LY YOUNG -ELOEND

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 $23.00
(CANADA: $35.00)

A, internationally recognized Jungian analyst

and psychologist helps women reclaim true

desire for themselves. Not since Simone de

Beauvoir's The Second Sex has female desire been

explored sO deeply and provocatively.

This groundbreaking book delves into the

complex world of female desire where women

simply “want to be wanted.” Many women encour-

age others to identify or validate images that give

them feelings of worth or vitality and then feel

resentful because they have sacrificed their real needs

and desires. Instead of knowing who they really are

and what they would like to do with their lives, they

become trapped in their images. As a result, self-

direction, self-confidence, and self-determination

are undermined from adolescence through old age.

Dr. Polly Young-Eisendrath examines this

damaging syndrome of female development,

showing women, and girls, how to untangle

themselves from the web of reflected images that

confuses or conceals their authentic wants and

needs. Women and Desire empowers women to

understand and take control of their sexual, social,

and spiritual lives.

 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2021 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/womendesirebeyon0O0O0O0youn
Other Works by Polly Young-Eisendrath

Integrity, Wisdom, and Transcendence

Gender and Desire
The Cambridge Companion to Jung
The Resilient Spirit
You're Not What I Expected
Female Authority
Hags and Heroes
POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH, PH.D.

Beyond Wanting
to Be Wanted

40>
HARMONY BOOKS NEW YORK
 Copyright © 1999 by Polly Young-Eisendrath

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmit-

ted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Harmony Books, 201 East 5oth Street, New York, New
York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

www.randomhouse.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and Harmony Books

colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Young-Eisendrath, Polly.
Women and desire : beyond wanting to be wanted / by Polly Young-
Eisendrath. — 1st ed.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women—Psychology. 2. Desire. _ I. Title.
HQ1206.Y69— 1999
155.6'33—dc21 99-13426
CIP
ISBN 0-609-60371-X
W@) 0) 1 GP Gy Go ch Sm it
FIRST EDITION
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 Acknowledgments

My FIRST GRATITUDE is to the women | have seen in psy-

choanalysis and psychotherapy, who have provided the basis
for my study and understanding of female desire. The work I do
is such a rare and great privilege. In what other profession
would I be invited into the most personal, intimate, and vul-
nerable places of human life?
People who are not therapists frequently ask me about the
fatigue or burnout that is assumed to accompany long hours of
doing psychotherapy. I have little fatigue; | am inspired and
energized by this work. My clients invite me daily to under-
stand the roots of human suffering and the hope for its trans-
formation. I become ever more optimistic about our capacities
for change through conscious awareness. As my clients grow in
awareness, compassion, and insight, I repeatedly witness the

vii
Viii Acknowledgments

paths we all must follow from confusion about our desires to

self-knowledge and a purposeful life. For this, I thank them.
The clients who appear in these pages are composites of the
actual life stories and individual struggles of people I have seen
in psychotherapy so as to disguise the identities of those peo-
ple. For psychotherapy to be effective it must be confidential.
That is a base on which it rests. Consequently, | cannot reveal
the identities of those whom I know in this unique way. But
the stories you read here are “true” all the same, because the
emotional themes and the psychological images emerge directly
from the lives of real people.
My second greatest resource in writing this, and all my
other books, is my husband and life partner, Ed Epstein. He has
argued each major idea with me, critiqued my writing, looked
for typos, run the errands, done the photocopying, fixed the din-
ners, and found me newer and better back supports throughout
the creation of this book. He and I have a karmic bond. We
were meant to be together doing these things as a team. I could
not have done this book without his help.
So many other people have talked with me about the ideas
you find here. Demaris Wehr, Amber Rickert, and Heidi Yockey
are always intelligent conversationalists whose insights have
helped me explore the complexities of female life—and they are
also wonderful friends. My research assistant, Katherine Masis,
has been an outstanding aid in tracking down scholarly sources
and finding the empirical studies to back up my claims. She is
the author of most of the endnotes and the careful documenter
of many of the materials I have used to illustrate the problems
and struggles that characterize female self-determination in our
society. | am very thankful to have had these women as col-
leagues and companions in doing this book.
 Acknowledgments ix

My editor, Sharon Broll, has been another extraordinary

colleague. Perceptive, intelligent, and critical-minded, she is a
gifted editor who has a special ability to trim my prose and
arrange my ideas into a logical sequence.
My editor at Harmony Books, Shaye Areheart, has been
encouraging and enthusiastic about this book from the day |
met her. Her energy and belief gave me confidence that there
would be an audience for a book that challenges widely held
ideas about female power.
My literary agent, Beth Vesel, worked with me for months
on the proposal for this book. At first | thought it would be a
book “about desire,” but Beth disagreed and insisted that |
knew more about female desire than I did about desire in gen-
eral. She was right. Her insight and prodding are always impor-
tant in the process of planning a book; I am very thankful that
Beth and I have been coconspirators for so many years now.
Many of my ideas derive from various teachings of Bud-
dhism, Jung, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Without these
important anchors for my life, |would be someone entirely dif-
ferent—perhaps unable to explore the levels and layers of
human desire and subjectivity. | only hope that what I have
written in these pages will be of use to others in a way that con-
tinues and expands the sources in which my ideas are rooted.
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 Contents

Introduction X1lil

ONE Wanting to Be Wanted

TWO The Menace of Female Beauty
THREE Sex through the Looking Glass
FOUR Hothouse Mothering and the
Divine Child
FIVE The Material Girl and the
Hungry Ghost I22

SIX The Spiritual Problem of Giving

Your Self Away LSS
SEVEN The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 186

Notes 207

Bibliography 226

Index 240

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 Introduction

IN TWENTY YEARS of practicing psychoanalysis and psy-

chotherapy, I have found that the question What do you want?
produces bewilderment in most women. We often do not know
or we cannot say what we desire. As a psychoanalyst and a
Buddhist, I have learned many theories and explanations of
desire, but the problem of female desire—why we are so con-
fused about what we want—always remained. This book is an
in-depth look at the problem and a guide to its resolution for
women and those who love them.
Human desire has two contrasting faces. The meaner face of
desire appears in craving, impulsiveness, addiction, and power
mongering. The kinder face shows through self-determination
and self-responsibility. We women have learned to hide the
meaner face, even from ourselves. Because we often ignore or
deny our meaner desires, we are also unfamiliar with how to

X Lil
Xiv Introduction

direct our lives through taking responsibility for our own needs
and motives.
Living by our self-determination remains remarkably opaque
to us, even in this period when feminism has opened many new
opportunities and avenues for female development. If anything
we seem blinder than ever to the implications of our own
choices and decisions. Whereas in the past we were eager to
push the limits of personal sovereignty, we now seem afraid of
the freedom that we have. We seek guarantees that our deci-
sions will be approved by others, and that our choices are
“right,” before we have even understood their implications for
ourselves.
In our society the question of desire is often asked with the
emphasis on you: “What do you want?” Over the years of ask-
ing it in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, | have come to
change the emphasis: “What do you want?” is a question about
our intentions. Knowing these, even the unconscious ones,
allows us to be responsible for ourselves and our effects on oth-
ers. In all domains of our lives—appearance, sex, motherhood,
career, money, spirituality—we hesitate to break the rules, to
move beyond the boundaries that have been set for us over the
centuries by male standards and desires. This limits us in
becoming aware of our actual desires and in living by our own
intentions.
In the pages that follow, I show why breaking the rules and
moving beyond the boundaries is necessary for living as self-
determining women. We have to awaken to the fact that we
were never really meant to be fully enfranchised human beings
in patriarchy, so we cannot follow the old rules in becoming
fully human.
In Buddhism there is a teaching called the Wheel of Life. It
is depicted as a great circle containing six realms of existence.
 Introduction XV

These realms can be understood as psychological states—states

of mind—or as actual places. In Buddhism they are understood
to be both. By their simplest names the six are the realms of
lowest hell, hungry ghosts, power gods, animals, humans, and
gods. Each of these forms exemplifies particular kinds of suffer-
ing and certain possibilities for freedom from that suffering. No
beings in existence are free from adversity and anguish, but
humans have the greatest possibility of liberating themselves.
Humans are the only beings who can change their lives
through changing their intentions and actions. At the very
essence of what it means to be human, then, is the freedom to
change. And this can be realized only when we know our own
intentions, when we know what we want.
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 ONE

Wanting to Be Wanted

BOUT TEN YEARS AGO, while reading a biography of

the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, I came across
something he said about women that struck me as uncom-
fortably true: women want to be wanted, not to be loved.
He meant that women sought to be desirable rather than to
be fully known. Lacan arrived at this conclusion after years
of psychoanalyzing and seducing women. (That is to say, he
attempted to psychoanalyze some women and to seduce others.
A heavily rationalized womanizer, he seduced many women,
but I doubt that he successfully psychoanalyzed any.) A some-
times brilliant theoretician, Lacan was also sexist and terribly
arrogant, so I wondered if I could take his claim seriously. Yet,
despite my doubt, the idea stayed with me.
Over the ensuing years I read many feminist accounts
of female desire, but I came across nothing quite as bold and
2 WOMEN AND DESIRE

blatant as Lacan’s claim. A psychoanalyst myself, | am also a

feminist, a mother and a wife, a writer, a teacher of psychother-
apy, and a student of Buddhism. In all of these roles | find it
useful to keep my ears and eyes open to the unspoken, the
unwritten, and the unconscious. So while I tucked away the
idea of women wanting to be wanted and continued to go
about my business of seeing people in individual psychother-
apy, Jungian analysis, and couples therapy, in the back of my
mind this notion was having an effect. That women might be
driven by the desire to be desirable, rather than by the desire to
be known and loved, became the background music for much
that I heard about female desire both in and out of psychother-
apy for the next ten years.
I now believe that Lacan was basically right about the prob-
lem of female desire, but instead of seeing it as a normal aspect
of female character, as he believed, I see it as a damaging afflic-
tion of female development in societies where women are
expected to please men. The compulsion to be desired and
desirable undermines self-direction, self-confidence, and self-
determination in women from adolescence through old age, in
all our roles, from daughter to mother, from lover to wife, from
student to worker or leader, whether or not the affliction is
conscious.
Wanting to be wanted is about finding our power in an
image rather than in our own actions. We try to appear attrac-
tive, nice, good, valid, legitimate, or worthy to someone else,
instead of discovering what we actually feel and want for our-
selves. In this kind of conscious or unconscious arrangement,
other people are expected to provide our own feelings of
power, worth, or vitality, at the expense of our authentic devel-
opment. We then feel resentful, frustrated, and out of control
 Wanting to Be Wanted 3

because we have sacrificed our real needs and desires to the

arrangements we have made with others. We find ourselves
always wanting to be seen in a positive light: the perfect
mother, the ideal friend, the seductive lover, the slender or
athletic body, the kind neighbor, the competent boss. In place
of knowing the truth of who we are and what we want from our
lives, we become trapped in images.
Wanting to be wanted is not codependency. It’s not some-
thing that develops out of someone else’s needs or demands.
Rather, it is a desire for power and control that has been trans-
formed and hidden. Instead of learning how to fulfill this—
our own—desire, we learn gradually, but clearly, how to fulfill
others’. This dynamic is rooted in the widespread psychologi-
cal and social constraints on female power. For, in spite of
feminism, female power—decisiveness, status, command, influ-
ence—cannot be expressed directly at home or in the work-
place without arousing suspicion, confusion, fear, or dread.
Both women and men still tend to experience female power as
exotic at best and dangerous and despicable at worst. Lacking
clear avenues for developing our power directly, we learn to be
indirect in making emotional arrangements based on others’
needs and wants, and how we would like to be seen.
Nor is wanting to be wanted the expression of a desire for
intimacy or closeness. Rather, wanting to be wanted makes us
feel as though we have no clear desires of our own. We focus on
how to bring things under control by appearing in a certain
way, speaking in a certain manner, implying our needs. Yet we
never say directly what we want, and we may never actually
know. We have been culturally programmed so thoroughly to
tune in to the subtleties of whether or not we are having the
“desired effect” that we fail to tune in to what we really want
4 WOMEN AND DESIRE

or to see how strongly we are motivated by wanting to be

wanted.
Many times in individual and couples psychotherapy, |
have faced a woman and said, “What do you want here?” and
she has replied, “I really don’t know” or “This is what the chil-
dren and my husband need” or “What do you think?” If I push
further and gently ask her to come up with some answer—any
answer—she usually gets flustered and apologetic. She either
doesn’t know or is afraid to say what she wants.

Female Power

In 1987 psycHOLoGIsT Florence Wiedemann and | published

a book titled Female Authority: Empowering Women Through
Psychotherapy, in which we detailed a condition that we called
the double bind of female authority: women are damned if
they claim their authority (they are called controlling, domi-
nating, bitches, or even feminazis) and damned if they don’t
(they are called manipulative, dependent, depressed, or worse,
immature and self-defeating). We addressed the problem that
results when girls and women believe that authority and
knowledge lie wholly outside themselves—in men, gods, or
institutions such as school or church. Since then I have helped
many women in psychotherapeutic and educational settings to
restore their personal authority, claim their competence and
voices, and seek satisfaction in their lives.
Yet as successful as many of these women have become,
they often feel “out of control” in their personal lives.
Although they can speak openly and passionately about the
values and principles they believe in, and defend others’ rights,
they still resist claiming and asserting personal needs and
 Wanting to Be Wanted 5

desires, especially when these are in conflict with others’. They

fear being seen as too bossy or too self-absorbed.
Anne is just such a woman, in her midforties, whom I have
come to know through weekly sessions of psychotherapy over
the past two years. She is a professor and part-time dean at a
local college. Articulate, conscientious, always prepared for
her therapy meetings, Anne appears to others to be in control
of her life. She is the mother of three lively children, one son
and two daughters, the eldest of whom is away at college. Her
children do well academically and socially. She is married to a
“nice guy’—a laid-back professional who spends a lot of his
free time outdoors with their children, camping, hiking, skiing.
He’s also an egalitarian spouse who runs the kitchen and
chauffeurs the kids. Anne appreciates all of this about John,
especially his parenting skills.
A grateful feminist, Anne enjoys both her career and her
family. She is decisive, well regarded as a leader at work, and
admired by her many friends. Certainly no one would dub her a
crybaby or victim. On the surface Anne appears to have every
reason to be completely happy and satisfied with her life.
You may know someone like Anne who seems to have it all;
you may even envy her. But each week when I meet with Anne,
she is full of complaints. She talks mostly about feeling that her
life is out of her control: she never has a moment to herself, is
almost always overwhelmed and overworked. She has no time
for her own creative outlet, a combination of sculpting and
painting, and she feels dominated by others’ needs and demands.
The disparity between how Anne appears and what she feels
about herself and her life is a symptom of wanting to be wanted.
Anne’s compulsion to be desirable begins with the funda-
mental belief that power—the right, capacity, or authority to
6 WOMEN AND DESIRE

act or influence others on her behalf—is not legitimately hers

but resides in the eye of the beholder. She struggles mightily
with how she is seen by others, not wanting anyone to think
she is demanding or pushy. Anne often tells me about feeling
empty—lost, betrayed, or abandoned. Sometimes in a dream
she is alone in a large building or tent and does not know
which way to turn or if there is anyone who can help.
Anne resents many of the things she has agreed to do at
work and at home, even with her friends. She recently spent
the evening with a good friend who took hours to recount the
details of a trek she and her partner had taken through some
mountains in South America. Anne felt she had no choice but
to listen because the friend had invited Anne for dinner specif-
ically to tell her about the trip. Anne appeared to listen agree-
ably, although she was bored and even angry. I asked her why
she had accepted the invitation in the first place if she didn’t
want to spend the evening hearing about the trip. “I don’t
know,” she replied. “I couldn’t imagine turning it down. After
all, this friend has spent a lot of time listening to me bitch and
moan about my job.”
“And so you set aside your own desire to spend the evening
quietly at home?” I inquired.
“Actually, no,” Anne said. “You see, I didn’t know how
resentful I really felt until I was sitting there, feeling under her
control with no chance of going home. Of course, I couldn’t
tell her how I felt. I would never say something that sounds so
rejecting to a friend. | wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
To her friend it appeared that Anne chose to spend the
evening together, but Anne had actually felt coerced by her
own'compulsion to be desirable. In order to make a choice,
Anne had to have at least two options. Being free to choose
 Wanting to Be Wanted 7

means having alternatives, and in this case Anne would have

needed to feel that she could say no in order to give a truthful
yes. No one but Anne can make such a personal choice, but
she has unknowingly refused to make it and so feels herself to
be under the power of another.
Anne’s compulsion to appear agreeable unintentionally
leads her to deceive her friend. Like most of us Anne wants to
appear supportive of others and their needs, but she does not
take full responsibility even for this desire. If Anne really
wanted to appear supportive, then her decision to go to her
friend’s would be freely given. But because Anne’s compulsion
to be desirable is hidden from her, she feels robbed of her power
and control in the presence of her friend. The hidden com-
pulsion to be wanted puts us under a sort of magic spell that
makes our behavior confusing to others, even to ourselves. We
seem to have chosen to be in a situation—a dinner party, a
committee meeting, even a marriage—but we feel as though
we had no choice, so we are there resentfully, holding in our
negative emotions with arms crossed and a plastered smile seal-
ing our lips.

What Do Women Really Want?

THE QUESTION What do women really want? is often attrib-

uted to Sigmund Freud, but as far as I know its first formal
appearance is in a medieval folktale titled “The Marriage of
Sir Gawain and the Lady Ragnell,” whose earliest recorded
version is from the thirteenth century. Its origin likely goes
back further than this version because elements of its plot and
themes show up in other folktales and literature in England
(such as “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury
 8 WOMEN AND DESIRE

Tales) and throughout Europe, indicating that it was widely

known by the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Since then
it has been told and retold in many forms throughout the world.
The following rendition most closely resembles a modern
retelling published in The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales
from Around the World, edited by Ethel Johnston Phelps.
Phelps selected stories in which the female characters, espe-
cially the heroines, contrast with those of the traditional fairy
tales and folktales that are commonly told to us as children.
On the one hand, the heroines of our most popular children’s
tales, like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, are known mostly for
their beauty, grace, or generosity—and their submissiveness
to Prince Charming. The tales chosen by Phelps, on the other
hand, portray women as strong, capable, and resourceful, as
well as hardworking and self-determining.

GAWAIN AND THE LADY RAGNELL

we day, King Arthur was out hunting a great white stag at

the edge of the oak woods when he looked up and found
himself confronted by a tall, powerful chieftain, swinging his
sword and appearing as if he would cut down the king on the
spot. This man was Sir Gromer, who declared that he was seek-
ing revenge for the loss of some of his northern lands to Arthur.
Since Arthur was unarmed, Sir Gromer showed the king mercy
and gave him a chance to save his life.
Gromer issued a challenge: the king had one year to return
_ unarmed to this spot with an answer to the question What do
women desire above all else? If Arthur answered the question
correctly, his life would be spared; if not, he would lose his head.
Arthur agreed, but he was very discouraged. This must be
a trick question, he thought. He felt certain that no one knew
 Wanting to Be Wanted 9

the answer. Back at the castle Arthur told the entire story to
his nephew Sir Gawain, who was known as the wisest, bravest,
most compassionate and courteous of all the Knights of the
Round Table. The young knight, in contrast to the king, was
hopeful. He and Arthur had a year to search the kingdom, and
he was certain they would find the right answer.
Almost a year passed, and Arthur and Gawain collected
many answers, but not one had the ring of truth. The
appointed day was almost upon them when one morning
Arthur rode out alone through the purple heather and golden
gorse, deep in thought about his predicament. At the edge of
the oak woods, he was suddenly confronted by a large,
grotesque woman who was covered with warts and almost as
wide as she was tall.
Her eyes met his fearlessly as she declared, “You are Arthur,
the king, and in two days you must meet Sir Gromer with an
answer to a question.”
“Yes,” Arthur replied hesitantly, “but how do you know
about this?”
“T am the Lady Ragnell, and Sir Gromer is my stepbrother.
You don’t have the right answer, do you?”
“T have many answers, and I don’t see how it concerns you,”
Arthur retorted, gathering his reins to turn and ride home.
“You do not have the right answer,” said Ragnell with
a confidence that filled Arthur with gloom. “I have the
answer.”
Arthur turned and leaped off his horse. “Tell me the answer
and I will give you a large bag of gold!”
“T have no use for gold,” Ragnell replied calmly.
‘Nonsense, woman, you can buy anything you want with
it! What do you want, then? Jewelry, land? Whatever you
want, I will pay you—that is, if you have the right answer.”
IO WOMEN AND DESIRE

“T know the answer. I can promise you that,” responded

Ragnell. After a slight pause she added, “I demand in return
that Sir Gawain become my husband.”
Arthur gasped. “Impossible!” he shouted. “You ask the
impossible, woman. I cannot give you my nephew. He’s his own
man, not mine to give!”
“TI did not ask you to give me the knight Gawain. If Gawain
agrees to marry me of his own free will, then I will give you
the answer. Those are my terms.”
“Terms! What right do you have to give me terms? It’s
impossible! I could never bring him such a proposal.”
Ragnell stared calmly at the king’s face and simply said, “If
you should change your mind, I will be here tomorrow.” Then
she disappeared into the woods.
Shaken from this stran gSge encounter, Arthur rode home at a
slow pace, thinking to himself that he could never speak to
Gawain of this matter. The loathsome woman! How dare she
ask for the finest knight in marriage! But the afternoon air was
soft, and the fateful meeting with Gromer weighed heavily on
Arthur. When the king returned to the castle, he found himself
telling his nephew about his adventure, concluding, “She
knows the answer, I’m sure of it—but I didn’t intend to tell
you any of this.”
Gawain smiled sweetly, not yet knowing Ragnell’s specific
proposal. “But this is good news, Uncle. Why do you sound so
discouraged?”
With his eyes averted, the king reported Ragnell’s demand,
along with a detailed description of her grotesque face, warty
skin, and bulging size.
“How fortunate that I can save your life!” replied Gawain
immediately. Over his uncle’s protests Gawain stated, “It is my
 Wanting to Be Wanted ter

choice and my decision. I will return with you tomorrow and

agree to the marriage, on the condition that her answer saves
your life.”
Early the next morning Gawain rode out with Arthur to
meet the Lady Ragnell. Even seeing her face-to-face did not
shake Gawain’s resolve. Her proposal was accepted, and
Gawain bowed to her courteously. “If tomorrow your answer
saves the king’s life, we shall be wed.”
On the fateful morning Gawain rode out part of the way
with Arthur, who assured the knight that he would try all the
other answers first.
The tall, powerful chieftain was waiting for Arthur, his
broadsword gleaming in the sun. As Arthur read out one
answer after another, Gromer shouted, ‘‘No! No! No!” until at
last he raised his sword high above his head. “Wait!” the king
cried. “I have one more answer. What a woman desires above
all else is the power of sovereignty, the right to exercise her
own free will.”
With a loud oath Gromer dropped his sword to his side.
“You didn’t find that answer on your own! My cursed stepsister
Ragnell gave it to you! I’ll cut off her head. I'll run her through
with my sword!” He turned and plunged back into the forest, a
string of curses echoing after him.
Arthur returned to where Gawain waited with the Lady
Ragnell. All three rode back to the castle in silence. Only
Ragnell seemed in good spirits.
The news spread quickly through the castle that a
bizarre wedding was to take place between an ugly hag and
the magnificent Gawain. No one could imagine what had per-
suaded Gawain to marry this creature. Some thought she must
possess great lands and estates. Others thought she must have
12 WOMEN AN DEDESTERE

some secret magic. Most were just stunned at the fate of poor
Gawain.
King Arthur drew his nephew aside. “A postponement
might be in order,” he said.
“I gave her my promise, Uncle. Would you have me break
my word?” Gawain replied.
So the wedding took place in the abbey, and the strange
wedding feast was held before the entire court. Throughout
the long day and evening, Gawain remained pleasant and cour-
teous. In no way did he show anything but kind attention to
his bride.
At last the wedding couple retired to their chamber. “You
have kept your promise well and faithfully,” Ragnell observed.
“You’ve shown me neither pity nor revulsion. Come kiss me
now that we are wedded.”
Gawain went to her at once and kissed her. When he
stepped aside before him stood a serene, beautiful woman with
gray eyes and a smiling face. His scalp tingled with shock, and
he jumped back. ‘““What manner of sorcery is this?”
Ragnell replied, “Do you prefer me in this form?” as she
turned slowly in a full circle.
“Yes, of course, but I don’t understand,” stammered
Gawain, confused and frightened.
“My stepbrother Gromer has always hated me. He obtained
a knowledge of sorcery from his mother and used it to change
me into a monstrous hag. He commanded me to live in that
shape until the finest knight in Britain willingly chose me as
his bride.”
“But why did he hate you so cruelly?” asked Gawain.
With her lips curled in amusement, Ragnell stated, “He
thought me bold and unwomanly because I refused his com-
mands, for both my property and my person.”
 Wanting to Be Wanted ie

With great admiration Gawain said, “Then you have won

the impossible condition, and his evil spell is broken!”
“Only in part, my dear Gawain.” Her eyes held his steadily.
“You have a choice which way I will be. Would you have me in
this, my own shape, at night in our chamber? Or would you
have me grotesque in our chamber at night and my own shape
by day in the castle? Fair by night, or fair by day—think care-
fully before you choose.”
Gawain knelt before his bride and responded at once. “It is
a choice I cannot make. It concerns you, my dear Ragnell, and
only you can choose. Whatever you choose, I will willingly
abide by it.”
Ragnell released a long, deep breath. The radiance in her
face overwhelmed him.
‘You have answered well, dearest Gawain. Your answer has
broken Gromer’s evil spell completely. The last condition he set
was that, after the marriage, the greatest knight in Britain, my
husband, must give me the power of sovereignty, the right to
exercise my own free will. Only then would the wicked
enchantment be broken forever.”
And so in wonder and joy began the marriage of Sir Gawain
and the Lady Ragnell.

Hag Psychology and the Mythical Dangers

of Female Desire

THIS ANCIENT sTORY holds dimensions of meaning that

are much deeper than its entertaining surface. It is a tale not
only about self-determination and self-confidence in women
but also about the confinement of a traditional patriarchal
marriage, which, when the story was set down in written text,
required by law that a woman surrender her freedom and
14 WOMEN AND DESIRE

property to her husband. Indeed, I am certain that this folktale

was told as a warning to women and men about the psycholog-
ical and interpersonal dangers of a condition that eliminated a
woman’s personal sovereignty.
In the medieval period, when the tale originated, the power
of the mythical hag to rob people of their vitality was well-
known to audiences. The hag was said to ride the bodies of
men and children at night while they were sleeping, absorbing
their vigor into herself. In the morning her victims would wake
to feeble will and lifeless gloom. Her kiss was her most potent
weapon. Getting close to her lips meant risking having your
soul sucked out. A medieval audience would have appreciated
Gawain’s courage in kissing his bride so directly. They would
also have guessed that he performed this act without hesitation
because he sensed Ragnell’s true nature. He would have been
thought to have seen beyond her appearance in order to trust
that she was not really a destructive hag who would exhaust
and dominate him.
Stories about the evil power of the hag were one way that
earlier societies demeaned and demonized female power. Por-
traying female power as devitalizing, overwhelming, poisonous—
especially for unsuspecting men and children—encouraged a
belief in a negative emotional spell that could be cast exclu-
sively by a demanding woman.
Today when women want to be wanted they unintention-
ally reinforce the misogynist belief that a demanding woman is
to be dreaded and subdued. When we act as though our desires
are too powerful and can overtake another's free will or good
sense, we reinvent the negative psychology of the hag-bitch.
We are at risk of identifying ourselves and our desires with an
alien, almost superhuman emotional power.
 Wanting to Be Wanted 15

When Anne, for example, prefaces her own needs or wants

with phrases such as “Do you mind if I. . .” or “It would be so
d

nice if you... ,” she implies that she wants something espe-

cially burdensome or difficult that cannot be stated directly.
When we cloak our desires in niceties and seductions, we pro-
tect ourselves from being known directly and imply that others
must always be nice to us. This kind of eggshell quality of
female desire suggests that our needs must be hidden, that they
are dangerous.
In therapy sessions I often remind people that direct
requests for reassurance, appreciation, even compliments are
necessary when the need is urgent. Women frequently chal-
lenge me, saying, “That spoils the effect. People should just
give these things spontaneously.” My response is that there
are no shoulds when it comes to such interpersonal supports,
and that clear and direct communication avoids the indi-
rect message that others must intuit our desires. Attempting
to evoke responses from others without claiming one’s needs
not only is confusing but carries the hidden meaning of
danger—that something is so troubling it cannot be put into
words.
It is only when we speak directly, with a secure self-
confidence, that we step outside this negative meaning of
female desire. Recognizing our desires as human-size (rather
than monstrous) means that we can speak about them calmly
and clearly. Although she was doomed to be a loathsome lady,
Ragnell knew that her needs and desires were acceptable. She
made her demands to King Arthur in a way that showed confi-
dence in herself and her knowledge that Gawain had a choice
in responding to her. She did not apologize, nor did she blame.
She spoke boldly from her heart.
16 WOMEN AND DESIRE

But, as many women have pointed out to me, Ragnell does

not win her freedom all by herself. She has to conform to the
conditions set by her stepbrother: that the greatest knight in
all of Britain must agree to marry her, and that this knight, her
husband, must grant her the power of her own sovereignty, the
right to make her own choices. For some readers these condi-
tions seem to diminish Ragnell’s accomplishments. But we
should not be too literal in our understanding of this tale.
The story of Ragnell symbolizes the development of a
woman’s self-determination within the confines of a patriar-
chal tradition that demanded that she give up her rights and
property after she married. Ragnell has to depend on men in
power to assist her in becoming a free agent, but that is not so
different from our situation today. At no point is Ragnell pas-
sive, compliant, or indirect. She defies her stepbrother and
finds a way to meet his conditions. She even confronts the
king, telling him that he does not know what a woman desires.
She watches her new husband carefully, and she skillfully pre-
sents her challenge to be taken seriously (to kiss her) at a
moment when it is likely to be most effective. And, ultimately,
she is aware that she cannot become self-determining without
relying on others; she poses her questions to Gawain to test
him, to see if he has grasped the fundamental dilemma of
her life.
Ragnell symbolizes a process through which a woman claims
the authority to be her own person, to command her own
actions. When we first meet her, she is the dreaded hag-bitch,
the symbol of the emotionally demanding woman. Yet we can
tell that she is something more, for even the king is convinced
of her wisdom. As the story progresses we are won over by her
courage and good humor. We are pleased that she will not be
 Wanting to Be Wanted 17

humiliated or subdued by the opinions of others. And finally,

when Gawain comes forward to kiss her, we believe that he
also senses something different about her. Of course he is star-
tled by her transformation, as are we. What of this transforma-
tion? Not until Gawain kneels before her and answers well do
we fully understand that she has been transformed not by his
kiss but by the process of her own courage in pursuing her free-
dom and confronting her new husband.
By example, Ragnell shows us how to respond to the con-
straints of patriarchy in order to become a self-determining
woman. First, she keeps her own counsel in the face of chal-
lenge. Although by all standards she is ugly, she is uncon-
cerned about her appearance and definite in her stance. She is
who she is. She speaks from her own authority in challenging
her stepbrother and the king. She feels free to arrange her life
according to her desires, even though she may be at risk for
retaliations. She is knowledgeable about her desire for per-
sonal sovereignty, and she will not be discouraged by spells cast
on her, insults, or rejections. She will not have her motives
demeaned, even by the king.

The False Power of the Muse

To UNDERSTAND WHY, many hundreds of years later, it is

still such a struggle for women to follow Ragnell’s lead, we need
to look more closely at the curse of her stepbrother, Gromer,
who thought Ragnell was too bold and unwomanly in refusing
his commands. She was a threat to his male dominance, the
prototype of the uppity woman. So her stepbrother turned her
into his image of that threat—an ugly, frightening hag, an
emasculating bitch. His wish was that Ragnell would stay that
18 WOMEN AND DESIRE

way forever, but her self-determination was more than Gromer

had bargained for. She stepped outside his spell in command-
ing her own life.
This move to shame female desire by turning it into the
image of a hag-bitch is matched by a countermove to elevate
female beauty and grace into positions of purported power. If
female desire is stifled through male dominance, how can
women be attracted to fill their designated roles as wife or
mother, as worker or lover? They are promised other means
for attaining power, means that remain under male control.
Female power is beauty is the refrain that influences young
women everywhere to believe that they will have influence
and status if they employ the “right” images.
Throughout the centuries of patriarchal art and literature,
we find a recurring image of the desire-awakening maiden (to
be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter), who is por-
trayed as the exact opposite of the devitalizing hag. This muse
is the essence of vitality and life, whereas the hag is the essence
of suffocation and death.
Today’s muse appears in the form of an anorectic woman-
child. Her image is girlish or waiflike, with a blank stare. It’s
hard to imagine that she is meant to be enlivening and arous-
ing, but there is no doubt that she is the blueprint for fashion
and female beauty in the contemporary world, emulated by
young women everywhere. Her principal roles in our culture
are supermodel, ingenue, celebrity, and movie star. Whatever
her form at any cultural moment, though, the muse stirs fasci-
nation, inspiration, and procreation in her male admirers and,
by extension, in all of us.
But the muse is not her own person. She is always under the
control of her master: he is the Subject and she is the Object of
Desire. A woman who identifies with being the Object of
 Wanting to Be Wanted 19

Desire is not a source of her own inspiration; she does not feel
as though her life belongs to her. Her vitality and imagination,
her efforts and plans, are directed toward the desires of others,
toward being desirable as the anorectic woman-child, the
lovely lady, the self-sacrificing mother. To be the Object of
Desire means to have no core self, no clear autonomy and self-
determination that are under your command. Ragnell, even in
her beautiful form, is no muse because she is the Subject of her
own desires.
By contrast, being the Subject of your own desires does not
preclude having an attractive appearance or a pleasant man-
ner. But appearance, manner, niceness, self-sacrifice are never
the central motivators for the woman who is a Subject. She—
like Ragnell—speaks confidently and clearly even in the face
of challenge, conflict, and her own anxiety. Because she wants
to be known for who she is, instead of how she appears, she is
straightforward and direct.
Why, then, in spite of the recent waves of feminism, do we
continue to worship the muse? Because we continue to believe
that female power is unhealthy and overwhelming—a kind of
soul-sucking danger that needs to be warded off by women and
men alike. So we unconsciously support the male fantasy that
the only legitimate power to be encouraged in girls and women
is to be the Object of Desire.
Women and men alike dread the hag-bitch. Women do not
want to be identified as too demanding, pushy, bossy. We do
not want to be known as the type who intimidates others with
ultimatums, demands, or needs that might overwhelm. In our
rush away from the hag-bitch, we move toward the muse and
her false power as the Object of Desire. Although she appears
to promise that female power is beauty, she denies a woman the
right to her own sovereignty. The muse always remains under
20 WOMEN AND DESIRE

the control of the master; it is the master’s life that is enhanced

and completed through her inspiration.
Nowhere can we see this more clearly than in Diana,
Princess of Wales, the cultural muse of our time. Diana is the
embodiment of a collective Object of Desire, a muse for the
contemporary world. We used her image to inspire and excite
us. Our hunger for her vitalizing effects is the crucial aspect of
Diana’s public appeal, in both her life and her death.
Diana herself was tragically caught in the female-power-is-
beauty belief. Witness her much-maligned fate: to be pursued
relentlessly by publicists, photographers, and a public who felt
that she belonged to them, and whom she courted tirelessly in
her quest for stardom. Diana obsessively maintained a slender
appearance, leading at one point to an eating disorder in
which she vomited up to four times a day. Even after she had
overcome this dangerous condition, she carefully controlled
her diet and exercise. She was fatefully, desperately motivated
by wanting to be wanted.
The ultimate Object of Desire, Diana sought romantic rela-
tionships with untrustworthy partners, starting with the Prince
of Wales. She may have been loved to some degree by each of
her suitors, but their motives were mixed at best. Most of all
they wanted her for what she symbolized rather than for the
person she was. They used the power of her appearance, and
her difficulties with self-esteem, to their own advantage and
status. They did not return that power to her, as Gawain did to
Ragnell. Diana was cursed as a muse as Ragnell was cursed as
a hag. And, as we will see, the curse of the muse is often the
more devastating: although the hag may not be wanted, or
even loved, she can know her own desires if she chooses. The
muse cannot, for as soon as she does, she ceases to be the muse.
 Wanting to Be Wanted 27

Diana is a symbol of female desire at the end of the twenti-

eth century. She portrays the conflict and confusion, shame
and fascination of potentially liberated women trying to be
Objects of Desire. We haunted her with our need to live vicar-
iously through her, to be enlivened by her, until the tragic acci-
dent of her death expressed how brutally high the stakes are in
this game. Tragically, Diana will always remain an Object of
Desire—tragically because at the time of her death she was
beginning to move toward the goal of claiming her own desires.

A Matter of Heart

DURING AND AFTER her divorce, Diana spoke out truth-

fully and became a role model for other women who, in hear-
ing about her personal struggles, seemed to feel a promise of
release from their own shame and family secrets. As psycholo-
gist Carol Gilligan remarked, “In breaking out so publicly from
an imprisonment of silence enforced by shame, Diana discov-
ered that in speaking from her heart, she touched the hearts of
others. Rather than shunning her, people embraced her.
Because she felt psychologically homeless and shunned, she
could reach out without the shadow of condescension to those
who were physically homeless and to people shunned because
of AIDS and leprosy.” Admitting her vulnerabilities while
maintaining her image of the desire-awakening maiden, Diana
cracked open the belief that beauty alone can protect even a
fairy-tale princess. Yet because of her untimely death, Diana
may be remembered more for her beauty—that “effervescent,
bubbly intoxication,” as one reporter put it—than for her final
courageous refusal to hide in shame and silence, unless we
change our understanding of female desire.
22 WOMEN AND DESIRE

Speaking the truth, as Diana had begun to do, is the only

path out of the superficiality and false promises of wanting to
be wanted to the possibilities of being loved. If wanting to be
wanted is a matter of image, then wanting to be loved is a mat-
ter of heart. Being loved is being known in our own fallible,
open, true spirit. As Ragnell shows us, being true to yourself
does not mean judging or blaming or letting your tongue roll
with nasty, accusatory words. Rather, it means speaking your
own thoughts and feelings with respect for others, without try-
ing to cover up the harsh bits or the rough edges in order to
keep your image shiny and clean.
When we live by the truth, we discover what constitutes
not only our individual nature but also our fundamental
humanity. Yet speaking the truth can expose us to criticism
and judgment, and most of all to our own fears about the
nature of our desires. Admitting who we are and what we want,
recognizing our dependence and gratitude, puts us in a vulner-
able position. We learn that human strengths and abilities are
always limited by weakness, tiredness, forgetfulness, bad habits,
and other imperfections. These innate limitations awaken us
to the ways we need others and compel us to appreciate how
we are helped and sustained by our relationships. Hiding from
the truth leads only to the opposite: anxious self-protectiveness,
isolation, fear, and shame.

