Cultures of Fetishism (8 page)

young men who had lost their fathers when they were children.

Freud does not enlist the childhood histories of these two young men because they were involved with castration or horrifying discoveries of genital absence, or sexuality, or, in fact, with any concrete fetish object. However, their responses to their fathers’ deaths do express succinctly the defensive structure of the fetishism perversion. Each child had thought about the death of his beloved father in much the same way that a fetishist thinks about a woman’s body. Each of them knew that his father had died. Yet, at the same time, they did not know and had not acknowledged this death. They were, so to speak, of two minds.
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Disavowal
, the psychological defense of having it both ways, is now thought to be one of our primary defense mechanisms, prior to and more fundamental than repression, originating in the earliest years of childhood, when the blurring between what is and what is not is characteristic.

Disavowal is the sine non qua of sexual fetishism. According to Freud, a sexual fetishist devises his fetish so that he can have it both ways. He can disregard reality and all the facts to the contrary and continue to believe that a woman
has
a penis. Yet, all the while, he will continue to take account of reality and recognize that she
does not
have a penis. Thus the fetish is both a substitute penis,
she does have a penis
, and “a memorial to the horror of castration,” therefore she does not have a penis. Freud’s likening of fetishism

to death sounds the note of destruction that will be echoed in his concluding remarks on the mutilations of women’s bodies.

Very often the defense of having it both ways shows up in the elaborate mental convolutions that determine the construction of the fetish. To show how this works, Freud brings in the example of the man whose fetish was an athletic supporter.
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This garment, an elaborately constructed jock strap, was often worn as part of a man’s swimming suit. It covers up the genitals entirely and thus conceals the difference between the sexes. But Freud’s apparently simple example of the athletic supporter fetish has in it more than a few befuddle- ments. Only one thing is certain, the garment is masculine. But who is wearing the supporter? Is it the fetishist himself? Or does the man require that his female sexual partner wear the supporter and cover up her female genitals with a masculine garment that disguises the sexual difference? Usually the woman wears the fetish garment, the white garter belt, the blue velvet bathrobe, the black leather boots, the rubberized raincoat. Or, sometimes, the fetishist simply fondles, smells, or gazes at his fetish. Or, at other times, the fetishist wears the garment himself.

Freud’s comments do not help us to decide who is wearing the fetish. However, they do clarify the accidental circumstances leading up to the choice of the fetish. According to Freud, the transformation of this ordinary supporter into a fetish was inspired by a fig leaf seen on a statue when the fetishist was a little boy. But this solution just leads to another conundrum. Although we might presume that a fig leaf on a statue is intended to cover up the male genitals, this is not necessarily the case. On some statues, the fig leaf masks the reality of the female genitals. Thus the fig leaf solution, though clarifying with regard to the accidental circumstances that lead to the choice of a fetish, only deepens the ambiguity with regard to which sex is having his or her genitals covered up. At this point in Freud’s tale of the athletic supporter, the sex of the wearer of the garment
and
the sex of the statue with the fig leaf are both in doubt.

Though Freud does not stop to clarify these matters, it may be that his own ambiguity is an objective correlative of the fundamental purpose of the athletic supporter fetish. Unconsciously, the garment was meant to leave the differences between the sexes ambiguous and thereby to have it both ways. Thus man could be a male engaged in the masculine activity of sexual inter- course, but leave open the possibility of identifying with a female person—and without anyone being any the wiser, including himself.

