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Childhood Abuse and Sexual Fears The incident of abduction, rape and murder of an 11-year old girl in
Florida prompts me to bring up the subject of subconscious fears.
Here's a fact that you need to know if you didn't already: growing up
female almost always involves at least one incident of feeling sexually
afraid or vulnerable. The vast majority of women (I'm tempted to say
all, but there are undoubtedly some who have led extraordinarily
sheltered lives) have had a personal encounter with a deviant of some
kind at some point in their lives, and the
most aggressive deviants tend to be male. There is reason to assume that in
everyone there exists a potential anxiety about injury through the
openings into the body. But, although other openings may be more or
less adequately protected, this is by no means so the case with the
vagina -- as first parental strictness and then rumors and fantasies of
criminal assault have tended to impress upon the child. Woman's normal
anxiety is not castration but defenselessness toward an internal injury
-- such as the incurring of pregnancy against her will. It's interesting that Fromm believes that it is only parental rules and
"rumors and fantasies" of criminal assault which create a woman's
fears. Like so many men of his era, Fromm simply didn't know that the
vast majority of women have had at least one real-life experience which
contributes to their concerns. But "rumors and fantasies" do play a
role, of course. Very few women have been able to avoid seeing movies
or reading books in which a woman is sexually threatened, attacked or
raped. And the surrounding culture sometimes seems to enjoy reminding
us that we can be victimized all too easily. The innate interior vulnerability of womanhood, Fromm believes, is one
of the crucial differences between men and women's differing approaches
to sex. It's not that women consciously believe their loving partners
will hurt them "in there," any more than a man consciously believes his
partner will cut off his penis (the equivalent instinctive fear for
men). But knowing and coping with those possibilities is part of the
fundamental, underground struggles of our psychological existence as
men (penetrating partner) and women (the penetrated). If as a child a woman was sexually abused, if she once actually
experienced sexual fear, guilt, disgust, or pain at the
hands of someone bigger and stronger, her underlying sense of
vulnerability and insecurity in the sexual realm will be even greater.
A woman can overcome such deep difficulties during the courtship phase
of any relationship, when she trusts and delights in her new love. But
when the relationship becomes more difficult (as relationships almost
inevitably do), the subconscious concerns raise their heads again. Even when a woman feels she has been strong enough to put her bad
sexual experiences behind her, they will nevertheless be standing by to
interfere with her libido whenever she begins to doubt the good will
and emotional gentility of her partner. When that insecurity surfaces,
when she feels unloved, when she senses that she is being viewed as a
mere "contractually obligated" vagina, a woman's open, life-affirming
erotic self will want to close and protect itself. Under the surface of the marital conflict, and often in a way she
can't understand or acknowledge to herself, she may feel that her
husband is "no different" from the sexual exploiter(s) in her past,
that he really only wants to use her flesh and responses for his own
selfish gratification. So it is that a man's insistence on his rights,
his pressure on his
wife to -- as her subconscious sees it -- be open and vulnerable to his
potentially harmful penetration, will only make her concerns about
being sexually exploited
that much worse. As I noted, all women have some small element of this fear in their
erotic background because of the reality of their bodies, their
develpmental experiences and their cultural conditioning, but for women
who have actually been overtly abused it is much, much worse. At the
far end of the spectrum of reactions to sexual and other abuse, you get
the histrionic withholding of an Andrea Dworkin, who believes that no
act of penetrative intercourse can be anything but an expression of dominance and exploitation, and who evidently lives her life in terror of malevolent men. But even ordinary women with benign sexual backgrounds can feel some whispers of that concern. Another very dark, very difficult problem for some abused women is
the
fact that the abuse was not always a totally negative or painful
experience. Some children, especially at first or before grim
understanding dawns, experience erotic responses or otherwise enjoy the
sexual activity their
abusers force on them. The guilt and horror a woman may feel when she
remembers her supposed "complicity" with her abuser's sexual sickness
can significantly interfere with her healthy enjoyment of eroticism later on. COMMENTS ON THIS BLOG POST:
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