Hiding in the Woods

ALL OF US STRUGGLE with shame, hiding ourselves and

our needs because they seem to be wrong or bad. Diana’s eat-
ing disorder was at its worst during the time she felt shamed by
the rejection of her husband in favor of his mistress. Uncon-
sciously she attempted to control those feelings by obsessively
 Wanting to Be Wanted 28

controlling her body, appearing to be slender while consuming

huge amounts of food. She hid from herself and the world the
ways in which she felt empty and hungry, wanting to be filled
by someone else’s desire.
The woods where the Lady Ragnell lived as a hag can be
understood as a symbol of shame—a place where we hide when
we feel our identity or desires are bad. Although Ragnell does
not express the feeling of shame, we can imagine that she lived
a lonely, isolated life as the hag in the woods, awaiting a time
when she could step forward. Women who identify with being
the hag-bitch—the negatively powerful woman—almost always
hide because they feel ashamed.
Shame is an emotion that expresses the desire to hide, dis-
appear, or even die because we fear that the self is empty, bad,
or inferior. When we are ashamed it feels as though nothing
can be done about it, because shame is linked to a sense of
being, not something that we’re doing. If you believe you can-
not do anything about feeling that there is something wrong
with who you are, then it makes sense that you would try to
protect yourself from being exposed. When we feel ashamed all
kinds of deceits and lies arise in us to provide a protective cover.
When | think of Ragnell’s woods as a symbol of shame, |
think of women hiding in unsatisfactory, sometimes uncommit-
ted, even cruel and abusive relationships. In such a shame-based
environment, women are intimidated by name-calling, betrayal,
threats of violence, and actual violence, which are often inter-
preted as indicating that something is terribly wrong with the
women themselves. I also think of the more ordinary problem of
a man who says to his female partner, “I just need more space,
some time away from you so that I can get my thoughts
together.” This kind of statement implies that the woman sucks
up the space between them, filling it with her overwhelming
24 WOMEN AND DESIRE

presence. In this example the image of the soul-sucking hag

creeps into what many regard as an egalitarian dialogue between
the sexes—rationalized by pop psychology about a man’s need to
separate himself from a woman in order to possess himself, as
though the woman’s presence prevents that experience.
When Cheryl began psychotherapy with me, she was
thirty-three years old, single, very intelligent, well-educated,
and working as a partner in a mostly male law firm in Philadel-
phia. Of medium height, she weighed about 145 pounds and
felt very ashamed of her weight and her body. Although she
was muscular and healthy, she constantly felt that something
was wrong with the way she looked. Cheryl was romantically
involved with Brad, who was twenty-five, good-looking, ener-
getic, less educated, and extremely noncommittal. They had
been involved for about a year, and things were not going well.
But Cheryl didn’t want to talk about their relationship. She
wanted to talk about herself, because she was afraid something
was really wrong with her. As had Princess Diana, Cheryl was
choosing men who eventually betrayed her, sexually or finan-
cially. Before Brad she had fallen for two other men who
quickly professed love for her, promptly moved into her apart-
ment, and soon began to take advantage of her high income
and low self-esteem.
Cheryl wanted to get married and start a family but had no
idea how to go about it. She did not want to “pressure” Brad,
who was still finishing college. In fact, she did not even want
to speak about her desires to Brad, because she feared bringing
up marriage and family would scare him away. Cheryl said she
just wanted to appear to be “hanging out” with Brad in a
relaxed and open way so that he could see that she wasn’t the
type of woman to pressure him.
 Wanting to Be Wanted 25

After Cheryl had been in therapy with me for about two

years, living off and on with Brad, she finally confronted him:
she was no longer willing to wait for him to make up his mind.
She wanted him to commit to a long-term relationship, with
marriage in tow, or she would move on. In spite of her forceful
declaration, however, Cheryl was not fully convinced of her
worth and attractiveness. Undermined by feelings of shame
about her body and afraid that no man would choose her,
Cheryl blurted out complaints and blame. She said she was
“disgusted” that Brad had stayed with her for so many years
without making any promises about their future. Instead of
speaking responsibly, she blamed Brad for making her feel so
bad about herself. Her feelings of shame had kept her in the
woods too long.
Unconsciously Cheryl acted out Brad’s worst image of the
hag-bitch: the power-hungry monster who cannot be satisfied.
This fantasy of the dangerous hag depends on the belief that
her demands and desires are endless, voracious, consuming.
When women identify with shame, they believe that they are
empty or worthless and turn to others to fill them up with sup-
ports and reassurances. As long as shame is primary in a
woman’s identity, nothing will fill the void; shame is like a vac-
uum or black hole that cannot hold the compliments and reas-
surances that are offered.
Cheryl gave Brad two weeks to make up his mind, but Brad
turned her down after two days. Naturally, Cheryl was angry,
bereft, and somewhat inclined to blame me and her therapy for
compelling her to speak directly and “spoil” her relationship.
Gradually, Cheryl and I examined the beliefs and fantasies that
linked her to the feeling of shame. We discovered why she had
been attracted to so many elusive and irresponsible men over
26 WOMEN AND DESIRE

the years and why she still longed to be shown that she was
not a bitchy woman who spoiled a man’s space or destroyed
his soul.
As we went through this process, Cheryl learned more
about her psychological complexes, the name Carl Jung gave
to the emotional tendencies we all have to protect ourselves in
the same ways we did in childhood, to imagine a world that
is filled with the dangers we sensed and encountered in our
original families. These complexes are unconscious and semi-
conscious tendencies to act out emotional dramas that may
or may not be known to us, fueled by habits acquired in our
dependency bonds from infancy and childhood, with parents
and siblings.
When Cheryl faced Brad directly with her desires, she
feared he would say she was not physically attractive to him.
She also feared he would blame her for being unfair to him, for
wanting too much, despite the fact that she had been endlessly
fair and generous. This made sense only when we discovered
that Cheryl had been both attracted to and intimidated by her
unpredictable father when she was a child. A charming Bad
Boy, her father was also a prominent lawyer who was outwardly
respected by the community. He was a “street angel” and a
“house devil,” as Cheryl put it. A womanizer, Cheryl’s father
humiliated his wife and blamed her for his failure to feel love
for her after the first years of their marriage.
Cheryl witnessed many fights between her parents but felt
more critical of her mother’s passivity than of her father’s accu-
sations. Cheryl wanted her mother to stand up to her father
and claim her own worth. Cheryl determined that she would
win her father’s love and praise by emulating him. She sought
his approval by excelling at school in the subjects he loved and
by developing a social charm that matched his. She won his
 Wanting to Be Wanted 29

admiration and interest to such an extent that eventually she

felt as though her father’s responses to her, his love and praise,
were under her control. If he failed to notice her or remark on
an accomplishment, she would believe that she must be at
fault. Her “power” over him was that of the Object of Desire;
she imagined that she controlled him through her actions,
image, and accomplishments. This was the father complex that
Cheryl re-created with Brad and her other lovers: unconsciously
she wanted to be the exclusive Object of Desire, the longed-for
companion who would perfectly meet the needs of the man.
Her energies would first be directed to making the man feel
good about himself and at home in her life. Then she would
seek to be approved and admired for her intelligence and
attractiveness. Because she felt ashamed of her body, Cheryl
believed that she had to work extra hard at being accommo-
dating and pleasing, so that her partner would remain physi-
cally attracted to her. When her partner’s interest seemed to
wane, Cheryl would try to do something special—to make a
particularly good meal or give a nice gift—in order to keep him
involved.
Psychological complexes compel us, as they compelled
Cheryl, to repeat the emotional themes from childhood, espe-
cially in our adult partnerships and parenting. Unless we
become conscious of these complexes, they rule us through
subjective impulses and images that seem to be reality. Com-
plexes are the psychological karma that we bring with us from
our families of origin. We came by them honestly, when we
were dependent on others for survival and sustenance. They
are triggered in our adult lives not only by certain emotional
meanings but also by any stimuli—sounds, tastes, touch, smells,
physical states (such as nausea)—familiar from the original
contexts that endangered or overstimulated us.
28 WOMEN AND DESIRE

When our complexes are hidden from our awareness, they

can become monstrous, dampening our vitality and motiva-
tion. The experience of pervasive discontent and a futile kind
of inner emptiness are symptoms of hidden complexes in their
uglier forms. Unacknowledged longings and fears manifest
themselves as strong drives that may appear in dreams and
fantasies as demons, snakes, floods, earthquakes, threatening
intruders, or hungry ghosts who could consume us. They may
appear in waking life as addictions and compulsions that
make no logical sense. Indeed, one way to interpret the mon-
strous hag hiding in the woods is as women’s unconscious com-
plex of female power that can be civilized and refined only
when it is listened to, examined, and brought out into the light
of day.
So Cheryl discovered what had bound her to irresponsible
men: she was attracted to men like her father, whom she then
idealized and tried to please, failing to notice where they were
limited, wrong, or even bad. She would take all the responsi-
bility for what went wrong in the relationships and increase
her shame, believing that something was fundamentally wrong
with her while overlooking the failures and mistakes of her
partners.
Today, some five years later, Cheryl is married to a man very
different from Daddy. He is a successful lawyer, like Cheryl and
her father, but he and Cheryl have a relationship of mutual
involvement and friendship. Together they work as profes-
sional mediators in divorce and separation cases. Cheryl now
teaches other women and men to speak the truth in the con-
text of respect and fairness.
Cheryl’s loss of Brad opened the way for a new develop-
ment. She learned the lesson that Ragnell hints at when she
 Wanting to Be Wanted 29

says to Arthur, “I did not ask you to give me the knight Gawain.
If Gawain agrees to marry me of his own free will. . .” This is
the lesson of knowing the boundaries and limitations of your
desire and power. When you learn to speak the truth, you come
to recognize that you have no special power over others to
make them do your bidding. You cannot pressure or scare away
others by speaking your desires. Other adults also have free
will. We all have a responsibility to speak our own desires and
to respect those of others. When you speak the truth directly,
you come to know the possibilities and limitations of being the
Subject of Desire. For women this means overcoming our fears
of being seen as the hag-bitch in order to say clearly and fully
what we want without either demanding that we get it or
believing that we have taken control of another.

The Subject of Desire

EITHER BECAUSE OF ignorance of the actual meaning of

self-determination or because of the magic spell cast by want-
ing to be wanted, we women often misunderstand or forget
that our deepest desire is for sovereignty over our own lives,
the right and responsibility to act with free will—to be the Sub-
jects of our own desires. This is true of all human beings, no
matter their condition. it is only within the framework of such
personal sovereignty that the kinder face of desire can shine
and develop, through the responsibility and self-determination
to live in a compassionate, conscious mannet.
Being the Subject of your desires means not just asserting
what you want but taking responsibility for your desires as well.
These are closely related but different issues. Whereas being
assertive means clearly stating your own needs and desires,
 30 WOMEN AND DESIRE

taking responsibility carries the additional meaning of answer-

ing for yourself, choosing ethically, and being trustworthy. Tak-
ing responsibility is the step that follows being assertive. For
instance, in therapy clients sometimes say something like “I
spoke to my partner about my need for greater reassurance and
closeness, and he said, ‘Okay. So what am I supposed to do
-
about that” I was just furious. Obviously he doesn’t care at all
how I feel.”
“So what did you say after he said that?” I ask calmly. The
most frequent answer is “Nothing. The conversation was over
because he just doesn’t get it. |have nothing more to say.” The
speaker has put the responsibility on the listener to take the con-
versation forward, but the speaker is the person with the desire.
To responsibly handle such a problem, the speaker should con-
tinue to communicate her desire.
Being responsible means trying again and again in different
ways to say what you want, until it can be heard and under-
stood. If you are trapped in a psychological complex, in feeling
that (for example) you are never heard or understood, then you
will have to develop a great deal of patience and tolerance in
order to take responsibility for your desire and not blame
another for failing you before you have fully tried. This toler-
ance is like a meditative discipline in conversation—breathe
deeply and calmly return to the subject at hand. Like Ragnell,
be confident that you can speak from your knowledge of your-
self. If all else fails, simply and sincerely say something like
“Those are my needs (or conditions), and when you are ready
to talk about them, please let me know.”
Being the Subjects of our desires means taking on the chal-
lenging, nuanced experience of learning who we are, charting
the many layers of our subjective lives, and being accountable
for them. Through this process we come to know how we are
 Wanting to Be Wanted 31

limited by conditions and happenings beyond our control. As

we take responsibility for our own desires, we discover how
much we depend on others, and how often we may be mistaken
or wrong in wanting certain things. The tolerance we develop
for our own mistakes and blind spots spreads out to being toler-
ant of shortcomings in others, especially those we love.
So how can we claim the validity of our desires without fear
of repercussions and shame? How can we use our desires to attain
self-knowledge and self-determination, to take responsibility for
ourselves and become more authentic in our relations to others?
Can we reach a place where our desires no longer drive us and
we are content?
Ragnell’s story provides us with some preliminary clues, and
Diana’s death is a cautionary tale. Wanting to be wanted is
often a completely hidden desire, confused with wanting to be
loved. In order to avoid the temptation to become the Object
of Desire, we have to learn to oppose our tendencies to present
an image. We must actively claim what we want, even if doing
so puts us at risk of being labeled as the hag-bitch. With a con-
fidence in our knowledge, we can firmly and calmly show that
we don’t fear female desire, that we want to be free from the
dominance of appearance and its false power. Until women
refuse to live by the belief that female power is beauty, we ~
will be unable to reach the next level of our development, an
ability to know and sustain our own truths in all domains of our
existence.

The Truth of Being Known

TRUTH IS A WAY OF LIFE, not something that exists out-

side ourselves. It’s being honest and direct and transparent, as
well as wholly respectful of those we depend on to sustain us. If
32 WOMEN AND DESIRE

our attention is focused on how we look or seem to others, we

will find it impossible to know our own hearts. If we become
Objects of Desire, we can easily forget how to be Subjects of
our own desires. Either we attend to our images, trying to make
hidden and implied arrangements for things to go our way, or
we attend to our desires and let the chips fall, no matter how
we are received.
The Renaissance metaphysician Paracelsus said that we
cannot love something without knowing it, or know some-
thing without loving it. When we feel deeply loved, we also
know that we have been encountered authentically, that we
have been true to ourselves in the presence of the other and
found that truth fully embraced and accepted. When we tell
the truth to a partner or friend, we are indeed vulnerable to
being judged, blamed, or rejected. If we hide the truth in favor
of protecting ourselves and appearing in a certain way, how-
ever, we may retain an illusion of control but we lose the possi-
bility of being known for who we really are, and hence of being
loved.
In writing this book it is my goal to illuminate the rocky
path from the hidden compulsion to be desired to the respon-
sibility for our own desires, and finally to the knowledge and
wisdom that arise from seeing into our limitations and depen-
dence. When we no longer cling to being seen in a particular
way and learn to speak the truth with an open heart, we find
that almost nothing seems impossible—not because we are in
control of everything but because we discover how to depend
gratefully on others, how to change when change is required,
and, most important, how to be less ashamed, envious, guilty,
isolated, and afraid.
 TWO

The Menace of Female Beauty

BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN symbolizes an almost

transcendent power or vitality in our society and others
like it. Women feel compelled to imitate her, and men feel
compelled to possess her. The refrain female power is
beauty leads us to believe that possibilities flow directly from
our appearances. Thus most American women strive to attain
(or torture themselves envying) the image of a pretty, youthful,
slender woman.
At a painfully young age an American girl becomes con-
vinced that she exists only in the ways she sees herself
reflected. Feelings of liveliness and vitality become connected
with the excitement of others: What a pretty girl! What a nice
disposition and pleasant manners! She is rewarded for how she
appears and not for what she desires or what she produces.
Indeed in the past, and even sometimes in the present, female

Bye)
34 WOMEN AND DESIRE

accomplishments (intellectual, professional, athletic) were

viewed with embarrassment and accompanied by an apology
because girls and women were meant to be powerful not in
their actions but only in their appearances.
More often encouraged to evaluate ourselves by our body
images than by our actions, we become Objects of Desire.
Seeking validation primarily through the interest and excite-
ment reflected back at us by others, we gradually lose sight and
control of our own needs, wants, wishes. We become objects
even to ourselves, constantly surveying our bodies and our psy-
ches as though from an external point of view. Doubting our
own abilities and knowledge, we need reassurance; lacking
confidence, we long for flattery. Unable to know ourselves
authentically, we want to be wanted instead of loved. We lose
track of how it feels to be in charge of our actions and desires.
Yet this feels perfectly normal, somehow connected to becom-
ing a woman, because almost everyone else is doing it too.
As historian and author Joan Brumberg says, our prob-
lems with appearance are unique to this period. In the past, the
question Who am I? was largely answered by the identity “a
woman”—broadly constrained and confmed by reproductive
and social conditions. Now that girls are free to answer the
question with a larger range of possibilities—such as artist, sci-
entist, or athlete—they are increasingly naming themselves as
an appearance: fat, thin, ugly, pretty. They’ve learned from a
very early age that the power of their gender is tied to what
they look like—and how sexy they are—rather than to charac-
ter or achievement. Brumberg calls this the “body project” and
claims that it emanates from middle-class upward strivings, our
media-driven culture, and the advice of “experts” on women’s
power and identity concerns.
 The Menace of Female Beauty 35

There is no way to remain completely free from this mes-

sage that female power is beauty. As girls and women we live
and breathe this atmosphere. It pervades all we do and all the
ways we are reflected back to ourselves. In the media there is
rarely a female accomplishment that is unaccompanied by a
description of what the woman was wearing and/or how she
looked. It is as if we must survey a woman’s appearance either
to find the root of her success in beauty (so she can be reduced
to her appearance) or in its absence to explain her success in
terms of compensating for her lack of that essential ingredient.
For a majority of American women, appearance becomes the
central expression of personal identity.
Initial identification with physical appearance happens in
adolescence. The obsession with looks and popularity bur-
geons in girls during the years of beginning self-awareness,
between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, when they are
developing the capacity to think about themselves, to reflect
on their own thoughts and feelings. Just at this time girls are
bombarded with images of the desire-awakening maiden.
Girls adjust their motivations and concerns to this identity
through dress, mannerisms, activities. Each of us retains the
stamp of this original identification within our sense of self and
body image for the rest of our lives.

Dissatisfied with Our Images

YET FOR ALL the attention and effort that we direct to bod-
ies and appearances, we are primarily unhappy with them.
Two-thirds of all American women, including those who are
average-size and thin, believe they are overweight. Americans
spend an estimated $5 to $7 billion on weight-loss products
36 WOMEN AND DESIRE

that are mostly worthless. The frightening percentages of

female dissatisfaction with weight and appearance get younger
and larger each year: a recent survey showed that by age thir-
teen 53 percent of American girls are unhappy with their bod-
ies, and by age seventeen 78 percent are dissatisfied.
Young, educated women are largely dissatisfied with their
shapes and sizes, and this unhappiness is linked to fasting,
overuse of laxatives (including diuretics), self-induced vomit-
ing, and rigorous exercise. One large survey showed that 61
percent of college women had some type of eating-related
problem and that only 33 percent of those questioned reported
eating habits that could be considered normal. All these stud-
ies point to one thing: body-image dissatisfaction is a fact of
life for almost all adolescent and young women.
Many women dislike themselves specifically because they
do not meet the standards of our modern-day muses: the super-
models, movie stars, female dancers, and some athletes (gym-
nasts and skaters, for instance) who weigh between twenty-five
and thirty pounds less than the average American woman of
the same height. For if female power is beauty, then thinness is
the core requirement to be the muse of our time.
Few are immune to our cultural obsession with female thin-
ness. A recent study of 176 women college students showed
that those viewing fifty fashion photographs of the “thin ideal”
immediately experienced decreased self-esteem and increased
self-consciousness, social anxiety, and body dissatisfaction in
comparison with those who had not looked at the pictures.
Think of how many images of the anorectic woman-child we
see in a day—traveling to and from work, glancing at maga-
zines, watching TV. Even women who claimed they did not
adhere to an ideal for attractiveness were negatively influenced
 The Menace of Female Beauty 37

by seeing the fifty photos. Another recent study showed that

just thirty minutes of watching TV programs and advertising
can alter a young woman’s perception of her body!
Only women over sixty seem to have escaped the thin
obsession. According to one study, and in my experience in
working with women in psychotherapy, older women are more
satished with their body images than younger women.
Although the researchers could not answer why this was so,
they guessed that the crucial difference was that the older
women had not been exposed during their adolescence to the
widespread influences of the beauty ideal.
Baby boomers like myself, now in our forties and fifties,
share with younger women the belief that thinness will lead to
power and privileges. We grew up when television and movies
were making their imprint on our society. Many of us matched
ourselves to female role models from these media, and many of
us came to feminism (if we did) with role models like Jane Fonda
and Gloria Steinem, who maintained the slender beautiful-
woman image alongside claims for greater sovereignty and
influence. My teenage years were influenced by dieting when it
was seen almost as a prerequisite to being grown-up. Baby
boomers may be feminists and have successful public lives, but
often we feel the confusion of beauty bondage almost as
acutely as our younger counterparts, whose images may be
honed by Kate Moss rather than Jane Fonda.
My forty-something client Anne feels trapped and disem-
powered by her body image. She is full-bodied and athletic,
well-presented and fashionable, but Anne doesn’t like either
her weight or her body. “I know it’s wrong that I get so preoccu-
pied with my weight. The truth is that I feel more powerful,
even kind of cocky, when I’m at my thinnest. But | always gain
38 WOMEN AND DESIRE

back those extra five or ten pounds—and they increase a little

each time I gain them back—and then I feel so negative about
my appearance that it interferes with almost everything.”
On a few occasions I suggested to Anne that she experi-
ment with eating just what she wanted and see what would
happen. She responded with fear in her voice. “I really
couldn’t ever do that, because I would be afraid that I would
keep on eating. It’s like I have a hole inside that I want to fill
up with food.”

Why Skinny Looks Powerful

POWER AND INFLUENCE have always been promised to the

desire-awakening maiden, but why is our modern-day muse an
anorectic woman-child, so thin as to make us wince? When |
call her anorectic, | am both describing her appearance and
hoping to shock you, for among the physical and psychological
dangers of female beauty, our obsession with weight is probably
the greatest.
The writer Laura Fraser believes that being thin offers an
illusion of control. In our chaotic lives, our efforts to control
our weight seem to promise control of other things: “Being
thin sends a visual message to the world... that a woman
works hard at being attractive, and is therefore good at her tra-
ditional job of being a desirable sexual object, romantic part-
ner and consumer. By being lean, she also conveys the idea
that she’s disciplined, efficient, and in control of herself.”
Women who suffer from eating disorders, who starve them-
selves in physically devastating anorexia or “purge” themselves
of unwanted calories through vomiting or laxatives, defend
their practices with an air of superiority, often saying openly,
“Doesn’t everyone want to be thin?” These women know that
 The Menace of Female Beauty 39

control of the body feels like power, and they won’t surrender
this feeling for any promise of health or normalcy—often until
they are very sick or almost dead.
From surveys and studies we know that people do indeed
connect thinness with control and competence, but the illu-
sion of control has always been an aspect of female beauty
bondage. The aura of influence and power linked to the muse
has in earlier periods been described in terms of skin, breasts,
hair, eyes, waist, and voice. In other words, thinness is only her
current guise.
Fraser traces the history of female thinness to a change in
women’s roles. The earlier image of a woman as “pleasingly
plump” or roundly sensual emphasized her maternal potential.
But changes in women’s lives and aspirations, coming with
suffrage and greater athletic freedom, also brought a new self-
conscious awareness of the female body.
Swimming and bicycling in the early part of this century
brought women’s legs into the open, and the new consumer
culture began to set standards for how legs should look. By the
1920s the plumper figure had given way to the straight, slender
flapper image. Hidden beneath the cultural message of the
greater freedom of the twenties was the dictate of restraint in
maintaining a slender female body.
By the 1920s manufacturers and advertisers had begun to
see women primarily as consumers. Beauty and body products
were invented, and smoking was advocated as a way to stay
thin. This consumerism was offered as a new freedom, but it was
hardly liberating, because advertisements increasingly spoke to
women’s anxieties, self-consciousness, and fears about them-
selves. With the advent of the birth-control pill, greater free-
dom from pregnancies and lactation, and the lengthened time
between menarche and menopause, it was possible to bring
40 WOMEN AND DESIRE

more and more control to female appearance—especially

weight.
Gradually what emerged as a beauty ideal was a body type
that resembled more a man’s than a woman’s body—little or
no fat, muscles showing through the skin, and an angular face,
legs, and arms. This body image is almost impossible to main-
tain without an eating disorder; it is unrealistic to aspire to it
and have a healthy existence. The icons of this anorectic
woman-child, the supermodels, often live lives that are crazed
with drugs, starvation, abusive relationships, and celebrity.
These women are the role models for a coming generation of
girls who, according to a large survey of third-graders, would
choose a career as a famous fashion model over being presi-
dent. Models’ power—earning capacity, social status, media
attention—communicates an ideal of control that is being
internalized by girls and young women in place of an under-
standing of their own desires and self-determination.
But we cannot blame just the media for indoctrinating our
young girls with the desire to be thin. Many of us are unwit-
tingly lending a hand. When Anne talks to her teenage daugh-
ter about issues of female appearance, she is so ashamed of her
own preoccupations that she misleads her daughter. While she
might tell her daughter about feminism, achievement, compe-
tence, career, and creativity—and mix this with rich accounts
of being a mother and a wife—she does not discuss what Laura
Fraser calls her “third job”: staying thin. Instead Anne encour-
ages her daughter, as most of us do, not to put too much
emphasis on appearance. “Don’t worry about that, it will take
care of itself; you look just fine.”
But Anne’s daughter notices her mother going from gym to
spa, from cosmetic counter to hair salon. She is right to chal-
 The Menace of Female Beauty 41

lenge her mother: “If appearance is not important, why do you

spend so much time on yours? You, especially, you’re a femi-
nist.” Anne’s daughter will doubt the usefulness of her mother’s
feminism if her mother cannot answer questions about these
concerns. But Anne cannot speak directly to this issue because
she has not been able to take responsibility for her own desire
to be thin. She hasn’t been able to say that she’s afraid of being
overlooked if she doesn’t work on her appearance. She hasn’t °
been able to tell her daughter how sordid this chapter of female
appearance has been in the recent history of feminism.
Our forebears may have constrained the female body with
girdles and corsets, but the feminist era has marketed the
female body as a power product that must be kept thin and
under internal control. Feminists have encouraged women to
claim their power, but they have not taught them how to dis-
tinguish male fantasies of the desire-awakening maiden from
authentic sources of female power. The image of the anorectic
woman-child appears to girls and young women to be a viable
means to success in a feminist-influenced world.
The belief that we must be thin in order to be successful
results in feelings of insecurity about ourselves and our abili-
ties. Obsessive control of the female body leads not to power
but to shame, self-consciousness, confusion, illness, even death
by eating disorders. Longing to be reassured of our worth and
validity, we submit to humiliating advice from experts who tell
us what and when to eat, and how to exercise, as if we were
children. Most women who are convinced that they are fat are,
in fact, no more than fifteen to forty pounds over the social
standards for what is desirable in the female body image. Stud-
ies have proven that this margin makes no real difference to
health or longevity.
42 WOMEN AND DESIRE

If we want to be more self-determining and responsible, we

must become acutely aware of how images of female beauty are
used against us. The camera may not steal our souls, but it com-
mercializes and markets our bodies. Mirrors and cameras have
left us with an insidious and pervasive obsession with thinness
in place of recognition and knowledge of our own desires.

Men under the Spell

MEN, TOO, LIVE with the consequences of the belief that

female power is beauty. They are often preoccupied with the
goal of attracting and possessing a slender, beautiful woman as
the means of proving their masculinity or personal attractive-
ness, or simply because they believe such a woman would
enliven and complete them. More than forty years ago feminist
author Simone de Beauvoir reminded us that when men set
themselves up as free beings, as Subjects of their own desires,
they needed a contrast or a negation of that freedom. Thus
the attractive woman became a necessity in men’s lives.
“Man aspires to clothe in his own dignity whatever he con-
quers and possesses,” de Beauvoir wrote, so he allows the beau-
tiful woman to retain “a little of her primitive magic” while she
shares in his dignity by becoming his possession. The desire-
awakening maiden is assumed, by men, to have a magic of her
own in being the Object of Desire.
But while men might want to possess the muse, they also
fear her influence. Even a two-dimensional image of a woman
of a certain age and shape can dumbfound a man. Advertisers
drape a skinny model across a car hood, dangle a cigarette from
her fingers, or pose her bikini-clad body alongside the pool of
an expensive resort knowing that the promise men read in her
eyes compels them to purchase. Men often report serious dis-
 The Menace of Female Beauty 43

trust, of both women and other men, from living in an atmo-

sphere where they are expected to compete for the most beau-
tiful woman, a scenario represented in countless myths, the
battle over Helen of Troy probably being the most famous.
The primitive magic of the desire-awakening maiden turns
man against man and can confuse an individual’s judgment.
Rape may be an “inevitable outcome,” say certain sociobiolo-
gists, as male sexual arousal is assumed to be controlled by
female appearance. Only the strongest of men will succeed in
capturing the muse, benefiting future generations through the
pairing of strength and beauty, according to this account.
Genetic ideologues such as Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson
claim that beautiful women are powerful because strong men
want to possess them.
In other words, male dominance is intrinsic to the power of
female beauty; the muse has no legitimate power and knowl-
edge of her own. The refrain female power is beauty creates a
condition in which women can never be free from male stan-
dards for appearance and behavior. Male desire and fantasy
dictate the contours of the female Object of Desire while her
powers over men’s reason and judgment are despised and
ridiculed. Bondage to her appearance leaves her needing reas-
surance and flattery, wanting to be wanted instead of loved,
and empowers male desires and male images of female beauty
and worth. Meanwhile, hatred and control of the female body
come, as we shall see, from male fantasies of women and their
dangerous powers.

Pandora and the Curse of Female Beauty

THE sTorRy OF the first woman in Greek mythology lays bare

the meaning of Woman in patriarchy, telling us how and why
44 WOMEN AND DESIRE

the beautiful female must be under the control of powerful

men. Sadly enough, this story is as relevant to our culture
today as it was centuries ago.
Accounts of Pandora go back to the eighth century B.c.E.
and the Greek poet Hesiod, although the story has been told
and retold in many forms. We possess what is probably only a
short fragment of a much longer tale, but it is all that remains.
My account is paraphrased from the two versions of Hesiod.

PANDORA

(}
nce upon a time there was great rivalry between the gods and
men. Prometheus, the champion of mankind, had stolen the
power of fire and brought it to earth. When Zeus saw the
flames flickering below him, he fell into a deadly fury.
In retaliation Zeus plotted to bring a terrible evil to men that
would be equal to the boon of fire. He commanded a lowly god,
a master craftsman, to fashion the image of a desire-awakening
maiden. Mixing earth and water, the craftsman gave his cre-
ation a face as beautiful as those of the immortal goddesses, and
a voice and strength of her own. Then he was aided by the god-
desses themselves: one taught the maiden womanly crafts, while
another gave her a radiance of charm and seduction.
When this first woman was fully formed, Zeus commanded
Hermes, a trickster by nature, to fill the maiden with bitchy
shamelessness and lies. Hermes made sure that the maiden had
flatteries and treacheries in place of a heart; then he com-
manded her to speak. Other gods and goddesses adorned her
with golden necklaces and wreaths of spring flowers. Hermes
named her Pandora, which means “rich in gifts,” because she
had been given so many gifts by the gods, and because she was a
“gift” to men.
 The Menace of Female Beauty 45

Zeus sent Pandora to earth by way of Epimetheus, whose

name means “he who learns only from experience.” He was to
deliver her and leave no suspicion of the trickery involved.
Epimetheus accepted Pandora as a gift to men and presented her
to them as the first woman.
Shortly after Pandora’s arrival on earth, her curiosity led
her to discover a great clay vessel that was stored underground.
The vessel, containin go sicknesses and evils and death itself, had
been buried explicitly to protect men from harm. Pandora
opened this jar and let out into the world all sufferings and
evils, including death—the great divider between humans and
gods. Only hope remained, kept in unbreakable captivity
according to the will of Zeus.
Thus, Zeus was triumphant. By his “gift” of woman, he
punished men with an evil that was equal to fire. Beautiful but
empty, Pandora was the first female of Western culture to prac-
tice her wiles against innocent, defenseless men. And so began
the influence of woman in the lives of men.

THE GREEK sTOoRy of Pandora reveals the template for the

female Object of Desire—empty of her own desires and filled
with seductive powers. Her deceptions, treacheries, and flatter-
ies can defeat male power. She is vindictive and manipulative,
and she was created specifically as a punishment to men. Like
that other first woman, Eve (whose story may have been taken
from Pandora’s), she is the embodiment of evil.
So we begin to see how and why the desire-awakening
maiden is cursed by her beauty: since she is judged to be
empty, she must be dominated and controlled. Without a
heart, she lacks a truth and nature of her own. In their absence,
she may want to take possession of everything. She may want
46 WOMEN AND DESIRE

to have not only what she wants but also to control and domi-
nate what men have.
For after men have dreamed up their muse, they dread the
lack of control they feel in her presence. Ancient religious laws
and moral codes warn against her evil powers. A beautiful
woman is evil because she possesses a power over men’s reason
and judgment. Yet that power is present only when men see it.
It has to do not with the woman herself but only with how she
is seen by others. Female power is beauty can never be free from
male standards because men consciously and unconsciously
shape the image of their Object of Desire.
Woman can aspire to share in Man’s dignity by being his
companion if she can become his Object, but she cannot share
in his power because she has nothing of her own to offer. Her
power—a beautiful appearance—depends on his reflection,
and her destiny remains in his control.

The Double Bind of Female Beauty

IDENTIFYING WITH PANDORA—evil perhaps but also

desirable, slender, young—may still seem preferable to being
seen as the lonely hag, ugly and ashamed. Beautiful is arousing,
vitalizing, exciting, and ugly is old, devitalizing, boring. The
muse enhances life, and the hag snuffs it out. Yet, as we have
seen, the muse exists only as an aspect of male power and dom-
inance. Her powers to vitalize are to be used for someone else,
not for herself.
In the last chapter I discussed the link between shame and
emptiness in the monstrous power of the hag. You’ll recall
that the shameful self is empty of anything good; it is bad and
inferior. Just as the hag living in the woods is an image of
 The Menace of Female Beauty 47

shame linked to women who identify with being monstrous

or poisonous, the heartless muse is an image of shame linked
to women who identify with being only an appearance, the
desire-awakening maiden. When we identify with the muse,
we are constantly troubled by obsessions about appearance,
fears of aging, shame, dissatisfaction, confusion, and ignorance
of our own desires. Beautiful women must meet the standards
for the muse; today they are not even free to eat.
Whether we fear to be seen as the hag or desire to be seen as
the muse, we are trapped in the double bind of female beauty:
damned if we are ugly and damned if we are beautiful. Within
this pervasive double bind we are restless and unsure, needing
the affirmation of others. For many womeny as we saw, identity
is appearance, so everything is tied to approval and attention.
Princess Diana was a perfect example of a woman trapped in
beauty bondage. Although she complained about photogra-
phers haunting her, she also openly complied with the media
and used them to her advantage. The biographer Donald
Spoto says that Diana was frequently a “willing victim,” and he
describes her as “a young woman who desperately needed to
feel wanted ...and according to the ethos of modern life,
nothing so confirms self-esteem as media attention. Diana
Spencer was receiving... the attention from the press that
she needed in order to feel alive and valuable.”
Many of us are stuck in beauty bondage because we are too
afraid of being seen as the hag if we find freedom and comfort
in our own bodies. Unless our thighs are toned, our breasts
perky, our skin smooth, we are not wanted. Just as we inadver-
tently confirm suspicions that an emotionally demanding
woman is a monster, we confirm that freedom of appearance
leads to loneliness and isolation when we bring our appearance
48 WOMEN AND DESIRE

under obsessive control. Liberation from the bind is often eas-

ier for a woman who has felt herself to be the hag than for one
who has seen herself as the muse. The hag, after all, has never
fully surrendered access to her own desires, even though she
may be ashamed of her body. When she comes out of the
woods, as Ragnell showed us, she knows what she wants and is
unafraid to say it.
To step outside the double bind, we have to confront the
hag in ourselves: the image of an overpowering female whose
needs and desires are monstrous. Both she and the heartless
muse are fantasies of male dominance that are used to keep
women disempowered. Trapped in the double bind of female
beauty, we have identified with these images, bringing shame
and defeat to ourselves.

The Muse and the Slut

MANY OF US, no matter how feminist we are, join with men

in reducing women to their appearances, dividing women
among themselves through competition, jealousy, envy of
physical traits. Believing that female power is beauty, we live
off each other’s images in crass and painful comparisons of
thighs, stomachs, hips, breasts, wrinkles, and hair. We use
images of women to stand in place of understanding their
desires and meanings; we go along with the Pandora story by
acting as though a woman is her appearance and is empty of a
heart.
Such is the story of Monica Lewinsky, the notorious twenty-
something intern at the White House. Lewinsky engaged in
oral sex in the Oval Office in exchange (we assume) for being
desired by the President of the United States. Her story stirs
 The Menace of Female Beauty 49

our contemporary Pandora imaginings. Men and women have

described Lewinsky as a “bimbo”—pretty but empty—and even
as a “slut” who uses her seductive powers to her own advan-
tage. How does the muse turn into a slut?
On television and in all sorts of media, Lewinsky has been
characterized by aspects of her appearance that fall outside cul-
tural standards for female beauty (usually in terms of being
chubby or overweight) and by her seductiveness (in terms of
her behaviors with the president, former lovers, and boy-
friends). Reported accounts of her personality and appearance
imply that she is just “too much”’—too pushy, too flashy, too
needy, too flirtatious, too inquisitive.
Feminist commentators have remarked that many women,
even feminists, do not champion her cause because Lewinsky
represents the “other woman,” the “young thing” at the office
or the workplace, who threatens to seduce our husbands or
boyfriends. Within the double bind of female beauty, we
encourage girls to become these flirty creatures, then condemn
them for the power they supposedly have over men.
The slut is the muse metamorphosed into the hag-bitch.
Within the double bind of female beauty, the heartless Pandora
works her wiles on innocent men. If she intrudes on male
power in some manner that interferes with the ordinary “rules
of the game”—as patriarchy has set up rules to protect male
power—then she becomes the monstrous hag. Women, espe-
cially, are often keen to show that the slut is not attractive. She
is too fat, wears too much makeup, is too loud. In other words,
she has become the hag who dominates men and children with
her magical powers.
So the woman who competes to be the Object of Desire is
labeled not only by men but by other women. But calling other
50 WhOEe Nie AG NED aD) EraaE

women (or ourselves) sluts and bimbos is just another symptom

of the shaming of female desire, seeing ourselves and our needs
as monstrous or manipulative or overpowering.
How can we escape this double bind? The answer seems
clear: we must let go of our beauty fixation. We must stop
identifying who we are by how we look. And we must learn to
protect ourselves against harmful stereotypes about female
appearance by recognizing how they undo our power and
undermine our self-esteem.
Enjoyment of our bodies, pleasurable exercise, and healthy
eating are the means to long life and good health. But these
restorative attitudes and activities can only arise from knowl-
edge of ourselves as Subjects of our own desires. As long as we
fear the emotional power of the hag, we will direct our atten-
tion and interests to appearances rather than to pleasure and
enjoyment.

Becoming Subjects of Appearance

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER | was faced with a dilemma. As

a young girl | was chubby and wore thick glasses. I saw myself
as a good girl and an achiever, not someone who could be
pretty or popular. But when I was sixteen my fate suddenly
changed: I was allowed to have contact lenses. Even though I
was far from being the muse type of my generation (busty, slim
hips and ankles, long, straight hair), after I got my contacts the
popular boys, who previously hadn’t given me the time of day,
suddenly greeted me by name. The choice presented itself for
the first time: appearance or achievement.
Intuitively I knew these were distinct domains, in which
the rules were different. If I wanted to compete for female
 The Menace of Female Beauty 51

beauty, I could no longer be number one in my class. Instead of

speaking up, | would have to develop mannerisms designed to
hide what I knew so that I wouldn’t challenge the boys.
Already I had had too much fun with achievement; |
couldn’t imagine giving up my own desires in order to appear
in a certain way. So I chose the path of achievement—but
tried very hard to be attractive, too.
I’m still fighting the battle. I sometimes hide from myself
the meaning of my daily exercise, as though it had nothing to
do with my appearance. I tell myself (and others) that I exer-
cise for my health, yet I know that the exercise has a compul-
sive edge that compensates for fears about appearance and
aging. But at an early age | learned not to bank on my appear-
ance, and in so doing | gained certain freedoms. I retained a
strong sense of self-determination and a belief that I was in
charge of my life. I tried to claim directly what | wanted. But
the consequences were not always positive: I often was left out,
lonely, ignorant of feminine social protocols—ways in which
women are expected to be self-effacing, indirect, invisible,
especially in the bailiwicks of male power. I never learned how
to keep my mouth shut, as my mother, my daughter, and my
husband have frequently reminded me. So I have been labeled
the hag-bitch, and I have learned to cope with it. I have
learned the lesson of Ragnell: be calm, breathe deeply, restate
my aims, don’t blame, and, most of all, don’t feel ashamed of
my desires.
Although I have not been immune to beauty standards, |
have elected to identify myself with something other than my
appearance. I can step outside the double bind of female
beauty, knowing I am neither the dreaded hag nor the danger-
ous muse. I look for role models of women who do not identify
52 WOMEN TAIND DESTRE

with the muse, who are often labeled as the hag in some form
but seem truly indifferent to it: historic figures like Eleanor
Roosevelt, Golda Meir, and Shirley Chisholm, who spoke their
minds without seeming to fuss about their reputations. Con-
temporary women like Attorney General Janet Reno and writ-
ers Carolyn Heilbrun, Nancy Mairs, and Joyce Carol Oates are
also exemplary; they are honest, open, fallible, and outside the
double bind of female beauty. Many black women have been
role models for me; among the most famous writers are some of
my favorites: bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison. They’re
irresistible as clear, powerful women who seem free from false
images that arise from male imagination.
Taking responsibility for stepping outside the double bind
of female beauty is not easy or straightforward. Because we are
evaluated by our appearance, we must be willing to change our
own evaluations while withstanding others’ and to bring our
hidden desires into the light. Only by opposing appearance
standards in our own talk and self-talk can we gradually change
the cultural conversations and symbols. We are like Ragnell
coming out of the woods to tell the truth: we want sovereignty
Over our appearance and identity.
To become the Subject of your own desires, you, too, must
resist the double bind of female beauty. In order to resist it, first
you must be able to identify it, and be alert when it is implied
in people’s observations and actions. Every one of us is up
against a struggle not to identify with being the negative hag-
bitch because we refuse to be stereotyped and constrained by
male fantasies of women’s power.
To be Subjects of our appearance, we must experiment and
enjoy. Rather than being slaves to fashion, we should use color
and fabric and body contours to express our pleasures and
 The Menace of Female Beauty 53

desires in individual ways. Drawing on our imaginations to

come up with appearances and styles to satisfy us in express-
ing ourselves in the various domains of our lives, we can move
outside the dictates of our skinny cultural muse. Most impor-
tant, clothing, makeup, and public demeanor must no longer
be translated automatically so that patriarchal stereotypes
abound: the fact that she’s wearing bib overalls does not mean
she’s a lesbian. The fact that she doesn’t shave her legs does
not mean she’s a feminist. The fact that she’s wearing panty
hose does not mean she’s a housewife. The fact that she’s deco-
rated with makeup and jewelry does not mean she’s “cheap” or
some other version of slut. The fact that she’s wearing high
heels does not mean she wants men to look at her legs. As
many black women have taught me, dressing up means getting
bigger, more colorful, more dramatic—more powerful—and
sometimes high heels help. Being alert to the many, varied
ways that women can dress and be and act ensures that we do
not automatically see a woman’s expression of herself as a sign
of a pat identity according to patriarchal rules.
As we engage with others and ourselves in domains outside
the double bind of female beauty, we will learn and develop
new ways of seeing and new images of being female. Until we
experiment in these ways, it will be impossible to oppose the
machinery that supports the industry of female beauty
bondage. No doubt it is useful to reveal the profits and mean-
ings of these markets, and no doubt it is critically important to
understand the history and development of female appearance
as an aspect of male dominance. But only when we are able to
change our own attitudes will we be strong enough to oppose
the culture around us and liberate our appearances from the
dictates of male power.
54 WOMEN AND DESIRE

Pandora as Subject of Desire

LET US LOOK once again at the story of Pandora. When Pan-

dora dug up the sealed earthenware jar, she uncovered the
buried troubles and miseries of human life. Most important,
she let death out into the world. Death is at the core of the
name given to humans by the Greeks: the mortals, those who
will die. Different from other species, humans are aware of
their own deaths. Our mortality should remind us of our limi-
tation and impermanence. Pandora as Subject followed her
curiosity and created humans as mortals, living with a knowl-
edge of their own limitations.
I like to imagine that Pandora was looking for her heart, the
lost meaning that would be her truth. Feeling her own empti-
ness, she was curious, and her curiosity eventually led her to
dig up the hidden miseries of human life. Perhaps she dug up
the buried remains from the mythical matriarchal goddesses,
such as Demeter and Persephone and Gaia, who preceded the
Greek pantheon at Olympus—remains that had been trans-
formed into misery and trouble by being left out and denied by
the newer patriarchal gods. Thus, we could say that the limita-
tion of death and illness Pandora brought to men was also a
limitation on their patriarchal power, their habits of and incli-
nations for controlling through dominance and aggression.