And here, though the point remains ambiguous, Freud is hinting at some- thing that
is
quite relevant to the topic of fetishism. Most fetish objects are adopted to allow a man to express his shameful and dangerous wishes to be female and yet remain male. In many typical fetishistic fantasies, where the male or his sexual partner is wearing a fetishized female garment, the fetishist unconsciously (or consciously) imagines he is a woman, but a woman with a penis. But what about a man who is wearing a male garment? Is he then a male impersonator? As Freud would point out in later years, the repudiation

of femininity—a man’s struggle against his feminine attitude toward another male—is the bedrock of male psychology.
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By masking his genitals with a garment that allows for genital ambiguity but is still reassuringly male, the protagonist of Freud’s tale of the athletic sup- porter identifies with some powerful, idealized “phallic” male. At this juncture in Freud’s paper, the overall drift of his commentary is toward the fetishist’s identification with his father, his father’s position in the world, his father’s position in sexual intercourse, his father’s attitudes toward the female sex.

It would seem that the man with the athletic supporter fetish has created a different sort of memorial from the one created by a fetishist who employs a female garment to attain erection and penetration. It is derived from con- trary ideas: the woman is both castrated and not castrated. It is, in part, a memorial to his mother’s absent (castrated) genital, her
inferior
genital, her
real
small penis, and that last moment before he discovered her castration. At the same time, since it covers over the male genitals, it is derived from two ideas: that a male could be like a castrated female, and yet the fetish could also serve as a “memorial” to his father’s
superior
genital.

Freud goes on to report that this divided attitude is exemplified by the
coupeur des nattes
, and other men who create their fetish to assert their strong identifications with the father: “For it is to him that as a child he ascribed the woman’s castration.”
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The
coupeur des nattes
action of cutting off a lock of hair or scrap of female clothing or, in a pretense of more civilized behavior, merely stealing a woman’s handkerchief, expresses two mutually incompatible assertions: “the woman has still got a penis” and “my father has castrated the woman.” In this way he is able to treat his fetish both with reverence and at the same time, with the contempt and hostility deserving of someone who has been castrated.

When Freud concludes “Fetishism” with his observation, “the normal prototype of inferior organs is the woman’s real small penis, the clitoris,”
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it is not clear whether he is alluding to a little child’s fantasy or an adult fetishist’s fantasy. In my opinion, most likely the phrase “real small penis” rep- resents Freud’s own irrepressible infantile version of the female genital regions. Freud’s intimacy with the workings of the unconscious mind did not exempt him from a prototypical, albeit unconscious attitude toward the female geni- tals, an attitude that expresses simultaneously an idealizing reverence and a hostility based on all the unwelcome news that is called to mind by the female genitals.

Like the perversion itself, Freud’s “Fetishism” unsettles the boundaries between the
real
and the
not real
. Freud’s concluding sentence about the female’s
real
small penis is tantamount to a disavowal of the enormous and terrifying and humiliating significance of the actual female genitals. The female genitals are the emblem of that unwelcome news that Mother and Father share a desire that excludes the little child. The mother does have some genitals of significance and the father does desire her for having them. The little boy, of course, is competitive with his mother for his father’s love. He wishes to be in her submissive position with the dominating father.

He envies her the power she has over his beloved and mighty father and would just as soon imagine her genitals as insignificant and puny—castrated, if necessary, and definitely inferior to his own.

Yes, the crucial point, which keeps peeking through the misogynism of Freud’s “Fetishism,” is the male’s unconscious wish to fulfill what would otherwise be his
shameful
feminine longings, as well as his unconscious envy of the female’s extraordinary sexual powers. As most contemporary psycho- analysts would acknowledge, their clinical experience with male patients brings this point home, over and over again—very subtly in most patients, quite emphatically in some others.

There are, for example, those ultra-macho men who are fascinated by “studying” the sexual allure of female prostitutes and call girls. As they speak about their desperate hunt for more and more contacts with professional sexual partners, who “know all the moves,” they eventually reveal their iden- tifications with these powerful women, their wish to be like them, their wish to be as sexually alluring as they are. Some men exhibit this by dressing up like women and then masturbating. Others, more secretively, wear shreds of female undergarments under their business suits, workman’s overalls, or police and military uniforms. Still others exhibit this feminine identification by giving up their apparently tranquil domestic life in order to devote them- selves to their “studies” of female sexual behaviors. Very often, the biggest turn-on of all for these super-macho males is observing lesbians making love to each other. That way they can have it both ways. They can be both sub- missive-femme and macho-butch;—categories that have more to do with their own fantasy life than what the lesbians are experiencing when they assume top and bottom and in-between sexual positions.

