Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ babies are not all that different from boy babies. True, there are anatomical differences, and some researchers say that boy babies are more active than girl babies, although other researchers say that adults see in babies what they expect to see, but all babies come into the world as themselves, curious about the world, and wanting to act upon it, but for little girls it is not to be. Neither is it for little boys.

      Every society, every family, has very clear ideas about what is masculine and what is feminine. There is considerable overlap in these ideas throughout the world, even though practices vary. Orthodox Jews and Muslims regard women’s hair as something dangerous which can snare and incite a man to sexual fervour, the expression of which he is not responsible for, while in most Christian countries virtuous women no longer have to keep their hair covered. (My mother was one of the last generation of women who felt it a necessary modesty to wear a hat. She and I battled over whether I should wear one. I prevailed, but only after considerable humiliation whereby I was told that it was impossible for me to be properly dressed because my head was so big that no hat would fit me.) However, the idea that women have to keep themselves covered and/or secluded because their sexuality is a danger to men is common to all cultures. Even in countries where women are allowed to leave their homes unescorted by a man, it is the custom that if a man who is attacking and raping women has not been caught by the police, it is the women who are instructed to stay at home, not the men.

      The fear of women’s sexuality is based not simply on the belief that the woman may passively, simply by her presence, arouse a man to passion, but on the belief that she may use her sexuality in an aggressive, assertive way. A feminine woman is not assertive. Little girls are taught this with great efficiency; they are taught and shown that assertive, aggressive women are not loved or even liked. Nowadays a woman can appear to be strong and assertive, but there is still an expectation that she will not go too far.

      Going too far means being so strong, assertive and clever that the woman robs men of their rightful status. When, in 2000, the A-level results in the UK showed girls doing much better than boys, these girls were not allowed to enjoy their success publicly. The media told them a) that the A-level examinations were getting easier, b) that girls did easy subjects like languages while boys did the hard subjects of mathematics and physics, and c) that girls were causing the boys to do badly because their success humiliated the boys. David Blunkett, then the Secretary of State for Education, agreed with this last point. Blunkett showed himself to be a man of tradition. In discussions about corporal punishment he would say that he had slapped his sons when they were children, and he knew that they had suffered no harm.

      Being assertive means standing up for oneself, and standing up for oneself is usually a response to a situation which leads one to be angry. If a woman feels that she cannot afford to be seen to be angry, she may try to give up feeling angry.

      However, giving up anger is as sensible as giving up breathing, and just as easily done. Women may give up the social expression of anger, and they may even deny its existence to such an extent that they never consciously feel angry, but the unexpressed anger is there, and it takes its toll. The preponderance of depressed women has more to do with what they do with their anger than what their hormones do to them. Many men prefer to explain a woman’s depression in terms of hormones rather than anger, for the second explanation involves a recognition that women have a right to anger, just as a man has. Of course, there are many women who feel, and express, a powerful anger, but, as they cannot direct this anger at its true source, the conditions of their lives, they express it against the only objects available to them, their children. Many of us come to adulthood bearing on our soul, if not our body, the scars of the blows our mother’s anger dealt us, and many of us, unable to retaliate when we were children, take out our anger with our mother on our own children. Thus do the sins of the mother get visited on the children.

      In dealing with her children in this way, a mother treats them simply as objects, something with which she can express her passion, like the door she slams or the plate she hurls at the wall. One way in which children can survive these painful, frightening, unjust events is to turn themselves into objects. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’, we might have chanted defiantly to ourselves in order to summon the courage to survive, encasing ourselves in a metal box, on the outside of which the wicked witch’s blows and curses rained without effect.

      Girls are not as efficient as boys in turning themselves into objects so as to protect themselves from a parent’s anger. Since boys are encouraged from their earliest days to take part in rough-and-tumble games, while girls are discouraged from climbing, jumping and fighting, boys have more experience in how to develop techniques for avoiding or minimizing physical pain. Some years ago many Australian girls became weary of being expected to sit on the beach admiring the boys’ prowess on their surfboards and instead acquired their own boards and learned to surf. Similarly in the UK many girls got weary of having to cheer the boys’ football teams and instead got their own football kit and formed their own teams. However, research shows that, while girls on the whole are keen on sport in junior school, once they enter secondary school their interest wanes. They believe that girls who play sport are not seen to be feminine. This view reflects that of society. Women’s sport receives only a fraction of the government finance and sponsorship deals that men’s sport receives, while the media show scant interest in reporting it.

      Since an essential part of femininity is being sensitive to what another person says and does, girls remain vulnerable to their mother’s angry abuse and insults, while a boy who is learning how to be a traditional man is learning to devalue such sensitivity. At around five or six a boy usually develops a peculiar functional deafness which renders him incapable of hearing his mother’s voice except for certain phrases, ranging from ‘Do you want an ice cream?’, through ‘How much money do you need?’ to ‘Here’s my keys. You drive.’ Many boys who receive a great deal of physical punishment learn to take great pride in the amount of punishment they can take without showing any pain or fear. Many boys not only make their closest relationships with machines, but they come to think of themselves as a machine - hard, logical, efficient, powerful, unaffected by emotional confusion and doubt.

      The processes by which a girl learns to be feminine and a boy masculine require that each gives up vital parts of his or her self. Boys must give up those parts of themselves which might be labelled feminine, and girls those parts of themselves which might be labelled masculine. Having been forced to relinquish parts of ourselves which we valued (we begin our lives by valuing every part of us, and we no more want to give up part of our potentiality than we want to give up an arm or a leg), we envy those people who have what we have lost. Thus men envy women, and women envy men not their penises, those curious appendages which always make women laugh, but the power and freedom which men have. Many men, however, long for what they see as the security and gentleness of a woman’s life, but are afraid to claim this as their own, clinging instead to women and hoping to share their good fortune. The woman may similarly be clinging to a man in the hope of sharing his power and freedom. On such misunderstandings are so many marriages made.

      These are the ordinary patterns of life for most boys and girls, but for some children the extraordinary occurs.

      On the whole, life for a child in the developed world is the best it has ever been in human history. Children are no longer required to work at a very early age, schooling is relatively humane, and most children are reasonably well fed, clothed and housed, and are not routinely beaten. However, the history of childhood is one of misery and tragedy. Adults have always regarded children as possessions which they could use and abuse.³³ This abuse was both physical and sexual. Physical abuse was seen as essential for the education of the child, while the sexual abuse was hidden by a conspiracy of silence.

      When Freud embarked upon the unusual method of actually listening to his patients, he found that many of them recounted stories of sexual abuse in their childhood. He developed his theory that sexual abuse lay at the root of much neurosis, СКАЧАТЬ