The Truth about Female Beauty

THE HEART AND TRUTH about female beauty is that it has

been under the dominion of male power and fantasy for far too
long. It has produced all kinds of suffering and misery. But to
free female appearance from male dominion means to open up
 The Menace of Female Beauty 55

what has been hidden. Following Pandora’s lead, we realize

that the only cure for shame is to bring our buried meanings
and feelings into the light of day. Many of these concern our
fears about our failings, ugliness, inferiority.
Pandora seen from this perspective exposes us to the knowl-
edge of our limitations. Because we are always vulnerable
to conditions beyond our control—illness, loss, death—that
escaped the earthenware jar, we wish for a perfection that we
cannot achieve. Our own ideals can cause us unending anguish
if they lead us to believe that the world should go as we would
like it to. We humans have limited power, but we are responsi-
ble for our intentions, thoughts, desires, and actions. Pandora
liberates us to understand and work within the constraints of
being human. The hope that remains is the hope that we will
learn from our limitations.
In Chapter One, | talked about Jung’s theory of psychologi-
cal complexes and how our old emotional habits get in the way
of being able to change our attitudes, identities, and actions.
Pandora shows us something about changing the psychological
complexes surrounding the meaning of female appearance.
The old habits of patriarchal societies deem women’s
appearance to be their greatest power. These habits promote
fear and shame when our appearance doesn’t match the image
of the muse. They produce envy, rivalry, bitterness, and iso-
lation among women themselves, who compete for the prizes
of female beauty under male dominance. But the beautiful
Woman of patriarchy is the symbol of male power. Her legacy
is about power between and among men, not about real and
actual power of and for women.
For us to act as Subjects of our desires, we have to bring into
the light our own hidden intentions and attitudes in order to
stop judging people (including ourselves) by appearance. No
56 WOMEN AND “DEST RE

amount of feminist analysis will dissolve the belief that female

power is beauty until we can stop perpetuating it. Only women
can change such beliefs, and we will do that one by one, as we
come to understand the destructive false power of images of
female beauty under male control.
 THREE

Sex through the Looking Glass

HE “LOOKING GLASS” of female appearance is the sur-

face that reflects our desire to be desirable. To travel
through it is to encounter a hidden underworld of female
sexual shame, embarrassment, confusion, frustration, and
numbness. Wanting to be wanted leads to little pleasure in sex-
ual passion or union. Instead of discovering and developing
practices and routines of female sexual pleasure, women want
to be admired and claimed for their seductive charms and
beauty. Our obsession with our physical appearance prohibits
or interferes with our capacities for sexual passion and merger.
And those who believe they have failed at the appearance
game, and identify with the negative hag, disconnect from
their sexual desires through resentment and _ loneliness.
Damned if you’re beautiful and damned if you’re not, the dou-
ble bind of female beauty has meant a widespread, painful loss

Dit
58 WOMEN AND DESIRE

of female sexual desire through excessive concern about

appearance and the shame of self-loathing.
Nothing dampens sexual pleasure more than _ self-
consciousness. Nothing increases self-consciousness as much
as excessive concern about appearance and desirability. To feel
deeply aroused and engaged with our sexual passions, we have
to temporarily be taken over by the experience of the moment.
In sex this feels like a loss of our ordinary boundaries, the loss
of me versus you, of in-here versus out-there. As Otto Kern-
berg, a well-known psychoanalyst, writes, sexual passion is
“crossing the boundaries of the self” or “merging with the
other” in a way that paradoxically still allows us to feel a sepa-
rate identity. This kind of sexual merger is impossible if you’re
caught up in fears about the size or shape of parts of your face or
body, or are in constant anxiety about being rejected.
Any passion demands the courage to enter into a desired
state or event in the face of dangers; in sex, we fear being
engulfed by the other’s needs or crushed by the other’s lack of
response, rejection, or abandonment. Mature sexual love dis-
solves anxieties and fears of engulfment or abandonment
through repeated experiences of pleasure, joy, and transcen-
dence in passionate sexual merger. To enter into and sustain
such passion requires more than desire to be with another. It
requires at least a modicum of ease with one’s own physical and
emotional being, liking oneself well enough to want to share
oneself intimately with another.
The double bind of female beauty, which engenders acute
self-consciousness, may explain why many women have a hard
time believing that sexual pleasures could be easily accessible
to them. Most national surveys of sexuality and sexual desire
show that American women—whether married, cohabiting, or
 Sex through the Looking Glass 59

single—want sex less often than men, experience orgasm less

often, and find greater satisfaction in emotional intimacy than
in genital sex. Researchers report that women equate sexual
satisfaction with emotional closeness, while men equate sexual
satisfaction with physical sex. This difference between women
and men appears to transcend race, class, and education.
From these findings and the stereotypes that abound in our
culture, we might come to believe that sexual desire is simply
more a man’s than a woman’s. After all, men have sex more
often, fantasize about sex more, have more orgasms and more
sexual partners than women have. Also, women in lesbian
relationships have genital sex less often than women in het-
erosexual relationships—a finding that has been used, even by
some lesbian researchers, to argue that genital sexual pleasure
may be the expression of male, not female, desire. If lesbians
don’t express much desire for genital sex, then it seems that
when women are left to their own devices, they simply don’t
need or want much sex.

Pleasure and Desire

In A BooxX that I wrote about couples, You’re Not What I

Expected, 1 commented on the popular notion that women
want emotional intimacy more than men, and men want phys-
ical sex more than women. From pop psychology experts, we
hear that women “want intimacy in order to be sexual” and
men “want sex in order to be intimate.” But it seemed to me
then—and studies have now confirmed—that women had not
had enough pleasure in sex in order to want more. Desire is
present only when something that has been pleasurable or
gratifying in the past is now missing.
60 WOMEN AND DESIRE

To use an example I provided in my earlier book: if you hear

about a wonderful, exotic Colombian yam—about its color,
taste, and consistency—you may long to try it, but you cannot
desire it until you have tasted it. Confronted with a dessert
menu and the choice of this exotic yam over a well-loved
dessert, you would probably choose your favorite dessert. In
any case, you wouldn’t salivate over the yam until you had
tasted it, and liked it. If you haven’t tasted the pleasure, then
you won’t feel the desire. Thus many more women than men
lack sexual desire because female sexual experience has not
been reliably pleasurable.
Perhaps you, like so many of us, have found the widespread
lack of female sexual pleasure confusing because, ideally,
women can have multiple orgasms and sustain arousal for very
long periods. But from recent research on American couples, |
have come to understand that women rarely believe that their
lack of pleasure is the problem. Instead, they feel guilty about
their lack of desire. They feel blamed (and blame themselves)
for not wanting more sex, and eventually they are angry and
resentful that their partners want them to desire sex.
Like many of the sex researchers, I believe that the lack of
female desire is a cultural condition, not a biological destiny. It
seems to me to be related to definitions of “femininity” that
began to emerge in the nineteenth century. When “feminine”
was equated with nature (as a passive force) and “masculine”
with culture (as an active force), women began to be widely
regarded as Objects who would receive the desires and interests
of others but have none of their own.
By the end of the nineteenth century, women were advised
to be sexually passive as wives—sometimes even fully clothed
during intercourse—because doctors and theologians defined
 Sex through the Looking Glass 61

the sex act primarily as the expression of male orgasm in the

service of procreation. If men wanted sex purely for pleasure,
often they pursued it outside their marriages, especially with
prostitutes. Men were to be Subjects and women were to be
Objects of sexual passion, and this was all considered nat-
ural—biologically and theologically destined. Women’s igno-
rance of their own sexual pleasures, their forced confinement
to domesticity and children, and their later preoccupations
with physical appearance have all contributed to shutting
down female sexual desire over the past two centuries.
But what of earlier periods of time? In her book Promis-
cuities, Naomi Wolf writes at length about the history of female
sexual desire in Western cultures. Beginning in the sixteenth
century, there are records of female sexual pleasure being “sci-
entifically” studied. A Venetian scientist, Renaldus Columbus,
called the clitoris the “seat of woman’s delight” and provided a
detailed description of orgasm through manipulation of it.
Because of women’s extensive possibilities for sustained sexual
pleasure, they were often described as the more sexually driven
of the two sexes. Physicians and midwives recommended sen-
sitive and thorough stimulation of the clitoris on all occasions
of lovemaking, especially as incentive and preparation for con-
ception, as a way to satisfy female sexual desire so that women
would not become agitated and restless in a state of unsatisfied
desire (the image we now have of men). Women’s sexual capac-
ity was heralded and feared; if women were sexually insatiable,
how could they be possessed and controlled by one man?
Gradually, the belief that men have the greater sex drive
countered earlier theories. Increasingly women were expected
to be confined at home with children and to fill roles that
left them on the margins of society. Around the end of the
62 WOMEN AND DESIRE

eighteenth century, according to Wolf, experts shifted their

attention from an emphasis on female sexual needs to a focus
on the tender affection that mothers give their children.
Women began to be idealized in terms of endearment for rea-
sons that were economic and political.
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexual ideology
claimed that women were better equipped than men to bring
their sexual impulses and desires under control because women
were natural caregivers in being mothers. By the middle and
end of the nineteenth century, doctors and scientists widely
counseled that rampant sexual desire in a woman could lead
her to hysteria, criminal acts, and violence. Cultural stan-
dards shifted to purity in women as they were increasingly
expected to submit to their husbands’ desires and to domes-
tic routines. By the early part of the twentieth century, the
female counterpart to the male sex drive had become the
“maternal instinct.”
At the turn of the twenty-first century, we still believe that
women’s sexual expression is tied more to emotional closeness
than to sexual pleasure. Although many women would reject
the idea that they are programmed with a maternal instinct,
they describe their intimacy needs in terms of tenderness,
affection, and closeness rather than sexual pleasure. In a recent
study of female sexual desire, the researchers summarize their
findings in saying that men and women engage in sex “for dif-
ferent reasons; men are more motivated by physical pleasure
and women are desirous of expressing emotion.” Neither the
number of orgasms nor the amount of pleasure in sexual activi-
ties was as important to the women as their perceptions of how
emotionally close the relationship was.
No doubt this emotional closeness is a prerequisite to a
deeply satisfying sexual union, but it is not more than a prereq-
 Sex through the Looking Glass 63

uisite. Without the reliable pleasure of arousal and transcen-

dence through orgasm, women do not have access to the expe-
rience of a mature passionate love that could awaken, again
and again, their sexual desire. On the contrary, the same study
discovered that women in physically abusive relationships
were having sexual intercourse more often than women in
nonabusive relationships. As the researchers say, “The rela-
tionship between female sexual desire and how often a woman
engages in sex is likely to be mediated by her husband.” In
other words, in abusive relationships the husband uses sex as a
means of power over his partner, and his insistence on having
sex is greater than the insistence of husbands in nonabusive
relationships.
This last illustration makes clear an underlying power
dynamic in the lack of female sexual desire. If sexual encoun-
ters and activities are assumed by a woman to satisfy male sex-
ual desire—if men are Subjects and women are Objects—then
a self-determining woman might not want to engage in sex.
Furthermore, most of the images of the sexual woman in our
society are shaped by male fantasies of the slut, bimbo, domi-
natrix. Amidst these images a self-determining woman will
hold on to her own power by resisting engagement in sex for
someone else’s pleasure. She will refuse to have sexual relations
with any partner unless she wants to. And because sex hasn’t
been pleasurable enough for them to create desire, most self-
determining women won’t initiate sex very often because they
have not discovered their own pleasure in it. Reliable female
sexual pleasure (even between two women) remains elusive. In
this period of feminism many mature women feel freer to say
No to sex, but they are not free to find Yes.
64 WOMEN AND DESIRE

The Seduction of Power

INSTEAD OF WONDERING about and investigating the

absence of sexual pleasure, many women unknowingly believe
that the seduction of power can substitute for sexual pleasures.
By this I mean a feeling of control over one’s own body paired
with a feeling of triumph over male sexual desire, both in
arousing it and in being able to decline it if one so desires. The
seduction of power may include having no sex at all or engag-
ing in risky sex—but clearly one has power over sex.
Feeling sexy, attracting attention, and wanting to be
wanted become the goals, even though sex may initially feel
like an exciting by-product of the attention. We tune in to
what effect we are having in sex rather than to what we want
in terms of our own needs and pleasures.
The desire to be reflected through the looking glass of
someone else’s desire is based on the felt experience that
female power lies outside of oneself and must be attracted and
won. Instead of practicing power within ourselves, we seek it
by controlling another’s responses. We come to see ourselves
only as reflected in our lovers’ eyes. But we cannot fill our own
needs with another’s desires. Trapped in these sex and power
games, we become acutely self-conscious.
In place of developing our own erotic lives, we become
obsessed about appearance, immersed in images of ugly-
beautiful, and distracted by self-conscious emotions, such as
shame, embarrassment, envy, or jealousy. We don’t investigate
what is beneath the surface; instead we feel betrayed by how
little sexual desire we find in ourselves, blaming either our-
selves or our partners. Unknowingly we are bound up in the
 Sex through the Looking Glass 65

psychological complex of muse or hag, accompanied by fan-

tasies about others desiring or despising us. As in female beauty
bondage, identifying with the muse or the hag makes us vul-
nerable to internalizing men’s fears and fantasies about us.
Trapped in the double bind of beauty, we are limited in our
awareness of pleasure for the sake of pleasure.
Linda is in her late twenties and comes to psychotherapy
because of her low self-esteem. She has had a series of uncom-
mitted sexual and emotional relationships with both men and
women, but in no way does she show any concern about her
lack of commitment. She says that “love is a false god and we
should all be practical about what we can and cannot have. No
one else can really make us happy, so we shouldn’t have to
commit to someone else for life.”
Linda is afraid to have children because she worries that her
fragile personality would break down under the weight. Some-
times she believes she should become celibate as a way to avoid
the pain she feels when she loses a lover. When a sexual rela-
tionship ends Linda feels dead and afraid of being alone, and
even when she begins a new relationship, she is suspicious that
her partner will disappoint her terribly in the end.
Linda feels alive and vital only when she believes that
someone else finds her sexy and exciting. At even the slight-
est withdrawal on the part of her lover, she becomes anxious
and begins to suspect that she is unwanted. Since she is afraid
of being rejected, she often cuts off relationships prematurely,
just as they have become a bit real, a bit beyond fantasy. She
knows little about her own desires except to say that she has a
“sex and love addiction.” This knowledge addresses only her
symptoms.
66 WOMEN AND DESIRE

The Meaner Face of Desire

LINDA IS MOTIVATED by a hidden desire: she wants to be

wanted. As we’ve learned, when our desires are hidden or
unknown to us, they take over much of our emotional lives—
often as part of an unconscious psychological complex that
promotes certain images and impulses, such as the desire-
awakening maiden or the soul-sucking hag.
When Linda has sex with a lover, she becomes absorbed in
whether or not her partner finds her attractive and exciting.
She is excited only by her partner’s excitement. If her partner
is worrying about Linda’s pleasure (will she have an orgasm?
will she be responsive? and so on), then both are distracted and
off-center. Linda is worried about whether or not her partner is
aroused (is she or he bored? is she or he turned off somehow by
my body? is she or he tired of me?), and her partner is worried
about Linda’s pleasure and desire. Rather than engaging in
authentic passion, they are making arrangements—conscious
or hidden—to secure the responses they want. These forced
arrangements (from evoking to demanding a response from the
other) usually require us to act out cultural stereotypes of the
desire-awakening maiden and her master (or vice versa in
today’s sadomasochistic “scenes”). Under these conditions
both women and men confuse love and power, and miss the
opportunity for deepened pleasure and passion.
In heterosexual sex—especially outside an intimate rela-
tionship—men can easily be drawn into fantasies and actions
of conquest and dominance of the female body. They want to
possess the fantasied power of the female body for themselves,
and they may feel humiliated when it is refused to them. As
 Sex through the Looking Glass 67

I’ve noted, possessing a beautiful woman is a sign of power

among men. Winning the seductive woman reinforces mascu-
line identity in a world where men compete for the desire-
awakening maiden. Once a woman is ostensibly his, a man
may feel especially shamed by sexual refusal and rejection from
his partner. For many men sexual rejection feels humiliating
because they are exposed in their visible sexual arousal and
vulnerable to being teased and subdued.
Women also want the power of having an erotic effect. This
is a meaner face of female desire—the craving to have power
over another’s sexual responses, the need to be filled up with
someone else’s desire. This seduction of power confuses eros—
the desire for connection—with influence or power.
Sex and love are easily corrupted by power struggles over
the female body. If a female partner wants to be dominated or
possessed as a sign that she is alluring (or she wants to domi-
nate her partner for the same effect) while her male partner
wants her to express an orgasm so that he is certain she is satis-
fied, both are distracted in their attempts to command the
female body.
In a mature partnership there is room for all sorts of sexual
fantasies—for aggressive longings and roles—provided they
are blended into a loving relationship in which the partners
are capable of understanding themselves and respecting each
other. To know your own pleasures and fantasies means that
you can direct your partner to what feels good for you. Authen-
tic self-created sexual fantasies can enrich our sexual experi-
ences and increase intimacy and pleasure. By contrast, sexual
fantasies that are disturbing because they eroticize abusive or
harmful aspects of a relationship are evidence of the meaner
face of desire, wanting power over another.
68 WOMEN AND DESIRE

When sex becomes entangled in power, you may come to

believe that you are only an Object, that you function only to
please your partner. This can quickly lead to sexual resentment
and blame, but you may be denying that you have your own
motives in wanting to confirm that you are beautiful or worth-
while through the desire in your partner’s eyes.
Healthy sexual fantasies always include communication
and trust, consent and equality, respect and mutual pleasure.
Dialogue and negotiation are necessary ingredients in this kind
of sexual partnership. Your partner may or may not choose to
do what you want. You may or may not agree to your partner’s
desires, but you will respect them because they have been
revealed with respect for you. Mature sexual partners talk
about what they want and devise routines, practices, even roles
to help them achieve pleasure in sex without offending or
harming either partner. To begin a relationship of mature sexu-
ality, both partners must relinquish the desire to have power
over each other and embrace the desire for self-determination,
sovereignty over their own desires.

Awakening Love between Equals

THE ANCIENT STORY of Psyche and Amor provides us with

a rich account of the meaner face of female desire, brought
into the light through loss of control. Although this story orig-
inally came from Greek mythology, its best-known version is
Roman—from Ovid’s Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, a text
written by Lucius Apuleius in the second century. My telling is
loosely adapted from Apuleius through a contemporary trans-
lation. The subtleties of female desire alluded to in this story
have been explored by many feminist writers, including Carol
Gilligan and Florence Wiedemann and myself.
 Sex through the Looking Glass 69

PSYCHE AND AMOR

nce upon a time, a king and a queen had three beautiful

daughters. Much the most beautiful was Psyche, the young.
est. People came from many lands just to witness the beauty of
this young woman, some saying that she was Venus, the goddess
of love, and others claiming that Psyche had replaced Venus as
love’s great goddess. Naturally, Venus was enraged by all the
attention that Psyche—a mere mortal woman—had drawn
away from her, so she poisoned the hearts of Psyche’s suitors,
leaving Psyche thoroughly rejected by men. Psyche’s father,
puzzled by the dearth of suitors for his beautiful daughter,
began to suspect that something had gone awry with the gods.
In his search for an answer, the king consulted an oracle,
through which Venus responded, telling him that his daughter
was destined to marry a monster, a winged serpent that fright-
ened even Jupiter (Zeus in Greek). She then instructed the king
to have his daughter dressed in the clothes of mourning and to
take her to a distant mountaintop where she would enter her
death marriage.
Psyche, accompanied by funeral music and her grieving par-
ents, and dressed as a woman going to her grave, led her strange
wedding procession to the mountaintop. At the summit her par-
ents left her as they were instructed.
Alone in her dread, Psyche waited. Suddenly she was lifted
by a gentle wind and carried over the side of the mountain
until she landed in a fragrant, flowery field. A palace of gold
and gems, filled with unbelievable beauty and treasures, rose
before her. Thinking that perhaps she had died and this was
the home of a god or goddess, Psyche entered and silently made
her way from room to room. In a sumptuous bedroom invisible
70 WOMEN AND DESIRE

hands bathed and dressed her, and brought her all possible deli-
cious foods and delightful comforts.
Adorned in the beautiful fabrics of the palace, comforted by
the pleasures of her surroundings, Psyche fell into a deep sleep,
only to be awakened at the stroke of midnight by a soft whis-
per. Knowing that anything might happen in this vast, unin-
habited place, Psyche feared for her life and her chastity, but
the whisperin g¢ voice—a man’s—reassured her: he would not
force her or hurt her. Her invisible visitor embraced Psyche
with unimaginable tenderness and made love to her in a most
arousing and gentle way. Her own sexual desires were both
stirred and satisfied in his embrace.
At the end of their night of passion, the visitor told her
that he was her husband, but that she would never be allowed
to see him. All her needs would be provided by invisible hands
in the palace. As long as she did not try to find out who he was,
they could continue to enjoy each other nightly.
At first Psyche willingly accepted these conditions. Amazed
by the splendor and riches of her palace, she passed her days in
pleasing occupations and spent her nights with her invisible
husband. Shortly, though, Psyche began to miss her parents and
her sisters. She longed to see them and to let them know that
she had not died but was thriving in her new home. Psyche
begged her husband to allow her to return to her family to
reassure them of her safety and good fortune, and reluctantly
he agreed. He instructed her to remember the conditions of
their marriage: that she could neither know nor reveal his iden-
tity or all would come to an end.
Psyche returned to her family and proudly told them of her
adventure—her journey over the mountainside, her glorious
palace, and her gentle husband. Jealous of her good fortune, Psy-
 Sex through the Looking Glass at

che’s sisters chided her and prattled about the dangers to which
she had subjected herself. After all, they said, your husband may
be a winged serpent, a monster of any kind, and you have surren-
dered yourself to him without knowing his real identity.
When Psyche returned to her palace, she had a plan that
she and her sisters had devised to discover her husband’s true
nature. She prepared to encounter her husband armed with a
knife and a candle. After they made love and while he slept,
she lit the candle and raised it over his body. Before her was
revealed the god Amor—the son of Venus—in all his beauty.
Astonished by his glory, Psyche lurched back and dropped hot
wax from her candle on his naked chest. Startled awake, Amor
cursed her and fled. From atop a cypress tree he reproached his
wife for her thoughtlessness and soared into the air. His iden-
tity revealed to a mortal, he had to return to his mother, never
again to mingle with a mortal being.
Psyche’s remorse was deep, and she wandered the earth in
search of her beloved husband. Weary and hopeless, she came
to atemple of Venus and entered, entreating the great goddess
to help in this matter of love. Even more enraged at Psyche’s
alliance with Amor, Venus set up tasks for her daughter-in-law.
Choosing feats that could never be accomplished by a mortal,
Venus promised that Psyche would be reunited with Amor if
she carried them out successfully.
Filled with faith in her great love for Amor, Psyche began
her heroic adventure. Each step of the way powers of the nat-
ural world came to support both her courage and her love. Her
final, most difficult task was to bring back a box of “beauty”
from Proserpine (Persephone in Greek) of the underworld so
that the aging Venus could restore her own appearance—faded
from nursing her ailing son.
72 WOMEN AND DESIRE

Helped by a talking stone tower, Psyche was given instruc-

tions on the exact steps to enter into, and be released from, the
underworld. Returning with her final task fulfilled, Psyche
foolishly decided to take advantage of some of Proserpine’s
beauty for herself. But Proserpine had placed death—not
beauty—in the box to be taken to Venus. Upon opening the
box, Psyche fell into a fatal sleep.
When he discovered his wife’s fate, Amor begged his mother
to allow Psyche to be made into an immortal goddess. In the end
Venus conceded to her son’s wishes. Amor rescued his wife from
her death-sleep and brought her to heaven to be his timeless
partner.

The Curse of Venus

THERE ARE MANY WAYS to interpret this complex story, but

I will focus on the themes of sex through the looking glass—
the seduction of power, competition among women, the split
between pleasure and power in female sexuality, and the death
of female sexual desire. By understanding this ancient tale as a
story about the challenge to self-determination in female sex-
ual desire, we come to see the sacrifice involved in being the
desire-awakening maiden.
At the beginning of the story, Venus is the aging muse who
fears being outdone by the beautiful young maiden. Venus
knows the underlying reality of female power, that mortal
women are extremely limited by male dominance. Psyche’s
only real power among humans is to attract a powerful man.
Venus spoils this by eliminating men’s desires to marry Psyche.
We could interpret the curse of Venus as Psyche’s muse com-
plex, an obsession about her appearance that turns her beauty
 Sex through the Looking Glass ee

upside down and makes it into a liability. So Psyche becomes

vulnerable to a death-marriage—a symbol of a total loss of
power through marriage.
I have found many examples of the death-marriage theme
in the dreams of women about to be married. One woman
dreamt she willingly entered a grave or underground tunnel
from which there was no escape. Another was present at her
own funeral, dressed in her bridal gown. Marriage is, in a fun-
damental way, a psychological death of an old identity (as a
single individual) and the beginning of a new identity (as a
coupled individual). And for women there is an additional
death: the adventure of being a bride comes to an end. Women
are idealized as brides, not as wives. Some women fear the shift
from muse to hag; they fear the weight of an unwanted identity
laid upon them during or soon after the honeymoon. Many
things previously attractive in a woman—her ambition, perse-
verance, intelligence—may be perceived as unattractive or
even threatening after marriage.
Psyche is saved from her fear and humiliation by Amor.
Who is Amor? Historically and mythically he is Eros (Cupid is
his trivial name)—the image of love fulfilled. Amor is also the
image of desire, born of pleasure’s memory, in whose presence
we long for more. When desire is blind or hidden, it becomes
craving or impulse. Because it is the nature of desire to be felt
as a lack, a memory, or a gap, we can be driven to fill its empti-
ness without knowing why.
Amor initially saves Psyche from the curse of Venus but
blinds her to the knowledge of her own desire. Caught in a web
of pleasures, Psyche is filled with desires and longing but has no
self-determination or understanding of her circumstances.
Becoming acquainted with her husband is forbidden. Even the
74 WOM EIN VSAUNDIP DIES TRIE

hands that serve her are invisible. Recall my client Linda, who
was caught in a cycle of dead-end relationships because, like
Psyche, she was only her lover’s Object of Desire. Blaming fate
or her lovers, Linda knew nothing of her own desires, so she
was deadened in her responses. Psyche’s longing to return
home is a longing to understand her own desire, to put
together her past and her present.
But what Psyche finds at home is the divisiveness and spite
of her jealous sisters. Like teenage girls directing their anger
against a popular rival, Psyche’s sisters attack her for being
pampered and passive. As we saw in the double bind of female
beauty, in place of female solidarity women join with men in
reducing women to their appearances and divide themselves
through competition, jealousy, and envy.
But sometimes the power mongering of others can awaken
us to our hidden motives, and the competitive strivings of
her sisters eventually lead Psyche to lift the candle and come
to know her own desires. Yet Psyche carries out the action
with candle and knife in hand because she is urged by her
jealous sisters; she is not fully in possession of herself and
acts carelessly in dropping the hot wax. Symbolically, Psyche’s
impulsive confrontation of Amor’s identity reveals her still-
developing sense of self-determination and desire to know
about her own life and power.
The light of Psyche’s candle reveals that Amor is a god. He
is outside or beyond the human realm. With this knowledge
Psyche loses Amor, not to be reunited with him until they
become equals, when Psyche is immortal.
Like Amor, our sexual desires often escape us when we
hastily cast the light of reality on arrangements that are hid-
den, unequal, without mutual consent and mutual pleasure.
 Sex through the Looking Glass 75

If we are motivated primarily by wanting to be wanted, to

reveal this hidden desire will chase away romantic feelings,
but to keep it hidden entirely will rob us of our pleasures.
Only when we know what motivates us are we free to choose
alternatives.
Psyche is deeply grieved by the loss of Amor, but she cannot
begin her transformation until she consults with Venus. In the
myth Venus is a source of ancient knowledge about love, but
we can also understand her as an aspect of Psyche’s own com-
plex, the source of some kind of ambivalence about herself.
Venus assigns tasks to Psyche. Each one is a challenge to Psy-
che’s ability to organize and take initiative, which are required
lessons in becoming a Subject. The first tasks engage her in
adventure, discernment, and courage. Creatures of nature
(animals, plants, water) assist her in carrying out these feats.
We can imagine this to mean that Psyche comes to understand
her own nature—her instincts and intuitions.
Psyche’s final task is the most difficult and important: she
must enter the underworld, where mortals are forbidden to go.
We can think of this as the realm of Psyche’s unconscious fan-
tasies and desires—the underworld of her sexual and other
unknown longings. Venus has specifically set Psyche the task
of stealing the ageless beauty of a goddess preserved in youth.
Bringing this beauty back to Venus, Psyche is tempted to have
some for herself and allows her impulse to rule her actions,
recalling Pandora’s impulsive curiosity in opening the earthen-
ware jar.
At the moment she opens the box, Psyche becomes a Sub-
ject of her own desire. This is her first action not commanded
by others. Although Psyche has developed some knowledge of
her own nature and her ability to be competent and successful,
76 WOMEN AND DESIRE

she has continued to retain the hidden desire to be the most

beautiful Object of Desire. Psyche is the potentially liberated
woman who, like Princess Diana, still believes that power must
be seduced rather than self-directed. Instead of completing the
process of her autonomous development and earning the right
to be Amor’s equal, Psyche is annihilated by her hidden wish
to retain the greatest beauty for herself. Once again she is at
the mercy of fate as she falls into a death-sleep. This death-
sleep is a parallel to her death-marriage at the start of the tale,
a state of depression based on an impossible desire to be the
ageless, desire-awakening maiden.
Her condition is reversed through the aid of Amor and
Venus. Psyche is rescued by powers greater than herself, on
whom she now depends. But she has learned the Subject
lessons of self-determination well enough to become the equal
of Amor. Psyche dies two deaths in the tale: the first as an
unconscious Object of Desire and the second as a conscious
Object of Desire, the muse who wants to be the ageless
maiden. In dying the second death, Psyche is finally awakened
on a higher level, an immortal herself and the Subject of her
own desire.

The Dilemma of Sexual Self-Determination in Women

LEARNING HOw to be Subjects of their own sexual desires

is both a confusing and complicated task for women in a
world that is ruled by male sexual arousal and desire. Unable
to awaken their own sexual pleasures and capacities, many
women complain of feeling devitalized and even erotically
dead. Wildly sexually active younger women and almost inac-
tive midlife women have all told me about feeling confused, dis-
satisfied, restless, even bored by their sexual encounters.
 Sex through the Looking Glass i

Rarely—personally, socially, therapeutically—do I hear reports

of ongoing sexual fulfillment in women. More often than not I
hear about women wanting to be released from the “burden” of
having to deal with men’s sexual desires.
Midlife women in particular frequently tell me in therapy
about how they experience more arousal and eroticism in con-
versations, movies, nursing their babies, masturbating, and
fantasies than in having sexual encounters with their partners.
These women tend to believe that they are having sex for their
partners rather than themselves.
Marla and Jack, a couple in their early thirties with two
preschool children, come to psychotherapy because their sex
life has no vitality, almost no spark at all. Marla says that she
doesn’t desire sex anymore. She reports that she is willing to
make love under some circumstances, and that she often
enjoys it when she has it, but she isn’t motivated to seek it. She
believes that her lack of desire is connected to her husband’s
lack of intimacy. She says, “Jack treats me like an object.”
Angry about this, she has decided that she will never again
pretend to want sex when she doesn’t feel the desire. From her
perspective she has become sexually “liberated,” claiming con-
trol over her own body. Marla is clear about wanting to keep
this control until she is guaranteed an outcome different from
what she has known: having sex primarily for Jack, gratifying
his desires because she fears his agitation and anger when they
don’t have regular sex.
Jack sees things differently. He says he feels rejected by his
wife. Since he believed he could become uncontrollably angry
if he appealed to Marla directly for intimate sexual contact and
she flatly refused, he agreed that she could have the sexual
lead. But since the time they made this agreement, Marla has
never pursued him sexually. Jack has consciously chosen to
78 WOMEN AND DESIRE

be somewhat emotionally distant from Marla to protect him-

self from his feelings of vulnerability and rejection. He isn’t
happy with this arrangement, but it is all he can do with his
confusion and pain about the fact that Marla doesn’t want him
physically.
In our therapy sessions it became clear that Marla learned
how to feel sexual only by looking sexy. In her adolescent and
young adult years, she saw herself as “potentially attractive,” by
which she meant that she believed she looked “better than aver-
age” when she had on the right makeup and clothes. If a man lit
up with excitement in her presence, this brought her pleasure
and often left her feeling sexually aroused. But now Marla feels
she is less desirable. She believes that her thighs are too heavy,
and she doesn’t like the thin wrinkle lines gathering around her
mouth. Marla thinks that she couldn’t attract a man again.
When she was young Marla learned how to flirt and charm,
but she never learned how to have reliable sexual pleasure.
Instead of having and practicing orgasm, she thought about
and practiced being exciting and pretty. In those days she
never felt that sexual arousal was in any way under her control.
It just happened sometimes when she looked good and felt
good about herself.
Without clear sexual needs of her own, Marla felt that she
was having sex not for herself but rather because someone else
wanted it. Even after she married Jack—who clearly desired
her sexually—she never fully enjoyed intercourse, although
she found the flirting, cuddling, and foreplay pleasant. Marla
tried to have orgasms with Jack through manual stimulation,
but she was too self-conscious. “It took too long; his arm
almost fell off the last time we tried it.” Although she could
achieve orgasm alone, Marla eventually concluded that her
 Sex through the Looking Glass 79

body was just not as responsive as some women’s. She initially

thought she could have sex for Jack because he was unhappy
without it. Then, a few months ago, she told Jack that she
didn’t want him to put any more pressure on her for sex, that
she would ask for it when she wanted it. But she almost never
wants it. Unconscious of her drive to be desired, she believes
that her husband’s emotional distance is most of the reason she
doesn’t want sex, yet she admits that she never really liked sex
that much anyway. For her sex often wasn’t pleasurable; some-
times it wasn’t even pleasant.
By contrast, since adolescence Jack has known what gives
him sexual pleasure, and he doesn’t believe that Marla—an
intelligent and perceptive person—could be so vague about
and uninvolved with her own sexual desire. When asked
directly whether he finds Marla attractive, Jack says, “Oh,
sure,” in a warm, convincing way. Both acknowledge that
Jack’s attraction to her is not the problem. He fears that Marla’s
lack of desire is his fault: maybe he doesn’t have the right
approach, the right body, or the right personality. He views her
lack of sexual desire as a personal affront, and he becomes
caught in wanting to be the Object of her desire.
But Jack’s fears that the problem rests with him are mostly
unfounded. At the root of their sexual difficulties is Marla’s
compulsion to be seen and reflected as sexy, arousing, beauti-
ful. She learned to feel aroused when someone wanted her but
not to develop her own sexual interest and pleasure. Now that
she wants greater control over her life, Marla doesn’t want to
have sex for someone else. And Jack now shares in her predica-
ment of wanting to be sexually desired himself. Neither part-
ner seems able to budge in this sexual standstill; it’s as though
someone has turned off the key to their self-determination.
80 WOMEN AND DESIRE

Following Psyche’s lead, Marla must look into the darkness

of her death-marriage and discover what her Amor looks like.
Her desire has been for ageless beauty and the seduction of
power, not for a sexual relationship that is mutually pleasur-
able. Marla’s refusal to have sex “for” Jack could be seen as a
first step toward admitting the truth of inner deadness, yet if
she were to believe that exercising this kind of negative con-
trol is in fact freedom, she would never come to know herself as
the Subject of her sexual desires. She has become a version of
the hag in the woods—ashamed of her body, fighting feelings
of inadequacy, afraid she is less female than other women, but
determined to stick to her own experience in evaluating what
she wants to do.
Like Psyche, Marla has been trapped in the dark. While she
has learned how to excite others through touch and appear-
ance, she is caught in someone else’s (Jack’s or the culture’s)
fantasy of the desire-awakening maiden. Afraid and angry, she
has tried to call a halt to the pantomime, but doing so has also
halted her own sexual development. She must allow her iden-
tity as a desire-awakening maiden to die in favor of a new iden-
tity, not as a hag but as a passionate partner, a loving friend,
and a self-determining lover.
Through acknowledging her insecurities and sorting out
how they are related to her hag and muse complexes, Marla
can allow her old patriarchal identity to die. Like Psyche she
has to practice courage and discernment to understand the
meaner dynamics between her and other women, between her
and Jack. For instance, Marla needs to acknowledge that she is
obsessive about her appearance and constantly compares her-
self with younger, slimmer women. She needs to acknowledge
her self-consciousness in the bedroom and learn how to relax,
 Sex through the Looking Glass 81

so that she can experience sexual pleasure instead of anxiety

about her attractiveness. Rather than look to Jack to provide
her with feelings of sexual worth, she must begin to explore her
own wants. Only by acknowledging these aspects of the
meaner face of her desires can Marla gradually free herself—
body and mind—so that she can develop an atmosphere of
eros and dialogue. Then she and Jack can talk respectfully
about their pleasures and needs.

True Love

NATURALLY THIS KIND of conversation includes a greater

vulnerability and openness, a willingness to be authentic in
the presence of a partner. As I talked about it in the first chap-
ter, authenticity opens the possibility for real love. Many
people tell me that they don’t really know what “love” is and
that they believe the word is overused. Love means a particular
kind of connection, and it cannot be overused or overspoken.
As the poet Octavio Paz described it, true love can happen
only when desire meets reality. Until Psyche could see Amor,
she shaped his image through her projections and fears.
Although she desired Amor, she could not love him because
she did not know him. When he was revealed she lost him—
symbolizing the loss of the romantic ideal in favor of the real,
authentic knowledge of a partner. Amor fled because he was
not human but idealized as a god. Psyche could return to him
in the end because she had become his equal, and she had
accomplished the tasks of courage and discernment that
allowed her to become a Subject of Desire.
Love—one of the most transcendent of human feelings—
emerges only after you and your beloved are deeply known to
82 WOMEN AND DESIRE

each other. Knowing and tolerating your own and your partner’s
vulnerabilities, frailties, needs, and limitations allows you to
gradually recognize that you cannot bring another under your
control through seduction or desire. The other will be who he
or she is. A deep and abiding affection for someone you know
and accept, someone you realize is not under your control, is
love. Love—including erotic love—teaches us that though we
have limitless desires, we have limited control, and paradoxi-
cally the only way to transcend our limitations is to love others
in their imperfection.

