Dark Night of the Soul: Oedipus Revisited

A Re-Examination of the Origins of Male Psycho-Sexual Identity

Sons and Lovers (the part Freud left out)

By Shere Hite

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Male psycho-sexual identity is one of the most important bases of the psychology of the culture. In my research into what makes boys and girls behave differently, I asked both what love meant to them growing up. Boys' answers are especially revealing.

Painful Initiation Rites: 'He's a mama's boy!'

As children, most boys feel especially close to their mothers, often preferring to spend time with them than their fathers. However, according to my research, around puberty most boys feel terribly confused as they are pressured by the culture to 'make a choice', i.e., told they must reject her: 'Don't hang on to your mother's apron strings,' 'Don't be a sissy', 'Get out of the kitchen and hang out with the boys, don't tag along with your sister', and so on. Boys are expected to demonstrate their new 'tough identity' by ridiculing and distancing themselves from their mothers, especially in front of male friends, fathers and brothers.

The implications of this have gone unanalysed, in favor of believing that the change in behavior boys exhibit around the age of puberty is caused by 'hormones'. The pain of the taunting is laughed off, 'Oh, boys will be boys! Their hormones make them rambunctuous at that age.' When, however, many, many moving and sad stories emerged in my research, I began to realize their importance. These are cultural initiation rites, as 'primitive' (or more so) as any tribe in 'darkest Africa'. These initiation rites change the course of men's lives, and society. The society has created these rites because of its need to shape men's behavior in a certain direction, facilitating the social system.

As one of the boys put it, ''When the guys come over and my mother tries to tell me what television show I can watch, it's humiliating. 'Turn that off!', she shouts from the other room, when she hears us listening to it or heavy metal rock videos. I am so embarrassed. I yell back 'Shut up!' and turn it up even louder. Then the guys are really impressed -- 'I guess your mother can't tell YOU what to do!', the biggest one said to me, smiling. I felt accepted then, but it also upset me. I felt like a terrible son and feared my mother would hate me.'

Boys are taunted mercilessly by other boys at school with phrases like 'mamma's boy' (if they won't go along with the other boys), or 'Stop being a sissy, un-cool', 'Act like a man and stop being a turkey, ape-shit'. They learn that they have to make a choice: in order to enter the 'male' world -- to be respected by other males, find a place in the world, get a job, they have to put aside what is called 'feminine', 'gushy', 'childish' behavior, and 'grow up', 'act male' -- which means, be the opposite of 'feminine'. They often prove this by, in effect, rejecting their mother (or sister) in favor of a group of boys or men, siding with them, 'talking back to her', and so on.

Boys' Betrayal of their Mother at Puberty (Joining 'the system')

Boys are, in effect, expected by the culture to change their allegiance -- and identity -- at puberty. While as children, many boys feel especially close to their mother, at 'puberty' they must decisively reject her (often in front of witnesses). This 'breaking up with' the mother puts boys under severe mental and emotional stress (for an average of about a year), according to my research. Most feel guilty: they simultaneously feel they are being disloyal to a person they love and who loves them (their mother) -- but that they have little choice. ('She shouldn't have told me to turn off the music. I didn't want to hurt her feelings by disobeying her and saying something mean to her, but what choice did I have? She brought it on herself.') Others, in a familiar reversal of psychological logic, come to feel that she deserted them, 'You can't trust a woman', and so on.

In other words, boys' psychology is affected at any early age by a traumatic psychological and emotional change in landscape which is not taken seriously by society -- or which is claimed by many Freudian and post-Freudian psychologists to be 'hormonal' and 'natural', i.e., boys' closeness to their mothers 'naturally' ends because male 'hormones' at puberty make boys become distant, dissasociated from their mothers, stop feeling close to them. But in fact, according to boys' testimony in my research, it is rather the taunts of their peers at school (and fathers), who ridicule them for associating with 'females' and being 'soft' 'like a girl', which makes their behavior change. Boys in my research also feel disappointed when they learn that their mother's power can't help them very much in the grown-up world; 'I came home crying after school one day and told my mother that a bigger boy hit me. I was stunned when she didn't even sympathize or help me, she just said, 'You'd better go back out and hit him even harder, don't come crying home to me. You're a big boy now.' Boys learn that their mothers cannot shield them from making peace with the world of men; they learn that they have no choice but to 'leave her'.

This 'desertion' of the mother leaves significant emotional scars on most boys. Many, feeling guilty about having 'betrayed' their mother, find that this guilt shadows their relationships with other women later, as adults. They may feel irritated by what they perceive as a woman's unspoken 'demands', i.e., their own buried memory of their mothers' hurt and pain. Or a woman's love brings up buried feelings of guilt and fear (which may easily become displaced from the mother onto the 'evil' woman who is 'provoking' or 'seducing' them), thus opening the way for a repeated enactment of the love-must-end-in-rupture scenario so that they obsessively look for signs of why they should leave 'the woman'.

Many women are left to wonder and puzzle over men's eratic behavior during love affairs or marriages, as they observe men waxing first passionate, loving and desirous, then cold and blocking, even hostile and aggressive, or violent.

