Fahs argues that women's sexuality embodies a permanent state of tension between cultural impulses of destruction and selfishness contrasted with the fundamental possibilities of subversiveness and joy. Emphasizing cultural, social, and personal narratives about sexuality, Fahs asks readers to imagine sex, bodies, and madness as intertwined, and to see these narratives as fluid, contested, and changing. With topics as diverse as anarchist visions of sexual freedom, sexualized emotion work, lesbian haunted houses, and the insidious workings of capitalism, Fahs conceptualizes sexuality as a force of regressive moral panics and profound inequalities—deployed in both blatant and more subtle ways onto the body—while also finding hope and resistance in the possibilities of sexuality.

By integrating clinical case studies, cultural studies, qualitative interviews, and original essays, Fahs offers a provocative new vision for sexuality that fuses together social anxieties and cultural madness through a critical feminist psychological approach. Fahs provides an original and accessible volume for students and academics in psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.

PART 1

Women explain things to me

1

MEN, THROUGH WOMEN’S EYES

When I was a 20-year-old rambunctious liberal arts student at Occidental College studying psychology and women’s and gender studies, I wrote a rant-filled undergraduate thesis on women’s orgasms entitled, “Dismembering orgasmic phallacies: Self-weaponry, potent fictions, and the blasphemous body.” In this document, I tried to capture a problem that seemed to have paramount importance to me at that time: How could women understand their own sexuality if they were largely constructed as objects within a patriarchal society? What sort of sexual imagination could they have if their sexual practices, ideologies, feelings, and desires were created and constructed by a culture that hates women? And, of course, how would something as delicate, intricate, and complicated as women’s orgasms stand a chance in a culture that overwhelmingly catered to men’s sexual needs and desires? What could this tiny thing—the orgasm—teach us about the bigger things like power, oppression, and capitalism?

I mention this anecdote in part to demonstrate that my interests in the questions raised in this chapter—questions about how we can understand women and their sexuality in a patriarchal culture designed to minimize or strip away such understanding—have captivated me for over 20 years. These questions do not lend themselves to easy answers. I have spent much of my career as a researcher and teacher outlining the ways that women interpret their sexual experiences under conditions that stack the odds against them—conditions that require constant re-evaluation of their own desires and ideas, strip women of self-understanding and self-assertion, and diminish women’s capacity for pleasure and satisfaction (particularly pleasure that is not wholly relational and directed toward pleasing others). Women’s assertions of their sexual subjectivities tell only part of the story. When we live in a culture that deeply distrusts its own relationship to pleasure, that weaves its hatred of women into the mundane aspects of everyday life, storytelling about sexuality is painfully difficult.

Ultimately, I want to return again to the question of how women can understand themselves in a patriarchal culture, but I also want to ask a slightly different one: What can we understand about men by looking exclusively at what women say about men? What do the (voiceless) objects of patriarchal culture—the women rendered invisible and/or insignificant—tell us about the core of that patriarchal culture? How might we understand men better, or differently, through women’s eyes, and how might women imagine different kinds of truths about men and sexuality?

To unpack these questions, I examine two common areas where women describe their personal sexual experiences of men: 1) sexual activities women perform solely to please a partner, and 2) women’s experiences with sex as a form of labor. Together, these stories shed light on the ways that women’s sexuality exists largely in relation to asymmetrical power structures that grant greater power to men than women. And, of course, these sexual narratives point toward more precise understandings of what it means to unite sex and madness not as individual madness (“being crazy”) but as cultural madness (“living in a culture that is crazy”). These stories arrive after the second wave of feminism and after the sexual revolution, in a time that promotes the view of women as sexually empowered, agentic, and more satisfied than previous generations. And yet, reading between the lines, we see a far more complicated picture of so-called “sexual liberation” emerging.