Freeing Ourselves from Male Fantasies

THE DILEMMA OF female sexual desire is that the light of

truth turned on our desires will reveal that we live in a world
of male sexual imagination. What has been hidden from our
awareness is the anxiety, contempt, and desire we feel in relation
to male images of erotic female power. These are the products
of our often hidden power plays in response to male fantasies
that continue to hold sway over the collective imagination.
We may be tempted to believe that sexual desire is primarily
male, and that withholding compliance is our only freedom,
but ultimately this mistaken belief cuts us off from our own
erotic imaginations, the possibility of discovering and acting
on our authentic pleasures and needs.
Only when we take full responsibility for how we have
knowingly or unknowingly played out the power dynamics of
the male imagination—in wanting to be or envying the Object
of Desire—can we learn to connect freely to ourselves and oth-
ers without excessive self-consciousness and control. This free-
dom is the product of knowledge, especially self-knowledge. To
 Sex through the Looking Glass 83

be accountable for your own desires, both the meaner and the
kinder ones, is to take the first step toward being able to act as a
whole person, as someone who can tolerate and accept a vari-
ety of motives in yourself and others.
In itself the desire to be seen as attractive or powerful is not
negative. Indeed it probably arises from wanting to know that
one’s love is good. Even as infants we want to give our affection
to others, not simply receive from them. The give-and-take of
love, one of the earliest dialogues in human life, depends on
being loved and lovable. Wanting to be wanted can be healthy
and engaging when it is playful and light, and remains in the
service of love.
Then it does not become a deadening compulsion that
overtakes our erotic pleasures and desires. As the story of Psy-
che shows us, we can free ourselves from our hidden desires by
bringing them into the light, then we can develop ourselves
as erotic partners by claiming our equality and freedom. As
erotic partners in fully passionate embraces, we can learn to
transcend our ordinary boundaries of self-other through the
practice of sexual love. We women have this possibility within
our grasp when we can dissolve the self-hatreds and self-
consciousness that keep us unknowingly focused on power
rather than love.
 FOUR

Hothouse Mothering
and the Divine Child

HERE IS MUCH about contemporary motherhood that

keeps mothers unknowingly focused on hidden needs for
power, on wanting to be wanted. Idealizing mother-
hood—speaking only of wonder, nurturance, and good-
ness in the mother-child relationship—encourages us to
believe that Mother is the most critical ingredient in child
development, and that mothering is the most important task a
woman can perform.
As in the 1950s and ’60s, many Americans today seem to
believe that conscientious mothering contributes more to our
future than any other work a woman can do. Midlife and
younger women contemplate the decision of whether to
become a mother with awe and uncertainty, but they are influ-
enced by friends and media to believe that a full-time emo-
tional commitment to mothering—especially for infants and

84
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 85

young toddlers—is the most important role a woman can

assume.
This basic assumption about the singular importance of
Mother—exclusive of Father, peers, the broader cultural con-
text—is highly misleading and often wrong. Many influences
that shape a child’s life, from the norms and values of our soci-
ety to a child’s peers, can be more important to identity forma-
tion and lifelong development. Certainly the father and other
adults can be as important as caregivers and role models as the
mother is, and individual temperament, sibling order, develop-
mental potentials, and unpreventable circumstances all play
major roles in determining who a child will become.
The image of the perfect mother (selfless, tireless, generous,
inventive, a good cook) is the bane of every mother’s exis-
tence. Wanting to be wanted, mothers often strive to fulfill this
wounding ideal of perfect selflessness. Cut off from their own
desires and pleasures, unaware of how much they want to be
admired, mothers can become anxious, depressed, even disso-
ciated from themselves, filled with worry and fear about the
details of their children’s behaviors and surroundings.
“Hothouse mothering” is promoted by this mixture of ideal-
ization and anxiety: a complete absorption in the child’s or
children’s world, leading to an all-consuming identification
with the mother role, with how well the child is developing,
and with how close to “perfection” the mother-child connec-
tion is.
Women cannot be faulted for wanting to be perfect moth-
ers; once again they appear to be offered power in a society that
repeatedly declares a mother’s irreplaceable importance. Yet
they never see this power materialize, and they are never
invited to explore their feelings of betrayal and anger at the
86 WOMEN AND DESIRE

ways they are disappointed and exploited by society and by

their offspring. Many mothers of grown-up children talk
regretfully about having spent the better part of their adult
years “sacrificing” for their children, who, now fully grown, are
often critical of their mother. We give only lip service to the
idea that mothers are to be honored and loved; children do not
feel responsible for sustaining an interest in their mothers’
lives. Mother is perceived simply as a resource for others’ needs
rather than as a person in her own right, and many mothers
lose themselves in the role.
The anxiety and idealization of hothouse mothering are not
the invention of women but the product of our collective
inability to respond to the physical and psychological needs of
parents of young children, especially mothers. There are no
choices available in many areas of responsibility for the devel-
oping child. All too often Mother is the only person whom
teachers, relatives, neighbors hold accountable for the child’s
welfare and protection. Without an outlet for expressing their
anger at being exploited and manipulated through idealiza-
tion—isn’t it just wonderful being a mother!—mothers uncon-
sciously turn resentment and fear into shame and guilt about
themselves. Women who struggle every day to do the best pos-
sible job as mothers feel constantly inferior to the task, afraid
that their shortcomings are the primary reason they cannot
measure up to the image of the ideal mother.

Of Woman Born

I AM A MOTHER myself—to my two biological children and

to four stepchildren. In mothering these six young people, I
was challenged and grew and changed. I love them all and
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 87

have encountered each one in both exhilarating and exhaust-

ing ways, but most of all ] came to admire and respect them for
the strong, compassionate people they are. In their twenties
and thirties now, they have all graduated from college and are
useful citizens. They are their own people, as indeed they have
always seemed to me to be.
I view myself as a successful mother who has been deeply
engaged in being a parent but also deeply engaged with other
things. My relationships with my grown-up children are fun,
demanding, fascinating, and complex. I still become unduly
involved in their vulnerabilities and life stresses, and I have
had my share of anxiety, fear, shame, and guilt. But however
much | have doubted my own mothering habits, practices, and
methods along the way of their growing up, I never doubted
that I loved my children and wished them well. I am no differ-
ent from most mothers in this way.
I became a mother when many of my peers were heading
into careers. Married to an older man and uncertain about my
future, I got pregnant in my twenties—during the early
1970s—when feminism was just beginning to sway American
women away from the traditional roles of wife and mother.
My unexpected ambivalence about being a parent to my
first biological child, and my haunting, irrational fears of doing
harm to her, roiled inside me after only a few weeks of single-
handed responsibility for my infant daughter. I could find
nothing in the child-rearing manuals at my disposal, nothing
in the faces or voices of my cousins who were also young
mothers, and no hint in my mother’s face to indicate that my
ambivalent feelings (especially the fleeting impulse to suffo-
cate my infant) were normal or even imaginable. So I hid my
feelings and read everything about motherhood | could find in
88 WOMEN AND DESIRE

psychoanalytic and feminist literature, only to be further mad-

dened by what I encountered there: either mothers were
blamed for all their children’s problems (psychoanalysis) or
they were analyzed in vaguely Marxist terms (feminism), but
their experiences and development were not recorded. | felt
sure that I was potentially psychotic in some way that would
manifest itself during a difficult middle-of-the-night feeding.
And then | found Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, in which
she seemed to address me directly in her historical and per-
sonal account of being a mother. Words like these became my
lifeline:

That calm, sure, unambivalent woman who moved

through the pages of the [infant care] manuals I read
seemed as unlike me as an astronaut... . Throughout
pregnancy and nursing, women are urged to relax, to
mime the serenity of madonnas. No one mentions the
psychic crisis of bearing a first child, the excitation of
long-buried feelings about one’s own mother, the sense
of confused power and powerlessness, of being taken
over on the one hand and of touching new physical and
psychic potentialities on the other.... No one men-
tions the strangeness of attraction—which can be as
single-minded and overwhelming as the early days of a
love affair—to a being so tiny, so dependent, so folded-
in to itself—who is, and yet is not, part of oneself.

Rich’s reflections and knowledge liberated me. Reading and

rereading her account of her own maternal being was the
only thing that sustained me in the first year of my daugh-
ter’s life.
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 89

Now I feel almost lucky that | became a mother so young

and so set apart from my peers. I had only my cousins, living
hundreds of miles away, and the strangers on the street and in
the pediatrician’s office to advise me. Early on I recognized
that being a mother evokes a lot of advice from others, mostly
unasked for and often unwelcome. Both women and men
would speak to me in the most personal terms on the streets, in
shopping malls, in women’s rest rooms—advising me on nurs-
ing, disciplining my daughter, telling me how to feed and
clothe her. Suddenly I was the center of attention, but in a way
that was destabilizing and often deeply confusing. | heard a lot
about others’ experiences and was never asked about my own. I
heard many idealizing comments (How wonderful! How beau-
tiful! How special!) but almost nothing about the confusion
that haunted me. But because the people advising me were
largely strangers, | could set their advice aside and return to
Rich’s wisdom, settle into my own experience, keep a journal,
and determine to free myself from cultural prejudices.
I made friends with other mothers who had children the
same age as my daughter, but I did not put much stock in their
warnings and admonitions either. Many of them were doing
what their mothers did, but I knew that I didn’t want the life
my mother had had. Most of my close friends were not having
babies, nor did they even seem to be interested in the fact that
I had. They were focused on going to graduate school, figuring
our their own lives, finding a love affair that might last. They
seemed to trust that I was a good-enough mother in a general
way, and that soothed me.
The media had lost sight of motherhood for a few years
there in the seventies, because feminism and the countercul-
ture were drawing attention away from the more traditional
go WOMEN AUN DE DES TRE

themes of family. Looking back, I recognize how J was able to

find my own way into my experiences, and to feel the guilt and
anxiety of my complexes as my complexes and not as some
reality that meant I was not an adequate mother.
A friend of my husband once said that she had had her
babies when her “hormones were high and brainpower low,”
and I feel something similar. I didn’t give a lot of thought to
having children; I wanted them and | had them. Frequently |
reminded myself that all adults had arrived here the same
way—through mothers. Therefore, | would think, I can be
okay with this; no matter how badly I feel I’m doing, I’ll mud-
dle through as well as most. And | know now that I wasn’t
doing badly in my relationship with my daughter or in my care
for her; it was only in my feelings that I suffered. | was afraid of
the range of negative, primitive feelings coupled with swollen,
prideful ones. I was both enraptured with this baby and angry
that she had stolen my life from me.
It is significant that | became a feminist at just about the
same time I became a mother. Rich’s book taught me my first
feminist lesson: that my experience as a woman was not in the
cultural record, and that I should not measure myself against
that record, especially in regard to motherhood. I quickly saw
that I needed to hold a strong distinction between the ideal of
motherhood and my experiences as a mother.
That deep insight has served me well. By the end of the first
year of my daughter’s life, I was in psychotherapy, exploring
how to put together my life in terms of the specifics of things
meaningful to me, as a woman and an equal partner and par-
ent. Daring, sustaining, challenging, and purposeful, my life
would encompass a context bigger than wife and mother yet
integrate these roles into it, I said to myself. |wanted to make
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child gl

creative use of the awesome responsibility, tender moments,

and tearful mistakes that are the stuff of mothering; I wanted to
read and write about it, to teach it, and to help women recog-
nize and understand the ambivalence of it.
From the constraints of my mother’s life—as a working-
class wife and stay-at-home mother—I concluded that I did
not want to be a full-time mother, without other work that I
could love. Besides, I needed to work for a living because my
husband and I could not support our family on his income
alone. I knew also that I didn’t want to be a full-time profes-
sional without children, because I loved a home that was filled
with life. And my home was soon that—filled with children
and stepchildren and pets and plants and lots of energy.
When my children were toddlers, | went back to graduate
school and became a psychologist, then moved from the Mid-
west to teach in a women’s college on the East Coast. While
teaching developmental psychology to graduate students, |
searched for a book that would situate the experience of being
a mother in a bigger context than attachment theory and chil-
dren’s development. I wanted my students to understand
mothering as distinct from motherhood and to penetrate the
social commentary that makes motherhood seem so ideal and
pressures mothers to want to be perfect.

Hothouse Mothering

I FoUND A revolutionary book, Inventing Motherhood, by

Ann Dally, an English psychiatrist, that put into context a
mother’s dilemma of anxiety and betrayal. In relating the spe-
cial difficulties of women in my mother’s generation—those
who gave birth in the decade after World War [I—Dally
Q2 WOMEN AND DESTRE

describes what I am calling hothouse mothering: the preoccu-

pied style of mothering that inflates a mother’s every decision
with portents of future meaning.
This style of mothering is both relatively new and scientif-
cally indefensible. As Dally points out, few of us have a histori-
cal perspective on child rearing or any suspicion that what we
may consider most “natural” for mothers and children—leav-
ing mothers alone with their children—had never been tried
before the mid-twentieth century. Instead, we claim to have a
“scientific” account, in which we supposedly understand what
is best for a child’s development.
Yet it is odd, as she points out, how so-called scientific ne
ories of child development that focus almost exclusively on the
mother-child pair have paralleled the idealization of mother-
hood and the ways in which women have been promoted as
ideal nurturers of their children. As Dally says,

When large numbers of mothers have never before the

mid-twentieth century been shut up alone with their
small children for most of their working hours, suddenly
it appeared that this was the ideal, the norm, essential for
the healthy psychological development of the child and
a demonstration of feminine normality in the mother.

Looking at how today’s adults—reared in the first era of hot-

house mothering—appear to compare with adults of the past,
Dally suggests that we might conclude that “the era of unbro-
ken and exclusive maternal care has produced the most neu-
rotic, disjointed, alienated and drug-addicted generation ever
known.”
Many of us in the baby boomer generation grew up in the
exclusive company of one adult at home: a depressed mother
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 93

who was frustrated by her isolation and unaware of her frustra-

tion. No doubt it is better to grow up with at least one adult in
charge than with no adults at all, but the hothouse isolation of
women and children has produced psychological difficulties
that are rarely expressed in any media accounts of mothers,
working mothers, attachment bonds, or child development. In
my practice of psychotherapy, I mostly treat the effects of nega-
tive mother complexes: the ways that now-grown-up children
internalized the expectations and anxieties of a woman with
whom they often felt emotionally trapped.
Even the most nurturant mother, when she is alone with
her children for too long, will have episodes of depression,
anxiety, or agitation that can feel dangerous to a dependent
child. When mothers are left unsupported and have no choices
about where they can direct their attention, they are even
more likely to become immersed in self-conscious emotions
(shame, envy, guilt, pride, jealousy) that interfere with their
ability to concentrate directly on their activities. In comparing
themselves (sometimes obsessively) with the ideals of mother-
hood, women increase their feelings of inferiority and self-
consciousness and long to be wanted, admired, validated. And,
of course, they turn to their children for these things.
Liz is an example of a contemporary hothouse mother.
She came to psychotherapy because her husband, Frank, rec-
ommended it. He was afraid of her intense emotional needs
and ruminations, with which she confronted him when he
returned from work at the end of a long day of physical and
emotional demands.
Liz is in her late twenties. She had been a successful insur-
ance adjuster before she began to stay at home as a full-time
mother with her first child, Julie, who was one year old when
Liz began therapy. “At first I thought that my angry, scared
94 WOMEN AND DESIRE

feelings were related to not wanting to get pregnant again.

Frank and I have always talked about having a second child
close to the first. Lately | have been panicked at the thought.”
Liz explained that she had just begun to feel that she had her
body back to normal. She had stopped nursing and was now
within five pounds of her prepregnancy weight. “And I just
started to take some dance classes on Tuesday nights. I don’t
want to give those up.”
Liz feels good about how Julie is doing. “I can tell that Julie
is a happy, normal baby—and sometimes when she laughs at
me or makes one of her funny faces, I think I’ll just explode
with pride and joy. But then I realize that Julie can’t be the
only person who makes me feel good. In fact, that’s probably a
big problem. I don’t really feel very good about myself or Frank
these days.”
Liz said she thought that Frank was angry because together
they had initially decided that she would leave her work, be a
full-time mom, and have their two children close together.
“Now that I’m not ready, I think he’s frustrated. Not only that,
when he asked me recently when I would be ready, I told him
maybe never. | don’t know if I want to have another child.”
When we talked about why Liz had changed her mind, she
said, “Becoming a mother has changed me. I used to be a
friend, a professional, a wife. Now I’m just a mom twenty-four
hours a day. Although I love Julie, and being Julie’s mom, I feel
like other parts of myself are dying. That scares me, and Frank
doesn’t understand at all.”
From her description of her daily life, it was clear how iso-
lated Liz had become, especially from her professional friends.
She often felt incapable of making a phone call or having
lunch with an old friend she didn’t seem to have anything in
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 95

common with anymore. At home with Julie, she could go

through an entire day without speaking to another adult.
“When Frank walks through the door, he’s never sure if he’s
going to speak to a sane adult or some screaming banshee. I can
talk his ear off or give him the cold shoulder without a
moment’s notice. I’m really angry that he still has his old life
and I don’t. And, of course, I know it’s not fair to be angry with
him. After all, I chose to stay at home with Julie.”
Frank and Liz rarely relate as a couple anymore. Finances
are tight now that they don’t have Liz’s income, and she feels
guilty about paying a baby-sitter so that they can go out alone
together. Frank is working extra hours, and he usually doesn’t
get home until 8:00 p.M., when Liz is exhausted. They fall into
bed at 10:00, and Liz then finds herself feeling angry that she is
so tired. “I’m so tired of being needed by Julie. There’s nothing
left to give to Frank, and I honestly tend to blame him for the
situation I am in, although I know that’s irrational.”
Yet, like many hothouse mothers, Liz is quick to defend her
choice. “I have always felt that I would be the best caregiver for
my child. Who else could be more interested in her? Why
should I have strangers raising her if I can afford to do it
myself?” When Liz thinks back to her own childhood, she says
she wants to be a “more involved mother than my mother was.
I was a ‘latchkey’ kid after my mom and dad divorced and my
mom went out to work as a secretary. I always felt responsible
for my younger brother, and he was usually mad at me for boss-
ing him around. I want to do a better job than my mom did.”
Liz’s mother lives in a nearby town, and she is very support-
ive of Liz staying at home full-time with Julie. “My mom says
now that she feels really guilty for the problems that my
brother has. He didn’t do very well in high school and got
96 WOMEN AND DESIRE

mixed up in drugs. She wants me to do a better job than she

did, and she’s always willing to take care of Julie, but my mom’s
still working, and she doesn’t have much time, except on
weekends.”
Liz believes that she is lucky to have a choice. She seems
unaware that her “choice” is embedded in a social and cultural
context of what is ideal for a child: care from a full-time
mother at home. She assumes that her decision is best for Julie,
even though Liz has never examined the long-term losses
(such as a more harmonious relationship with Frank) to both
herself and Julie that her decision implies.
Liz unknowingly increases the guilt her own mother feels
about her brother by failing to assign it where it rightfully
belongs—to Liz’s father, the school system, and a lot of other
people who failed to lend a hand in assisting her mother in
raising healthy children. Taking on all the responsibility for
Julie’s development and welfare seemed to Liz to be normal,
natural. “Everyone agreed. But there are days when I’m just
miserable and feel that the ‘choice’ to be a full-time mom
doesn’t seem to be mine. Why did everyone, including me, seem
to assume that I’d be the best parent, the one to stay at home?
And why didn’t anyone tell me that it would be so hard?”

The Invention of Motherhood

THERE HAVE ALWAYS been mothers, but motherhood (like

childhood) was only recently invented. Not until the Victo-
rian era did motherhood first emerge in popular literature as a
social concept. Earlier it was just a fact: one was a mother or
not. But in the later part of the nineteenth century, being a
mother became associated with the virtues of nurturance and
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 97

femininity, and phrases such as “true motherhood” were used

to describe an ideal condition imposed on women’s mothering.
Victorian mothers were often depicted in paintings or early
photos as angelic, madonnalike, and serene. One can’t imagine
that these mothers ever directed a cross word at their children.
Perhaps they never did; they were not full-time mothers.
As Dally points out, the mothers pictured in these idealized
portraits were privileged women who did not provide direct
care for their children but had wet nurses at birth and nannies
later. The aesthetic and cultural origin of idealized mother-
hood is the privileged mother who saw her children only when
they were bathed and fed, and could be enjoyed. When
contemporary full-time mothers are urged to see themselves as
versions of the idealized mother, ironically they lack the infor-
mation that the unambivalent, smiling madonna had a lot of
hired help.
In the past, middle- and upper-class women hired servants
to care for their children, while farming and working women
relied on aunts and grannies; children and mothers were rarely
alone and isolated. Before mothers were meant to be the singu-
lar caregivers for their children, they were portrayed as gentler
and kinder than mother substitutes. The latter were regularly
depicted in childhood stories and nursery rhymes as witchy
images of the split-off hatred and resentment that develop in
children because of their long dependence and powerlessness.
Recall the mean nanny, the nasty older sister, the crabby
maiden aunt, and the dreaded stepmother of folk and fairy
tales. These archetypal figures of the hag-bitch are blamed for
destroying the child’s fragile soul, while Mother is preserved as
saintly. The fact was that these mother subs often did most of
the disciplining, and, as we saw in the first chapter, it has
98 WOMEN AND DESIRE

always been easy to demonize a woman who expresses a power-

ful negative emotion. No doubt there were caregivers—older
siblings, poor house servants, and others—who were bitter and
spiteful, jealous of the more pampered mama. No doubt they
took out their resentments on the children, but I also believe
that the mother subs were especially negativized because the
dangerous hostility of a child’s dependence could be safely pro-
jected onto them, preserving the image of a good and wise
mother.
Idealization can be understood as a feeling of love isolated
from hate for someone whom you actually love and hate. The
image of the idealized must be elevated in order to hide its
shadow, its darker component. The hatred is kept out of aware-
ness, and the love becomes unrealistic and fanciful. Fantasies
of perfection prevent the hate from becoming conscious. If
someone were to suggest that hate is present along with love,
angry feelings would be provoked.
The idealized mother of the Victorian era could be admired
for her constantly loving nature because she was often unavail-
able. Perhaps she was more enthusiastic and positive when
she engaged with her children than the full-time mother can
often be. It is most important, though, to recognize that the
unambivalently loving and nurturant mother—the origin of
our ideals of motherhood—is not a full-time mother but some-
one privileged enough to hire a nurse or nanny to carry out the
more difficult and/or dirty tasks.
What we now expect of a full-time mother—a deeply felt
connection with her infant, a desire for a better life for her
child than for herself, and a devotion to the needs of each
child—increases her fearful responsibility for her child’s wel-
fare. Consciously or unconsciously, a mother often fears her
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 99

negative feelings and splits them off into attacks on her partner
or herself so that her feelings will not endanger her child. In
this situation, especially in the context of the idealization of
motherhood, a woman will either come to see herself as the
dreaded hag-bitch or believe that her partner, her own mother,
or someone else is sucking her dry of vitality. Like Liz, most
mothers attempt to protect their children from such negative
feelings. If these split-off feelings are enacted against the child,
a mother may become abusive—usually in an instant in which
she suddenly feels enraged at her child. Alternatively, if the
mother feels a flash of rage or hatred at the child but does not
attack, she may believe that she is an abusive mother even
though she has not really enacted her hostility.
Idealizing our children or our mothers suppresses our guilt
and anxiety about our hateful feelings, but it prevents us from
knowing the truth of the ambivalence involved in the long
dependence of human children. Especially in a society like
ours, which hypervalues independence, adolescent and some-
times even adult children are free to express their hostility
about dependency needs. Biting the hand that feeds them,
they issue complaints, criticisms, even open attacks aimed at
reducing the inner importance of Mother. This kind of adoles-
cent hostility is portrayed in TV shows and movies, but rarely
with any sympathy for the mother. More often the mother is
the target of damning humor or criticism. Mothers themselves
rarely get equal time, either at home or in the movies, to
express their feelings about the long dependence of their chil-
dren or their responses to being vilified by adolescent humor.
Instead of allowing mothers to become aware of the range of
ambivalent feelings that are a part of mothering, the doctrine
of hothouse mothering encourages us to become increasingly
I0o WOMEN AND DESIRE

self-conscious about whether we are meeting the demands of

the ideal. Are we adequately selfless, courageous, calm, assured,
patient, nurturant? Hothouse mothering promotes total identi-
fication with the child’s needs and wants, so much so that we
become oblivious to the needs and wants of other adults
around us as well as our own. We are dominated by wanting to
be wanted by our child or children and wanting to be validated
and seen as ideal mothers. Having no world outside such an
obsession with motherhood, a woman can get lost in a hall of
mirrors that distort her feelings of worth and her ability to see
where she is useful and successful.
Having worthwhile work outside the home, and effective
child care for dependent children, can be a step toward healthy
mothering for a woman and her child or children. But a social
climate of hothouse mothering spoils the ameliorative effects
of mothers having lives of their own. It undermines social sup-
ports for effective child care from mother subs and encourages
women to feel ashamed and guilty for wanting a life separate
from child-rearing responsibilities. So-called expert advice has
seemed to make it impossible for women to wholeheartedly
practice the more traditional form of child rearing: having
diverse activities in their lives and sharing mothering responsi-
bilities with a variety of others.

Attachment Theory

AS MOST PEOPLE KNOW, two-thirds of all American moth-

ers of dependent children are now in the labor force. More
mothers than nonmothers have paid jobs or are actively look-
ing for them. Most working mothers have full-time jobs—
thirty-five hours or more weekly. Yet in place of developing
support systems that would help women combine work and
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child IOI

family, we continue to extend and develop beliefs that full-

time mothers are the best caregivers for their children. Natu-
rally this has encouraged a bad case of hothouse mothering in
women who stay home to care for children, and perhaps an
even worse case of guilt and anxiety in the majority of women,
who are employed away from home.
A great deal has been written about the “second shift” of
work and responsibility faced by mothers when they arrive
home from the workplace. In part this problem arises from the
idealization of motherhood: fathers, relatives, and hired help
aren’t as ideal as the mother. In part it arises from the lack of
power (status, income, decision making) connected to mother-
ing itself and the reality of the universal ambivalence felt by
children toward their caregivers. In part it arises from the fact
that effective, safe child care is not available to many poor,
working-class, and even middle-income mothers. Whether the
mother works outside the home or not, the psychological con-
dition of hothouse mothering—as it affects mothers and chil-
dren—is neither natural nor healthy.
Much of what we currently regard as a scientific defense
for the singular importance of the mother comes from attach-
ment theory and a set of studies carried out on British children
separated from their parents during and after World War II.
Attachment theory is a model of different “patterns of attach-
ment” that are formed in our earliest dependent relationships.
Early bonding, characterized as secure, anxious, or avoidant,
has been shown to carry over to later personal development
through our abilities, self-confidence, and emotional tenden-
cies in relationship.
Psychiatrists Rene Spitz and John Bowlby were the original
authors of the studies investigating the attachment behaviors
of war orphans. These first studies were used to draft an official
102 WrO MEE ING ASN ID Dibrs GSE

British governmental document that encouraged women to

leave their places in the work world and become full-time
caregivers for their children when their husbands returned
from the war. The original studies, based on children who were
left in dire circumstances without contact with their parents,
do not readily generalize to the child who is left in effective
child care.
Later attachment studies, though, especially through the
pioneering work of Mary Main and her colleagues, did show
that all children develop certain patterns of attachment in
infancy that have important effects on other areas of their
functioning, such as self-confidence, emotional security, and
achievement. In my therapeutic practice and in my writings
and teaching, | have made ample use of attachment theory
and research findings. I am convinced that our early bonds do
carry over into our later adult bonds and identity formation,
although with mediating effects throughout childhood and
adolescence. Mapping relational styles in terms of the three
major attachment patterns—secure, anxious, and avoidant—
is useful to psychotherapists for diagnosing and helping with
problems in childhood and adult relationships.
However, it is misleading to use these findings to support
the singular importance of a full-time mother. From attach-
ment research we know that children normally form their orig-
inal attachment bonds in the first six months of life. This is a
fundamental base for later development. During these first six
months, a normal infant can form attachment bonds with at
least three or four, and probably up to five or six, caregivers
who can function as this secure base. If this were not so, ear-
lier generations would have been seriously impaired, because
infants were often cared for by several people—an older sib-
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 103

ling, a hired helper, a nanny, a grandmother, or a neighbor, in

addition: to the mother.
Until modern birth control a woman was pregnant an aver-
age of fifteen times during her adult life and so was giving birth
or lactating most of the time. Older siblings and other helpers
cared for the younger ones as much as the mother did. Also,
mothers did not cherish each individual infant as a unique per-
sonality, as we now do. As Dally reminds us, “Two centuries
ago, of every four babies born alive, only one was likely to be
alive on its first birthday. ... The death rate between the ages
of one and five was a further eighteen per cent, and the death
rate throughout the rest of youth was also very high.” Although
infant mortality has fallen steadily in the past two hundred
years, it was still high during the early part of the twentieth
century. Only since World War II have parents been able to be
reasonably confident that their children would survive.
What was it like to be a mother with the possibility that at
least half of your children would fail to survive long enough to
grow into adolescents? Losing one’s children through death
was regarded as a natural part of life; thus it was important to
have as many children as possible so that at least some might
survive. Although grief over the loss of an infant or child is
clearly universal, mothers of the past seem to have had a more
resigned, even detached, attitude. For example, Dally quotes
one devoted mother of many children in the 1770s, who writes
in her journal after the death of a newborn: “One cannot
grieve after her much, and | have just now other things to
think of.” Often two children in the same family were given
the same first name so that at least one of them might carry
the name into adulthood. Mothers were more emotionally
reserved about their involvement because it wasn’t clear that
104 WOMEN ASND DES TRE

an individual child would survive until that child had reached

some maturity, often adolescence.
In contrast, our current tendency to see each child as
unique, and each mother as solely responsible to develop that
unique potential, is a very recent development coming directly
from official British and American decisions to proselytize
women to leave the workplace to make room for men return-
ing from World War II. John Bowlby was swept up into this
movement not only because he was a psychoanalyst and scien-
tist but because he was raised by a nanny.
A product of the British upper classes, Bowlby had seen his
mother from a distance that permitted him to think she would
be the most important person for his development. Of Bowlby,
Dally writes,

He feels that mothers should be there all the time, as he

puts it “constant attention day and night, seven days a
week and 365 in the year.” This is to him much more
important than how a mother feels about it, whether it
suits her personality and ultimately her children, or
what happens if she can’t do it... . Children brought up
by nannies tend to idealize their mothers. They see her
from afar and think how wonderful it would be if they
could be looked after by her.

Many current studies are as slanted as Bowlby’s biases,

assuming that the mother’s constant presence is the ideal con-
dition for the child. Most popular and scientific manuals and
standards for mothering are based on studies of animals, tribal
peoples, or working-class and lower-middle-class mothers. The
scientists who do the studies and write the books investigate
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 105

either captive groups or those who need money and can be

paid to be studied. Studies of mothering are usually written
without reference to the social contexts of participants,
although the type of attention and care provided by care-
givers—mothers and others—might be affected by social and
financial conditions. The old system of paid help—nannies or
other employed helpers—still exists among privileged people,
but it is not widely studied because this group does not need
the money paid by researchers.
Journalist Joan Peters’s book, When Mothers Work, is an
exception. In her interviews with working mothers who are
able to find good hired help to care for their children, she dis-
covered that both mothers and children benefit from the
mothers’ employment away from home. Drawing on a wide
range of studies to back her findings, Peters also shows that
good outside child care, even for infants under six months, puts
children at no risk and sometimes gives a developmental
advantage over full-time home care.
Yet the notion that a young child should have the constant
and exclusive attention of a full-time mother (supplemented
by times with the father on weekends and evenings) has
replaced the more traditional situation of a mother sharing her
children—right from birth—with grandmothers, aunts, nan-
nies, fathers, older siblings, neighbors, workmates, and friends.
In this current period of backlash against feminism, women
have been once again convinced of the enormous importance
of full-time mothering, especially for young children.
106 WOMEN AND DESIRE

The Divine Child

PART AND PARCEL Of our present idealization of the mother

is idealization of the child. The healthy infant (equipped to be
lovable and very dependent) draws an idealizing love from par-
ents and others. Accompanying this normal tendency to see
the infant as a most desirable creature is an emotional pull
toward imagining an extraordinary potential contained in the
infant. Carl Jung described this universal emotional pull as the
“archetype of the Divine Child.”
Archetype literally means “primary imprint,” and it refers to
a universal tendency for humans to form certain emotionally
charged images. We humans are designed in such a way that we
form internal images (based on our subjective experiences, not
on fact) of those on whom we depend and those who endanger
us, especially in our early years. Once we have formed an
archetypal image (of a demanding Terrible Mother, for exam-
ple), we unconsciously import it into our later development by
imposing it on new situations. We cannot escape the emo-
tional tendency to do this; even after we become conscious of
the tendency, we still have it, although we can diminish its
influence on our actions.
A psychological complex gradually evolves from myriad expe-
riences in which we impose such an image on our perceptions
and then respond emotionally in a certain way. These images—
such as the Great and the Terrible Mother, the Divine Child,
the Demon, and the Great Father—show up as symbols in
religions, art, dreams, and other creative expressions among
human beings everywhere. Each new stage of life brings some
fresh potentials for new archetypal images (for example,
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child Lo7

images of illness and decay usually emerge only later in life),

but we are always recycling the ones from our earliest years
because they are so fundamentally compelling. Many of them
were formed in our early attachment relationships and gave us
a sense of being able to cope with the reality around us before
we had any concept or use of language.
The Divine Child is an easily recognized archetypal image.
This is an image of a child who is extraordinary, with enormous
gifts and promise. In most world religions we find the symbol of
the Divine Child—like the infant Siddhartha (later to become
the Buddha), who can at his birth walk and speak about his
profound spiritual nature. The baby Jesus is another example,
recognized by wise men to hold greater potential than kings
and poets.
The symbol of the Divine Child is an expression of that
tremendous power of the infant to stir imagination and possi-
bility, and to encourage us to believe in new beginnings. In
dreams, for example, the extraordinary infant who walks and
talks and performs feats most often symbolizes the potential for
a new beginning in ourselves. And, of course, each infant is a
new beginning.
But we all risk investing our babies with such potential that
we consciously or unconsciously believe they will save us from
the suffering and miseries of our ordinary lives. You have prob-
ably heard about or known parents who spend all their waking
hours developing the musical, mathematical, theatrical, or
athletic ability of an unusually gifted child. Rarely is this child
happy and securely attached. Instead the child is co-opted into
an arrangement whereby he or she is to provide the parents
with a certain magic. Sustaining the supposed powers of the
Divine Child, the parents provide the constant attention, day
108 WOMEN AND DESIRE

and night, that Bowlby asks of mothers. But that attention is

bound to the parents’ wishes for the child and is usually not in
the best interest of the child. The child’s attachment bonds are
then marked by anxiety and resentment about having to please
and fulfill the parents’ dreams.
Sacrificed in the process is the development of the child’s
autonomy—that source of action and self-knowledge that per-
mits us to become self-determining adults. The sense of auton-
omy, the conviction that our feelings and motivations are
genuinely ours, is a precious human capacity that comes from
a childhood in which there was both love and discipline from
a variety of adults. As we have seen throughout, girls and
women do not develop an easy autonomy because they are
promised false powers for being desirable, nice, pretty, and pop-
ular instead of being clearly encouraged and rewarded for
self-determination. But a child of either sex can surrender its
autonomy in the face of parents’ wishes and demands to be a
Divine Child.
Many hothouse mothers believe that their child or children
are extraordinary in some positive way. The idealization of
mothers includes the belief that children, especially babies, are
wonderful. Hothouse mothering is about the most wonderful
child, who shows what a wonderful mother you are. As I said
earlier, this situation prevents us from becoming conscious of
the ambivalence of a normal parent-child bond.
The normal hatred that arises in a parent-child relationship
is the reaction of both people to the long dependency period,
in which a human being is readied for a responsible adulthood.
During this time—anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five
years in our society now—the child comes to feel infuriated
and resentful of being so powerless and subordinate. As I men-
tioned earlier, adolescent children in America often openly
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 109

express the hostility they feel about their dependency. A par-

ent, especially a full-time mother, is apt to feel equally hostile
about the needs, demands, and impulses of a child, but she sup-
presses this anger.
As all parents know, power struggles abound at each new
stage of development in the child’s life, and good parents learn
how to guide the process of autonomy through discipline and
punishment in the earlier years, and example and advice in the
later ones. This is a demanding, strategic job—neither fun nor
wonderful and full of potential mishaps. If a parent has enough
self-confidence and personal worth, she or he can stand up to
the pressures and frustrations of the child all along the way.
The image of a monstrous parent or an indifferent tyrant that
arises from a child’s imagination has to be recognized and toler-
ated, with guidance and discipline, as part and parcel of par-
enthood.
In the atmosphere of hothouse mothering, though, mothers
are likely to want only to be admired and/or to succeed accord-
ing to the image of an idealized mother. The relationship of my
client Anne (whom I discussed in earlier chapters) with her
daughter suffered from Anne’s belief in the “wonders” of moth-
erhood. When Anne’s teenage daughter became sternly critical
of her mother’s preoccupation with an attractive appearance,
Anne was unable to hold firm while being honest. Anne wanted
“credit” from her daughter for all that she had provided, both
as a mother and as a feminist role model. Anne did not want to
look straightforwardly at her daughter’s envy, competition,
criticism, and fear. Anne sugarcoated a lot of what she said to
her daughter and used the type of phrasing (“Would you mind
if...” and “If you don’t find it too much trouble ...”) that
implied that Anne’s requests were too much, that Anne was
the hag-bitch.
IIo WOMEN AND DESIRE

Her daughter took advantage of Anne’s vulnerability and

played out the hag-bitch toward Anne, demanding that Anne
submit to criticisms, judgments, and pressures. Instead of hold-
ing to her own point of view while acknowledging her daughter’s
hostility, Anne often gave in to her daughter’s demands—leav-
ing her daughter feeling much too powerful in her negative
emotions.
Anne had to learn how to stand up to her daughter’s chal-
lenges and to allow her daughter to feel (but not always
express) her envy and competition. Anne set limits on what
her daughter could say to her but also recognized that her
daughter was free to have a range of negative feelings toward
her mother. Certainly it was helpful that Anne had a successful
career, and a good deal of support for aspects of her identity
beyond the role of mother.
Marjorie, by contrast, came to psychotherapy because she
had three children under six and was constantly depressed,
overwhelmed, and afraid of her aggressive feelings. With a
master’s in business administration and ten successful years in a
lucrative managerial position, she left her career at the age of
thirty-three, when she was about to give birth to her first child.
Immersed in hothouse mothering, Marjorie had turned all her
intelligence to reading about and studying the ideal ways to
discipline, toilet train, and raise the perfect child. Now forty,
she had lost much of the self-esteem gained by having a world
beyond home.
Marjorie’s first child, Henry, was a precocious, philosophi-
cal little boy who tended to ask penetrating questions about
nature, God, and the meaning of life. From her account, Henry
was charming and engaging and very popular with his teachers,
beginning in nursery school. In many ways Henry was like his
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child Prt

articulate father, a charismatic high school principal. Marjorie

often felt inferior to six-year-old Henry because she believed
that he was much more intelligent and talented than she, and
deserved more of her husband’s time than she did.
Marjorie nursed Henry until he was fourteen months old
and was reluctant to allow him to sleep separately after he was
weaned. Naturally, Henry was also reluctant. That was the
beginning of a power struggle, which Henry regularly won.
Even after Ethan was born, when Henry was almost three
years old, Marjorie felt guilty for making Henry sleep in his
own bed. By the time Marjorie started psychotherapy, she also
had Melaney, who was six months old, but still had not fully
demanded that Henry spend the night on his own. Of course
there were other power struggles with Henry—over toilet
training and discipline and knowledge (he often felt he was
more accurate about facts than his mother, and sometimes
he was).
Marjorie began therapy after an occasion when she lost
control. One day in the family van, with all three children
aboard and herself the harried driver, she had hit Henry
because he wouldn’t let his younger brother take his turn at the
favorite window seat. As a result, she feared that she had some
fatal flaw in her personality. Moreover, Henry was becoming a
tyrant at home, and Marjorie worried that her “aggressive ten-
dencies” were to blame.
Henry was confused and often unhappy. Marjorie’s idealiza-
tion of him had made it impossible for him to behave really
badly in public or to express his frustrations openly even at
home, so Henry tended to take out his negative feelings on his
younger brother. Unbearable things in the psyche are dealt with
in a variety of ways, but often they are projected (consciously
MlAt WOMEN AND DESIRE

or unconsciously seen as arising in another) onto someone

close at hand. Henry loathed Ethan for his perceived advan-
tages in being younger and for having taken away Mother.
Because Henry could not know or say anything directly, he
became a tyrant. At home Henry would seem to cut himself off
from the rest of the family and make threats and demands,
especially regarding Ethan. It was as though Henry felt cut off
from his life source in Ethan’s presence.
Because Marjorie believed so strongly in Henry’s special
abilities, she could not imagine how or why he could have
become so hostile and aggressive. She tended to deny the seri-
ousness of Henry’s recalcitrance and to take it on herself,
believing that he must have inherited her temper, which she
had witnessed in herself only as a developing mother.
Both Marjorie and Henry were absorbed in the archetype of
the Divine Child, in which Henry was to behave as an extraor-
dinarily gifted and wise person, and Marjorie was to promote
this giftedness by securing him all the best opportunities and
possibilities, and by never having to feel really angry with him.
If Henry were to grow up in this atmosphere of hothouse
mothering, as an adult he would appear to be absorbed in him-
self. Others might find him charming or pretentious, but they
would resent the attention he always needed. Under the sur-
face, Henry, who might appear quite successful in his work,
would be unsure if he was directing his own life.
Growing up as the Divine Child, Henry would feel as
though he was always responding to the desires of others
instead of his own desire. In place of autonomy, the adult
Henry would come to obey an internal source that the psycho-
analyst Neville Symington calls the “discordant source”:
actions and reactions expressing pain and frustration that are
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child aig)

not conscious. Sacrificing his autonomy to this discordant

source—the pathological residue of a Divine Child complex—
Henry would feel that he had no choice in acting out impulses
of rage, hostility, and self-destruction (such as addictions or
risky behaviors). In place of ordinary modesty and fear, Henry
would tend to feel “I can do anything, I am exempt from ordi-
nary constraints. I have the powers of a god.”

The Discordant Source

THE SAVAGE NATURE Of the discordant source is expressed

in a well-known Grimm’s fairy tale that describes simply and
vividly the consequences of hothouse mothering and projec-
tions of the Divine Child. The story of Rumpelstiltskin is
retold in my own words here from the tale recorded by the
Brothers Grimm around the turn of the nineteenth century. I
have transformed the miller of the story into a miller’s wife so
that she can be the mother of the Divine Child.

