Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

whom Konrad Lorenz examined to conclude that male cichlidsfailed to find the courage to mate unless the female of their speciesresponded with ‘awe. ’” Millett notes that u[h]ow one measures ‘awe’in a fish is a question perhaps better left unanswered. . .” 3T he useof the cichlid to buttress male sexual supremacy— not to mentionthe multitudes of insects that people Edward O. Wilson’sSociobiology: The New Synthesis—may be seen to indicate either a newmilitancy or a new desperation on the part of those who look toother species to justify male domination.Psychiatrists and psychologists, however, still postulate a basicfemale sadism. T heir proof is clinical, that is, deduced or imaginedfrom what they observe in patients. Bruno Bettelheim suggests thatin females sexual sadism would naturally lead to self-mutilation:T he desires of our little boys indeed suggest that some menwould excise part of the female sex organs if not prevented. Butthe example of the girl who had to take special precautions toprevent herself from tearing off her own clitoris raises a doubtas to whether this far-reaching mutilation also may not be reenforcedat least in part by desires that spring up autonomouslyin women. 4Bettelheim’s generalization from the behavior of one disturbed girlexpresses a wish, one also expressed in the photographs, scissors inthe hand of a woman aimed at the genitals of a woman.Robert Stoller, concerned ultimately with the paradisical heterosexualadjustment of angry women, posits, much as Briffault did, asexual sadism that manifests in both males and females. H e isparticularly contemptuous of women who fail to meet elementarystandards of humanism because they think that males alone aresadistic:Belle [Stoller’s prototypical female] suffered endlessly fromher anger at males and envy at their happier lot, without hopethat she could move from her inferior position and ashamedthat she mismanaged these issues. Yet she discovered thatknowing men to be sadists (she did not make that up), she wasusing that knowledge to read sadism into all our acts. And that