Plus ça change

Misogyny Is the Social Unconscious

Britney Spears. Photo credit: Eduardo Muñoz

In recent years, there have been various media reports about a “war on women,” a term I find both hyperbolic and inaccurate. There is no war on women. To have any such “war,” we would be able to see the lines of engagement, the fortresses of munitions, and even the scenes of battle as if locatable here, there and way over there. War also encompasses reprieve, for war is not a constant state. Wars can last years, centuries even, but they do have breaks—even a Christmas truce has been known to occur. For women, however, there is no reprieve.

Indeed, on days like this when I wake up to the news that a serial rapist has been released from jail while another woman has been legally obliged to remain in a interminable domestic jail, it is clear that there is not a war on women and girls, but rather that we are living in a landscape where language, communities, entire societies and institutions are built upon the unconscious of woman as symptom whereby cultural processes rely upon women being that litmus test of the social—she is punished for speaking, obliged to carry through with unwanted pregnancies, denied the right of free movement, accused of bigotry for saying that “men are not women,” and even arrested for inadvertently “causing” a Tour de France crash. Meanwhile, all it takes for this very same society to see victimisation is to be told that a man who “feels like a woman” is a victim and women and girls are his oppressors. 

In Studies in Hysteria (1895), Freud examines the phenomenon of hysteria in which he posits an idea or memory that makes the subject ill without any physical disease being the cause. For Freud, hysteria is ideogenic (its aetiology is an idea) whereby a repressed idea is converted into a bodily symptom. Freud initially contended that hysterical symptoms are the result of violent childhood sexual violence but later abandoned this hypothesis replacing it with his thesis of infantile sexuality—the idea that symptoms are brought about through the conflicts and repressions of unconscious fantasy where fantasy is the determining factor of neurotic symptoms. 

In the early twentieth century, Karen Horney, a German psychoanalyst, pushed back upon Freud’s notion that neuroses had a biological foundation suggesting that cultural attitudes and social norms played a role in determining neurotic feelings. Horney likewise rejected the notion of “penis envy,” inverting Freud’s idea while alluding that womb envy was the reason behind male social dominance whereby men experience feelings of inferiority because they cannot give birth to children. She writes, “Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?”

At the core of both Freud’s and Horney’s attempt to understand female sexuality was a drive to understand the independent nature of women. Where for Freud woman was understandable as “symptom,” for Horney and later thinkers culture played a far larger role in women's subordinate status. Simone de Beauvoir goes even further in addressing the role of psychoanalysis in The Second Sex (1949) devoting an entire chapter to her distrust of “The Psychoanalytic Point of View.” Similar to Horney, Beauvoir denounces Freud’s idea that there is but one, masculine, libido and no feminine libido with “its own original nature” as she accuses psychoanalysis of holding women in particular to an absolute destiny, a teleological process, and a fixed essence because psychoanalysis defines the female subject within the framework of a past beyond her control. For Beauvoir woman is made into the other denied her existential freedom, rather than being allowed to be a subject in her own right: 

The true problem for woman is to reject these flights from reality and seek fulfilment in transcendence. The thing to do, then, is to see what possibilities are opened up for her through what are called the virile and the feminine attitudes. When a child takes the road indicated by one or the other of its parents, it may be because the child freely takes up their projects; its behaviour may be the result of a choice motivated by ends and aims. Even with Adler the will to power is only an absurd kind of energy; he denominates as ‘masculine protest’ every project involving transcendence. When a little girl climbs trees it is, according to Adler, just to show her equality with boys; it does not occur to him that she likes to climb trees. For the mother her child is something other than an “equivalent of the penis.” To paint, to write, to engage in politics – these are not merely “sublimations”; here we have aims that are willed for their own sakes. To deny it is to falsify all human history.

Reacting to Freud and Beauvoir, French psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (1981) argues that women the sex which is unevocable and unrepresentable. Irigaray maintains that there is an inherent linguistic opacity in a language that elides the polyvalence of identity thus making the construction of the subject and the other as integral to the creation of the masculine, excluding the feminine entirely from the process of representation. The female sex for Irigaray constitutes that which is not “one” but multiple: “She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either. This puts into question all prevailing economies: their calculations are irremediably stymied by woman’s pleasure, as it increases indefinitely from its passage in and through the other” (31). Irigaray dismantles Freud’s concept of woman as lack (of the phallus) while she also critiques Beauvoir’s concept of woman as the negative of man, whereby the feminine is always insufficient. She also homes in on the problems of representation based on the archetype of Western metaphysics which is a mirror that employs the language of and for the construction of masculine identity.

Beauvoir views that woman cannot truly be represented since any such interpretation necessarily denies all essence (truth) of the feminine since the body of woman is subject to cultural taboos. Conversely, Irigaray sees any representation of woman as necessarily flawed. Thus, where Beauvoir sees language as simply not enough (language as removed from signification) Irigaray views language as defective (scarred by the traces of phallogocentrism). 