RUMPELSTILTSKIN

fli upon a time, a poor miller’s wife had a beautiful daugh-

ter about whom she boasted a great deal. On one occasion,
wanting to make herself seem important, she told the king that
her daughter could spin straw into gold. “That is an art that
would please me well,” replied the king, hoping that he might
grow even richer if the miller’s wife were telling the truth.
“Bring your daughter to my palace tomorrow, and I will put
her to the test.”
When the girl was brought to him, the king put her into a
small room with a spinning wheel, a reel, and many bales of
114 WOMEN AND DESIRE

straw. “Set to work now,” he commanded. “If you have not

spun this straw into gold by tomorrow morning, you must die.”
With this he locked the room and left the girl alone. She did not
know what to do; she had no idea how to spin straw into gold,
and she became very afraid and wept.
All at once the door opened and in came a little man who
said, “Good evening, mistress. Why are you crying?”
“Because the king has left me here to spin straw into gold
and I do not know how to do it.”
“What would you give me,” said the little man, “if I would
do it for you?”
“My necklace,” said the girl, handing it over to him.
The little man seated himself at the spinning wheel, and,
whirring the wheel, he put in a round of straw and filled a reel
up with gold. This went on until daybreak, while the miller’s
daughter slept. At dawn the little man disappeared at the
instant the king appeared at the door. Astonished and delighted
at the gold, the king only became greedier.
So he installed the miller’s daughter in an even larger room
of straw the next night, leaving her alone with the command to
spin the straw into gold if she valued her life. Once a 8gain the
girl wept in fear, and once again the little man appeared. “What
will you give me now if I spin this straw into gold?” he asked.
Immediately she answered, “The ring on my finger,” and
handed it over to him.
The little man took her ring and began to spin, and by
morning he had changed all the straw into glittering gold.
The king rejoiced at seeing his riches, but still he was not
satisfied. This time he left the girl in an even larger room, but
said, “If you succeed in spinning this straw into gold, you shall
become my wife.” Even though she was only a miller’s daughter,
he knew he could not find a richer woman in the whole world.
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child I15

When the girl was alone, the little man came again. “What
will you give me now if I spin this straw into gold?”
“T have nothing more to give you,” replied the girl with
sorrow.
“Then you must promise me that, if you should become
queen, you will give me your firstborn child.”
Who knows what will happen to me? thought the girl; I
doubt that I shall ever be queen. And she agreed to the promise.
So, once more, the little man spun the straw into gold.
When the king came the next morning and found what he
had wished, he took the miller’s daughter in marriage. And so
she became the queen.
A year later the queen gave birth to a beautiful child with-
out a thought about her promise to the little man, until sud-
denly one night he appeared in her room and demanded that
she give him what she had promised. Horror-struck, the queen
offered the little man all the riches of the kingdom if he would
leave her the child.
‘Something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the
world,” the little man replied. “But I will give you three days’
time; if you can find out my name, then you can keep your child.”
The queen thought all day and all night of all the names she
knew. She sent a messenger over the country to inquire far and
wide for any other names there might be.
When the little man came the next day, the queen began to
recite the names she had collected, but to every one the little
man replied, ‘“That is not my name.” On the second day she
made inquiries through the kingdom of the most uncommon
and curious names. But when he returned, he always answered,
“That is not my name.”
On the third day the messenger came back and said, “I have
not been able to find a single new name, but I came to the end
116 WOMEN AND DESIRE

of a forest on the high mountain, and there I saw a little house.

Before the house was a fire, around which a ridiculous little
man danced round and round, shouting out, “Today I bake,
tomorrow I brew, the next I’l] have the young queen’s child.
Ha! glad am I that no one knew that Rumpelstiltskin I am
styled.”
The queen was elated. When the little man returned for the
third time, she teased him first with a few names to hear him
say, “‘No!” Then at last she said, “Perhaps your name is
Rumpelstiltskin.”
‘The devil has told you that!” cried out the little man. In
his rage, he plunged his right foot so deeply into the earth that
his whole leg went in. And then, in frustration, he pulled at his
left leg so hard with both hands that he tore himself in two.

THIS LITTLE FAIRY TALE portrays the Divine Child com-

plex in two images of the discordant source: the greedy king
and the demanding little man. The miller’s wife sacrifices her
only daughter because she wants to seem important to the
king. Who is this king, and how is he connected to Rumpel-
stiltskin, who does what the king demands of the daughter but
claims for himself everything valuable in her? On the one
hand, the king represents the mother’s alliance with patriar-
chal power—her power complex, her own discordant source.
Rumpelstiltskin, on the other hand, symbolizes the daughter’s
Divine Child complex, her discordant source. The king and
Rumpelstiltskin are linked together because the daughter
internalizes her mother’s needs and develops a “little man
within,” who does the king’s bidding. This little man replaces
the function of the daughter’s autonomy; he produces what the
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child [17

king desires while the daughter’s ego sleeps. Giving over every-
thing of worth to her Divine Child complex is the only way
that the daughter can cope with the mother’s alliance with
patriarchal power.

Naming the Problem

THIS BETRAYAL of the daughter is examined at length in

The Mother-Daughter Revolution: From Betrayal to Power by Eliza-
beth Debold, Marie Wilson, and Idelisse Malave. In their own
and others’ research, they discover that mothers repeatedly
transform their daughters’ needs for autonomy and power by
insisting that daughters conform to the demands of patriar-
chal institutions. Mothers encourage their daughters to fill the
roles of Object of Desire, wife, and mother without helping
them to understand the hidden meanings and false powers in
these roles.
In the atmosphere of hothouse mothering, daughters as a
consequence feel betrayed by their mothers. “Ironically and
tragically, mothers are blamed for the very betrayal that they
themselves suffered,” and the demands they place on their
daughters “compromise girls’ self-love and integrity. . . Moth-
ers lose their daughters’ trust and, horribly, are rewarded with
contempt. These limiting individual strategies perpetuate fear,
isolation, and divisiveness.” We could say that Rumpelstiltskin
is an image of the daughter’s genius, of her abilities that she is
unable to use for her own development because they are bound
to her mother’s power needs.
The Divine Child cannot use her normal creative and
aggressive impulses to develop her own autonomy. Instead
these impulses are channeled into feeding the Divine Child
it1S) WOMEN AND DESIRE

complex, the discordant source. Gradually this complex

becomes greedy, hateful, spiteful, and contemptuous because it
expresses the internalization of a parent’s unconscious strivings
for fame, recognition, and power in the world. These negative
feelings may manifest themselves only indirectly in the child-
hood years, as they did in Henry’s hostility toward his younger
brother. But the grown-up Divine Child expresses his hateful
and spiteful feelings in various kinds of hostility and aggres-
sion, often directed toward his partners and children but typi-
cally disclaimed or denied consciously.
In the story Rumpelstiltskin prophetically says, “Something
alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world.” The
developing autonomy of the child is its dearest possession. But
the dependent child can easily sacrifice this treasure to the
unconscious power needs of those on whom she or he depends.
Growing up with a hothouse mother who is self-sacrificing—
knowingly or unknowingly wanting to be wanted—can
encourage a child to surrender her or his autonomy in
exchange for being idealized.
An adult who identified, while growing up, with the Divine
Child complex rather than the ego may be unable to see the
problems with feeling like the king—superior, special, or
unique. Caught up in the complex, the adult believes that she
or he is especially wonderful, as wonderful as an idealized child.
Only when the grown-up Divine Child begins to feel the
absence of an authentic source, and the presence of a discor-
dant source, will he or she send out a messenger to find the
name of the problem.
It is often quite a challenge to get such a person to see what
is happening. Even though others, especially family members
or Close friends, may see and experience the feelings of hostil-
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child I1g

ity, greed, superiority, or contempt expressed by the discordant

source in the grown-up Divine Child, the individual herself or
himself is likely to rationalize or deny them. A telltale sign of
this kind of denial is one word, pointed out by the psychoana-
lyst Symington: the word just. The adult Divine Child says, “I
was just closing the door when you happened to walk into it. I
didn’t mean to hit you with it.” “I was just teasing when I said
that you shouldn’t have that fattening dessert.” “I just want a
little more attention from you.” The word just is meant to erase
the aggressive motive from awareness in both the speaker and
the listener.
In the story, the miller’s daughter has one true helper: the
messenger, who saves her by discovering the name of the dis-
cordant source. The messenger symbolizes that aspect of the
daughter that wants to discover her authentic truth, the prob-
lem that she faces. As the story shows, naming the aggressive
motive also means destroying the discordant source and sav-
ing one’s potential for new development (symbolized as the
daughter’s baby). The miller’s daughter awakens to her genius
and begins to make it her own. From then on she will know her
desires, her power, and her abilities. In The Mother-Daughter
Revolution the authors come to the same idea from a different
angle: “While the demands on women’s lives are intense, the
feeling of tiredness that comes from living hard is completely
different from the exhaustion of perfection.” The miller’s
daughter found the name of what exhausted her; she will no
longer try to live out some alien perfection.
120 WOMEN AND DESIRE

A Mother’s Desires

WHEN THE WORSHIPFUL condition of the Divine Child

archetype becomes a way of life between mother and child, we
have a painful case of the Divine Child complex, which robs
both of their authentic development. If this dynamic is
allowed to overtake their relationship, especially if the mother
is solely responsible for the child, there is a suppression of
autonomy and authentic desire in both parties. Sometimes
the Divine Child becomes cruelly rejecting of her mother,
leaving Mother feeling ashamed and despairing. In such a situ-
ation hothouse mothering can become a vicious circle, in
which the mother unknowingly tries to meet her self-esteem
needs through her child, who is (consciously or unconsciously)
intent on attacking the mother’s hidden desire for power—the
discordant source. This depletes the mother’s self-esteem fur-
ther in a snowballing effect that can bring both parties to a cri-
sis. Mother and child enter into a fierce battle for power, in
which the child feels she is fighting for her very life and the
mother feels she is fighting for her legitimacy.
Stepping outside the push for hothouse mothering means
being able to name the problem and to claim what is “alive” in
oneself as “dearer than all the treasures in the world.” Claim-
ing the right to sovereignty over your own life, to whatever
freedom you can manage in order to pursue a range of responsi-
bilities and tasks as an adult, is the path of healthy mothering.
By making good working alliances with mother subs—relatives,
neighbors, friends, sitters, partners, and ex-partners—you can
share your mothering responsibilities in a way that supports
connections between yourself and other adults. Mothering is a
 Hothouse Mothering and the Divine Child 121

demanding, awesome responsibility, and its weight should be

carried by many around the child, not by a single individual.
The renewal of hothouse mothering, in the media and
among certain experts, is once again increasing the creation of
the Divine Child, the inevitable outcome of mothers’ isolation
in caregiving. Hothouse mothering must be openly opposed if
mothers and children are to find the path to authentic sources
of autonomy, responsibility, and compassion. Telling the truth
about the ambivalence of love and hate in the long depen-
dency of human development is a way of keeping oneself trans-
parent, lively, and honest. Openly resisting and disclaiming
the illusion of the perfect mother is a requirement to move
ahead in our development as mothers. By acknowledging to
others the strains and the strategies of effective mothering, we
can form a larger family—beyond the isolation of women and
children in the hothouse of the “nuclear” family system.
 FIVE

The Material Girl

and the Hungry Ghost

F A WOMAN CANNOT SUPPORT herself financially, she

does not have the freedom to choose the relationship that
supports her emotionally, for in order to choose the relation-
ship she has to be able to choose to be out of it. Even with
the influence of feminism, many girls and women still believe
that they have more power through appearance, more free-
dom through seducing power, and greater possibilities through
being desirable than through being responsible for their own
material intentions and welfare. Yet financial dependence in
adulthood is almost always hazardous to psychological health.
Women who come to adulthood as Objects of Desire may
believe that earning a living is a temporary state of affairs until
they can again depend on someone else for all or most of their
material needs. These women yearn for, wish for, and even

I22
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 123

expect material security without hard work of their own. Few

understand the emotional price they pay in exchange. Because
they do not learn the difference between emotional depen-
dence and financial dependence, they cannot be sure if they
love their partners or simply need them financially.
Even those of us who earn a living may not understand the
symbolism of financial independence because we may feel
forced to work for money, believing that some other option
(for example, full-time mothering) would lead to greater satis-
faction or happiness. We may forget, or never have learned,
that paid work does much to keep self-confidence and self-
esteem afloat, encouraging us to feel that we are legitimate in a
society that regards financial independence as a sign of adult-
hood. To offer yourself as an equal in a relationship that
involves financial support, such as marriage, you need to know
that you can support yourself.
As we saw in the last chapter, shared mothering and paid
employment benefit the development of both mothers and
children. A landmark study by Grace Baruch and Rosalind
Barnett elaborated upon these points by showing the impor-
tance of paid work for women’s development in midlife. These
psychologists discovered that the most content and confident
midlife women were those who had families and paid work.
Women who stayed at home, without outside employment, to
be full-time mothers often felt pleasure in their relationships
but lacked a feeling of competence. Women who worked but
did not have intimate or family relationships often felt the oppo-
site—competent but without much pleasure. Women without
paid work or children, staying at home as financially depen-
dent housewives, fared the least well in feelings of pleasure
and competence. But those women who did both mothering
124 WOMEN AND DESIRE

and paid work felt both competent and satisfied. Other studies
have supported these findings to show that paid work, espe-
cially challenging paid work, increases women’s satisfaction
in life, even when it is combined with the demands of house-
keeping and child rearing. In order to feel that satisfaction,
though, women have to stop trying to meet ideals of perfection
in mothering and housekeeping, and gradually understand
how to be Subjects of their own desires.
Taking responsibility for earning income is directly linked
to being responsible for and familiar with the world of money.
As women develop a better understanding of their financial
desires and needs, they learn about limitation and cooperation,
about how difficult it is be a “breadwinner” and how much
planning goes into even basic financial security.
As the major breadwinner for our family over the last six-
teen years, | have enhanced my understanding of this role that
is typically filled by men. (In my earlier marriage I was finan-
cially dependent; so I know the emotional demands of that
condition as well.) I have great empathy for the traditional
male position of “provider” because I realize how the experi-
ence of earning money for a family’s needs is accompanied by a
responsibility for others’ futures and the fear that should one’s
health or good fortune fail others would suffer as well. Without
the ability to provide financially at least for herself or himself,
an adult cannot know the power of financial decision making
or benefit from the inventions of necessity that come with
earning a livelihood.
Unfortunately many women, younger and older, still
believe that appearance and charm, more than achievement
and effort, provide financial and emotional security. In striving
to be Objects of Desire, they consciously or unconsciously try
to seduce power and live out fantasies of dependency through
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 125

finding a partner who can provide financial security, if not out-

tight support. Yet many midlife and older women who are
financially dependent, and feel hopelessly disconnected from a
career or purposeful work identity, are no longer able to imag-
ine themselves as Objects of Desire. Without access to any
sources of even imagined power, their unfulfilled longings pur-
sue them through regrets, sadness, and a sense of meaning-
lessness.

Unequal and Unfree

IN TODAY’S FREE-MARKET economy money equals free-

dom. This does not mean that earning or inheriting large sums
of money is freedom (huge incomes can actually create an
encumbrance of greed and attachment to material things) but
rather that earning enough money to cover your own life
expenses is a symbol of responsible adulthood and an indica-
tion that you choose to be where you are because you are free
to go. Women still tend to ignore this central message, even
though the vast majority of us are employed outside the home.
One reason we may be ignorant of how money is connected
to self-determination is that we earn so little of it for the work
we do. In the United States we still earn only about seventy-six
cents for every dollar men make. Women lack the earning
power, status, and decision-making potential that men have in
the workplace.
As we have seen throughout earlier chapters, instead of
direct compensation and real power, women are promised false
power in their roles as desire-awakening maidens, as wives of
powerful men, and as mothers. In light of the “power” images
that society generates about women’s appearance, nurturance,
supportiveness, and submission, it’s no wonder that women of
126 WOMEN AND DESIRE

all ages are confused about the meaning and importance of

making their own money.
Women often speak of “working on our relationship” or
“doing the work of relating, ‘and they may believe that their
’

emotional skills are worth something on a material level. In

our society and many others women are expected to feel and
express more emotions than men; they are expected to
enhance good feelings and keep intimate ties going. In addi-
tion to being encouraged to be Objects of Desire, women are
socially reinforced to pursue the power of positive emotions, to
keep everyone happy. Trading on good feelings and making
assertions of “relational superiority,” some women make claims
for equal worth in marriages where they earn much less income
than their husbands, or no income at all.
Ironically, this work of love is financially rewarded only in
divorce. Sociologist Marcia Millman has described two such
cases in her analysis of the role of money in the family.

One woman, divorcing a clinically depressed husband,

claims she earned a share of his inheritance because she
kept him sane and functioning over many _ years.
Another woman, dumped by her husband, argues in
court that she deserves half of the marital property,
though she didn’t work for wages, because her husband
was a “full-time job.”

What might have been perceived as love going into the mar-
riage is translated by the woman as money coming out.
As problematic as it may seem, making money means power
and freedom of self-determination throughout long stretches of
adult life. When love and trust are no longer the heart of an
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 129

intimate relationship, people turn to the signs of power to

evaluate and protect their personal worth.

Female Desire in the Workplace

WHAT THEN HAPPENS to the majority of us who earn

money and work full-time? Do we automatically have greater
access to positive evaluations of ourselves? Obviously not,
because the workplace is yet another setting in which male
rules dictate most of our conduct and the means for our mov-
ing up in the power hierarchy. If you work in an organization or
institution, it’s more likely than not that men are in charge at
the highest levels and have been there from the outset. If you
work for a woman-owned-and-operated business, or for your-
self, you may have different circumstances, but you still have to
conform to certain rules of conduct that permeate our society.
Even working for yourself means interacting with other organi-
zations and social systems that operate according to the old
rules of patriarchy. As we have seen, women are openly invited
to want to be wanted—to be desirable, nice, inspiring—and
are threatened with being known as hag-bitches if they directly
claim power and authority. In the workplace this situation
makes for an impossible balancing act.
A number of years ago I presented a lecture on gender differ-
ences to an audience of high-powered international executives.
Most of the women in the audience were wives of the execu-
tives, but there was a handful of women executives present.
After my presentation I was harassed by male respondents who
criticized me, without referring to anything I presented, for
what they interpreted as my desire to eliminate sex differences
and “make women into men.” No matter how I answered, the
Nera: WOMEN AND DESIRE

men in this group would not allow themselves to understand

what I was saying about the importance of female-male partner-
ship and equality for work and family in our future. They
wanted to label me the hag-bitch and avoid or trivialize the
research and ideas I had presented.
After about an hour, an articulate and obviously passionate
woman from India stood up and spoke about how cruel and
troubling her life as a corporate leader and a woman of color
had been over the past twenty years. As an international
leader she was frequently exposed to the double bind of female
authority: you’re damned if you take direct authority, and
you're damned if you don’t. Because she found that she could
not be an Object of Desire and a competent leader, she had
decided early on to be strong, direct, and tough in her influen-
tial position. So she was frequently called a bitch and blamed
for being rigid and demanding. She spoke of her commitment
to her own goals over the years, and of her widespread achieve-
ments. Yet she wondered if she could continue in her position
because she felt emotionally depleted from the constant blame
and criticism. She feared that she might soon surrender her
leadership position in order to achieve greater peace of mind. |
thanked her with a deep sense of appreciation for her frankness
and support. The men acted as though they had heard nothing.
We expect females at work and in public domains to be self-
deprecating, to want to avoid conflicts, and to want to be
liked—even when these attitudes mean being less effective.
When women do not behave as expected, they are frequently
attacked. Linguist Deborah Tannen describes the dilemma of a
woman at work, whether the work is challenging and well-paid
or menial and underpaid: “Everything she does to enhance her
assertiveness risks undercutting her femininity, in the eyes of
others. And everything she does to fit expectations of how a
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 120

woman should talk risks undercutting the impression of com-

petence she makes.”
The socialization and habits connected with being the
Object of Desire translate into certain styles and tendencies of
female communication that are in sharp contrast with male
styles, especially in the workplace. Many years ago I saw in psy-
chotherapy a successful female lawyer who labeled the male
way of handling power at work as Boasting, Roasting, and Toast-
ing. Men boast about their accomplishments, tease and razz
each other in playful and jockeying ways, and praise and credit
other men for competence and ideas—often remaining silent
about or ignoring the same things in women.
In working with this client, I eventually labeled women’s
comparable styles and tendencies as Caring, Sharing, and Bar-
ing (our souls). My client was tired of both styles. She resented
male power posturing, but she also disliked what she saw as the
overly personal, indirect approach of female power. We expect
women to avoid boasting, and by and large they do so, playing
down their talents and abilities and appearing from their
speech to be less confident than men. Women tend to use the
conversational rituals of “I’m sorry” and “thanks” when these
statements are not literally meaningful but induce a feeling of
closeness between speakers. This kind of conversational ritual
makes sense only when the speakers share the belief that it is
a ritual about closeness, not about having less power. The
combination of a self-deprecating manner, a desire to talk
about personal issues at work, and a need to share feelings may
enhance relationships among women, but it does not carry
over as effective communication with men—especially if a
woman’s competence and authority are meant to be part of the
message.
Most studies of women’s conversational styles show women
12S WOMEN AND DESIRE

to be more indirect in asking people to do things, just as |

described in Anne’s tendency to say “Would you mind if” or
“Would you like to.” In American society this manner is often
labeled manipulative or deceptive, but in other societies—
such as the Japanese—this style is thought to be more mature
than a direct, abrupt request. Such indirect statements do not,
then, necessarily mean a lack of conviction or authority, but
they are read this way in American work settings.
In America women do better to speak directly and make
claims for what they know—calmly, without blaming others—
than to attempt to be liked by exemplifying feminine manners
and then be overlooked for raises and rewards. Although they
may be labeled hag-bitches at first, they will generally become
better known for the work they do than for the way they look,
what they wear, or how nice they are.

The Problem with Competence

WOMEN FREQUENTLY BELIEVE that competence leads

directly to power, authority, and material rewards in the work
setting. It does not. What leads to power is self-promotion,
making the right connections, and being self-confident—
based on actual skills and knowledge, not posturing. Although
we may fear that self-promoting will provoke resentment from
peers, sound boastful, or demean others’ contributions, we
must step outside the double bind of female authority because
it will undermine all of our efforts to be effective. As Tannen
describes it, when a woman is in a position of influence and
leadership, “there is an expectation that she will be unfemi-
nine, negative, or worse....And these prevalent images
ambush professional women as they seek to maintain their
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost eae

careers as well as their personal lives.” It is difficult but impor-

tant to claim repeatedly what we know and how effective we
are, without blaming others for not seeing these qualities auto-
matically. If you surrender to demands to be feminine and lik-
able, you will undermine your authority and power at work and
ultimately lose the possibility of moving ahead. Yet, like the
woman executive | described earlier, we are inevitably at risk
for being labeled bitches if we stand on our own authority. For
this reason it is essential to find ongoing supports and encour-
agement from friends (at work, if possible) who can see the
reality of the double bind, confirm your effectiveness, and rec-
ognize your right to be known for your performance rather
than your appearance.
When women do not fit stereotypical images of self-
deprecating femininity, they are more likely to become self-
determining and responsible for their own development. I am
not suggesting that women become bullies or take on the
Boasting, Roasting, and Toasting that men in power embrace.
Rather I am saying that women need to be aware that they
work in a patriarchal society, in which power does not come
directly from being competent and in which conversational
styles signal gender stereotypes. Speaking as the confident
Lady Ragnell, who says, “I have the answer,” is not identical
with boasting about yourself. It is an authentic and truthful
way of representing your knowledge and skill. To be the Sub-
jects of our desires in the workplace, we have to develop a settled,
centered, and honest style of communication about strengths
and weaknesses, as well as a strategic understanding of the
workings and styles of male power.
Standing up, making ourselves known, and being truly con-
fident are ways of transforming female desire from wanting to
i By) WOMEN AND DESIRE

be wanted into wanting to be seen and heard as sources of

innovation, successful ideas, and hard work. Knowing that we
can depend on ourselves in the workplace and develop gradu-
ally to meet reasonable goals for ourselves does not mean that
we increase our independence from others or need others less.
It simply means that we can depend on others in a mature way
and that we can make choices for ourselves rather than feel
resentful and overwhelmed by others’ needs.

Equality in Trust

MATURE DEPENDENCE, aterm | borrow from the psycho-

analyst Ronald Fairbairn, means a style of dependence in adult
life in which you are grateful, appreciative, and free to depend
openly because you know the importance of give-and-take and
are dependable as well as dependent. This style of dependence
should be a goal in all aspects of adult life, both in the work-
place and at home.
Mature dependence is in stark contrast to both the imma-
ture, clinging dependence that is exemplified by an infant or
young child and the anxious, defensive independence that is
exemplified by the adolescent struggling for emancipation. A
financially dependent adult—female or male—often feels
immaturely dependent or defensively independent (staking out
unnecessary claims of doing it “my way”) rather than maturely
dependent.
Instead of believing that we develop from being depen-
dent to being independent human beings, I believe that we
develop our ability to be dependent—from early infant depen-
dence through the dependence of childhood and the defensive
pseudoindependence of adolescence to the final mature depen-
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 133

dence of adulthood. Everyone has the potential to develop

through dependence, but only those who can work through
earlier stages of dependence to later ones will actually succeed.
There is no real independence for humans, because we always
need and depend on others; independence is an illusion.
Mature dependence is a developmental achievement then,
available only to those who can establish a mutual rhythm of
give-and-take with a partner or friend. One has to be an equal
in order to respect that other as much as the self (not more, not
less). A key part of mature dependence is trust.
Pooling our resources in a relationship signals the willing-
ness to trust and usually communicates the desire to function
as equals, even when one partner earns a lot more money than
the other. Couples who pool their financial resources are more
likely to stay together than those who do not. Only in couples
where women make twice or three times their male partners’
income have | heard confusion and hiding about who makes
what in the common pool of finances. Obviously, honesty and
knowledge are necessary ingredients in pooling resources, so
that both partners know what each contributes and can fully
appreciate each other’s efforts and situations.
Lesbian couples can teach us about trust and equality in
money. In a study by the sociologists Philip Blumstein and
Pepper Schwartz, lesbians were sensitive and honest about the
inferior financial status of women in the workplace and
accepted the limitations of each other’s earning capacities. If
one partner was better educated or of a higher social class, or
simply luckier in finding well-paid employment, she supported
the other partner rather than criticizing her for making less
money. Lesbians appeared to appreciate and even cherish what
each partner brought to the sharing of finances—both partners
it 33al WOMEN AND DESIRE

earning whatever income they could, typically each enough to

be self-supporting.
Women in heterosexual relationships, especially in mat-
riages, can feel confused and frustrated about how to express
financial equality and mature dependence. When Cheryl, from
Chapter One, came to psychotherapy she was in a relationship
with Brad, a younger man who was still a college student. |
talked about how he took advantage of her greater income
although he refused to commit to her emotionally. Many
women have told me that they prefer to keep individual check-
ing and savings accounts and to have what is clearly their
“own” money so that they don’t have to answer to anyone
about earning or spending.
Such financial separation means that chit lists and power
struggles about who owes whom what can interfere with inti-
mate relating. Women are generally not as comfortable dealing
with money as men, because we have not been socialized to see
doing so as part of our adult responsibilities. | believe that
some of our desire to protect individual earnings, and to keep
accounts separate, is related to the prevalence of shame in
female development.
Shame is a self-conscious emotion (like pride, envy, embar-
rassment, guilt, and self-pity) that arises in the second year
of life, after the infant is able to distinguish its own body-self
reliably from other things. The difference between “in here”
and “out there,” between “mine” and “yours,” has to be well-
organized before we can feel conscious of “me and mine” versus
“you and yours.”
When it comes to succeeding at having and managing one’s
own money, I believe that many women want the freedom
from having to be on view in their earning and spending
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 135

habits. Like Ragnell hiding in the woods, they may still be

trapped in shame. They may also, however, have a legitimate
problem with trusting a partner who is not responsive and
responsible. Women like Cheryl, who have been reticent to
pool their income with partners like Brad, may be expressing
their unwillingness to trust through the unwillingness to pool
finances. If you are unwilling to share openly and honestly on a
financial level, perhaps you need to examine whether you trust
your partner on emotional and sexual levels. Financial trust
should come naturally on the heels of emotional and sexual
trust, as long as we are not dominated by shame.

The Subject (or Object?) of Shopping

THE INTERTWINING OF emotional and financial trust is

perhaps nowhere more difficult for heterosexual couples than
in the area of shopping and consumerism. | have come across
all kinds of crude explanations for what is often regarded as an
almost exclusively female “drive” to shop—as though it were
biologically ordained from women’s supposed adaptation as
hunter-gatherers. There is no doubt that shopping is a major
material domain that haunts women’s relationship to money,
but I have discovered that women historically are linked to
shopping, as men are linked to sports, as a means to develop
the feeling of being in charge of one’s own being, knowing how
and when to make decisions.
Beginning in the late Victorian era and continuing through
the explosion into full-blown consumerism by the 1920s,
women were invited to feel a kind of liberation in shopping for
personal items, as I showed in Chapter Two. With the onset of
an American middle class in the latter part of the nineteenth
136 WOMEN AND DESIRE

century, shopping and consumer spending emerged as an

important part of female life. Women, who had been excluded
from any significant economic activity, suddenly became cen-
tral to practices and theories of modern consumerism: how to
seduce shoppers to buy more than they needed.
Earlier dark and unattractive dry goods stores were gradu-
ally transformed into glamorous, well-lit, exciting department
stores. By the beginning of the twentieth century these depart-
ment stores, especially in New York, were considered almost a
cultural achievement. Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, and Altman’s
were among the first to draw customers by creating beautiful
environments. Women came to these stores for pleasure, con-
versation, and to avail themselves of a range of commodities—
particularly to substitute much-touted ready-made garments
for handmade goods.
Once ready-to-wear became widely available, the depart-
ment stores began to foster an extravagant demand for new
clothes and eventually other personal products, such as cos-
metics, attempting to keep their sales volume greater than
overhead costs. Before department stores there had been little
fashion for women who were not among the most privileged
classes. Now keeping up with fashion would make all the dif-
ference to an ordinary middle-class woman, who could never,
of course, keep up with an image that was constantly being
manipulated and changed by designers and retailers in order to
create consumption.
‘To participate in this new and stimulating form of consump-
tion, and simply to enjoy themselves, middle-class women
increased their number of shopping days to the extent that
they were shopping every third or fourth day. So women and
department stores became partners in a new social develop-
ment, a profound cultural transformation in which both women
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost ie

and stores were caught up in the murky business of creating

desires and longings that can never be satisfied.
The woman shopper was being seduced into an atmosphere
that promised her the power of choice: to be the Subject of her
own desires. Created by male retailers specifically for women’s
needs and desires—and widely criticized by husbands, preach-
ers, and doctors—these new shopping environments became
the first material world to promise women some form of indi-
vidual freedom.
Shopping was designed for women as an intoxicating mix of
promises to be both the Object and the Subject of Desire.
Choosing material things, especially clothes, women could fol-
low their own desires, at the same time keeping up with the
cultural image of the desire-awakening maiden, the seductive
youthful female. No wonder even feminist women like myself
can still be attracted by the smells and sights of a department
store! Here was perhaps the first widespread cultural develop-
ment that was designed especially with the female as Subject
in mind, and meant also to address all the stereotypes of cul-
tural femininity and women’s wanting to be wanted.
Our contemporary shopping malls and megadiscount stores
are only the extensions and continuations of the life of the
department store, and they now appeal to women at all income
levels. By producing products that need to be replaced quickly,
and by creating need that does not arise from necessity, modern
consumerism appeals especially to women because it appears to
offer choices. When we make choices we feel we have a mea-
sure of control. Shopping offers an escape from our resentment
at having given in to others’ wishes and desires, and it promises
that we can mold our images to fit the current cultural muse,
the perfect mother, or the competent boss.
But because women are not in control of either the fashion
138 WOMEN AND DESIRE

industry or other large retail enterprises, they have once again

been tricked into believing they have power as Objects of
Desire. Retailers seduce us to buy freedom when no freedom is
available. Instead of freedom, modern consumerism creates
more desire, even compulsion.
Unless we are conscious of the endless cycle of desire—
need arising from the memory of pleasure—we can become
driven by desires that overtake all other activity. Shopping was
designed to create and multiply desires for things and images.
Most shoppers are unconscious or somewhat unconscious that
shopping environments, especially beautiful and sensually
pleasing ones, create need and breed desire.
If you are bound to shopping or fashion, or simply want a
lot of consumer goods, you will find that new purchases don’t
satisfy desire, except for a brief moment. The effect of the pur-
chase inevitably fades, and desire emerges for the next thing.
Women who suffer from feelings of shame or envy, who feel
they are empty of resources to make life meaningful, are espe-
cially likely to turn to consumerism and its false promise to fill
the black hole inside.

Hungry Ghosts

In BuppuisM, as! mentioned in my introduction, there is

an account of different forms of existence that are symbolized
as unique realms on the Wheel of Life. These realms can be
understood as actual places, states of mind, or both. The realm
of the Hungry Ghosts is where beings are driven by unfulfilled
desires. It is a hell realm, although not the worst hell. Often
the Hungry Ghosts are described as trying to satisfy unfulfilled
desires connected to lifetimes that have already passed and
cannot be relived.
@
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 70

Hungry Ghosts are depicted as humanlike creatures with

long throats that are so narrow and raw that swallowing pro-
duces unbearable pain. Their huge, distended bellies are unable
to digest any nourishment, and attempts to gratify themselves
only yield more intense hunger. Hungry Ghosts cannot take
joy in the experiences of everyday life but are obsessed with
achieving complete release from the pains of their past,
unaware that their desires are unattainable. The empty, insa-
tiable nature of Hungry Ghosts is painfully expressed by women
who are caught in the material world of shopping.
Cassandra, a wealthy woman of sixty-five, was living alone
with four cats and a lot of depression when she first came to see
me in psychotherapy. In her youth she had been a great beauty,
and she had been married (and divorced) three times, always
to successful businessmen who had problems with alcohol or
drug dependency. She had five children—now grown—whom
she had raised without emotional support from their fathers.
While her children were young, Cassandra had worked as a
weaver and quilter and had a business of her own, selling her
craft. She did not make much money at it, not enough to sup-
port herself, but she enjoyed the work, and her husbands
always supplied enough child support and alimony to provide a
very comfortable life for her and her children. Cassandra
thought it was her part of the script to provide a nurturing
home environment, to be a good cook, to grow lovely gardens,
and to look beautiful. She never imagined anything like a
career for herself, nor did she think she had missed out on any-
thing by not having one.
Cassandra came to me because she was very distressed by
her propensity to shoplift. Mostly she stole expensive items of
clothing and extravagant jewelry—pieces she could not afford.
She stole only from large department stores that she felt could
140 WOMEN AN DD DESTRE

easily absorb the loss, and she made sure to spend money in
those same stores, places in which she was well-known and
liked by salesclerks. Several times she had been caught,
although usually she was treated gently by the police. She was
deeply ashamed of her behavior but also confessed to me that it
was extremely exciting: “It’s almost sexual. I get weak in the
knees and sweat all over, and then I am so overjoyed when I get
out of the store. Free! I feel that I have gotten back at a few of
those people who have cheated me out of a good life—like my
husbands. I know the owners of the stores are men like my hus-
bands; some I have even known personally. I feel excited that I
have taken something from them.”
But Cassandra would become very ashamed of her behavior
within hours after her triumphs. Many times she would give
away what she had stolen, either to her children or to the poor.
Telling me about her excitement in stealing was difficult for
Cassandra, who saw herself as deeply honest with a lot of
integrity.
Like her namesake, Cassandra was often the person in her
family who could intuit the truth of a situation but could not
convince others of what she saw. In her adult years, especially
in her marriages, Cassandra often spoke the truth, but she did
it with so much blame and resentment that her husbands, even
her children, failed to believe her. Known for her beautiful
appearance, Cassandra was also known as a “hysterical woman”
who was frequently on edge in some social situations—“just
trying to get across my point,” she would say while holding
forth in monologues in which she brought too much evidence
and argument to bear.
Over the years Cassandra had come to see that shoplifting
meant something more than a mere addiction to her. She
could see that it expressed something she wanted in her life.
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 141

But instead of investigating what that might be, she had hung
on to her resentment over losing her relationships and her
beauty and continued to shoplift.
Cassandra was living in the realm of Hungry Ghosts. With
unmet needs to be validated, and a painful longing to be taken
seriously, she tried to retaliate against the “powerful” parents/
husbands of her psychological complexes by stealing resources
from them. She was constantly empty and lonely, and often
felt like retaliating against others’ successes and freedoms,
even those of her children.
Between episodes of shoplifting, Cassandra could find no
meaning in her life. She had few social activities and often
found herself alone in front of the television with a pint of ice
cream for company. Recently she had inherited almost a mil-
lion dollars through her father’s estate, which terrified her. She
did not want the responsibility for the money, nor did she have
any idea about what she could do with it. She felt ashamed and
undeserving, not only because she had openly despised her
father but also because Cassandra felt she was fundamentally a
loser, a criminal. She deeply disliked herself, calling herself “a
fat, old thief” and claiming that she had been ruined by her
husbands’ demands and addictions.

Pathologies of Female Material Desire

THREE PATHOLOGIES OF FEMALE material desire are

bound together in their meanings, and sometimes in their
occurrences: compulsive shopping and overspending; shoplift-
ing; and binge eating. All three of these problems involve
Hungry Ghost fantasies—obsessions with desires of attaining
complete release from the pain of the past, unaware that these
obsessions can never be satisfied through material means.
142 WOM EIN ZAUNDDE RSE

Shoplifting costs American ’retailers roughly $1o billion per

year, and it is spreading in almost epidemic proportions all over
the country, from urban centers to small towns. The over-
whelming number of shoplifters in urban department stores
and malls are female, mostly middle-class and upper-middle-
class, who steal things for excitement, not because they need
them or because the things are especially useful. For some
Hungry Ghosts the high of shoplifting is almost unrivaled
among addictions.
In a recent magazine article a young woman was quoted as
saying that shoplifting is a tougher habit to break than heroin.
She steals not only clothes and smaller items but also house-
hold appliances, like her TV and freezer. “I can go two to three
weeks without drugs, but not a day goes by that I don’t shoplift.
I saw a shrink. He put me on Paxil; he thought it would help
me. But I’m not depressed. I just like to steal a lot.” This
woman’s desires to steal are conscious and have probably sub-
stituted for doing other exciting or meaningful things with her
life. She has chosen the quick fix and tries to quell her pain
and frustration through acquiring something new.
Cassandra used stealing to respond to resentment and loss,
to frustration and fears about her future. Many women
shoplifters are acting out a loss, according to clinical psycholo-
gist Will Cupchik, whose book Why Honest People Shoplift has
become the focus of support groups and web sites to address the
Hungry Ghost longings of episodic shoplifters. He believes
that women are stealing because they have unconscious desires
they have not recognized: losses they have not satisfactorily
addressed, hurt and anger from relationships that have been
abusive or unsatisfying. They feel victimized by a variety of
people whom they want to get back at through stealing. As the
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 143

psychiatrist Mark Epstein says of Hungry Ghosts, they “have

uncovered a terrible emptiness within themselves” and “can-
not see the impossibility of correcting something that has
already happened.”
Those of us who don’t identify with Cassandra might find
ourselves all too familiar with the second pathology of female
material desire: compulsive shopping. Compulsive shopping
has been around for a long time, at least since department
stores. In 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected President
of the United States, it became clear that his wife, Mary Todd,
had a bad habit of overspending. During her tenure in the
White House she made over eleven major forays into New
York to enlarge her wardrobe and redecorate the White House,
vastly overspending her budget, which was a great distress to
her husband. Another more recent First Lady, Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis, dismayed both of her husbands, President
John Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, with her lavish expendi-
tures on clothes and furnishings. Charlotte Curtis of The New
York Times is quoted as saying, “Jackie’s expenditure of $50,000
for clothes in 16 months after Jack Kennedy’s election was
— about two-thirds of his income from the trust fund his father
had set up for him and his other children.” Princess Diana,
another icon Object of Desire of our century, was a well-known
clotheshorse and jet-setter who eventually auctioned off much
of her extravagant wardrobe and apparently pledged herself to
a simpler lifestyle, although the nature of that future life was
not clear by the time she died in Paris—after shopping there
all day.
But it is not only the rich and famous who overspend and
feel driven to shop for expensive or unnecessary items. There
are estimates that up to 8.1 percent of the American population
144 WOMEN AND DESIRE

falls into the category of compulsive buying. Of this group, 80

to 92 percent are female, ranging in age from eighteen to
thirty-nine years.
Compulsive buying is distinguished from ordinary shopping
and overspending by the following criteria: frequent preoccu-
pations with buying or impulses to buy that are experienced as
irresistible and senseless; frequent buying of more than can be
afforded, and of items that are not needed; and shopping for
longer periods than intended. These impulses interfere signifi-
cantly with work and family life, and often can result in severe
financial problems, such as bankruptcy.
Compulsive shoppers turn to stores when they feel sad,
lonely, angry, frustrated, hurt, or irritable. The vast majority
report feeling happy or powerful when they are shopping,
although this feeling is followed by depression when they real-
ize how much money they have spent. They prefer to shop
alone and have more credit cards, rely on them more, and have
more credit-card debt than others do. One study showed that
normal buyers pay about 22 percent of their income to debts,
while the average figure for compulsive buyers is 46 percent.
Like our shopping foremothers, compulsive buyers describe
their pleasure in shopping as enhanced by the colors, sounds,
lighting, displays, and smells of stores, as well as the textures of
clothing. Some compulsive shoppers describe their experi-
ences as sexually exciting, although they may feel terrible
remorse when they get their packages home.
But one does not have to be compulsive to fall into the
shopping trap. Researchers surveying a group of both male and
female “impulse buyers” who did not all fully meet the criteria
of compulsive buyers were especially interested to discover
whether there was some kind of personality. trait associated
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 145

with impulsive buying, something more enduring than a tran-

sitory mood. They discovered that women were more likely
to be impulse shoppers than men. The female impulse buyer
had either high materialistic desires and/or high discrep-
ancy between her ideal self-image and her perceived self-
image—something the researchers called self-discrepancy.
They concluded,

It is well established that there are more female than

male compulsive buyers, and this pattern appears to be
reflected in our more normal sample in impulse buying.
One possibility is that shopping is a self-completion
strategy that is easily available to women (either through
socialization or opportunity) while other self-completion
strategies may be more available to men (e.g., alcoholism
or participation in sports).