Theoretical framework

The question of what it means to take up sexual subjectivities—that is, the telling of one’s own sexual stories and the ability to imagine oneself as an agentic sexual being (Tolman, 2002)—carries immense weight in a culture that routinely strips women of power and agency. How can women talk openly about their sexual perspectives and desires if they live in a culture that denies them those very things? Further, in a historically Puritanical culture that is tremendously afraid of its own sexual impulses, and eager to quarantine sexuality and construct it a site of anxiety and chaos, understanding women’s perspectives on sexuality becomes even more difficult. Much like Susan Bordo’s (1997) claim that anorexia represents the crystallization of culture, that is the distillation of who we are as a people (e.g., a culture eager to imagine women as passive, small, and weak), I would argue that women’s sexuality serves as a symptom of cultural stories about women and power. To closely examine how women’s sexualities are shaped and molded to fit dominant, hegemonic ideas about men’s power over women is to fashion a kind of self-portrait. In doing so, women’s ideas and stories about men might help to unpack and better nuance the insidious ways that patriarchy operates, revealing aspects of men and masculinity that often remain unchecked, unspoken, and invisible.

As a key contribution of French feminist philosophy, the construction of women as commodities—and the shaping of subjectivity that results from men “trading” women on the sexual marketplace—helps to frame some of the conversations in this chapter and in the book more broadly. To understand how men feel about women, and how women perceive men’s perceptions of them, the construction of women as sexualized commodities is essential. For example, Luce Irigaray (1985) stated,

Women’s bodies—through their use, consumption, and circulation—provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown “infrastructure” of the elaboration of that social life and culture. The exploitation of the matter that has been sexualized female is so integral a part of our sociocultural horizon that there is no way to interpret it except within this horizon.

(p. 171)

Essentially, Irigaray argues that women come to understand their sexuality in relation to being “good” or “bad” commodities; as such, they imagine themselves in relation to how men evaluate or judge them. She wrote of this process:

Woman is traditionally a use-value for man, an exchange value among men; in other words, a commodity. As such, she remains the guardian of material substance, whose price will be established, in terms of the standard of their work and of their need/desire, by “subjects”: workers, merchants, consumers. Women are marked phallicly by their fathers, husbands, procurers. And this branding determines their value in sexual commerce. Woman is never anything but the locus of a more or less competitive exchange between two men, including the competition for the possession of mother earth.

(Irigaray, 1985, pp. 31–32)

She further argued that, in order to understand women as sexual commodities, both their physical bodies and their symbolic value must be accounted for. She wrote, “when women are exchanged, woman’s body must be treated as an abstraction” (Irigaray, 1985, p. 175). And, when women become abstractions, men define women according to dominant definitions of power and virility, thus placing women along a continuum of more or less successful mirroring of men’s sexual needs. She wrote, “Woman herself is never at issue in these statements: the feminine is defined as the necessary complement to the operation of male sexuality, and, more often, as the negative image that provides male sexuality with an unfailing phallic self-representation” (Irigaray, 1985, p. 70).

Similarly, American feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon has argued that patriarchal conditions of sexuality foster a kind of permanent ignorance wherein men have no idea what women really experience, think, or feel. She wrote of this process:

Men’s power to make the world here is their power to make us make the world of their sexual interaction with us the way they want it. They want us to have orgasms; that proves they’re virile, potent, effective. We provide them that appearance, whether it’s real for us or not.

(MacKinnon, 1987, p. 58)

In this sense, women’s perceptions about heterosex (and men in general) exist within a culture that demands a lack of self-knowledge and constructs women around men’s fantasies and desires. Put differently, Achille Mbembe (2001) argued about men’s phallic power:

In fact, the phallus has been the focus of ways of constructing masculinity and power. Male domination derives in large measure from the power and the spectacle of the phallus—not so much from the threat to life during war as from the individual male’s ability to demonstrate his virility at the expense of a woman and to obtain its validation from the subjugated woman herself.

(p. 13)

If men experience validation from the subjugation of women, how, then, do women speak about this process?