For a short while, the TV series
The L Word
, which features a wide variety of sexually alluring females who seem to be empowered with a variety of erotic ingenuities, took over the place in male imaginations previously held by the departed
Sex and the City
. On posters and in newspaper ads
The L Word
was promoted as VENUS ENVY. Now that this Venus envy is out in the open, we might look back at
Sex in the City
and detect something we might never have noticed about its appeal to some men—an opportunity for them to identify with females and give passive expression to their unconscious feminine identifications.

Two years before his death, in one of his last papers, Freud asserted that the rock bottom of the female personality is her penis envy, her unconscious wish to assume a masculine role in her sexual and domestic arrangements and in society.
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Most females would protest that they do not have such wishes, or that those wishes are in fact quite conscious and nothing to be ashamed of, except for the sad fact of society labeling such wishes as “masculine.” The corresponding rock bottom for the male is his unconscious wish to assume a feminine position in a relationship with a male. Since this feminine position is shameful to a man, he must make every effort to repudiate it. His so-called masculine protest is but the outward sign of his “repudiation of femininity.” A possibility Freud never considered, however, was that his own insistent and

re-iterated proclamations on female castration, the female absence of an adequate genital, the inferiority of her genitals, and penis envy, were, at least in part, a masquerade, a duplicity, a very elaborate and clever cover story for Venus envy.

Behind every proclamation of female inferiority lurks a forbidden and shameful identification with the powers of female sexuality. When a man feels castrated and humiliated by the conditions inflicted on him by his society, his shameful feminine identifications are aroused. A popular response to these social humiliations is the desire to silence the sexuality of females.

We do know that in cultures where the vast majority of male citizens are treated as if they were beasts of burden or less than human, these men identify with their oppressors. Rather than experience himself as a “castrated” woman, the man acts toward females the way that their oppressors act toward him He denigrates and punishes females for exhibiting their femininity. In such cultures, dominating and humiliating the woman is the screen, the cover story that protects a man from having to acknowledge his own vulnerability. In politically oppressive cultures, women have usually been the most oppressed and humiliated members.

The tumultuous social, political, and religious upheavals that plagued the country of Iran during the last half of the twentieth century and that now continues into the early years of the twenty-first century, testifies to these observations.
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In 1957, after a succession of premiers finally restored some degree of order to Iran, there was a temporary end to the oppressive laws that had existed for sixteen years. Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had assumed the reigns of authority from his father, instituted a series of reforms that would give land to the poor and establish closer relationships with the West. His project of industrialization, modernization, and Westernization created extraordinary and ostentatious wealth in some sectors of the popula- tion but alienated and humiliated the urban and rural poor, who grew more and more restless and dissatisfied.

The SAVAT, the Shah’s secret police, kept a close watch for signs of discontent and punished those who objected to the Shah’s regime with pub- lic humiliation, torture, imprisonment, and death by stoning and execution. The humiliation of the female population in the less-advantaged social classes was accomplished by beatings, desertions, and denigrations by their hus- bands and fathers. On the other hand, under the Shah’s regime, the Westernized middle- and upper-class women were encouraged to serve in public offices, and allowed to vote, dress as they wished, listen to Western music, and read Western books.

One of those who objected to the policies of the Shah, particularly his adoption of Western values, was the Iranian Shiite, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. His outspoken criticism of the Shah’s regime led to his exile to Iraq in 1964. In Iraq he developed a strong religious and political following, which led to Saddam Hussein forcing him to leave the country. Speaking from Paris, Ayatollah Khomeini called for his fellow Iranians to depose the