I have talked about Anne many times, and she is a good

example of an impulse buyer who is not pathological in her
need to shop but who uses shopping to shore up low self-
esteem. When Anne has finished a long day at work, or some-
times when she has a longer lunch hour than usual, she finds
herself wandering through her favorite clothes and lingerie
shops without a clear intention. When she and | talked about
these occasions in greater detail, we discovered that they
almost always came on the heels of a disappointment at work,
at home, or with a friend in which Anne felt she gave up her
own needs in favor of someone else’s. Rather than address
these events through understanding her problems with self-
determination, with wanting to be wanted, Anne unintention-
ally sought shopping as a self-soothing activity. Sometimes she
146 WOMEN AND DESIRE

was soothed by a couple of hours in the stores, but more often

she was frustrated when she got home and found she had spent
more time and money than she could afford.
Like Anne, many of us use shopping to soothe our feelings
when we feel out of control in other areas of our lives. And we
also feel disappointed and frustrated when we find we have
purchased too much, spent too much time, or simply wasted
our energies. Like Hungry Ghosts who are obsessed with stop-
ping the pain inside and unaware of what is happening in the
present moment, we wander about in the shopping realm, an
environment that was designed precisely to increase our belief
that we can satisfy desires that can never be fulfilled. That
hunger inside, often described by women clients as a black
hole that consumes everything into its despair, can also lead to
overeating, the third pathology of female material desire.
Binge eating, something I discussed briefly in relation to
Princess Diana in Chapter One, may occur in women’s lives as
an occasional problem or as a severe addiction. Chronic binge
eaters consume large quantities of food, enough to make them-
selves sick. Some vomit, others don’t. Like the Hungry Ghost
who is known to suffer terrible indigestion, Cassandra would
eat large quantities of pretzels and ice cream, then go to bed
with a terrible stomachache and cry herself to sleep. Food, like
shopping, creates a physical sensation that seems to fill up the
emptiness inside. In this way we can consider binge eating a
material desire; food is an aspect of the material world.
The three pathologies of female desire are often found in
tandem or in unison. That is, shoplifting, compulsive shop-
ping, and binge eating often affect the same woman, either
over time or simultaneously. The rest of us, who are not patho-
logically addicted to these activities, may find that we crave
either things or food in the face of painful, unfulfilled desires.
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost Az

Longing for Abundance

SOME WOMEN TURN to material goods for comfort or

revenge for lost loves or other losses. Other women are desper-
ate to have the newest fashion or thing of beauty that is meant
to increase their attractiveness or compensate for what has
gone wrong. Persuaded by patriarchal culture to seek power in
the feminine roles of muse, mother, and wife, they discover no
real choice or power there, and they turn the blame and resent-
ment on themselves. Instead of recognizing the problem with
making an image rather than a self, instead of learning to know
their desires and develop self-knowledge, women continue to
turn to old habits that momentarily relieve the pain.
All three pathologies of female material desire have in
common the experience of unfulfilled cravings and painful
emptiness. Mark Epstein says that “longing for inexhaustible
abundance is very common in the Western psyche, where it
masquerades under the heading of ‘low self-esteem.’” If by
midlife a woman does not have a clear sense of her worth and
her own desires, then she will have developed a black hole in
place of an authentic self. The hole is the Hungry Ghost,
always craving to fulfill impossible desires and unable to be
content in the moment.
As we’ve learned, female power is not appearance, nor is
the seduction of power any guarantee of material security. Nor
can material success bring us inner security, contentment, and
peace. Cassandra had to learn all three of these things succes-
sively in her psychotherapy. First, she had to look back at her
own wishes for power and control that were projected onto
others. She had to acknowledge how important her appear-
ance had been to her and how much she had counted on it to
148 WOMEN AND DESIRE

bring her what she wanted in life. She also had to recognize
that her children could never give her a life of purpose and
meaning; they were passing through her life in search of lives
of their own. Letting go of her attempts to control two of her
grown daughters was significant progress in Cassandra’s rather
quick improvement in therapy.
Then she and I looked squarely at the meaning of her
inheritance. She had been born her father’s daughter, and she
had received this money through that birth, not through any
particular work of her own. Yet it was a part of her individual
karma, a circumstance of her birth that only she could develop
and mold. In our work together, deeply examining what Cas-
sandra’s authentic needs and desires were, she decided to buy
some rural property and open an animal sanctuary for both
wild and domestic animals. Cassandra’s cats had been a great
comfort to her over the years, and she felt deeply for animals
who were abandoned or abused. In many ways Cassandra iden-
tified with wounded animals because she felt that they, like
herself, often trusted too much or in the wrong places.
Organizing the plans for her sanctuary became Cassandra’s
major project. No longer did she feel empty, and no longer was
she drawn to shoplifting or binge eating. In fact, Cassandra
began to describe her inheritance as a spiritual offering from
her father, something that she could use to transform her life
into an existence of deeper connections and greater joy. When
we talked about the possibility of Cassandra shoplifting at
some future time when something would go awry, she gave her
solemn word that she would not. She said she understood that
the shoplifting was an impossible career: it never led to real
joy, and it always put her at risk for shame.
As Cassandra came closer to making her project a reality
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost 149

and felt wholly engaged by getting to know both the physical

surroundings of her sanctuary and the animals that would be
sheltered there, a wonderful transformation took place. She
experienced herself as a worthwhile human being who was liv-
ing in the way she felt she was meant to. We called this feeling
of groundedness “spiritual nourishment,” and I thought of the
Bodhisattva of Compassion, who offers the Hungry Ghosts
spiritual refreshment.
In each of the realms of the Wheel of Life there is a helpful
figure (a bodhisattva, or saintly helper) who challenges the
beings there to wake up and liberate themselves to greater free-
dom, eventually to full enlightenment—a state of alert wake-
fulness, living in the moment. In the human realm this helpful
figure is Buddha Shakyamuni, a human being who founded the
religion of Buddhism and taught its practices and theories for
forty-nine years after his Supreme Enlightenment, more than
twenty-five hundred years ago. According to Buddhism, a Bud-
dha (a perfectly enlightened being) appeared in the human
realm specifically to show humans how to liberate themselves
from suffering. Only we can awaken ourselves to how we create
distressing and painful situations through our desires and hid-
den intentions. Only we can change. The Buddha is a spiritual
psychotherapist who invites us to learn how to free ourselves
from greed, hatred, and ignorance.
What is the helpful figure in the realm of Hungry Ghosts?
It’s the Bodhisattva of Compassion, holding out a bowl filled
with objects that are symbolic of spiritual nourishment. The
Ghosts must recognize that their cravings and fantasies will
never be fulfilled by material things but only by pursuing a spit-
itual path. In simply showing the Ghosts spiritual nourish-
ment, the bodhisattva reminds them of the inherent need to
I50 WOMEN AND DESIRE

lead a meaningful life on a deeper level, to feel connected to

others, and to develop compassion for oneself and others. In
Zen Buddhism this is called “rousing the thought of Enlighten-
ment.” The aching longings of Hungry Ghosts express a need
for spiritual nourishment, the only kind of nourishment that
can really satisfy their emptiness.

Spiritual Nourishment

SO WHAT Is THIS spiritual nourishment, and how does it

affect our material desires? If you are a Material Girl, does that
mean you are destined to live as a Hungry Ghost? I have come
to believe that the questions surrounding how we earn and use
money are especially useful for girls and women. They are
often the bridge to understanding that a sense of inner empti-
ness and lack of worth may be the door to a spiritual path, may
raise the question of what it means to be human, to be respon-
sible for your intentions in creating a life.
Our Western material longings for inexhaustible abun-
dance too often substitute for the experience of a core self con-
nected to others and sustained by our own intentions. On the
one hand, it is useful to be financially responsible, so that you
can be free to discriminate emotional dependence (and develop
mature dependence) from financial dependence. On the other
hand, our material longings, especially if they are confused
with a sense of self or worth, can tie us into the murky business
of creating desires and longings that cannot be satisfied.
Girls and women in our society are faced with the compli-
cated and confusing task of knowing the difference between
making a living and being a Material Girl. The former leads to
development through necessity, but the latter is a joke played
 The Material Girl and the Hungry Ghost I51

on us by the shopping business. There is nothing wrong with

shopping and spending in themselves; they can be great
delights, if they are recognized as momentary pleasures. When
shopping is kept human-size, it is a matter of choice, not com-
pulsion.
Earning your own living, cooperating as a financial partner
in a relationship, and solving money problems will free you to
be a self-determining adult in the material world, but excessive
spending and attachment to material things will bind you to
a realm of impossible wishes based on emptiness. Even if you
are caught in the realm of Hungry Ghosts, however, you can
awaken to the reality of your unfulfilled desires, recognize your
ghostliness, and follow your true spiritual yearnings.
Spiritual yearnings may take the form of wanting more
insight into the ways you create conflict and suffering in your
life, so that you can live in greater harmony with yourself and
others. They may take the form of desires for some enduring
purpose or meaning, beyond earning a living and raising a fam-
ily. They may take the form of wanting to help others change
the conditions of materialism, greed, and power mongering
that bring so much pain to the human and natural worlds of our
planet. Whatever the forms, the yearnings of Hungry Ghosts
are hidden desires for fulfillment beyond the material world.
Becoming aware of your psychological complexes, espe-
cially those that interfere with self-determination in your
material life, is often a first step toward becoming a Subject of
your own spiritual desires. We humans can know our own
intentions and direct our lives responsibly and compassion-
ately. This is a great privilege, but many of us remain trapped in
the realm of Hungry Ghosts, forsaking life as intentional
human beings.
152 WOME INEEAINDD SDI ETSH Rae

To live as intentional human beings, discovering and fol-

lowing our spiritual longings, is a specific challenge for women
in patriarchal society. All the great religions of the world have
created symbols, rituals, and meanings that have been used to
oppress women and to turn us away from understanding our
own experiences. Still, this is a period in which women are
encountering these traditional religions in a distinctly feminist
way and are shaping new traditions as well. In the next chapter
I will address the challenge of self-determination for women
following a spiritual path or a religion, aroused from the vague
yearnings of a Hungry Ghost.
 3 |X

The Spiritual Problem of

Giving Your Self Away

E ALL LONG FOR SOMETHING to take us outside

ourselves, beyond our discontent. As we saw in the
last chapter, we can be duped into believing that mate-
rial things will fill the black hole of inner emptiness.
Women, especially, can get lost in the realm of Hungry Ghosts,
wanting and acquiring more and more material things in an
attempt to shore up appearance and security in the process
of aging.
The great religions teach us that only spiritual nourishment
can truly satisfy our longing for security and inner peace. Yet
for centuries this spiritual nourishment—particularly in the
form of meaning, purpose, and connection—has been avail-
able only in the packaging of religious language and images in
which women were almost never self-determining Subjects.

153
154 WOMEN AND DESIRE

Only recently women have begun to influence our religious

traditions and practices in the roles of leaders, teachers, and
thinkers.
As a Jungian psychoanalyst, I regard spiritual development
as a necessary component of a healthy, effective life as a human
being. By spiritual development I mean a lifetime engagement
with a transcendent source that is intimate and Other. This
development begins in childhood, out of our dependence on
others. In our early years we are awed by our parents and elders,
whose power seems supreme: Who are They? They are our ear-
liest encounter with an Otherness that sustains and protects
us. The images and meanings that we accrue in those early
contacts with Otherness introduce us to, or block us from, a
later respect for and interest in the transcendent.
If we mature emotionally as we grow older, we come to see
that we are responsible for sustaining and protecting ourselves.
This is a fearful prospect. Some adults never wholly assume
this responsibility but continue to hope for protection and
favors from a powerful Otherness (God, Goddess, divinities).
Their spiritual development remains in a childish form.
Assuming responsibility for our own (and eventually oth-
ers’) lives is a transformative event that should lead to the next
phase of spiritual development: What is my purpose here? How
do I fit into the intimate Otherness of family, society, the
world? If we discover a satisfactory answer to this question—
and some may not, the search may be lifelong—then we natu-
rally turn our attention to the last, great spiritual mystery:
Who are we? Why are we here? Mature spirituality is the hon-
ing of integrity, wisdom, and transcendence in regard to the
question of what it means to be human within the Otherness
of our universe.
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 155

Traditionally, religions guided spiritual development; sym-

bolic connections were regulated by images and processes that
were automatically made available to the developing child as
well as the mature adult. But in our era development is more
individual, random, and easily derailed. Mystery and awe are
now thought to arise more from a stroll under the night sky or
a climb to a panoramic mountain view than from religions
and responsibility. Our only widespread symbolic connections
come from TV and movies.
Many of us question whether we need religion in today’s
world. Some feminists have doubted its usefulness for women
because the world’s religions are sexist in many of their basic
practices. Over the centuries religions have cast women as
selfless mothers and protectors of virtue in the family, as child-
ish beings who need protection and guidance themselves, or
as sexual and sensual temptresses and deceivers of men. As
we've seen, such roles emerged from patriarchy and can be
found in all aspects of life, but they have been rationalized and
defended by theology and religion. So if religions have been so
harmful to women, why is spirituality important to female self-
determination? And further, how can women have access to
spiritual contexts and practices that encourage intentional
actions, self-knowledge, and courageous engagement with life?

Why Spirituality?

SPIRITUALITY IS IMPORTANT because it is essential to

good psychological health, especially in the second half of the
life span. By the time we reach the age of thirty-five or forty,
most of us begin to recognize our mortality if we haven't
already confronted it through illness, accident, or loss. For
156 WOMEN AND DESIRE

women the confrontation with aging also brings a painful chal-

lenge to the wish to be a lifelong desire-awakening maiden.
But if we have developed a spiritual purpose, we discover that
we can thrive through midlife and after in many ways that
were barely imaginable earlier. A sense of purpose that tran-
scends our personal identity (the feeling that “I’m useful and
have a bigger purpose than just promoting my identity”) is rad-
ically important to self-esteem and self-determination as we
age. Such a conviction is a shield against the slings and arrows
of hag-bitch projections that follow from our claims to female
authority.
Without some spiritual context we face the future with
despair, inner emptiness, or restlessness. A religious or spiritual
orientation does not erase these negative experiences; they are
a part of human life. But such a perspective gives them mean-
ing, makes them understandable in a way that sustains our
hope and interest in life. This is not a sleight of hand or mind.
Rather it is an essential root of human creativity and develop-
ment: a mythology or Big Story through which we discover the
spiritual meaning of our individual lives.

The Big Story

TuHeE Bic Story is an account of what it means to be alive

and human, what is true and good, and why we should act as
we do. We regard our own lives as understandable only in the
context of some kind of Big Story, our basis for “reality.” We
need a Big Story in order to make sense of what goes on within
and around us, but not all Big Stories offer possibilities for spir-
itual development.
In our era we implicitly accept a form of scientific realism as
part of the Big Story. Most of us do not understand how elec-
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 157

tricity works, for instance, but we use electric appliances with

the belief that this technology stems from a scientific set of
principles (the Big Story) that are predictable and control-
lable. Countless times each day we believe in the Big Story of
science when we accept on faith the effectiveness of medi-
cines, the operation of computers, the explanations of genet-
ics—without any real understanding of them. But the Big
Story of science provides little guidance for our personal spiri-
tual development; we would be hard-pressed to find a symbolic
connection to it that would help us know what our purpose in
life is.
Both Carl Jung and psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton have
written about the importance of a “symbolic connection”
between our individual lives and a spiritual context that pro-
vides meaning. If, for example, you believed that the sun rose
over the horizon every morning because you performed a cer-
tain ritual, then you would be fulfilling a great task every morn-
ing. To give a contemporary example, if you have faith that
your efforts to heal conflicts and respect others will increase
possibilities for world peace, then those actions take on signifi-
cance beyond your personal concerns. By contrast, if all your
activities and desires seem meaningless in the larger world—
random or disconnected from everything else—then your indi-
vidual life is trivial. When the symbolic connection is broken,
we feel numb and aimless, or we search for substitutes for some
meaning beyond our personal concerns.
I agree with Jung and Lifton, who claim that the symbolic
connection is broken for many people in our era because we
have no unifying Big Story that allows us to see our individual
purpose in a spiritual context. But we still have the need for
it, so we develop leisure activities that are life-threatening
(such as bungee jumping and skydiving), invest ourselves in
158 WOMEN AND DESIRE

beliefs in alien worlds, or seek altered states through drugs.

These substitute for spiritual meaning by providing experi-
ences that break down our ordinary sense of self and connect
us with awe or mystery (loosely congruent with science). Yet
none of these pastimes can offer reliable spiritual meanings that
evolve over time.
Without some kind of transcendent meaning, we cannot
live fully because the constraints and suffering of human life
are too severe. We need to find a way to make our pain and
misery tolerable, even beneficial. Among the stories available
some people embrace our contemporary scientific adventure as
the Big Story of progress, miracles, predictions, and salvation
that will defeat human adversity in the future. Others embrace
the adventure of personal development through investigating,
studying, and meditating on subjective life. Through practices
of self-awareness and self-knowledge, these people discover
both the patterns and the transcendence of self via relation-
ship and interconnectedness. Others turn to more traditional
spiritual adventures and make use of religious teachings and
institutional offerings of Big Stories that may conflict with sci-
ence but provide greater spiritual guidance. Still others become
involved with a humanitarian cause and put their spiritual
energies into developing a future that improves survival for the
poor and disadvantaged, and/or protects the environment for
all of us.

The Great Quest(ion)s

IF WE DEVELOP into emotionally mature adults, we have to

give up fantasies that once sustained us—such as, There are
perfect people in the world with absolute control of their lives,
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 159

and I will become one of them. Stripped of childish illusions of

power and control, we are left to face the underlying insecuri-
ties of being human: nothing is permanent; everyone ages and
dies; everyone is vulnerable; there are no guarantees that if I
behave well only good things will happen to me. Spiritual
questions naturally arise from this confrontation, and they
must be encountered seriously if we are to live life to the
fullest. Why am I here? What does it mean to be human? What
happens when I die? Our attempts to answer lead to the dis-
covery of our spiritual desires.
In Chapter Four I talked about Marjorie, the hothouse
mother consumed with her hidden desire to make her son
Henry into a Divine Child who could supply her with all that
she felt she lacked. He would be a charming, successful genius
who reflected her mothering. Over the course of her therapy
Marjorie encountered her feelings about mothering more hon-
estly. She discovered her ambivalence, and she found that she
could discipline Henry more effectively by recognizing that he
was both good and bad, not simply wonderful. Once she
allowed Henry greater freedom to feel his ambivalence about
her, Marjorie was freed from her illusions about motherhood.
No longer did she believe that she had been created to be a
perfect mother to Henry. Instead, she started to wonder about
her larger purpose in life.
At the age of forty Marjorie was beginning to feel a short-
ness to the years ahead. She noted aches and pains in her body
and often remarked that she wasn’t going to live forever.
Although she longed for a transformative spiritual meaning,
she felt obliged to take her children to the same uninspiring
Protestant church in which she had grown up. Her husband
had no objections to this form of religious education for the
160 WOMEN AND DESIRE

children, but he rarely participated in the services. Marjorie

said she was “bored to tears” in this church, yet she did not feel
free to join something else.
Like so many of her friends, Marjorie had a variety of New
Age beliefs—in astrology, past lives, sometimes even alien
abductions. She told me she didn’t want to “close the door on
something prematurely,” and she found many of these ideas
fascinating. Instead of using her energy to face the spiritual
question What’s my purpose in life? she voraciously read
accounts of past lives, watched The X-Files religiously, and fre-
quented a nearby psychic for predictions of her future and
readings of her astrological chart or other oracles. It was diffi-
cult for me to challenge Marjorie’s beliefs in these endeavors
because they were part of her spiritual identity, but they were
only substitutes for a symbolic connection to a life of meaning.
While we were interpreting one of Marjorie’s dreams, some
tension arose between us about the idea of spirituality. I sug-
gested that spirituality had to connect in some realistic way with
everyday life in order to be vital and engaging. Marjorie dis-
agreed with me, saying that her spirituality was “on another
plane” and provided insights that were beyond her ordinary life.
From this confrontation we looked at the way Marjorie’s
parental complexes seemed similar to her spirituality and dis-
covered that she compensated for flaws and limitations in her
parents’ ability to care for her as an infant and child with illu-
sions about their strengths. She had developed partly fictional-
ized stories about them so that she could feel proud they were
her parents. Rather than acknowledging her mother’s emo-
tional withdrawal and depression, Marjorie imagined that her
mother was truly kind and sensitive. She explained away her
father’s temper and unpredictable demands by believing that
he was fundamentally generous and lively, just occasionally
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 161

overwhelmed by his duties. These were not wholly false

images, but they were romanticized, filled out by Marjorie’s
imagination of what good parents should be.
Thus her first encounter with transcendent meaning—her
relationship with her parents—had required a_ fictional
account of what was taking place, and her adult spiritual devel-
opment continued this fiction. Marjorie went to a church
where she was not deeply affected, tried to fit in, then looked
for something soothing or mysterious in her New Age beliefs,
even though they did not really satisfy her spiritual yearning.
When Marjorie saw how her psychological complexes inter-
fered with her spiritual development, she began to look more
deeply at her own desires. She had wanted a spiritual orienta-
tion that would excite her, that would emphasize the grandeur
rather than the suffering of life. In the absence of a Big Story
that could supply authentic symbolic connection with her
everyday life, Marjorie had plugged into the sci-fi, New Age
mentality of the media and some of her friends. Largely this
was a distraction from her more personal spiritual questions.
Now she was ready to find the answers to her own questions:
what did she want to do with her life, and what could she do
for herself and her children to find spiritual nourishment that
felt authentic and truthful?

Must We Be Good?

For CENTURIES, INSTITUTIONAL religions have expected

women to be ignorant, passive, receptive, devout, silent, and
selfless. In reaction many women have turned away from all
types of organized religions. But to fully engage with our spiri-
tual yearnings and to develop them actively in a way that sup-
ports everyday life, we (people, in general) typically must join
To2 WOMEN AND DESIRE

some group or community that has similar beliefs. Without a

community we cannot see ourselves easily and we are always
vulnerable to our psychological complexes—even when we
have developed insight and understanding. Other people, with
similar spiritual desires and beliefs, can help us to stay honest,
stick to the path, and recognize the signposts of where we are.
A community adds a level of support and emotional engage-
ment that can be the essence of spiritual development. But in
order for a community to support spiritual development, it
needs to suit you well and you need to engage with that com-
munity—not simply wait for it to affect you.
There now are many alternatives available for women who
want to be self-determining Subjects, actively involved in dis-
covering and understanding their own spiritual development
within a community of like-minded people. But these endeav-
ors are challenging and often confusing because patriarchy has
shaped our religious and spiritual symbols for many centuries.
Images of women in patriarchal religions have traditionally
discouraged female sovereignty.
If we engage with a religious or spiritual community, must
we fit into traditional feminine roles to be accepted and sup-
ported? If we don’t fit into the roles, perhaps we shouldn’t be in
the communities. And perhaps even more insidious is an
almost palpable fear that once again we will simply have to be
“good”—good girls, good mothers, good wives—in order to
have any part in spirituality. Women agonize over a single
question—Am | too selfish?—struggling with the belief that
focusing on ourselves is selfish when it comes to spiritual or
religious issues. We’ve been taught that we’re inferior to men
in our ability to be pure-hearted and wise. We’ve been
described as more narcissistic, childish, unclean, and Passive
than men—even though we may be parenthetically extolled
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 163

for being nurturant and motherly. The roles of maiden, muse,

mother, and wife (emphasized for women in all traditional reli-
gions) have assumed that we should be selfless or that we have
no self or soul—that is, no capacity for spiritual development.
Even when the role of female celibate or monastic is permit-
ted, women are still considered inferior to men in their spiri-
tual capacities because of the nature of being female.

Selfish or Selfless: The Wrong Question

ADDING TO THE CONFUSION surrounding religion and

female self-determination is the fact that many contemporary
and traditional religious and spiritual teachings, especially those
involving meditational practices, focus on letting go of the
individual self. Psychiatrist Mark Epstein, writing about Bud-
dhist teachings, says:

The Western psychological notion of what it means to

have a self is flawed. . . . Self-development, self-esteem,
self-confidence, self-expression, self-awareness, and self-
control are our most sought after attributes. But Buddhism
teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind
of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Hap-
piness comes from letting go.

Many women will read this passage and believe that they
should let go of developing self-determination, self-awareness,
and self-control without realizing that what is implied here is
an attitude about the self, not the functioning of the self.
Women are easily misled by language that assumes we have
mastered the art of personal sovereignty. At the heart of many
religious and spiritual teachings is the assumption that human
164 WOMEN AND DESIRE

beings have sovereignty over their own lives, with no acknowl-

edgment of how this may be compromised for women. Central
to the moral and ethical codes of all the great world religions is
the belief that human beings have free will, choice, intentions
of their own. When they act on these intentions, they create
consequences for themselves and others. All religions instruct
us to pay close attention to our intentions and actions if we are
to be ethical and moral.
In English we imbue the very word self with intentionality.
This means that self-development, self-awareness, and self-
determination are connected to living an intentional life,
being responsible for ourselves and our subjective responses.
But in patriarchal cultures and religions, women have been
uniformly discouraged in all the self-aspects that are named
in Epstein’s passage, and this certainly has not led to their spir-
itual enlightenment. Without the knowledge and develop-
ment of self-determination, women do not understand what it
means to have free will. Women have not been free, or have
not felt free, to live responsibly by the choices they make. As
we have seen throughout the book, this situation has created
conditions that reinforce the false promises of living as Objects
of Desire.
When women look to others—masters, psychics, astrol-
ogers, gurus, leaders, or priests—to instruct them in answers to
questions that they have not asked, they are at risk for spiritual
abuse: a situation in which a woman is used as an Object of
Desire by someone who is supposed to be on a higher spiritual
level. Sexual, emotional, or financial abuse by a spiritual leader
becomes spiritual abuse when the experience is justified or
rationalized through a so-called spiritual practice.
Feminist therapist and theorist Demaris Wehr writes that
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 165

spiritual abuse is especially harmful because it takes place in an

environment that is seen as sacred. The spiritual seeker “tends
to be more accepting, more trusting, and less skeptical than he
or she might be in a secular setting.” Spiritual abuse often
occurs in a situation in which there is some alteration of con-
sciousness, renewed energy, miracle of healing, or the promise
of such. The consequences of betrayal are extensive because
trust has been broken not only in relation to a particular set-
ting or individual but often in relation to a whole set of values
and beliefs, even perhaps to the ability to trust spiritually again.
Spiritual yearnings then become tainted, and development is
derailed through the mix of cynicism, doubt, fear, and hurt that
is bred by the unsavory combination of a desire for power and
the seeker’s spiritual longings. The desire for power originates in
the corrupt leader but is reinforced by a recipient who is con-
fused, overwhelmed, ignorant about her self-determination, her
rights to personal sovereignty.
One aspect of healing from abuse recommended by Wehr is
to redefine the sacred, “to move God from an external to an
internal authority. ...God didn’t really sanction any abuse,
even though the abuse was done in the name of the Holy.
What really is Sacred, Holy, God? What does your deepest
sense of who you are, your deepest integrity, demand of you?”
What is lost or buried in spiritual abuse is the seeker’s ability to
make her own decisions. Mixing betrayal and spirituality,
power and love, abuse blurs the longings for wisdom or tran-
scendence with the sense that one must give one’s self away.
In order to be spiritually and psychologically mature, we
have to take responsibility for ourselves, to be accountable for
our thoughts, intentions, actions. When we are driven by our
complexes or jettison our desires by projecting them onto
166 WOMEN AND DESIRE

others—wanting to be the Objects of Desire—then we are not

living consciously by our intentions. To know our own inten-
tions and desires we must gain a knowledge of our complexes.
We can partly answer the question Who am I? in learning how
we specifically create suffering in ourselves and others. Recog-
nizing how we create it, we can recognize how to stop it. We
then have a choice rather than a compulsion.

Expanding, Not Giving Away the Self

So WHAT ABOUT letting go of the self? Instead of the lan-

guage of letting go, I have found it useful to think of expanding
or sharing the self to include all that we sense and feel in our
connection to others. If we expand the self, then we don’t have
to give it away. Instead, we come to recognize that such spiri-
tual teachings point to the fact that we are never separate from
anything else in this universe; our fundamental condition is
interdependence. Many women understand this almost intu-
itively if they have extended themselves into their children—
which feels as though they have multiple locations of self.
Using the metaphor of expanding, we get around the thorny
questions of whether we have to “be somebody” before we can
“be nobody.” For women at this time in history, it seems that
the dualism of somebody-nobody is misleading, and often dan-
gerous.
We women need to be especially clear about self-
determination, about being Subjects of our own desires, while
recognizing that the self is a function and not a thing. We
should also become alert to our self-conscious emotions (pride,
envy, shame, jealousy, guilt, embarrassment, self-pity) that pre-
occupy us with worry about our images. We can struggle to let
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 167

go of these emotions and turn ourselves more directly to tasks

at hand.
Throughout this book I have recommended not being good
and nice but instead being sincere, compassionate, alert to the
choices you make. My feelings about spirituality are expressed
in the images and meanings of Mary Oliver’s evocative poem
“Wild Geese.” She reminds us that we do not have to be con-
tained, penitent, or self-effacing to engage the spiritual aspects
of our existence. We need only dive wholeheartedly into the
excitement and energy of our own physical and emotional
being, especially through our connection with the natural
world around us.
No matter your circumstances, fears, loneliness—even your
confusion—she says, “the world offers itself to your
imagination/calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and excit-
ing... .” Spiritual longings and questions arise in this kind of
immediate and authentic encounter.

Engaging Your Quest(ion)s

WHEN IT COMES TO the questions of why we are here, what

it means to be human, and why we die, we must go beyond the
province of psychology. To confront these questions, we turn to
a Big Story that offers a spiritual context for our development.
In my own life, I find the Big Story of compassion useful for
stepping out of self-consciousness, restlessness, and hopeless-
ness. Compassion, in English, literally means “suffering with.”
The word points to the possibility of empathy, or feeling
another’s pain or difficulty. Compassion stirs our natural altru-
ism, our desire to help. Anytime I have truly helped another
person or animal, I have been rewarded many times over and
168 WOMEN AND DESIRE

above the effort. Developing the capacity to give effective

help, to enter into another’s unique situation and see what is
useful and what is not, has expanded my self-knowledge, not in
a personal way but in the way of understanding what it means
to be human.
I have learned that my self is enhanced by every compas-
sionate act, and indeed that I cannot make the distinction
between self and other at these moments because there is no
distinction: there is one action that encompasses both peo-
ple—or all who are involved. My practice of Buddhist medita-
tion has assisted me in being keenly aware of sharing self in
this way, relaxing in my sense of self without excessive self-
consciousness and self-protection.
The peace activist Joanna Macy describes her approach to
compassionate action in a way that resonates with mine: “Even
my pain for the world is a function of this mutual belonging
like a cell experiencing the larger body. Because it shows that
causality, or power, resides in relationships rather than in per-
sons or institutions, it offers the courage to resist conformity
and to act in new ways to change the situation.” Resisting
conformity here does not mean rebelling but rather being alert
to the choices we make, the implications of our actions.
Responding usefully to others’ pain and suffering, knowing we
can make choices that change the world, keeps our focus large
and encompassing rather than small and fearful.
But this is just one way to answer the question of how to
expand the self through spiritual inquiry. My client Marjorie,
in seeking a sense of bigger purpose in her life, began to attend
a women’s group at her church and to read some books about
women’s spirituality, especially by the feminist Starhawk. She
found these books helpful in a more practical way than her ear-
lier New Age reading.
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 169

Influenced by her women’s group, her reading, and her ther-

apy, Marjorie began to study yoga and meditation. In the long
run these interests led her to open a little shop that specialized
in alternative approaches to women’s health—offering yoga,
vitamin supplements, aromatherapy products, and_ other
health and cosmetic products. In this work she integrated her
business skills, her ability to organize people, and her spiritual
interests.
When Marjorie left psychotherapy, she had changed her
religious affiliation and was attending Quaker meetings with
her children and husband. Participating in a feminist group in
her Quaker community, she had also begun to study advanced
yoga so that she could become a teacher. Her spirituality had
matured to the point that she felt symbolically connected to
the world around her, confident of the religious teachings she
was offering her children, and even hopeful amidst the appar-
ent chaos of our times.
Self-determining women engage their spiritual questions
directly and personally, and find ways to answer through tradi-
tional religions, feminist spirituality, or other contemporary
spiritual practices. Feminism has encouraged all of us to make
choices and to understand why and how we are doing things,
to know the implications of our actions for our humanity. From
a feminist perspective, women cannot thrive in any religious or
spiritual environment in which they simply follow rules that
were invented, at least in part, to keep men functioning as
Subjects and women as Objects. So we have to be watchful as
we engage with spiritual environments and practices to keep
our intentionality in the foreground if we are to have personal
sovereignty.
Jane, a client I see in psychotherapy, recently brought up a
dilemma she had encountered in her meditation practice. She
M9) WOMEN AND DESIRE

had been practicing a form of Zen Buddhist sitting meditation

for several months. Her sitting is immobile, still without random
movements of her body, even though her muscles might be
strained or she might experience an itch or cough. She had
been meditating long enough to learn that itches and coughs
have a way of fading if you just “sit with them” and let them
pass. Jane knew some of the benefits of holding still and not
giving in to the impulse to move. She liked the effect of watch-
ing the “profile” of her need to react: the intensification of it,
then its gradual fading and disappearance.
Yet Jane was often reminded of her early fundamentalist
Christian background, which had demanded that she endure
pain in silence and suppress pleasure. She remembered being
humiliated for being “weak” because she was a woman, and she
worried that once again she was forcing herself to endure pain
because it would teach her a lesson. From her psychotherapy
she had learned a very different way of living, much more in
line with the Mary Oliver poem: expecting the richness and
harshness of the world to call her forth in a way she could trust.
Now she worried that through her spiritual practice she was
forcing herself into an old pattern of self-abnegation.
My response was to ask her what she wanted. She had
already experienced some benefit in seeing the rise and fall of
her subjective reactions, and she had learned enough about her
practice to know what the long-term benefits could be. But I
stressed the fact that she was the only one to decide whether or
not the meditation “was worth it”—not in the sense of being
worth her time and energy but rather in the sense of affirming
her experience without promoting too many negative, oppres-
sive images of herself. Only she could answer this question.
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 171

Is It Worth It?

THE QUESTION Is it worth it? is one we all need to ask and

answer if we are to become Subjects of our spiritual desires.
This means an ongoing evaluation of where we stand in rela-
tion to rules and codes in our religious practices and traditions.
Does this work for me as a woman? If not, can I work to change
it? As the Buddhist scholar and feminist writer Rita Gross says,
“Because patriarchal religions will not rid themselves of their
patriarchy, a feminist who wishes to remain within that tradi-
tion must take nothing on faith and test everything.”
All institutionalized religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
Hinduism, Buddhism—contain practices and rules that are
oppressive to women. Influenced by feminism and female
leadership, these institutions are changing, even though the
process of change is slow and the traditions are strong. For any
woman, then, the question will be whether she can keep her
sanity, her connections with others, and her belief in her own
sovereignty in the face of the time and effort it might take to
participate in a patriarchal religion, even one that is in the
process of feminist transformation.
Many of us are still confused about how to be Subjects of
spiritual desires without miring ourselves in power struggles or
isolating ourselves in yet another way from other women. My
client Anne says, “I have so many things to be grateful for, and
I want to return what has been given to me through some kind
of spiritual expression. | want an outlet or a group, but I hesi-
tate to get involved with anything religious in an institutional
sense because everything gets so complicated.” She feels con-
flict when she goes to a formal mass at her Episcopal church, a
yD WO MUEEN 2AUN DDE SERIE

tradition that she has known since childhood. Even though

one of the pastors at her church is a woman, and even though a
female bishop presides in a nearby diocese, Anne feels that her
church still operates according to the same male-oriented prin-
ciples it did when she was a child. Women priests may lead ina
more relational style, but their presence has not affected much
of the decision making at higher levels, even in her own
church. Anne enjoys the ceremony, but she fears that she justi-
fies her involvement because she can’t motivate herself to do
something else. She is as uncertain about looking further into
her religion as she is ambivalent about looking for another
one. If she leaves her tradition she cuts herself off from her
family functions, but if she stays she has to be willing to chal-
lenge the status quo in order to even open the door to some
major changes she would like to see.
I, too, question the patriarchal roots of my religion. I
became a formal practitioner of Buddhism in 1970, before |
became a feminist and a mother. Even then I| recognized that
Buddhism, especially Zen, would become my mainstay for
being clearheaded and happy. But from the beginning I some-
times felt a wordless fear and a rising anger about practices and
rules that were imposed on me without my understanding
them. | had no idea how to verbalize that conflict, and I didn’t.
After only four years, having learned so much that was
tremendously important to me, | realized that I was experienc-
ing the same kind of shame and humiliation, negative feelings
about myself and my goodness, that I had felt in my childhood
religion. I was confused, sometimes even terrified, that I was
once again in a “fear-based” religion. I was troubled by the
severity of Zen practices that seemed to lack a human touch,
and | did not know why practitioners had to be so subdued and
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 173

isolated. So, without much forethought and almost to my own

surprise, I left the Zen center I had joined. When I spoke to my
teacher about wanting to leave, he responded kindly, in a way
that allowed me to continue to identify with being a Buddhist.
For almost twenty years I practiced on my own, sometimes
using formal Zen methods and sometimes not, often associat-
ing with various Quaker groups as a means of being in commu-
nity with like-minded people. I read a lot about the history of
Buddhism and gained knowledge that made my practice more
understandable, gave it a larger context. Identifying myself as
“a Buddhist,” I felt sheepish about not having a group affilia-
tion, but I also believed that my intuition was correct about
needing to be on my own for a time. Then in 1993, after seek-
ing a new teacher in a number of places, I was reunited with my
first teacher and the American Zen center where | began.
In the ensuing time feminism and women had influenced
Buddhism and the center where I had practiced. Now I find
there is room to ask questions, to express doubts and problems,
and to raise issues that might conflict with the mainstream
opinion. I am grateful to have returned to my community and
to have so many friends and so much history there. I am also
aware I still feel nagging doubts about the severity of some of
the practices and rules that have been imported from Japanese
society. As I have become better acquainted with Japanese his-
tory and culture, I have realized that Zen has been influenced by
many (sometimes hidden) beliefs that are oppressive to women—
arising especially from the hierarchical traditions of Confu-
cianism in China and Japan. So I continue to examine and
question while I engage with my practice and Zen community.
174 WOMEN AND DESIRE

If God Is Male

As I TRACE my own spiritual history, |cannot imagine that I

would be participating in a Zen Buddhist community today
were it not for American feminism. Buddhism is a nontheistic
religion (it does not deny the existence of supernatural beings
but has no Absolute or Supreme Being who can confer salva-
tion or damnation), so it has no gendered Absolute, no God.
Thus in the 1970s, feeling secure in Buddhism, | did not give
much thought to God or gods of any sort until I began to read
feminist theology.
A 1979 collection of essays called Womanspirit Rising: A
Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Carol Christ and Judith
Plaskow, introduced me to a broad range of new developments
from feminist theology. These essays awoke me to the idea that
a male god image affected our entire society, not only our
Judeo-Christian religions, but in the ways we looked at every-
thing, all of our values and all of our environments. Six years
earlier the theologian Mary Daly had said, “If God is male,
then male is God.” Spoken clearly and boldly, Daly’s words
were for many the clarion call to look at the political compo-
nents of traditional religions.
This perspective revealed my experiences at the Zen center
in a new light. I had found a language for my silent conflicts.
Even in that nontheistic environment there was a clear impli-
cation that “male is God” because all the teachers, leaders, role
models were male—and their authority was unquestioned.
Today women can be found in positions of authority and
influence in Buddhism and other major religions in our society,
but we are only at the point of departure in having an effect on
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 175

many traditions. Struggling for leadership, changing language

and forms of thinking, we continually renew our desires to
make our religions responsive and compassionate to the needs
of all kinds of people. Back in 1979 Christ and Plaskow
believed that feminism would “present a growing threat to
patriarchal religion less by attacking it than by simply leaving
it behind.” Their words have not proven to be true. Although
women-based religions have gained wide popularity, many
women have stayed within the framework of institutional reli-
gion while recognizing it as an instrument of their betrayal.
Women clergy, religious teachers, and monastics of all tradi-
tions have brought about remarkable, some almost unimagin-
able, changes by working from within their institutions.

Working within the Traditions

FEMINISM HAS THREATENED the religious status quo of

many traditions by questioning and undercutting the founda-
tions of the roles and beliefs that keep power in the ranks of
the few. In their efforts to disrupt the damaging effects of ele-
vating some and oppressing others, feminist religious leaders
and theologians are interested in much more than putting
women into leadership positions in religious institutions. They
are interested in reconceptualizing faith so that all people rec-
ognize that they are active shapers of their spiritual lives and
not passive recipients.
Feminist influences on religions and spiritual practices are
making an impact. In my view American feminism of the past
twenty-five years has been more successful in theology and
spiritual practices than in other areas of our society. Mainline
seminaries and religious institutions are now virtually forced to
176 WOMEN AND DESIRE

include feminist works in their bibliographies and course offer-

ings; even those who reject it must become acquainted with
feminist theology as a matter of professionalism. We cannot
say the same of professions such as medicine or law, or of gov-
ernment and business.
Feminist theologians and women priests, rabbis, pastors,
and teachers have opened and strengthened new possibilities
of greater participation for all people—but especially for
women who have been denied the right—to be Subjects in a
spiritual process. Feminism has challenged all of us to ask the
questions we want to answer.
Yet the faith that it is possible to practice female self-
determination in a traditional patriarchal religion is very
much a work in progress. Psychotherapist and feminist Rachel
Josefowitz Siegel describes herself as a “loud, proud Jewish
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother” and has written
numerous articles on issues of feminism and Judaism. Writing
about changes that have allowed women to practice as rabbis,
and girls and women to learn the sacred text, the Torah, Siegel
says, “The institutional changes are far from universal and
often have the quality of crazy-making illusions, being only
superficial, while the basic attitudes and behaviors have hardly
changed at all.” Only since 1922 have Jewish girls been per-
mitted to have a coming-of-age ceremony, called bat mitzvah,
and still they are excluded from such a ritual in the Conserv-
ative and Orthodox sects of Judaism. This ceremony, available
to boys for more than twenty-five hundred years, introduces a
young person as an adult into the community of practitioners.
Among other things preparation for the ceremony includes
learning the scholarly language (Hebrew) in which the sacred
books are written. Through most of the history of Judaism, girls
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 177

and women were not permitted to learn this language, so they

had no access to sacred texts.
Now that girls and women can be initiated into the
domains of power from which they had been excluded for cen-
turies, they are confronted with information about ritual and
tradition that they often find unwelcome. After acquiring the
knowledge of the Torah in the latter part of her adult life, Siegel
was surprised at her ambivalence about what she had learned.