Women’s sexual subjectivities

Many social constructionists of sexuality have convincingly argued that women’s sexuality does not exist in a vacuum; the notion of “my sexuality” is impossible on an individual level unless we account for the social processes that make sexuality (Plante, 2014; Tiefer, 2004). Women’s sexualities are made and remade through a process of disavowal (“you must like what I like”), colonization (“my reality is superior”) and mirroring (“show/tell me what I want to hear”) and enter a matrix where patriarchy, misogyny, and racism construct “good,” “moral,” and “healthy” sexualities. Sexual scripting theory, developed by Gagnon and Simon (1973), posited that people construct sexual selves through intrapsychic scripting that draws on fantasies, memories, feelings of arousal, and ideas about desirable and undesirable sex. Later, Rebecca Plante (2007) argued that sexual scripts also extend widely into the realm of the social:

“The Story” is the narrative of the many. It is the way in which Western citizens make sense of the need to make sense, to develop and sustain a continuous self. There are rape stories, gay and lesbian “coming out” stories, and recovery/self help stories.

(p. 33)

Sexual scripts and sexual subjectivities come alive most poignantly in the context of women’s sexual satisfaction, a seemingly innocuous term upon which an enormous number of assumptions are built about sexuality. What is a satisfied woman? What makes a sexual encounter satisfying? Many sex researchers have assumed that sexual satisfaction for women can be measured using single-item questions that make generalizations about how satisfied women are (Barrientos & Páez, 2006; Meston & Trapnell, 2005; Sprecher, 2002), often ignoring the complexity and possible contradictions of physical and emotional satisfaction, as well as the complex ways that women gauge their satisfaction in relation to their partners. Notably, women described sexual satisfaction most often in relation to pleasing their partners and cared more about whether they have satisfied another person than whether they have themselves felt physically satisfied (McClelland, 2010, 2014), while men described sexual satisfaction as “getting off” (Bancroft, Loftus, & Long, 2003; Nicolson & Burr, 2003). Similarly, in a small study of English women, Nicolson and Burr (2003) found that partner satisfaction mattered more than personal satisfaction when women defined their sexual satisfaction. This distinction has supreme importance for understanding women’s sexual lives, as women consistently construct their notions of satisfaction around the other, caring less about their own feelings and more about the satisfaction of their partners.

This attention to emotional and physical caretaking—and the prioritization of a partner over themselves—has deep roots in traditional gender roles and socialization processes that teach women to value men’s needs over their own (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2007; Katz & Tirone, 2009). That said, sexual satisfaction is also connected to who expects to feel satisfied and who feels entitled to pleasure, as those who felt more entitled to satisfaction and pleasure reported more sexual satisfaction (Braun, Gavey, & McPhillips, 2003). Not surprisingly, sexual minority youth and all women reported lower rates of sexual satisfaction than did heterosexual youth and men in general (Diamond & Lucas, 2004; Sanchez, Kiefer, & Ybarra, 2006). Recent research has framed sexual satisfaction instead as a combination of frequency of orgasm, emotional satisfaction, emotions about sex, and physical satisfaction (Fahs & Swank, 2011) in an attempt to broaden overly narrow definitions of sexual satisfaction and capture elements of women’s satisfaction beyond partner pleasure. Further, several sexual satisfaction inventories have pushed to broaden how researchers measure sexual satisfaction in order to avoid an overly simplistic single-item assessment of something as complex as sexual satisfaction (Pinney, Gerrard, & Denney, 1987; Štulhofer, Buško, & Brouillard, 2010; Ter Kuile, van Lankwd, Kalkhown, & Egmond, 1999).

In my earlier work on women’s orgasms, I found that women also felt satisfied when their partners felt sexually successful, leading to epidemic rates of women faking orgasm (Fahs, 2011; see also Muehlenhard & Shippee, 2010). Women reported that their own physical experiences of sex (e.g., having an orgasm) mattered less than what they reflected back to their partners (e.g., their partners perceiving that women had an orgasm). Certainly, the prevalence of women faking orgasms is startlingly high, with studies consistently showing that over half of women have faked orgasm (Darling & Davidson, 1986; Fahs, 2011, 2014; Muehlenhard & Shippee, 2010; Opperman, Braun, Clarke, & Rogers, 2013; Wiederman, 1997), particularly with male partners while engaging in pen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: mad women, precarity, and the possibilities of sex
• PART 1: Women explain things to me
• PART 2: Veering and queering
• PART 3: On the couch
• PART 4: All riled up
• Acknowledgments
• Index