Female Sexuality

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Notes

Hoyt (1978) points out that the Latin origin of the word “secret” is “secernere,” meaning to pull apart, to separate.

Interestingly, Freud wrote in the preface to another journal, A Young Girl’s Diary, by Frau von Hug-Hellmuth, published in 1919: “The diary is a little gem … . The secret of sexual life begins to dawn on her indistinctly and then takes complete possession of the child’s mind … . In the consciousness of her secret knowledge, she at first suffers hurt, but little by little overcomes it” (p. 341).

I do not mean to imply that men do not have interior sexual feelings for men (see Fogel, 1998), but only that the nature of sexual arousal and pleasure for women has a more secret interiority.

Carson (1990), a classical scholar, has written extensively about attitudes in the ancient world toward women and their bodies. Women were perceived as creatures formless by their very natures, who could not or would not maintain their own boundaries and who had tendencies to let themselves go in emotion or appetite. According to Plutarch, for example, “A good woman does not exceed the boundary of her household … . Neither the body nor the speech of a “chaste and sensible” woman is “for the public.” Her feelings, character and disposition must be kept hidden.

The clitoris has also been denied its rightful place in psychoanalytic theory of female development. It was conceptualized as a stunted penis, an enfeebled masculine organ, not as an articulated part of female sexuality.

Euripides distinguishes the hidden nature of women’s virtue from the public nature of man’s: ‘The quest for virtue is a great thing: / For women it is a secret quest concerned with love, / But for men, the good order innate in each nature / Multi- plies to make the city thrive.’ A fragment of Sophocles warns women to keep their own shame closely concealed: “Cooperate, restrain yourselves in silence: women have an obligation to cover up womanly shame” (pp. 156–157).

The French scholar Sissa (1990) wrote that an unmarried woman in ancient Greece was rigorously forbidden to have an overt sexual life; ‘its necessary conditions are dissimulation and secrecy’ (p. 347).

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Notes on contributors

Nancy Kulish

Training and supervising analyst, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute; adjunct assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry, Wayne State Medical School, Detroit; adjunct professor of psychology, University of Detroit/Mercy.