As | learned more, I became aware of my aversion to the

sexist, hierarchical, and vengeful messages that are
embedded in Jewish texts. | began to ask myself whether
this was what | really wanted to perpetuate. The ques-
tion that emerged was whether it is possible to retain the
positive elements of Jewish teachings, while reframing
or rejecting the objectionable elements.

Siegel answered this question affirmatively and has been work-

ing for the inclusion of women in prayer, institutions, and
communal leadership while challenging the status quo of texts.
She has worked within her own community and through
national organizations to open more possibilities for women to
question and discuss sacred texts with their rabbis. She has
called on her own granddaughters to discuss with them their
developing identities as feminist Jewish women. She has
insisted that traditional male hierarchy be challenged and that
Jewish women recognize the important knowledge they bring
to their community, knowledge based on their experiences of
work and life. Through all of this Siegel accepts nothing from
tradition without questioning its specific meaning for women.
The Catholic theologian Mary Hunt raises some of the same
Were. WOMEN AND DESIRE

concerns. Is it possible to eliminate what is objectionable,

retain positive elements of Catholicism, and be a viable
Catholic feminist? Hunt believes that it is, but only by focusing
on changing structure, dogma, and language, and eliminating
power hierarchies. Although she believes that the ordination of
women as Roman Catholic priests is increasingly likely, she is
dubious about its effects. Hunt, like many other Catholic femi-
nists, feels ordination would be a hollow victory: “To ordain
women into hierarchical structures and... demand that they
be celibate and under the direct control of male bishops will be
no great accomplishment.” In fact, such an arrangement would
shore up male power, reinforcing most of the oppressive aspects
of Roman Catholicism and “leave untouched the many doc-
trinal and dogmatic issues which are so problematic.”
Hunt stresses that women should not be confused by win-
ning certain trappings in a patriarchal religion:

The major change [through feminist influences on reli-

gion] is not in the gender of the divine, though female
imagery and symbolism, as well as more abstract, non-
gendered notions are important. Rather it is the idea
that women are not meant to be passive recipients of
religion but active shapers. . . . This signals a fundamen-
tal change from a hierarchical model with religious pro-
fessionals . . . in charge to women taking responsibility
for our own religious lives.

In her memoir on being a Catholic feminist, Ordinary Time,

writer Nancy Mairs provides an example of feminist Catholi-
cism in her descriptions of her own spiritual community. All in
her community are committed to social change, especially to
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 179

working for peace and justice, and serving the hungry and
homeless. Every other Sunday afternoon her community meets
in informal gatherings in homes for a “leisurely Mass,” discus-
sion, and a potluck supper. This type of “house-church” is
closer to the manner in which early Christianity was practiced.
Before Christians could worship publicly (when they were
still persecuted by Romans), they met quietly in their homes to
gather around a table and celebrate, discuss, reminisce, eat,
and drink. Women played a major role in this movement, often
being the central organizers. Women were priests, prophets,
and probably even bishops during the first thousand years of
church history. But during the third and fourth centuries, as
Christianity entered the public sphere, conflict arose among
Christians about female leadership. Men became the major
leaders and demanded the same subjugation of women that
prevailed in society. Church scholars from Origen to Augus-
tine argued, not from theological but from social premises, to
condemn female prophecy and leadership. Eventually the
church adopted the position that women by their nature were
not fit to teach or baptize because their place was in the home
(as maidens, mothers, wives), not in the public domain.
Thus official female leadership was all but lost for hundreds
of years within Christian churches. In 1853 the first ordination
of a female minister was performed by the United Church of
Christ (UCC). Other denominations eventually followed;
now over 20 percent of UCC ministers are female. In 1973 the
first female priest was ordained in the Episcopal Church, and
today there are more than 1,950 female priests in the Episcopal
Church, and 2.3 percent of bishops are female. Yet across all
categories of ordained ministers and priests, women have con-
siderably less power than men in comparable roles, in terms of
180 WOMEN AND DESIRE

their status, decision making, and numbers of practitioners

they oversee.
In contrast with Christianity, there is no record of early
female leadership in Judaism. Ignorance of the sacred language
and texts was imposed on women through most of the formal
history of the religion, in the belief that it was women’s role to
be supportive of Jewish traditions through domestic and nurtur-
ant practices but not knowledgeable of the core teachings. The
combination of internalized inferiority and oppression from
the non-Jewish world and learned ignorance from within
Judaism leaves even feminists feeling “ambivalent about act-
ing, speaking, or being Jewish.”
But in spite of these negative internal and external discour-
agements, Jewish women are actively making their voices and
concerns heard. In 1972 the first woman rabbi was ordained in
the Jewish Reform Movement, and within a decade women
constituted more than a third of the students at the Reform
seminary. Feminist Jewish study and Rosh Chodesh groups are
flourishing in both Reform and Conservative congregations,
introducing new areas of Jewish study that focus on women at
international, national, and regional conferences. The major
task of Jewish feminism at this time is confirming women’s
knowledge and ability to speak out about their Jewishness,
questioning and claiming what they know, searching for an
authentic Jewishness that is not limited to male-dominated
labels and ideas.
Buddhism, like Christianity, has at its roots a belief in the
fundamental equality of the sexes. The ancient texts that pre-
serve the stories of the Buddha’s life also preserve the early sto-
ries of women monastics who achieved the highest goals of a
spiritual life as formulated by earliest Buddhism. Buddhism is
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 181

unique among world religions in having these female “songs of

triumph,” as Rita Gross calls them, scriptural accounts of
women’s experiences of enlightenment recorded in the sixth
century B.C.E.
Even with such events on record, though, Buddhism grad-
ually subordinated and oppressed women, assuming their
fundamental spiritual inferiority to men. Throughout its twenty-
five-hundred-year history, and until the advent of Western Bud-
dhism about forty years ago, many Buddhists “believed that
women needed to be reborn as men before they could attain
enlightenment.” Although this belief is now widely thought to
be wrong, it is still held by some more traditional Buddhists.
All the same, feminist women—like myself—are attracted
to Buddhism and to Buddhist meditational practices because
they are grounded in experience. Like feminism, Buddhism
presumes that we are blinded to our true nature by ignorance of
how things are. Both practices encourage us to break down and
release the obsessions and illusions that hide from us the true
beauty and contentment of our lives. Feminist women may see
Buddhist practices as ways to augment their own processes of
self-discovery and activism, offering well-tested methods for
awakening to the fullness of the present moment.
Yet when one reads Buddhist scriptures and teachings,
or the Western scholarship of Buddhism, even most of the
instructional books written for the beginning meditator, one
finds few references to women’s experiences, especially in ways
that might be different from men’s. Consequently, until very
recently there has been little to no instruction about using for-
mal meditation practice to improve and enhance the experi-
ence of relationships, childbirth, or parenting. Even though
daily physical work—cleaning, gardening, cooking, building—
row WOMEN AND DESIRE

is a major part of Zen training, it is rarely compared specifically

with managing a household and caring for a family. Contempo-
rary feminist Buddhists are filling this gap by integrating
women’s everyday lives into Buddhist practices and by devel-
oping a literature and approach that can sustain the feminist
gaze alongside the meditative gaze.
In this section, I have offered only a glimpse into the sexism
and oppression in a few religions, and what women are doing
to make changes. Because feminists have continued to practice
within the confines of patriarchal religions, and because these
religions offer long and well-tested traditions of spiritual devel-
opment, we can to varying degrees become Subjects of our spir-
itual desires within them. Repeatedly feminists stress the
critical importance of taking nothing on blind faith, following
no rules or codes without understanding them, then deciding
what can be used to develop integrity, wisdom, and transcen-
dence in a way that supports self-determination.

Working outside Traditions

WHAT, THEN, OF THE RELIGIONS that step outside pa-

triarchy? Alternatives to traditional religions in New Age,
Goddess, and Neo-Pagan groups have been established and
organized by women—some of them explicitly along the
lines of feminist concerns. They welcome and encourage self-
determination and are sensitive to the internalized inferiority
that has developed in many women through traditional reli-
gious practices.
Since the 1979 publication of Drawing Down the Moon by
Margot Adler, the Neo-Pagan movement has been one of the
fastest-growing forms of spirituality in the United States, with
estimates of more than 200,000 members. Neo-Paganism is a
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 183

loose affiliation of several forms of Goddess-based spirituality

that are known collectively as Wicca, Witchcraft, or simply
the Craft. There is no formal body of doctrine shared by all
practitioners of the Craft, but most contemporary Wiccans use
a system of practices that includes observance and celebration
of certain festival days (such as the vernal equinox, the sum-
mer solstice, and other season-linked days) for worship of the
Goddess and some Gods. Basic methods include the Sacred
Circle, a meditative frame of mind, and tools such as a ritual
knife (charged with certain energies) and quartz crystal.
Wiccan communities are composed of both women and
men—with the exception of Dianic Wicca, which is women
only—and are supportive of a wide variety of lifestyles and
identities. Feminist groups include in their goals the ongoing
creation and magic of women-oriented mysteries, such as
changes in the female life cycle.
The Goddess is often visualized in three aspects that corre-
spond with phases of the moon and with the female life cycle:
Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Each of these aspects is described
and imagined in ways that contradict patriarchal assumptions
about them and increase women’s strengths and abilities.
In ritual gatherings and study groups, women practitioners
find that feminist concerns and spiritual longings can merge.
In an atmosphere that is intended to be healing, women report
a renewal of trust, recovering from psychological, physical,
sexual, and spiritual abuse. Enlivened by their work together,
spiritual feminists often champion social change. They share
the belief that the “feminine principle” (connected to the
Goddess, nature, nuturance, and growth) can contribute to a
new synthesis of environmental, social, and gender healing.
Most practitioners find much to embrace in women-centered
spirituality, although criticisms sometimes arise in regard to
184 WOMEN AND DESIRE

the exclusion of men, or sexism, in some Neo-Pagan groups.

Wrestling with the forms and meanings of women living in
patriarchy—while excluding men and focusing on the femi-
nine life cycle—may not always be suited to the broader goals
of women’s self-determination. After all, most of us live in a
society that includes male dominance, patriarchy, and men.
To succeed in this society while changing it often means
reaching beyond Goddess images and emulating what seems to
be workable, honest, and useful from role models of both sexes.
Feminist spirituality appears to be single-mindedly devoted to
images that enhance the power of the Goddess, that focus on
the female reproductive cycle and its counterparts in the nat-
ural world. Furthermore, these Neo-Pagan groups are only
about twenty-five years old at most. Their newness and
uniqueness can mean that they do not fit easily with other
aspects of women’s lives—their families, friends, work settings.
And sometimes their newness means long and arduous invest-
ments in working out even basic premises for how to function
as a group.
Yet feminist spirituality has provided a much-needed alter-
native to patriarchal religions, as well as a clear message that
spiritual life for women should be a matter of self-determination,
self-esteem, and psychological health. The dialogue between
feminists in patriarchal religions and those in women-created
religions has strengthened and expanded the possibilities for
women being Subjects of their spiritual desires, asking the
questions they want to answer.

A Life of Meaning

EVEN WITH THE RISKS to women’s self-determination in

religious and spiritual settings, the benefits of spiritual devel-
 The Spiritual Problem of Giving Your Self Away 185

opment outweigh the alternative of a wholly secular life. With-

out a spiritual context of some sort, life eventually seems too
overwhelming or depressing. It is the design of human life
itsel'—the long dependency of childhood, the fearful responsi-
bility of adulthood, our aging, decline, and death—that moti-
vates us to want something more than a personal identity and
material things.
Finding and engaging greater spiritual meaning can now be
a major component of an intentional life for anyone, even in
this scientific materialistic period. Feminists have significantly
improved things by emphasizing the relationship between
mature spirituality and emotional maturity, especially for
women. What feminism teaches about spiritual life is that we
are all responsible for developing it; it does not come from
somewhere on high.
I like the way Nancy Mairs expresses this idea from a Chris-
tian perspective: “We are not pitiful creatures huddled help-
lessly beneath a blizzard of miseries blown down by some
capricious power amusing himself at our expense. God is
with(in) each of us, and to the extent that we recognize and
honor God’s presence in one another, we form and dwell in the
Community of God.”
Finding the guidance of a tradition and the support of a
community to create and sustain spiritual meaning is now pos-
sible in a new way. Patriarchal religions (however reluctantly)
and feminist spirituality are joined in inviting us to be Subjects
of our spiritual desires.
 SEVEN

The Paradox of Freedom and Desire

HROUGHOUT THIS BOOK | have talked about personal

sovereignty in many contexts. As we’ve learned, personal
sovereignty is different from assertiveness, individuality,
independence, and getting your own way. Personal sover-
eignty or autonomy means feeling free to choose and to intend
your actions. It requires practice and knowledge to make deci-
sions in a way that is responsible, fulfilling, and satisfying.
Expressing and supporting one’s decisions with responsible
action, ethical values, and clear language is a skill that can be
developed only through conscious understanding and effort.
Cravings or longings that arise from desire for what was
merely gratifying or pleasurable are not reliable guides to
autonomy because they lead to impulse and addiction. We can
never satisfy such cravings. They are based on the absence of
something we want—slenderness, sex, money, even an ideal

186
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 187

life partner—which no longer seems so exciting if or when we

get it. Indeed, absence is the nature of such desire, experienced
as emptiness, hunger, a lack, a yearning.
~ To be capable of personal sovereignty, you must come to
know all of your desires. When you know your own desires,
then you can choose among them—there is almost always
more than one desire in a moment or a decision—and begin to
discriminate the various paths your desires may lead you down.
As you come to know the difference between your desire to be
desirable and your desire to make your own decisions, you will
understand more clearly how to cope with the pressures that
arise in yourself and others when you begin to take yourself
seriously. You will come to see that making claims for your own
authority can sometimes lead to being seen as the hag-bitch,
and you will learn how to conserve your authority in the face of
challenges, attacks, and negative labels. Holding on to your
authority means breathing deeply and standing firmly behind
your decision without shame or blame.
Feminism has contributed to the development of women’s
sovereignty by opening many new avenues. New educational,
athletic, relational, financial, professional, spiritual, religious,
and lifestyle possibilities are available to all of us. Feminism
has alerted us to the fact that gender identity and power are
linked, and that it is vital to study and understand gender
because gender is focal in a lot of what we think about human
differences. Furthermore, feminism has shown us that gender is
the product of social and environmental influences rather than
biology and genetics.
What feminism has not clarified, though, is that certain
types of power lead not to personal sovereignty but to black
holes of despair, inner emptiness, and Hungry Ghost longings.
188 WOMEN AND DESIRE

Girls and women have been encouraged, even supported by

contemporary feminist and womanist groups, to go after what
they want, to increase their power and self-esteem. But they are
left unschooled in reading the signposts about what a particular
power might mean. Consequently, many women believe that
they are living out their own desires when they choose to be
thin, chic, fashionable, sexy—imitating the anorectic muse of
our era. And young mothers may feel that they have chosen,
rather than been elected, to be full-time moms. But we have
repeatedly seen that these are not free or autonomous choices
when they develop from conscious or unconscious desires to be
wanted, approved, worthy. The power of the Object of Desire is
short-lived and never real. And even though younger women
may not yet feel the depression and fear that are linked to being
Objects of Desire, those of us who are beyond young adulthood
know the burden of spending decades in beauty bondage or self-
sacrifice, overwhelmed by others’ needs, with no sense of con-
trol over our own lives. If we don’t wake up to the problem of
wanting to be wanted, and practice being the Subjects of our
own desires, then we feel that others are always choosing for us,
that our lives do not belong to us. We don’t feel responsible for
actions because we feel out of control.

An Intentional Life

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to feel “in control” of your life? The

word control carries a lingering shadow for women because we
are often called “controlling” by our husbands, boyfriends, and
children. What I mean by control is the ability to make a
choice. Personal sovereignty means that you choose from what
is available in order to be intentional about your life. Even if
you were locked in a prison cell, you could choose how to
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 189

think about it. You could, through your own attitude, find a
way to make use of your experience. Personal sovereignty is the
ability to know and practice self-determination in whatever
circumstances you find yourself. It depends on recognizing the
boundaries and domain in which your autonomy exists, con-
stantly seeing them clearly and extending them in favorable
ways. When you feel in control of your life, you know yourself
to be the author of your own actions and know that you always
have choices.
Exercising choice and intentionality does not necessarily
lead to the outcomes that we desire. No one is free to have her
or his own way in human life. We are all limited by our weak-
nesses: mistakes, ignorance, circumstances, physical limita-
tions, impermanence, illnesses, and death. Innumerable things
fall completely outside our personal control every day. But as
we learn how to make decisions in our daily lives, we become
enlightened about our strengths and limitations, and how we
depend on others for what we cannot do for ourselves.
In the early years of our development, we come into posses-
sion of the experience of being an individual self. That experi-
ence is hedged around by self-conscious emotions—envy,
pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, self-pity. These emotions
encourage us to protect ourselves from others and convince us
that the story of our world is “us against them.” In order to
break down those defenses and change the story to “us depend-
ing on them,” we have to learn how to live intentionally. Com-
ing to know the paradoxical nature of our autonomy—that we
are always free to choose but limited in our knowledge and
power—we come to be grateful for the people and situations
that complete us, and we become more fully engaged with the
choices that are available.
As we saw in the last chapter, free will or intentionality is at
Igo WOMEN AND DESIRE

the heart of all the great religious and spiritual teachings. They
teach that human beings are free to make their own choices
and so are responsible for their actions in a way that animals
are not. Here is how the Buddha said it, more than twenty-five
hundred years ago:

My actions are my only true belongings.

I cannot escape the consequences
of my actions.
My actions are the ground
on which I stand.

Social and political rights to sovereignty are vital to cultivat-

ing the experience of personal sovereignty. When people are
not granted basic human rights—to life’s resources, property,
free expression, and suffrage—then it is difficult, sometimes
even impossible, for them to develop their own feelings and
experiences of personal sovereignty. The rights of women and
minorities to vote and openly express their views, to hold posi-
tions of leadership, and to be originators of cultural and cre-
ative expressions are intrinsic to their experience of personal
sovereignty. Women and minorities are relative newcomers to
the domain of social and political freedom. We continue to
be confused about our personal sovereignty, at least in part,
because our expressions of power and authority are still not
openly supported in many cultural, political, domestic, and
relational arenas.
Thus, the knowledge and skill of developing autonomy are
unfamiliar to many women. Those who identify with being
Objects rather than Subjects function more in terms of what
they “ought” to do, what they “have to” do, or what they
“should” do because their sense of worth arises from others’
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire IgI

evaluations, reflections, desires. They miss out on learning how

to be self-determining, although they may believe that they
have learned. The telltale sign that they are functioning more
as Objects than as Subjects is, as we have repeatedly seen, feel-
ing resentful and overwhelmed by their daily activities—feel-
ing as though someone else were in charge.

The Hero Myth and Selfish Determination

MEN, ESPECIALLY WHITE MEN, have traditionally been

shaped and schooled by society to be Subjects of their desires:
they have been taught and shown by example how to be self-
determining, to guide themselves by the belief that they must
exercise their freedom in choosing a partner, a job, a direction,
a political leader. This does not, however, mean that all men
succeed in becoming Subjects of their own desires; they cer-
tainly do not.
Contemporary men are often confused about the nature of
personal sovereignty because recently we have come to ques-
tion and undermine the male myths that surround our sense of
self. Traditionally, white men grew up believing that their
autonomy was intimately related to their independence and
individuality. In the United States our major cultural biases
about the autonomous self have been cast in the form of the
hero myth. This is the story of the lone genius, adventurer, ath-
lete, artist, doctor, or scientist who triumphs against all odds to
achieve a “unique” status because of his individual abilities. He
is known as the Great Man, on whom we all depend for our
meaning and miracles. Note that the myth never includes all
the people on whom the great man depends for ideas, conver-
sation, personal support, and services.
More important, this myth is a distortion of what it means
192 WOMEN AND DESIRE

to be a Subject. The myth emphasizes individuality, aloneness,

uniqueness, and independence to the exclusion of relation-
ship, community, shared identity, and mature dependence. It
confuses independence with autonomy. Men have been cheated
out of a range of feelings and experiences in emulating the lone
hero, resulting in unhealthy internal pressures, excessive nar-
cissism, and feelings of isolation, resentment, and depression.
Fewer and fewer men feel good about following the hero
myth as a personal life story. Yet the myth persists in our cul-
ture, causing many of us discomfort and confusion about our
autonomous needs. Both women and men have questioned me
when | say that self-determination is at the heart of feeling
human. They unconsciously hear the phrase as “selfish deter-
mination.” Should I put my needs above others’? Is it fair to be
selfish and go after just what I want? are the questions they
most often ask.
These are the wrong questions. They come from the
assumption that your needs are intrinsically opposed to others’
needs. They eliminate the idea that you can willingly choose to
fulfill someone else’s needs and wants when it is a matter of
personal intention and not pressure from another. These ques-
tions obscure the real meaning of self-determination, as the
freedom to choose, by surrounding it with anxiety about inde-
pendence or individuality. They also eliminate the knowledge
that choosing to help another can increase your own satisfac-
tion and welfare, not simply because you were compassionate
but because you chose to help when you could have chosen
something else.
The right question—What do I want here?—needs to be
posed with the understanding that your desires, needs, and
wants can never be met perfectly, yet you are free to choose.
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire ewe:

As I have said, I believe that we live in a world of depen-

dence—with mature dependence as a worthy goal of adult
development—so | also believe that everyone has needs for
good, healthy relationships and desires to be of use to society
and family. These considerations will always count heavily in
our decision making, weighing one possibility against another,
until we reach a viable direction. However, as we have seen
again and again, if we give away personal sovereignty—either
consciously or unconsciously—then we cannot be vitally
engaged with our lives.

Living without Resentment

PERHAPS YOU RECALL Marla, from Chapter Three, who

was married to Jack. Marla no longer believed that she could
be an Object of Desire because her thighs were too flabby and
her mouth had too many wrinkles around it. Believing that
she could not stir the sexual excitement of her husband (or
another man), she gave up wanting sex. When Marla came
into psychotherapy she felt “liberated” because she could say
No to sex with Jack. As we learned, though, her No was not a
real choice because she could never say Yes. And her No was
filled with resentment because, as she said, she felt constant
guilt about it.
Unless you have two options, you don’t have a choice,
and Marla had only one option. She was not free. Marla began
to say No to sex because she knew that she didn’t want it.
Her reason for not wanting it, though, was that she could no
longer identify with being the desire-awakening maiden. Once
she had been trapped as the muse, but now she was trapped as
the hag.
194 WOMEN AND DESIRE

The hag must get out of the woods of shame in order to

become the Subject of her own desire. Marla came to psy-
chotherapy to do that. Her hag identity had to transform into
the belief that she could become an active sexual partner. For
Marla, this meant letting go of her obsessions about appear-
ance and engaging in physical pleasures more often with Jack.
At first they massaged each other and spent some leisurely
hours in bed together. Then Marla began to explore a few sex-
ual pleasures—being stroked and kissed—and eventually
found that, when she was relaxed, she could easily come to
orgasm with Jack manually stimulating her. Having discovered
this, Marla wanted to pursue her sexual responses further, in an
atmosphere of respect for both herself and Jack.
But there were limitations. She and Jack had a two-year-old
daughter and a five-year-old son, and Marla had a career as an
elementary school teacher. There were physical limitations,
too. Marla often had severe premenstrual syndrome (PMS)
and could barely manage her moods during several days of each
month. She had to make choices: how and how often could she
get child care so that she and Jack could spend some leisurely,
intimate time together? How could she manage her PMS so
that her potential sexual engagements could take place during
more than two weeks every month? At first she tended to fall
back into her hag complex: it’s no use, | was never meant to
have sexual pleasures, I’m just not that kind of woman. But
when she saw how resentful and bitter she became, with the
knowledge now that she could be otherwise, Marla wanted
greater freedom. She began to want both Yes and No as options
for her sex life.
Eventually Marla was able to achieve a compromise: she
could schedule certain Saturday mornings with Jack as “time
for sexual pleasure” and plan to have the children stay with her
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 195

mom. She had to relinquish the idea of “spontaneous sex”—

something that she had always hoped would be a part of her
married life. If she was feeling physically exhausted, she and
Jack might agree to exchange orgasms manually rather than
have intercourse. Sometimes they would exchange massages if
orgasm seemed too burdensome. She had to give up the idea
that she had to feel physically good before she could be inti-
mate with Jack.
Marla surprised herself with her ease of orgasm when there
was no pressure on her to be “seductive or beautiful.” She said
that she felt “okay” about her body, and she knew that Jack
accepted her completely. Her sex life wasn’t perfectly passion-
ate, but it certainly brought her pleasure in a way it never had
before. The most important thing was that Marla felt free to
continue to explore and develop her sexuality; she was the
Subject of her own sexual desires. No longer was she resentful
and bitter, because she knew that she had choices and that
Jack did not control her sexuality.
Marla was able to decide in favor of creating a sex life and
changing her attitude about marital sex. But some decisions
are not that easy.

No Right Answers

DECIDING WHETHER OR NOT tohave achild, for example,

often seems especially difficult. Single and married women—
lesbian and straight or bisexual—seek the “right” answers in
deciding whether or not to procreate. | have sat for weeks,
months, and even years in weekly psychotherapy sessions with
women who were trying to make this decision, which would
affect the remainder of their lives.
Are my personality and life situation suited to being a
196 WOMEN AND DESIRE

mother? Is this the right time,or should I wait, even though

the biological clock is ticking? Would it be better to undergo
fertility techniques or to adopt? Should I have a committed
partner as a condition for becoming a mother, even though
waiting for one may mean that | am too old to get pregnant
without technical assistance? What if | want a baby and my
partner doesn’t? With all kinds of options available to women
who are privileged enough to use them, the questions are end-
less about how, when, and even what (girl or boy) to have.
It is my job to listen and explore all the options with my
clients. What I see in the process, and what my clients come to
see, is their secret desire to have guarantees, to know that what
they have chosen is the “best” choice available. We women are
fundamentally unpracticed in being the Subjects of our desires,
sO we are continuously wary about deciding what we want
because we fear the consequences of that decision. It’s not at
all wrong to gather information and explore all options; gath-
ering facts and hearing about others’ experiences are necessary
ingredients of making major life decisions. Eventually, though,
a decision is just a decision. We will not know whether it was
the right one or the wrong one until we live out its conse-
quences (and perhaps we won’t know then). But we will learn
more about being Subjects of our desires and about being
human.
Trying too hard to avoid negative consequences will throw
us off course, because a decision means choosing from at least
two options, not always making the best or the right choice but
being willing to learn from choices. Making life decisions, and
making everyday choices, means learning about risk and chal-
lenges. Our choices are never flawless. We are not gods; we
cannot see the future; we cannot know all our effects on the
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 97

interdependent world in which we live, the webs of relation-

ships that sustain us. Yet we must choose, because if we do not
we cannot be free. If we do not choose consciously, we will
react unconsciously through our impulses and hidden desires,
projecting our power needs and other longings onto others and
feeling as though they have control of our lives.
By consciously choosing, we also come to see our mistakes,
our weaknesses, our need for others. If we do not encounter
the flaws in our own choices, we may pretend to be perfectly
knowledgeable and complete in ourselves. By practicing
autonomy and engaging fully with the choices we have made,
we learn that we are responsible but not omniscient, that we
need to admit failure and mistakes, and that we may need to
change a course of action even when it is under way. We learn
why and how we need others to help us in understanding our-
selves and coping with the consequences of our actions. This is
what I call living an intentional life.

Stories of Female Desire

IN THE STORIES of personal sovereignty in women | have

told throughout this book, certain themes have recurred. The
first is bringing what was hidden out into the light; the second
is gaining knowledge of that which was hidden; and the third
involves the paradox of autonomy—how we learn about our
vulnerability and limitations when we finally become Subjects
of our own desires.
In the first story Lady Ragnell lives hidden in the woods of
shame, yet she knows and directs herself by her own desires, so
when her moment arrives she steps out and makes her desires
clear. This begins the process of her development.
198 WOMEN AND DESIRE

In the second story Pandora digs up the buried earthenware

jar and brings it into the light of day. Within it are the troubles
and evils of life, including death, that divide humans from the
gods. Pandora’s curiosity causes her to reveal what had been
hidden from men: the weaknesses that make us mortal and
fallible.
In the third story Psyche shines her light on the god Amor,
revealing the nature of romantic desire as an unattainable
ideal and awakening the possibility for true love. Later, in pur-
suit of becoming a Subject of her own desires, Psyche opens the
box of beauty that she brought from the underworld. Again,
female curiosity leads to an uncovering: death is where beauty
was supposed to be.
In the fourth story the miller’s daughter reveals the savage
nature of the hidden desire for power—the impotent rage of
narcissism. By identifying the impish man, the daughter brings
out into the light the narcissistic longings of mothers (or
fathers) to amass reflected glory through their children. These
longings can bring disastrous results for mother and child if
both lose their capacity for autonomous development.
In the account of the Hungry Ghosts of Buddhist cosmol-
ogy, we saw one more example of the importance of bringing
what was hidden into the light. Our attachment to hidden
longings that can never be fulfilled—such as wanting to be the
youthful desire-awakening maiden when we are no longer
young—binds us to pathologies of material desires, like com-
pulsive shopping and eating.
In all these stories women gain knowledge in seeing what
had been hidden. Ragnell discovers what she must master to
restore her sovereignty: the rebukes to her authority and the
ridicule for being a hag. Bringing her hag complex into the
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 199

open, she comes to understand how to transform her wretched

identity as a loathsome lady into that of a free, serene woman.
In the process she also learns that she must depend on others’
goodwill as well as her own authority to bring about changes.
Ultimately, Gawain grants her the “right” to exercise her
autonomy in choosing how she will appear. Surrounded as she
is by male dominance, Ragnell’s choices and actions are inter-
twined with the choices and actions of her male counterparts
as she struggles to claim personal sovereignty in her marriage.
Because this story was probably told originally as an edifying
tale about the loss of female sovereignty in traditional patriar-
chal marriage, we must understand it in the context of the lim-
itations of female desire. Many women have questioned me
about the fact that Gawain bestows the right to her personal
sovereignty on Ragnell. I have answered that we all depend
on others to assist us in finding our autonomy. In this story
Ragnell depends on her partner, but she is in no way passive in
her dependence. She makes every choice presented to her, and
she is always clear about her authority and knowledge.
We don’t know anything of Pandora’s development after
she opened the earthenware jar. We can only speculate that
her curiosity brought her knowledge about the necessity of
transformation. We might imagine that Pandora’s develop-
ment was similar to Psyche’s. Psyche encountered two transfor-
mative moments when she gained important knowledge
through uncovering what had been hidden: the first when she
lifted the candle to reveal the identity of Amor, and the second
when she opened the box of beauty.
In the first, knowledge brought sorrow, because at the
moment that Psyche learned Amor’s true identity as the god
of love she lost him. Knowledge often awakens us to our
200 WOMEN AND DESIRE

limitations, sometimes even to pain and loss. Emotionally, Psy-

che had been wedded to a fantasy or ideal until she lifted the
candle to reveal Amor; she had been in a death-marriage, in
which she was passive and ignorant, even though it felt
pleasurable. Without knowledge of her partner’s identity, she
had no freedom.
When Psyche held her candle over Amor, she illuminated
her own desire to be cared for in a realm of effortless abun-
dance. She had been trapped in a ghostly place in which her
fantasies materialized into food, drink, pleasures, and sex.
Faced with the recognition of how she had been living as a
human in the realm of the gods, Psyche was bereft of all that
she loved. Her all-too-human error of carelessly dropping hot
wax on Amor’s sleeping form symbolizes the impossibility of
our achieving perfect pleasure and beauty. True love, as we
have repeatedly seen, is possible only when desire meets real-
ity; Psyche had no possibility of true love as long as her desire
was captured by fantasy.
In her search for her lost Amor, Psyche is confronted with
many tasks set by her challenger, Venus. With the help of oth-
ers, Psyche overcomes obstacles and gains knowledge of her-
self—her instincts, her intuitions, her discriminating intellect.
Each task brings greater self-awareness. But the final task, to
bring Venus the box of beauty, is the only one Psyche fails. Her
lingering desire to be the most beautiful of all women remained
even after she had learned about many of her strengths and
abilities. Psyche’s death-sleep can be interpreted as a depres-
sion, an inner deadness that results from her hidden desire to
remain the Object of Desire.
How can we understand her rescue by the powerful Venus?
I believe that Venus represents Psyche’s mother complex, a
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 201

discordant source that had been driving her to be the most

beautiful. Because Psyche has been struggling to defeat this
powerful complex, she successfully completes all but one of the
tasks. But she cannot bring about her own liberation from the
spell cast by the negative complex. She has a fatal flaw (addic-
tion to beauty) that she is unable to overcome without the aid
of those more powerful than herself, Amor and Venus (who
can be interpreted as separate beings or as aspects of Psyche’s
personality who aid her ego). However we choose to interpret
the last scene of Psyche’s tale, we can be certain that she is not
a hero. She does not save herself, but she is saved; she has
reached a frame of mind in which liberation is possible, but she
cannot bring it about without help.
When the miller’s daughter learns Rumpelstiltskin’s name—
symbolizing the knowledge that he is the discordant source of
her mother’s power needs—she is directly released from his
spell and becomes her own person. Hearing his name spoken
by the daughter, the little man tears himself into two, depict-
ing the destruction of the daughter’s Divine Child complex,
which had bound her to carry out her mother’s will rather than
develop her own autonomy. But even here the daughter
depends on the messenger to find the name of the little man;
she does not find it all on her own.

The Paradox of Autonomy

BRINGING WHAT IS HIDDEN out into the light and know-

ing the name of what troubles us are the first steps toward
autonomy. They provide us with insight and understanding
about our hidden desires and emotional habits. But to become
Subjects of our own desires, we need the moral strength or
202 WOMEN AND DESIRE

courage to continue to face the conflicts of our inner and outer

lives as we attempt to put our insights into action. Just as Psy-
che’s illumination of Amor and her curiosity about the box of
beauty led to more struggle and challenge, so living as Subjects
of our desires has the nature of conflict.
When an unmarried client of mine in her thirties recently
decided to adopt an interracial baby, she did so with the recog-
nition that many conflicts would arise from having a baby of a
race different from her own. Contemplating the adoption, this
woman went through a long process of asking herself and her
partner questions. Many of the questions had a “What if...”
beginning, and the client eventually saw that she was trying to
protect herself and her (potential) baby from harm by trying to
get guarantees before even deciding to take the baby. With my
help she stopped asking these questions and instead, when she
felt the impulse to ask, she breathed deeply and questioned
herself, “What do I fear in this?” Discovering that her fears
were human-size—Would she be a good mother? Would others
criticize her for adopting a baby without being married? Would
her partner leave when the baby came? Would the child turn
on her because she was of a different race?—allowed my client
to decide in favor of adopting. All her questions had to do with
how others would perceive her rather than with the experience
of loving a child. She decided she wanted the experience and
could learn from the conflicts that would inevitably develop.
Another client, in her midfifties, was faced with the deci-
sion of whether to leave a marriage of thirty years when she
discovered that her husband was having an affair with some-
one at his workplace. As she looked at what she wanted, she
saw conflict: she wanted to stay and retain a sense of family and
history, and she wanted to respect herself and move on with
her own life without her husband. For several months she and I
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 203

talked about the conditions that had led to her husband's

desire for another woman—the lack of sex between them, the
failure to engage in lively dialogue after their children grew up,
the gradual separation of their lives as their personal interests
diverged. My client felt responsible for a great deal of what had
gone badly over the past ten years.
Her husband did not want to dissolve the marriage, but he
would not promise her that he would never again engage in a
sexual relationship with an outside partner. She asked him to
go to couples therapy with her, and he did, but she suspected
that he was continuing to be involved with his lover. Increas-
ingly she felt that she was unable to live with so little trust in
him, and she decided to leave the marriage. Although she
faced a terrible grief in leaving, she was also satisfied that she
had made a choice that expressed her values of honesty and
trust as a foundation for a marriage. She left as the Subject of
her own desires, so she did not feel ashamed and broken by her
husband’s infidelities, although she knew that her life ahead
would be difficult in many ways.
When you live an intentional life and make your own deci-
sions, you come to see the paradox of your personal sover-
eignty. To follow blindly your own desires will create a prison
of constant craving and longing, from which you cannot
escape. To refuse your desires will create another kind of
prison, one in which you will feel ashamed, guilty, resentful, or
even psychologically dead. To engage your desires, with the
recognition that they will teach you about your limitations,
your vulnerability, and your conflicts, as well as your strengths,
will lead to the discovery of your own nature, of who you are.
I know from personal experience and my clinical work that
we become deeply ethical people only through the lessons of
personal sovereignty. By engaging freely in our own choices,
204 WOMEN AND DESIRE

and then seeing how and why those choices are flawed and
lacking, we develop a sincere tolerance for our own and others’
faults, and a generosity in wanting to help. Struggling to use
our conscious intentions to guide our actions, seeing how hard
it is not to be driven by our complexes and meaner desires, we
develop compassion for others and ourselves. Over time these
experiences teach us. Here is how Jung put it:

The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the

rightness of your life. A life without inner contradiction
is either only half a life or else is a life in the Beyond,
which is destined only for angels. But God loves human
beings more than the angels.

When we become Subjects of our desires, then, we do not

learn how to be gods or how to get our own way. We do not
become more selfish or self-interested; rather we come to see
what it means to be human.

True and Authentic

PERSONAL SOVEREIGNTY LEADS to the knowledge of

freedom and limitation. On the one hand, we come to consider
our own desires and needs more openly, to take them as seri-
ously as we would take those of others—our friends, children,
partners. We learn to negotiate differences and conflicts among
our various Commitments to community, family, self, as well as
differences and conflicts with others’ needs and desires. On the
other hand, we learn to recognize our mistakes, blindness,
weaknesses, and other limitations that are not under our con-
trol. We learn that we continue to live in a male-dominated
 The Paradox of Freedom and Desire 205

society in which images of the desire-awakening maiden sym-

bolize an almost transcendent vitality. We learn that our own
claims to authority and desire, even when spoken calmly with-
out blame, can be unfairly labeled as the expression of a hag-
bitch whose negative emotions are deeply threatening.
The dialogue that develops between freedom and limita-
tion of female desire allows us to open up conversations that
we thought we could never have. These conversations inevi-
tably show us that an authentic self depends on relationships
and contexts that we can never wholly command or control.
As the philosopher Charles Taylor plainly says, “My own iden-
tity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others.”
In my understanding of female desire, | agree wholly with
Taylor’s view of the nature of authenticity: that its source
is relationship, and that some of the things we most value in
our selves are accessible to us only through those we love. So
those others become internal to our own identities. Auton-
omy—our ability to make choices and take responsibility for
ourselves—when understood as embedded in our relation-
ships, leads eventually to gratitude, tolerance, and compassion
for others.
When we act according to our “true self” or “authentic
self,” we make transparent our shortcomings in a way that
arouses compassion. In order to see ourselves as naked and not
to be ashamed, to acknowledge our weaknesses and know that
they open us to being loved by others, we have to engage our
own choices again and again. Following our intentions, we
come to our authentic being, and we no longer have to hide in
shame or equivocate in guilt.
As Subjects of our own desires, we develop our potentials
and grow in our capacity to lead an ethical life. What we once
206 WOMEN AND DESIRE

accepted as the dictates of an external authority we now think

out for ourselves, and we are required to articulate an identity
over time that places us consistently and squarely at the center
of our own contradictory feelings and motives.
Under these conditions we are not free in the sense of being
more independent or more individual. But we are free in
understanding human intentions and actions, our own and
others’, in a manner that allows us to trust our hearts. For if
wanting to be wanted is about image, wanting to be loved is
about heart. The heart-truth of wanting to be loved is what we
discover through a way of living that rests on honesty, direct-
ness, transparency. When we live as the Subjects of our desires,
we discover that we are sustained by others, paradoxically
through making our own choices every step of the way.
 Notes

ONE. WANTING TO BE WANTED

1 Lacan: According to the Lacanian analyst Stuart Schneiderman, in

a 1972-73 seminar titled “Encore,” “Lacan was saying that, what-
ever it is that women want, it is not love... . Women do not give
their love to men who love them, but to men who want them.” Stu-
art Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 30.
4 double bind of female authority: See Polly Young-Eisendrath and
Florence Wiedemann, Female Authority: Empowering Women Through
Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1987).
7 Sigmund Freud: Rather than a hostile remark, this was a genuine
inquiry into the unhappy condition of Victorian women posed by
Freud to Marie Bonaparte: “The great question that has never been
answered and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my
thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a
woman want?” Quoted in Lucy Freeman and Herbert S. Strean,
Freud and Women (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), p. 200.

