Our world has been structuredby the male for millennia, includingconcepts like 'femininity', what a 'woman' shouldbelike. Both sexes can be symbolically reduced to their respective genitals - the penisand the vagina - but the 'woman' being a male concept, and the male itself has no experience of the vagina, the organ that is the symbolic counterpart of the penis in the patriarchal psyche is rather the anus. This is what I believe some basic duality concepts look like throughsuch a filter:
PHALLUS Clean External Active Acceptable Social Ego Masculine
ANUS Dirty Internal Passive Shameful Private Unconsciousness
Feminine
PHALLUS Civilized
Virtuous Legitimate Real Human
Structure Life
ANUS Wild
Sinful Illegitimate Unreal Animal Chaos Death
In a world without a vagina, the anus serves that function, and the
mouth, whenitsfunctional significance is reversed - also.
From a male perspective the significance of the female genital can only be experienced
as a combination of 'anus' and 'mouth'. The 'female sexuality' thus
constructed inthe patriarchyisan anal and oral sexuality. In psychoanalytical terms - a pregenitalsexuality.
If transvestites could give birth, real females would be redundant in the
patriarchy. In some contemporary Muslim and other 'traditional' societiesfemales are
redundant outside the sphere of childbirthand mothering, and sexual reenactmentsofthe
authentic surface impulses is pursued with prostitutes, bought sex slaves, and malemale
relationships.
When I say that males construct female sexuality, I mean not onlythe direct
influence of massmedia and popculture onthe formationof the values and choices - I mean Erich
Fromm, 'The Sane Society' (1954), p110, Routledge paperback 1963
also the deep layers of verbal and nonverbal
influence in a patriarchal family/society. "In a sensethepersonis born into an identity. The infant does not know
this identity, or its place inthe social system- it literallyhas tobecome his or her self. This self will largely be
determinatedbyor constructed aroundtheanatomical distinctionbetween thesexes, the possession
or non possessionofa penis."
The little females themselves, cutoff bypatriarchal upbringingfrom anyvestige of
their original sexual capacity, are flunginto a worldof male
phallic sadism, from which, no sooner that they adapt to it, they are
barred, not allowed to compete on the same level, forced
todeal with a 'passive' role such as it is of the 'passive' homosexual males -
anoral and anal submissive sexuality - which the females are obliged
to fuse unconsciouslyin some way whichincludes their vaginas,
and try to not destroy their personalities.
Which is what psychoanalysts of the first wave foundto their disgruntlement - that 'Anal drives appear to
predominate in establishing vaginal sexuality. In the unconscious, vagina andanus aresynonymous.33'
Below all the social layers there may be an original 'male
penile' and 'female vaginal' sexuality, but what we get in the patriarchyis an artificial, strained,
painful conglomeration of conflictingdrives accumulated
inlayersfrom childhood, which must be forcedby willpower to correspond to the
prevalent social norm.