As this current era of gender wars demonstrates with pronouns being enforced within the workplace and law and “identities” are given more legal weight than material reality, we know that language is merely the sandbox for the larger social unconscious where women is perpetually relegated to cultural trope. It’s certainly not as Judith Butler maintains in Gender Trouble that Irigaray’s notion of gender is left in a position of linguistic and mimetic aporia while for de Beauvoir the female subject is “always already masculine.” It’s not that women don’t know how to represent themselves or that their gender is a “problem”—it’s that women have never had a gender. As we see within the gender debates over the past decade removing the shackles of one historical school after another that automatically frames us within gender has become part of snowball effect blighting women’s rights. It’s no surprise to those of us who have been on the front lines of the gender debates that the sleight of hand begins with the presumption of “having” a gender—not in getting it wrong.

Where Butler attempts to short circuit political and cultural debates regarding the oppression of women and girls, material reality weighs in far more convincingly than a group of gender activists who claim their interior femininity makes them the victim of feminists. Yesterday’s Los Angeles court decision denying Britney Spears’ request to remove her father from her conservatorship can only be described as a postmodern form of enslavement where the reality or even the pretext of “mental healthcare” is used as a tool of control against women just as it was at the time Freud penned Studies in Hysteria. 

Parallel to the Spears case yesterday was the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision to release serial rapist Bill Cosby from prison due to a technicality. Sit down for this one. Montgomery County district attorney Bruce Castor went outside the normal processes for immunity having told the media in a 2005 press release that Cosby would not face prosecution as a result of the civil case brought by Andrea Constand who was drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby in 2004. Castor thought that by removing the threat of criminal prosecution that Cosby might not invoke the Fifth Amendment (the right against self-incrimination). Skip to 2015 when dozens of women were speaking out against Cosby relating their experiences of rape and sexual assault and the former–district attorney Risa Vetri Ferman reopened the criminal investigation that her predecessor had closed. By removing criminal prosecution in 2005, Cosby’s reliance on Castor’s statement and subsequent self-incrimination within the civil case meant that his 2018 criminal prosecution denied his right to due process and the entire prosecution has been thrown out. Read this again.

There is a perpetual undertow within every centimetre of law, society, culture, institutions and media that consistently undermines the lives of women and girls to such a degree that laws do not and seemingly cannot protect this 51% of the population from the other 49%. Where Spears is relegated to a bizarre form of celebrity house arrest prohibited from having other children or control over every facet of her life, the women whom Bill Cosby sexually assaulted and raped have been handed an equally uneven hand of justice, effectively being sent the message that the entire system is rigged against them.

There is no war against women, folks. There is a cultural unconscious where women are made into a social signifier, their bodies to be controlled as they are rendered the ultimate scapegoats for social unrest and non-conformity. In a quasi-Biblical fashion of Eve tempting Adam with the apple, it is no wonder that the depths of this symbolism permeates every facet of our lives to include the media that reports an eleven-year-old girl as “falling pregnant” or the woman who “caused a crash” at the Tour de France as “bringing down most of the Tour de France peloton.” Certainly, the excision of the rape of a child from the first story might have lent a modicum of credibility to the reportage just as contextualising what appears to be the misstep of a bystander seeking to be captured by television cameras within the many historical moments of pelotons being taken down mostly by men during past Tours de France. Alas, we were given male tears, hopes dashed, and a woman who is now arrested.

Alas, ladies, here we are with our menstruation, hot flashes, our inability to keep our legs together from rapists and our bigoted skills in reading science books. Where Freud made women into symptom current social and political processes have made us into the ostensible “cure.” We are certainly not living through a war—we are living the status quo where all it takes to be “guilty” is to point out that women don’t have a penis, that men don’t give birth, or that Laurel Hubbard is man.

Merely suggesting that women’s sports might be decimated by allowing third-rate male athletes to opt into first-rate women’s sporting events is enough to garner online threats on social media. Where 21-year-old Tongan weightlifter, Kuinini Manumua, was disqualified from this summer’s Tokyo Olympics due to Hubbard having taken her spot last month, she is now back in this summer’s Olympics competition although it isn’t entirely clear how. One report claims that Manamua “has been offered an Invitation Place by the Olympic Games Tripartite Commission through the Tonga National Olympic Committee” while the BBC reports that she “has been handed a tripartite place by the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF).” Offered, handed. One thing has been made clear this past week: women are destructive forces standing in the way of men, even if by accident. Yet, when men crash women’s sports, the media is far kinder, unwinding red carpets, issuing diktats to journalists as to “correct pronoun” usage and organising media debates amongst four men as to the rights of women in sports. Where the IOC rules were said to be “fair,” it would seem that these same rules are meant to be broken for men cheating the system and even to silently appease the massive outcry made by women and sports personalities against the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and IWF (International Weightlifting Federation).

Today, Bill Crosby walks a free man, Britney Spears continues to live in conditions of what look like the recently-terminated Saudi Arabian guardianship system and far too many people are caving to a quasi-religious movement as they genuflect to “correct pronouns” and other anti-material religious doxa cementing atomised notions of personhood, largely in the interest of males.

There can be no greater contempt for women than a non-stop stream of media messages, laws, and tactics of opprobrium to put women in their place for daring to say no, for daring to speak the truth.