Freud Got It Wrong About Alice's Sexual Wonderland
By Shere Hite  

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It seems to me that Alice, with her intelligent irreverence for a (from her point of view) topsyturvy world, is an apt archetype for the identity of girls at puberty.

It is odd that there is no daughter in the Christian holy family. The Holy Family is composed of Mary, Jesus and Joseph. This, the model on which we in the West were supposed to build our lives, has left girls in an awkward position. Who were they supposed to be?

Lurking in the background was the character of Eve, the unmarried girl woman who, by being sexual, supposedly caused the downfall of 'mankind'.

Were all the little Alices of this world supposed to identify with her? Is this why single women are constantly being asked, "Are you married yet, dear? And do you have any children?" Only when Alice becomes a mother "Maria," can she stop being questioned about her identity.

Freud's naming of young men as 'Oedipus', facing heroic struggles, follows along the Holy Family model, in that the son is seen as a great protagonist, dealing with serious issues, worthy of notice. Yet Freud's naming of girls, 'Elektra', was not successful.

In fact, most of his theories about women have turned out, with time, to be untrue; Freud understood very little about women. For example, one of his now-disproven theses was that at puberty girls should change the stimulation they need for orgasm from the clitoris to the vagina.

Similarly, he seems to have believed that girls have puberty in the same way that boys do. Somehow I had also assumed it to be true. However, my own research now indicates something entirely different.

While girls may have what we could call reproductive puberty, they do not usually have puberty in the sense that boys do, that is a sexual awakening. Most girls can orgasm completely long before they are able to reproduce, through self stimulation.

Many parents tell me they have noticed their small daughters masturbating and had to tell them, "Please don't do that, or only do it in your own room." The implications for psychological revision are startling. This suggests a theory of childhood that is totally different from Freud's.

In other ways, too, as Alice could tell you, girls are seen through a distorting lens by much of psychological theory. Girls are given few or no models of girlhood or young womanhood, the only proper role for females, it would seem, is to 'grow up' and become 'full women' by getting married and becoming mothers, performing motherly functions; heroic activities are slated, still today, for boys' futures.

There are many examples of boy heroes, young unmarried men as important protagonists: neither Jesus Christ nor James Dean had to get married to 'prove himself.' Yet when young women are active or challenge authority, they are often labelled 'angry', 'neurotic' or 'maladjusted'; conversely, if they are loyal and 'serving', they can be labelled 'masochistic', even 'self-destructive'.

I propose a more positive, new icon: Alice. With her intelligence and clear-eyed questions and observations about the status quo and its rules and regulations, she speaks for many girls.

It is unfortunate that traditional psychology presents the family as a biological given, rather than a political or social institution, with pro's and con's, an institution one can choose or not.

It has allowed the 'family' to assume the proportions of a sacred, mythological, never changing reality ('biology'), putting the burden on the individual to 'adjust' to the institution, rather than allowing individuals to build flexible families of all kinds that suit them. The overly rigid family system causes problems for both boys and girls, perhaps particularly for girls.

Sexuality is an integral part of the personal identity which girls must try, in this not-so-friend-to-them context, to formulate. This is made harder by its being denied or silenced, not 'seen' -- or if noted, frequently declared 'bad'. One thinks of the oft-repeated maxim, 'Good girls keep their legs together.'

The symbol of society's denial and negativity toward female sexuality is the silence and gloom surrounding menstruation. Even today, there is, at the onset of girl's menstruation, generally no thought of giving her a celebration or a special dinner, to welcome her into a new phase of her life and celebrate the changes going on in her body. In very few families is the father even informed.

A celebration would do much to alter the negative atmosphere which has hung over female sexual identity for centuries, an atmosphere that has labelled menstruation 'the curse', female sexual feelings 'wicked', and sexual appearance in women as 'cheap' and 'whorish'.

There should be a new movement of support and respect for girls to take pride in their bodies and their sexuality.

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