Men have extremely complex feelings of acceptance and denial when they are in love with a woman. In my research on men, I discovered that most men do not feel comfortable being in love; in fact, most men do not marry the women they most passionately love. Not only did I find that most men say they did not marry the women they most passionatley loved, but also that most men are proud of it. Most are proud they kept 'control of their feelings'. The reasons for this go back to the love scenario they learned when they were small with the first important woman in their lives: it can't last, it's wrong to stay too close to her, you have to learn to be cold.

Interestingly, in homes where there are not two parents, when boys grow up with only their mothers, they are much less likely to experience the most intense types of this emotional trauma of separation, and much more likely to develop stable and equal emotional relationships with women later in life.

Perhaps this psychological dynamic is present in men in other cultures, that is, in patriarchal cultures that drive a wedge between men and women: Arab writer Fatima Mernissi, in Beyond the Veil, notes a similar phenomenon in men in Islamic culture, saying that they feel great love for a woman would interfere with their love for and duty to Allah (who, one could say, is symbolic of other men and the 'male system').

Why Do Some Men Connect Eroticism with Giving Pain to Women? Or Tend to
Inflict Psychological Pain on Women in Relationships?

Not only is this confusion of emotions applied to many men's way of seeing women, but also to their sexual feelings. Sexually, most boys' early sex lives are subliminally yet potently associated with feelings for the mother. She is the woman with whom they are most intimate: they have been kissed byher, seen her body, felt her arms around them, know her habits in the bath. She is the one who knows their secrets, has fed and clothed them, and physically touched and held them. Yet at puberty, all this changes.

Boys' puberty, that is, 'sexual awakening', occurs between the age of ten and twelve, when changes in boys' bodies make full orgasm possible for the first time. Most boys begin a very heavy masturbation sex life -- mostly in secret, although half of boys share masturbation and perhaps other sexual acts iwth other boys (Kinsey 1948; HIte 1981 and 1994). 'I remember it as a time of secrets,' one boy relates, 'a whole and complete second world was opening up around me.' Another remembers lying in bed in his room, masturbating, while listening to his mother in the kitchen making dinner.

What has not been noted in previous psychological theory is that, at the same time that sexual feelings are becoming so strong for boys, boys also go through the moral and emotional crisis in their relationship with their mother, just described.

Dissasociating themselves from their mothers, at the same age as they are also experiencing the beginning of strong sexual feelings, causes a peculiar love-hate type of sexuality and eroticism to develop in boys in relation to women: a sexuality connected with emotions of guilt and anger.

Because their sexuality is awakening at just the time they are learning to reject and ridicule the mother and 'women's ways' -- and because, at the same time, many mothers keep coming back and giving more 'love' and 'understanding' the more hostile and difficult hte boy becomes (in an attempt to continue the closeness), the pattern is reinforced. Many men come to believe 'women love pain', women are 'masochists'.

In the boys' evolving thinking, the mother's continuing to be nurturing is seen as the mother humiliating herself, which affects how they will learn to define 'love' coming from a woman. William is typical in saying, 'It made me begin to wonder, how far can I go before she will stop being so nice to me? I told my friend the other day when he was over, and we broke some glasses in the kitch, 'Let's don't pick them up and see what she does.' We made a bet: I said she would pick them up, and he said, no, she'll make you do it. I won.' Unfortunately, this all becomes an erotic-love package which some men take iwth them throughout their lives.

After this, is it any surprise that it can seem normal and erotic for men to want to humiliate women at the same time that they want to kiss them? Is this love? Yes and no. Men are in a bind; most do not see patriarchy as a chain, a fence around them, but instead, believe it gives them 'rights' and 'privileges'.

Though society calls some of the attitudes in men examined here 'human nature', my theory -- if correct -- is good news, because it means that these attitudes are not 'nature' nor dictated by hormones. It means these attitudes are part of an ideology which the society puts in place in boys, especially at puberty, through pressure to express contempt for their mothers and 'things feminine', at the same time that they begin to be 'sexual' toward women. These two messages fuse, and the resultant behavior becomes so commonplace that we call it 'human nature'.

Is there a crisis in masculinity, in the male soul and psyche -- of which the recent widespread call for a 'return' to 'traditionalism' is only a symptom? Such a crisis will not be solved by the 'preservation of traditional family values', since 'to protect the family as we know it' does not mean, as it sounds, to keep the world safe for loving values. Rather it means maintaining the traditional family hierarchy -- which insists boys switch their allegiance at puberty from their mother to their father. (Why is it necessary to have a family or social structure in which there is a need to choose?) The 'traditional family' means, and always meant: women in the home and subservient, men 'in power' but impoverished and alienated emotionally. To follow the 'traditional path' will lead to further weakening of the social fabric, because men, feeling unhappy and cut off, become aggressive, and women, feeling frustrated with trying to make love work, grow cold.

I believe that many individuals are now breaking through these old cliches, the old social 'shoulds' and stereotypes about the family, trying to build new families of many new types and designs, forge real love alliances with people they care for. This can be the wave of the future.