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Hite
Report on the Family Revolutionising the Psyche of Patriarchy This book is a picture, many pictures, of childhood – and
a questioning of the identity given to each of us as children. A significantly different picture of ‘childhood’
emerges from my work than elsewhere – as boys and girls, women and men, ages
8-38*, movingly describe their childhood feelings and experiences. The theory regarding childhood which has dominated
twentieth century thought is the Freudian view, with its fixation on gender. It
proposed such incorrect concepts as ‘penis envy’ (to ‘describe’
women’s dissatisfaction with their suppression and inequality); the belief
that girls should transfer their feelings at puberty from the clitoris to the
vagina to have ‘mature orgasm’; the ‘explanation’ that if boys love
their mothers, they have an ‘Oedipus complex’ (a remarkably negative way to
view boys’ love for their mothers); as well as the ‘explanation’ that men
are ‘naturally’ aggressive and desire to dominate because of ‘biological,
hormonal changes at puberty’ (which are inescapable). This work challenges these Freudian and post-Freudian,
‘modernist’ views and others. In fact ‘Freudian’ and post Freudian ideas
merely reflect the social psyche that has been imposed on children, the
psycho-sexual identity that our social system wants them to have. Perhaps Freud
should have used a larger sample, or a cross cultural sample. Much more interesting than such negative theories are the
real, individual psychological and sexual feelings we hear children and young
adults express here as they describe their childhoods, their feelings about
their parents, their bodies, themselves and their friends. This work questions whether ‘puberty’ is a valid
category: ‘puberty’ is not the time of sexual awakening for girls, as it is
for boys. Out of these new stages emerge inner psychological turning points not
described before. While most boys first masturbate to orgasm with ejaculation
between the ages of 10-12, girls usually masturbate to orgasm much earlier,
almost half starting by the ages of 5-7. Puberty is not so much a time of
‘sexual awakening’ for girls as a change in reproductive status. Freud
incorrectly modelled his ideas of puberty in girls on his notions about boys. Even his ideas about boys are incorrect: the change in identity demanded of boys (‘stop staying at home and hanging around your mother’ and go out with the boys and be tough, play sports) is something brought about by patriarchal culture, not by ‘hormones’. Much too much was made of ‘puberty’ by Freud, following the reproductive cultural modes of patriarchy and calling them biological. Perhaps the most surprising is the intensity of the pain most boys describe feeling as they undergo this uprooting process, to achieve their new identity. Mixed with this identification with the ‘male world’ is the ‘information’ that women are objects of different or lower status, but also objects of sexual desire. In short, puberty is notable because it is a time of ideological ‘shoulds’ which children now have to obey because they are of reproductive status; thus it is the time of transference of loyalty from the mothers to the fathers, i.e., the system. Puberty is a time the society demands children switch their loyalties from the mother to the father (or the ‘system’, ‘adulthood’). Many people, all their lives, live out a play-enacted version of themselves, a shadow-self tailored for public consumption… displaying ‘appropriate’ social behaviour in public ‘life’, while underneath, in private, an undergrowth of confusing feelings of joy, fear, eroticism and pain exist, all jumbled together. The picture of development of psycho-sexual identity that we see here, based on new data (whether or not ‘perfect’), indicates that the whole shape and thrust of how we see ‘children’s’ and our own identities is conveniently and self-servingly blind. Who are we, before we learn to see through society’s lens = to see ‘properly’ and doubt our own feelings? *90% of answers were kept within this age range, so that almost all respondents have grown up during the last twenty-five years of gender change and debate, the change in family structure. |
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