207
208 Notes to Pages 7-23

7 medieval folktale: See Donald Sands, “The Marriage of Sir Gawain

and the Lady Ragnell,” in Middle English Verse Romances (New York:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966).
ioe) modern retelling: See Ethel Johnston Phelps, ed., The Maid of the
North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1981); and Polly Young-Eisendrath, Hags
and Heroes: A Feminist Approach to Jungian Psychotherapy with Cou-
ples (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1984).
14 mythical hag: See Young-Eisendrath, Hags and Heroes, pp. 65-68.
anorectic woman-child: The anorectic woman-child seems to be
personified in today’s models. For data on weight and height for
models versus the average American woman and the average U.S.
Army woman, see note to page 36, weigh between twenty-five and
thirty pounds less.
Subject: According to Lacan, our early childhood experiences of
subjectivity are chaotic and difficult to bear. Therefore, we seek to
be mirrored and tend to identify with images that are more coherent
than our own subjective experience. Although we all seek the
coherence of a mirrored self over the chaos of a subjective self,
women are especially encouraged to experience their subjectivity as
objects outside themselves by locating themselves in reflections,
thereby losing sight of their own true subjectivity. See Joseph H.
Smith and William Kerrigan, eds., Interpreting Lacan: Psychiatry and
the Humanities, vol. 6 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1983).
20 Diana, Princess of Wales: For a recent account of Princess Diana’s
last year, see Donald Spoto, Diana: The Last Year (New York: Har-
mony Books, 1997). See also Andrew Morton, Diana: Her New Life
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
21 “In breaking out”: Carol Gilligan, “For Many Women, Gazing at
Diana Was Gazing Within,” New York Times, September 9, 1997.
22 Shame: For an insightful discussion of the role of shame in human
development, see Michael Lewis, Shame: The Exposed Self (New
York: Free Press, 1995). See also Daniel L. Nathanson, ed., The
Many Faces of Shame (New York: Guilford Press, 1987).
23 “I just need more space”: See, for example, John Gray, Men Are
from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving
 Notes to Pages 24-35 209

Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships

(New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
24 pop psychology: Ibid. See also Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About
Men (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990).
26 psychological complexes: Jung’s theory of psychological complexes
is presented in Carl G. Jung, “A Review of the Complex Theory,”
in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, 2d ed., vol. 8, trans. R. E C.
Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 92-104;
and Collected Works, vol. 2, trans. L. Stein (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1973), pp. 598-603.
27 emotional meanings: See James Le Doux, The Emotional Brain: The
Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996); and Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It
Can Matter More Than IQ (New York: Bantam Books, 1995).
28 hungry ghosts: See note to page 138, Hungry Ghosts.
22 Paracelsus: I am quoting this material from memory. For a discus-
sion of the relationship between knowledge and love, see Hans G.
Furth, Knowledge as Desire: An Essay on Freud and Piaget (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987).

TWO. THE MENACE OF FEMAUE BEAUTY

33 female power is beauty: Two excellent appraisals of the damaging

effects of current images of female beauty are Naomi Wolf, The
Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New
York: William Morrow, 1991); and Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight:
Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1993).
34 problems with appearance: See Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body
Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random
House, 1997), p- 195-
3S between the ages of thirteen and eighteen: The self-centeredness
and self-consciousness that emerge in adolescence are the natural
outgrowth of a capacity for self-reflection that did not exist before.
See Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, trans. M.
Warden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926); David Elkind, “Ego-
centrism in Adolescence,” Child Development 38 (1967), pp. 1025-34;
210 Notes to Pages 35—36

David Elkind, Child Development and Education: A Piagetian Perspec-

tive (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); and David Elkind,
The Child and Society: Essays in Applied Child Development (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
55) Two-thirds of all American women: Laura Fraser, Losing It: Amer-
ica’s Obsession with Weight and the Diet Industry That Feeds on It (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1997), p. 46.
35) $5 to $7 billion: Ibid., p. 82.
36 by age thirteen: Brumberg, Body Project, p. xxiv. Two recent studies
show that female fourth-graders are concerned about their weight.
See Ann M. Gustafson-Larson and Rhonda Dale Terry, “Weight-
Related Behaviors and Concerns of Fourth-Grade Children,” Jour-
nal of the American Dietetic Association 92 (1992), pp. 818-822; and
Mark H. Thelen, Anne H. Powell, Christine Lawrence, and Mark E.
Kuhnert, “Eating and Body Image Concerns Among Children,”
Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 21, no. 1 (1992), pp. 60-69. See
also Judith Newman, “Little Girls Who Won’t Eat: The Alarming
Epidemic of Eating Disorders,” Redbook, October 1997, pp. 120-154.
36 fasting, overuse of laxatives . . . : See Joan P. Cesari, “Fad Bulimia:
A Serious and Separate Counseling Issue,” Journal of College Student
Personnel 27, no. 3 (1986), pp. 255-259; Helen P. Klemchuk, Cheryl
B. Hutchinson, and Rochelle I. Frank, “Body Dissatisfaction and
Eating-Related Problems on the College Campus: Usefulness of the
Eating Disorder Inventory with a Nonclinical Population,” Journal
of Counseling Psychology 37, no. 3 (1990), pp. 297-305; and Paul
Rozin and April E. Fallon, “Body Images, Attitudes to Weight, and
Misperceptions of Figure Preferences of the Opposite Sex: A Com-
parison of Men and Women in Two Generations,” Journal of Abnor-
mal Psychology 97, no. 3 (1988), pp. 342-345.
36 61 percent of college women: See Laurie B. Mintz and Nancy E.
Betz, “Prevalence and Correlates of Eating Disordered Behaviors
Among Undergraduate Women,” Journal of Counseling Psychology
35, no. 4 (1988), pp. 463-471.
36 weigh between twenty-five and thirty pounds less: Laura Fraser
reports that today’s average model is “five feet nine and a half inches
tall, weighs 123 pounds, wears a size 6 or 8, and often has too little
body fat to menstruate. .. . The average American woman, on the
 Notes to Pages 36—41 211

other hand, is five feet four inches, weighs 144 pounds, and wears a
size 12.” Fraser, Losing It, pp. 8-9. The Fort Military Information
Command Center lists the following maximum weight standards for
a five-foot, four-inch female member of the U.S. Army: ages seven-
teen to twenty, 133 pounds; ages twenty-one to twenty-seven, 137
pounds; ages twenty-eight to thirty-nine, 141 pounds; ages forty and
above, 145 pounds. See Fort Military Information Command Cen-
ter web site at http://www.fortmicc.com/pages/FMAR
108. htm.
36 viewing fifty fashion photographs: See Bill Thornton and Jason
Maurice, “Physique Contrast Effect: Adverse Impact of Idealized
Body Images for Women,” Sex Roles 37, nos. 6-7 (September 1997),
Pp- 433-439. See also Sarah Grogan, Zoe Williams, and Mark Con-
ner, “The Effects of Viewing Same-Gender Photographic Models
on Body-Esteem,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1996),
Pp: 569-575.
Sil thirty minutes of watching TV: See Philip N. Myers, Jr., “The Elas-
tic Body Image: The Effect of Television Advertising and Program-
ming on Body Image Distortions in Young Women,” Journal of
Communication 42, no. 3 (Summer 1992), pp. 108-133.
S71 women over sixty: See Sara Wilcox, “Age and Gender in Relation
to Body Attitudes: Is There a Double Standard of Aging?” Psychol-
ogy of Women Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1997), pp- 549-565.
38 “Being thin”: Fraser, Losing It, p. 7.

39 history of female thinness: ibid., pp. 16-49. See also Brumberg,

Body Project.
40 supermodels: For a comprehensive exposé of the lives of celebrity
models, see Michael Gross, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful
Women (New York: Warner Books, 1996).
40 survey of third-graders: | heard about this survey at a conference on
eating disorders, where it was reported as part of a presentation by
members of an eating disorders clinic in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
40 “third job”: See Fraser, Losing It, p. 7.
41 girdles and corsets: For a history of the transition from external to
internal corsets, see ibid., pp. 16-49; and Brumberg, Body Project.
41 Studies have proven: Laura Fraser reports studies performed by
Steven Blair of the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas,
 Notes to Pages 42-48

Texas, which indicate that “as long as they’re in good shape, some-
one who’s overweight by 20, 30 or even 75 pounds is at no particular
health risk.” Fraser, Losing It, p. 250. For information on U.S. Army
female weight standards, see note to page 36, weigh between
twenty-five and thirty pounds less.
42 “Man aspires ...”: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New
York: Vintage Books, 1989), trans. H. M. Parshley, pp. 80-81.
43 certain sociobiologists: See, for example, Richard Dawkins, The
Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and
Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).
44 Hesiod: See Hesiod, The Works and the Days; Theogony; The Shield
of Herakles, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1959).
47 “willing victim”: See Spoto, Diana, The Last Year, p. 57.
47 freedom of appearance: Sadly enough, among the consequences of
middle-class adolescent girls’ deliberately dressing for their own
comfort as opposed to dressing for boys’ pleasure is rejection from
boys, as well as the severing of relationships with their female peers
who conform to current fashion trends. See Lyn Mikel Brown, Rais-
ing Their Voices: The Politics of Girls’ Anger (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1998).
48 dividing women among themselves: Elizabeth Debold, Marie C.
Wilson, and Idelisse Malave argue that the roots of the often
cruel competitiveness among women lie in a detrimental mother-
daughter separation in early adolescence, prescribed by models of
child development largely created by and for males. As girls give up
their connectedness with their mothers, they give up the potential
for intimate knowledge of their own desires and consequently turn
to relationships endorsed by patriarchal culture. Giving up what
they know—that is, the injustice of a world that favors men over
women—girls try desperately “to keep from being abandoned or
excluded by their mothers and the other women closest to them”
and thus “try to live up to the impossible ideal of the Perfect Girl.
They act out their anger covertly through increasingly painful
games of inclusion and exclusion.” Debold, Wilson, and Malave,
The Mother-Daughter Revolution: From Betrayal to Power (Reading,
 Notes to Pages 49—60 213

Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993), p. 43. Drawing on the Brazilian edu-

cator and social activist Paulo Freire’s concept of “horizontal vio-
lence,” Lyn Mikel Brown observes that the lack of mutual support
and solidarity among women is a consequence of the internalization
of the values of the divisive, dominant patriarchal culture. See
Brown, Raising Their Voices.
49 Feminist commentators: In the spate of commentaries on popular
media during the latter part of 1998, I heard a number of feminist
journalists and academics speak to the issue of Monica Lewinsky
being the “other woman.” In general, feminist sympathies were not
with Lewinsky.

THREE. SEX THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

58 “crossing the boundaries ...”: Otto Kernberg, Love Relations:

Normality and Pathology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1995), P- 43.
58 Most national surveys: See Shere Hite, The Hite Report (New York:
Macmillan, 1976); Dianne Grosskopf, Sex and the Married Woman
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983); and “Who, What, Where,
and How Do You Love?” Redbook, October 1989, p. 134. For more
recent, comprehensive data on sexual behavior in American soci-
ety, see June M. Reinisch, The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex:
What You Must Know to Be Sexually Literate (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1990); and Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, Edward O.
Laumann, and Gina Kolata, Sex in America: A Definitive Survey
(Boston and New York: Little, Brown, 1994).
59 lesbian relationships: See David Farley Hurlbert and Carol Apt,
“Female Sexuality: A Comparative Study Between Women in
Homosexual and Heterosexual Relationships,” Journal of Sex and
Marital Therapy 19, no. 4 (1993), PP- 315-327:
59 You’re Not What I Expected: See Polly Young-Eisendrath, You're
Not What I Expected: Learning to Love the Opposite Sex (New York:
William Morrow, 1993).
60 lack of female sexual pleasure: See surveys quoted above in note to
page 58, Most national surveys. See also David Farley Hurlbert,
Carol Apt, and Sarah Meyers Rabehl, “Key Variables to Under-
standing Female Sexual Satisfaction: An Examination of Women in
 Notes to Pages 61-81

Nondistressed Marriages,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 19, no.

2 (1993), pp. 154-165; Raymond C. Rosen, Jennifer B. Taylor, San-
dra R. Leiblum, and Gloria A. Bachmann, “Prevalence of Sexual
Dysfunction in Women: Results of a Survey Study of 329 Women in
an Outpatient Gynecological Clinic,” Journal of Sex and Marital
Therapy 19, no. 3 (1993), pp. 171-188; and David Farley Hurlbert
and Carol Apt, “Female Sexual Desire, Response, and Behavior,”
Behavior Modification 18, no. 4 (1994), pp. 488-504.
61 Naomi Wolf: Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (New
York: Random House, 1997).
61 Renaldus Columbus: [bid., p. 143.
62 “maternal instinct”: [bid., p. 146.
62 “for different reasons ...”: Hurlbert and Apt, “Female Sexual
Desire,” p. 494.
63 physically abusive relationships: Ibid., p. 495.
63 “The relationship . . .”: Ibid., p. 496.
67 sexual fantasies that are disturbing: Wendy Maltz and Suzie Boss,
In the Garden of Desire: The Intimate World of Women’s Sexual Fan-
tasies (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), pp. 194-195.
68 contemporary translation: See Michael Grant, Myths of the Greeks
and the Romans (New York: New American Library, Mentor, 1962),
PP. 357-362.
68 Carol Gilligan: See Carol Gilligan, “The Riddle of Femininity and
the Psychology of Love,” in Willard Gaylin and Ethel Person, eds.,
Passionate Attachments: Thinking About Love (New York: Free Press,
1988), pp. 101-114.
68 Florence Wiedemann and myself: See Polly Young-Eisendrath and
Florence Wiedemann, Female Authority: Empowering Women Through
Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1987).
Psyche’s own complex: For a Jungian interpretation of the myth,
see ibid.
Octavio Paz: As discussed in Kernberg, Love Relations, p. 44.
deeply known to each other: See note to page 32, Paracelsus.
 Notes to Pages 84-86 215

FOUR. HOTHOUSE MOTHERING AND THE DIVINE CHILD

84 Idealizing motherhood: For a recent discussion of the excessive

blame placed on today’s mothers, see Diane Eyer, Motherguilt: How
Our Culture Blames Mothers for What’s Wrong with Society (New
York: Times Books, 1996). For a critical analysis of the post-World
War I glorification of full-time motherhood and housework, see
Betty Friedan’s seminal work, The Feminine Mystique (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1963).

85 singular importance of Mother: Writing about male clients, the

Jungian analyst Guy Corneau argues that the very absence of fathers
in family life reveals how relevant their role is: “Although the liter-
ature of psychoanalysis has abundantly described the influence of
mothers on their sons, it has in this regard often neglected to men-
tion that these mothers were omnipresent and omnipotent precisely
because the fathers were absent—so absent, in fact, that their
absence was simply taken for granted. These days, when I hear my
patients complain about their mothers, what I also hear (although it
is not stated explicitly) is that their fathers were absent.” Guy
Corneau, Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Iden-
tity, trans. Larry Shouldice (Boston: Shambhala, rggr), p. 16. Eliza-
beth Debold, Marie C. Wilson, and Idelisse Malave contend that
mother blaming has emerged in our society over the past hundred
years as a middle- and upper-class phenomenon: “Very little effort
is made in traditional therapies to explore the complexities of a
mother’s behavior, place it in the appropriate socioeconomic or
political context, or wonder about her partner’s role (or lack of it).”
Debold, Wilson, and Malave, The Mother-Daughter Revolution: From
Betrayal to Power (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993), p. 22. A
recent book, based on extensive empirical and statistical analyses,
claims that peers are more important than parents in the long-term
development of the child’s personality; see Judith Rich Harris, The
Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New
York: Free Press, 1998).
86 collective inability: With the loss of extended family and commu-
nal life, it is little wonder that motherhood “is exhausting in our
society... . Motherhood does not have to be the responsibility
solely of biological or adoptive mothers living in the isolation of
individual nuclear families.” Debold, Wilson, and Malave, Mother-
2 16 Notes to Pages 88-101

Daughter Revolution, p. 235. For a discussion of less individualized

and more socialized forms of child care, such as what exists in Swe-
den, see Eyer, Motherguilt.
88 “That calm, sure .. .”: Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Mother-
hood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976),
pp. 35-36.
OI mothering as distinct from motherhood: See ibid.
ope Ann Dally: See Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences
of an Ideal (New York: Schocken Books, 1982).
Q2 “When large numbers . . .”: Ibid., p. ro.
g2 “the era of unbroken. . .”: [bid.

93 hothouse isolation: For a critique of the compartmentalization of

mothers and motherhood in isolated nuclear family units and a sug-
gested alternative of shared, supportive mothering through circles of
“othermothers,” see Debold, Wilson, and Malave, Mother-Daughter
Revolution, pp. 223-246.
96 only recently invented: For a history of the emergence of childhood
as a social phenomenon, see also Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Child-
hood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). A brief outline of Ariés’s main ideas
may be found in Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New
York: William Morrow, 1970), pp. 81-118.
97 “true motherhood”: Dally, Inventing Motherhood, p. 17.
100 expert advice: for a critique of the effect of “expert advice” on child
rearing as it pertains to female children, see Carol Gilligan, In a
Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). See also Barbara
Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the
Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Press,
1978).
IOO two-thirds of all American mothers: Arlie P. Hochschild, The Sec-
ond Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York:
Viking Press, 1989), p. 2.
100 thirty-five hours or more weekly: Ibid.
IOI “second shift”: See note to page 124, ideals of perfection.
 Notes to Pages 101-104 217

IOl attachment theory: For a recent critical overview of classical

attachment theory, see Tiffany Field, “Attachment and Separation
in Young Children,” Annual Review of Psychology 47 (1996), pp.
541-561.
IOI Rene Spitz and John Bowlby: See Rene A. Spitz, The First Year of
Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of
Object Relations (New York: International Universities Press, 1965);
and John Bowlby, Child Care and the Growth of Love, 2d ed. (Balti-
more: Penguin Books, 1965); Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. 1
(London: Hogarth Press, 1969); Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child
Attachment and Healthy Human Development (New York: Basic
Books, 1988).
102 Mary Main: See Mary Main, “Exploration, Play, and Cognitive
Functioning Related to Infant-Mother Attachment,” Infant Behav-
ior and Development 6, no. 2 (1983), pp. 167-174; “Recent Studies
in Attachment: Overview, with Selected Implications for Clinical
Work,” in Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental, and Clinical
Perspectives, ed. Susan Goldberg, Roy Muir, and John Kerr (Hills-
dale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1995); “Discourse, Prediction, and Recent
Studies in Attachment: Implications for Psychoanalysis,” in
Research in Psychoanalysis: Process, Development, Outcome, ed. Theo-
dore Shapiro and Robert N. Emde (Madison, Conn.: International
Universities Press, 1995). See also Mary D. S. Ainsworth, M. C.
Blehar, E. Waters, and S. Wall, Patterns of Attachment: A Psychologi-
cal Study of the Strange Situation (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum,
1978).
102 misleading to use these findings: A recent National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) study suggests
that, in and of itself, nonmaternal child care is neither beneficial
nor detrimental to infant-mother attachments with respect to spe-
cific infant-mother separations. See NICHD Early Child Care
Research Network, “The Effects of Infant Child Care on Infant-
Mother Attachment Security: Results of the NICHD Study of Early
Child Care,” Child Development 68, no. 5 (1997), pp. 860-879.
103 “Two centuries ago . . .”: Dally, Inventing Motherhood, pp. 26-27.
103 “One cannot grieve . . .”: Ibid., pp. 101-102.
104 “He feels that . . .”: Ibid., p. 28.
218 Notes to Pages 105-119

105 Joan Peters: See Joan Peters, When Mothers Work: Loving Our
Children Without Sacrificing Our Selves (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1997).
106 “Divine Child”: Examples of this archetype are the Christ Child
and the child who is chosen as successor to the Dalai Lama by recog-
nizing the identifying signs. A firstborn or long-awaited child may
also evoke a Divine Child archetype when the parents feel they
have given birth to an extraordinary individual. For a psychological
analysis of this archetype, see Erich Neumann, The Child (Boston:
Shambhala, 1990); and Carl G. Jung, Collected Works, 2d ed., vol. 9,
pt. 1, trans. R. E C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1969).
106 Archetype: See Carl G. Jung. For a thorough analysis of the evolu-
tion of Jung’s concept of the archetype, see Polly Young-Eisendrath
and James A. Hall, Jung’s Self Psychology: A Constructivist Perspective
(New York: Guilford Press, 1991).
106 psychological complex: See note to page 26, psychological
complexes.
108 so powerless and subordinate: Shulamith Firestone argues that, for
all practical purposes, children make up a lower class. For a discus-
sion of children’s prolonged economic and physical dependence as
well as their sexual, familial, and educational repression, see Fire-
stone, Dialectic of Sex, pp. 107-118.
112 “discordant source”: Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New The-
ory (London: Karnac Books, 1997), pp. 118-119.
ie Brothers Grimm: See The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (New York:
Random House, 1972), pp. 264-268.
ing Elizabeth Debold, Marie Wilson, and Idelisse Malave: See Debold,
Wilson, and Malave, Mother-Daughter Revolution.
iemtty) “Ironically and tragically . . .”: Ibid., p. 55.
117 “compromise girls’ self-love . . .”: Ibid., p. 60.
119 the word just: See Symington, Narcissism, p. 116.
119 “While the demands .. .”: Debold, Wilson, and Malave, Mother-
Daughter Revolution, p. 115.
 Notes to Pages 123-128 219

FIVE. THE MATERIAL GIRL AND THE HUNGRY GHOST

123 Grace Baruch and Rosalind Barnett: See Grace K. Baruch, Ros-
alind C. Barnett, and Caryl Rivers, Life Prints: New Patterns of Life
and Work for Today’s Woman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).
124 women’s satisfaction in life: Ibid. One recent study indicates that
professional-managerial mothers report higher levels of psychologi-
cal well-being than working-class and unemployed mothers. See
Mary Secret and Robert G. Green, “Occupational Status Differ-
ences Among Three Groups of Married Mothers,” Affilia 13, no. 1
(1998), pp. 47-68. Statistical trends over the last two to three
decades regarding mothers in the workplace suggest that job satis-
faction is the best predictor of psychological well-being. See Phyllis
Moen, Women’s Two Roles: A Contemporary Dilemma (Westport,
Conn.: Auburn House, 1992).
124 ideals of perfection: Believing it is their personal problem rather
than society’s, many American women who work outside the home
feel guilty and inadequate when they are unable to fulfill unrealistic
child-care and housekeeping standards. This feeling is partly caused
by the media, which convey the message that supermoms are per-
sonally “organized enough” to manage a perfect balancing act of
home and work in a society that does not favor such integration.
See Arlie P. Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the
Revolution at Home (New York: Viking Press, 1989). In a study of
dual-career couples in the corporate world, sociologist Rosanna
Hertz calls corporate employers the “silent partners” in dual-career
marriages, who do nothing to facilitate but, on the contrary, often
sabotage the marriage. See Hertz, More Equal Than Others: Women
and Men in Dual-Career Marriages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1986).
125 seventy-six cents: Ginia Bellafante, “Feminism: It’s All About
Me!” Time, June 29, 1998, p. 58.
126 “One woman, divorcing .. .”: Marcia Millman, Warm Hearts and
Cold Cash: The Intimate Dynamics of Families and Money (New York:
Free Press, 1991), p. 135.
128 “Everything she does . . .”: Deborah Tannen, Talking from Nine to
Five: Women and Men in the Workplace: Language, Sex, and Power
(New York: William Morrow, 1994), p. 203.
220 Notes to Pages 129-138

129 conversational rituals: See ibid.

130 more indirect: Deborah Tannen argues that both women and men
engage in indirect communication: “Most studies finding women to
be more indirect are about getting others to do things... . But the
situations in which men are most often found to be indirect have to
do with the expression of weakness, problems, and errors, and of
emotions other than anger.” Ibid., pp. 89-90.
130 “there is an expectation .. .”: [bid., p. 169.
132 Mature dependence: W. Ronald Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of
the Personality (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 41.
Couples who pool: See Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz,
American Couples (New York: William Morrow, 1983).
Lesbian couples: Ibid.
shopping and consumer spending: For a fascinating history of
women’s shopping patterns in the nineteenth century, see Elaine S.
Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the
Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989).
department stores: [bid.
137 especially clothes: When so many women perceive their bodies as
far less than the ideal, media-promoted norm, it is not surprising
that female compulsive shoppers usually buy items related to body
image, such as clothes, jewelry, and cosmetics, in an attempt to
assuage depression, feelings of emptiness, and low self-esteem. See
Helga Dittmar, Jane Beattie, and Susanne Friesse, “Objects, Deci-
sion Considerations, and Self-Image in Men’s and Women’s Impulse
Purchases,” Acta Psychologica 93, nos. 1-3 (1996), pp. 187-206;
Gary A. Christenson et al., “Compulsive Buying: Descriptive Char-
acteristics and Psychiatric Comorbidity,” Journal of Clinical Psychia-
try 55, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 5-11; and Michel Lejoyeux, Jean
Adés, Valérie Tassain, and Jacquelyn Solomon, “Phenomenology
and Psychopathology of Uncontrolled Buying,” American Journal of
Psychiatry 153, no. 12 (December 1996), pp. 1524-29.
it appears to offer choices: Ibid. See also Abelson, When Ladies Go
A-Thieving.
138 Wheel of Life: See L. Austine Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism: With Its
Mystic Cults, Symbolism, and Mythology (New York: Dover, 1972).
 Notes to Pages 138-157 ele a

For a discussion of the Wheel of Life from a psychological point of

view, see Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy
from a Buddhist Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
138 Hungry Ghosts: For a discussion of the realm of Hungry Ghosts
from a psychological point of view, see Epstein, Thoughts Without a
Thinker, pp. 28-31.
142 roughly $1o billion per year: Jeanie Russell, “Klepto Nation,”
Allure, February 1998, p. 129.
1422 Lean gO 6 IIa pe 131.
142 Will Cupchik: See William Cupchik, Why Honest People Shoplift or
Commit Other Acts of Theft: Assessment of Atypical Offenders
(Toronto: Tagami Communications, 1997).
143 “have uncovered a terrible emptiness . . .”: Epstein, Thoughts With-
out a Thinker, p. 28.
143 “Jackie’s expenditure of . . .”: Donald W. Black, “Compulsive Buy-
ing: A Review,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 57, supp. 8 (1996),
Dnset
143 8.1 percent of the American population: Reported ibid., p. 51.
144 Compulsive buying is distinguished: Ibid.
144 about 22 percent of their income: Reported ibid., p. 53.
145 “It is well established . . .”: Dittmar, Beattie, and Friesse, “Objects,
Decision Considerations, and Self-Image,” p. 204.
147 “longing for inexhaustible abundance . . .”: Epstein, Thoughts With-
out a Thinker, p. 30.

SIX. THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF GIVING YOUR SELF AWAY

155 TV and movies: No doubt the heavy reliance on television and

movies for general information has contributed to a loss of what the
ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak has referred to as “religious liter-
acy”: “the widely acknowledged ‘dumbing down’ trend in American
textbooks and education during the past twenty years seems to have
spread to religious literacy as well.” Charlene Spretnak, States of
Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (San Fran-
cisco: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 3.
157 Carl Jung: See Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Religion (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1938).
 Notes to Pages 157-174

Robert Jay Lifton: See Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection:
On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
“The Western psychological notion . . .”: Mark Epstein, Going to
Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness
(New York: Broadway Books, 1998), pp. xv—xvi.
“tends to be more accepting . . .”: Demaris S. Wehr, “When Good
People Do Bad Things: Spiritual Abuse,” in Polly Young-Eisendrath
and Mel Miller, eds., Integrity, Wisdom, and Transcendence (London:
Routledge, 2000).
“to move God. . .”: Ibid.
“Wild Geese”: Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Bea-
con Press, 1992), p. 110.
“Even my pain...”: Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self
(Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991), p. 63.
Starhawk: See Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Poli-
tics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), and The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of
the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (New York: Harper and
Row, 1979).
169 feminist spirituality: Feminist spirituality is not exclusive to
any one tradition. For an excellent source of feminist spirituality
from different perspectives, see Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ,
eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989). See also Carol P. Christ,
Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (Read-
ing, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997); Christ, Return of the Great God-
dess (Boston: Shambhala, 1994); and Spretnak, States of Grace.
era “Because patriarchal religions . . .”: Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After
Patriarchy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993),
p. 282.
174 Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow: Carol P. Christ and Judith Plas-
kow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979).
174 “If God is male”: Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Phi-
losophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p- 19.
 Notes to Pages 175-180 pipse)

175 “present a growing threat”: Christ and Plaskow, Womanspirit Ris-

Ing, Pp: 575
“The institutional changes . . .”: Rachel Josefowitz Siegel, “‘I Don’t
Know Enough’: Jewish Women’s Learned Ignorance,” in Celebrating
the Lives of Jewish Women, ed. Siegel and Ellen Cole (New York:
Haworth Press, 1997), p. 208. Web site version at http://www.
utoronto.ca/wjudaism/journal/v1n1sieg.htm.
176 bat mitzvah: For a simple, brief description of the bat mitzvah, see
Barbara Diamond Goldin, “Coming of Age in Judaism,” New Moon:
The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams 5, no. 5 (1998), pp. 20-21.
177 “As I learned more . . .”: Siegel, “I Don’t Know Enough,” p. 207.
178 “To ordain women . . .”: Mary E. Hunt, “Psychological Implications
of Women’s Spiritual Health,” Women and Therapy 16, nos. 2-3
(1995), p- 27.
178 “The major change . . .”: Ibid.
178 Nancy Mairs: See Nancy Mairs, Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage,
Faith, and Renewal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
179 Women were priests: See Karen Jo Torjesen, When Women Were
Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of
Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper-
SanFrancisco, 1993).
179 United Church of Christ: The first fully ordained woman in the
United Church of Christ was Antoinette Brown in 1853. In the
United States there are currently 2,346 fully ordained women and
7,962 fully ordained men in the United Church of Christ. Informa-
tion provided via telephone communication by the Research
Department, United Church of Christ Board for Homeland Min-
istry, (216) 736-3813. Mailing address: 770 Prospect Avenue, Cleve-
land, Ohio 44115.
179 Episcopal Church: See Louie Crew, “Female Priests in the Episco-
pal Church,” at http://newark.rutgers.edu/%7elcrew/womenpr.html.
180 “ambivalent about acting. ..”: Siegel, “I Don’t Know Enough,”
p. 208.
180 first woman rabbi: See Joseph Telushkin, “Women Rabbis,” in
Telushkin, Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About
224 Notes to Pages 180-183

the Jewish Religion, Its People, and History (New York: William Mor-
row, 1991), pp. 428-429. ;
180 Feminist Jewish study and Rosh Chodesh groups: See Siegel, “I
Don’t Know Enough.”
181 “songs of triumph”: Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy.
181 “believed that women . . .”: Ibid., p. 18.
181 daily physical work: In Zen Buddhism guidelines for physical work
have usually emerged from male monastic environments. Never
considered inferior to intellectual or artistic pursuits, physical work
is highly valued in Zen Buddhism and is regarded as a powerful aid
to spiritual training. In thirteenth-century Japan, Zen Master Dogen
wrote a manual, Instructions for the Head Cook, which draws parallels
between meal preparation and spiritual training. See Dogen,
“Instruction for the Tenzo,” trans. Arnold Kotler and Kazuaki Tana-
hashi, in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, ed.
Kazuaki Tanahashi (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), pp.
53-06. For an account of daily Zen monastic life, see Daisetz Teitaro
Suzuki, The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk (New York: University
Books, 1959).
182 Contemporary feminist Buddhists: For feminist applications of
Buddhist principles in everyday life, see, for example, Anne Carolyn
Klein, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art
of Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Joanna Macy, World as Lover,
World as Self (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991); and Charlotte Joko
Beck, Everyday Zen: Love and Work, ed. Steve Smith (San Fran-
cisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989).
182 Margot Adler: See Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches,
Pagans, Druids, Goddess-Worshipers, and Other Pagans in America
Today (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).
Goddess-based spirituality: Although Neo-Paganism includes vari-
ous forms of Goddess-based spirituality, such spirituality is not
unique to Neo-Paganism. A recent anthology that provides a good
overview of contemporary women’s spirituality is Charlene Spret-
nak, ed., The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays by Founding
Mothers of the Movement (New York: Anchor Books, 1994). Schol-
arly studies of Goddess worship and egalitarian societies in
 Notes to Pages 185-205 225

Neolithic Europe are Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of

Old Europe: 6500-3500 B.C.: Myths and Cult Images (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); Gimbutas, The
Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western
Civilization (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989); Gimbutas, The
Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); and Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the
Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: HarperSanFran-
cisco, 1987). For a history of the Goddess from the ancient Near
East to Christian Europe, see Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of
the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of
Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992).
185 “We are not pitiful creatures . . .”: Mairs, Ordinary Time, p. 186.

SEVEN. THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM AND DESIRE

190 “My actions ...”: As quoted by Joan Halifax, “The Great Matter
of Life and Death,” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 7, no. 1 (1997),
p20,
204 “The apparently unendurable conflict . . .”: Carl G. Jung, Letters:
1906-1950, vol. 1, trans. R. F C. Hull and ed. G. Adler (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p- 375-
205 “My own identity ...”: Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, r9g1), p. 48.
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 Index

Abundance, longing for, 147-50 Appearance

Abusive relationships, 63, 67, 99, 164-65, 183 fears about, 51
Accountability and identity, 33-35
and spirituality, 165-66 “looking glass” of, 57
and wanting to be wanted, 30 and materiality, 124, 125-26, 147-48
Achievements, 27, 33-34, 50-51, 102, and personal sovereignty, 193-95
124, 128 and power, 67, 122 125-26, 147
Addictions, 28, 113, 141, 142, 186 and sex, 57-58, 61, 64, 72-76, 78,
See also Binge eating; Compulsive 80, 83
shopping; Shoplifting stereotypes of female, 50
Adler, Margot, 182 and wanting to be wanted, 2, 14, 17,
Adolescent children, 36, 108-9, 132 19, 20, 21, 24-27, 32
Adoption, of interracial baby, 202 See also Beauty; Thinness
Advertising, 39, 42 Archetypes, 97, 106-7
See also Media See also specific archetype
Age/aging, 36-37, 51, 76, 80, 155-56 Arthur (fictional king), 8—ro, 11, 12, 15,
Amor (mythological character), 68—72, 16, 17, 29
73-76, 80, 81, 198, 199-201, 202 Attachment bonds, 93, 100-5, 107,
Anne (case study) 108
and beauty, 37-38, 40-41 Authenticity
conversational style of, 15, 130 and conversational style, 131
as hag-bitch, rog—10 and materiality, 148
as impulse buyer, 145-46 and mother-child relationship, 118,
as mother, 40-41, 109-10 IIQ, 120, 121
and spirituality, 171-72 and personal sovereignty, 204-6
and wanting to be wanted, 5-7, 15 and sex, 67, 81, 82

240
 Index 241

and spirituality, 161, 180 and personal sovereignty, 187, 205

and wanting to be wanted, 2, 31, 32, 34 and sex, 60, 68
Autonomy and wanting to be wanted, 22, 25, 26,
of children, 117, 118, 120, 121 30, 32
paradox of, 201-4 and working women, 128, 130,
and wanting to be wanted, 19 131
See also Personal sovereignty Blumstein, Philip, 133-34
Boasting, Roasting, and Toasting, 129,
Barnett, Rosalind, 123-24 131
Baruch, Grace, 123-24 Bodhisattva of Compassion, 149-50
Beauty Bowlby, John, ro1—2, 104
and achievement, 33-34, 50-51 Brumberg, Joan, 34
control of, 38-40, 41 Buddha, 149, 190
curse of, 43-46 Buddhism
and dissatisfaction with images, 35-38 and feminism, 181-82
double bind of, 46-48, 49, 50, 52, 53, and materiality, 149-50
57-58,
65, 74 and personal sovereignty, 198
ideal of, 40 and spirituality, 163, 168 169-70, 171,
male standards of, 45-46 172-73, 174, 180-82
and materiality, 139, 140, 141 See also Hungry Ghosts
men under spell of, 42-43
menace of, 33-56 Caring, Sharing, Baring, 129
men’s fear of, 42-43, 46 Cassandra (case study), 139-41, 142, 143,
and muse and slut, 48-50 146, 147-49
and Object of Desire, 34, 42, 43, 45, 46 Catholicism, 177-79
49-50 Cheryl (case study), 24-27, 28-29, 134,
and Pandora myth, 43-46, 48, 49, 53, 135
5455 Children/childhood
and patriarchy, 43-46, 49, 53, 55 adults repeating emotional themes
and personal sovereignty, 188, from, 27-28
199-201, 202 and attachment theory, 100-5
and power, 18, 19, 20-21, 31, 33-34, autonomy of, 117, 118, 120, 121
36-37, 38-43, 46, 49, 54-56, 80 British, 101-2, 104
and sex, 65, 68, 72-76, 80 criticism of mothers by, 99, 110
and Subject of own Desire, 50-53, 54, death of, 103-4
55-56 dependency of, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 108,
as symbol of male power, 55, 67 Ilo, i2het32, 165
truth about, 54-56 and discordant source, 112-17, 118-19,
used against women, 41 120
and wanting to be wanted, 21 as fulfilling parents’ dreams, 107-8,
See also Appearance; Thinness 118, 198
Beauvoir, Simone de, 42 idealization of, 99, 106-13, 118
Betrayal identity formation of, 85, 102
of daughters, 117-19 love of, 87, 108, 121
and spiritual abuse, 165 mother subs for, 97-98, 100, 101,
and wanting to be wanted, 24 102-3, 105, 120-21
Big Story, 156-58, 161, 167 power of, 107-9, 110-13, 120
Binge eating, 141, 146, 147 role models for, 85
Blame self-determination of, 108
and conversational style, 130 spirituality of, 154, 185
and materiality, 140, 147 as unique, 103, 104
and mothers, 88, 97, 117 See also Divine Child; Mothers
242 Index

Choices of Diana, 21
no right, 195-97 and identity, 73
and personal sovereignty, 13, 186, 187, marriage as, 73, 76, 80, 200
188-89, 192-93, 195-97; 199, and personal sovereignty, 198, 200
202-4, 205, 206 psychological, 73
and spirituality, 168 Debold, Elizabeth, 117, 119
and wanting to be wanted, 6-7, 13, 16 Decision-making. See Choices
Christ, Carol, 174, 175 Demonization, of women, 98
Christianity, 170, 171 179-80, 185 Dependency
Cinderella (folktale), 8 of children, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 108-9,
Communication 118, 121, 132, 185
as confusing, 15 emotional, 123, 124, 150
gender differences in, 129-30 fantasies of, 124-25
and personal sovereignty, 205 financial, 122-23, 124, 125, 150
and pooling resources, 133 mature, 132-35, 150, 192, 193
and sex, 68, 81 and personal sovereignty, 189, 192,
styles of, 15, 129-30, 131 193, 199, 206
and wanting to be wanted, 15, 30 self-, 132
See also Directness and spirituality, 185
Community, spiritual, 162, 173, 178-79, and wanting to be wanted, 3, 22, 26,
185 DT Bi32
Compassion, 29, 167-68, 192, 204, 205 Desire
Competence, 4, 123-24, 129, 130-32 damaging effects of, 2-3
Compulsions, 28, 32, 166 dilemma of female sexual, 82-83
See also specific compulsion and discriminating among desires, 187
Compulsive shopping, 141, 143-46, 147, and hiding of needs, 15
151, 198 history of female sexual, 61-62
Connections, symbolic, 155, 157-58, and Hungry Ghosts, 138-41
161, 169 Lacan’s views about, 1-2
Consumers, women as, 39, 135-38 limitations of, 205
Control meaner face of, 66-68, 81
and beauty/appearance, 38—40, 41, 45, mythical dangers of, 13-17
46, 56 and no desires, 3-4
by mothers, 148 pathologies of material, 141-46
and personal sovereignty, 188-91, 197, stories about, 197-201
204-6 to be desirable, 1-2
and sex, 61, 62, 66, 77-81, 82 to be known and loved, 1-2
and shopping, 137-38, 146 Desire-awakening maiden
and spirituality, 158-59, 163 and beauty, 42-43, 45
and wanting to be wanted, 2~3, 4, 5, 7, and materiality, 125-26, 137
22-23, 27, 29, 31, 32 and personal sovereignty, 193, 198, 205
See also Personal sovereignty; Power and sex, 66, 67, 72, 76, 80
Conversational style. See Communication and spirituality, 156
Cupchik, Will, 142 and wanting to be wanted, 18
Curtis, Charlotte, 143 Diana (Princess of Wales), 20-23, 31, 47,
76, 143, 146
Dally, Ann, 91-92, 97, 103, 104 Directness
Daly, Mary, 174 and conversational style, 130
Dawkins, Richard, 43 and personal sovereignty, 206
Death and wanting to be wanted, 3-4, 15, 19,
and beauty, 53, 198 25, 28-20, 31-32
of children, 103-4 Discordant source, 112~17, 118-19, 120,
of desire, 72-76 200-201
 Index ZAC

Divine Child and personal sovereignty, 200

as archetype, 106-13, 120 and sex, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 82-83
and desires, 112, 121 and spirituality, 158-59
and discordant source, 113-17, 118-19 and wanting to be wanted, 25, 28
and naming the problem, 117-18 Fathers
and personal sovereignty, 201 and materiality, 141, 148
and spirituality, 159 and parental complexes, 160-61
Divorce, 126, 202-3 parenting by, 85, 95, 96, 101, 105
Double bind IIO-13
of beauty, 46-48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57-58, and wanting to be wanted, 26-27, 28
65,74 Fears
of female power, 4 about beauty/appearance, 42-43, 46, 51
of working women, 128, 130-31 and financial responsibility, 124
of hag, 50
Eating disorders, 18, 19, 23, 36, 38-39, of men, 42-43, 46, 61, 63, 65, 66, 79,
40, 198 82-83
See also Binge eating of mothers, 98-99, 109, 117
Emotions and personal sovereignty, 188, 202
and emotional dependency, 123, 124, and sex, 61, 63, 65, 66, 79, 82-83
150 and spirituality, 154, 165, 172, 185
and emotional intimacy, 3-4, 59, and wanting to be wanted, 4, 5, 22, 23,
62-63, 77-81 Diy PAS), XO}, 3h BP?
and financial responsibility, 150 Femininity, 60, 96-97, 128-29, 131,
and material value of emotional skills, 137, 147
126 Feminism
and personal sovereignty, 189 back-lash against, 105
and spirituality, 167, 185 and beauty, 41, 49
of working women, 128 and Buddhism, 181-82
See also specific emotion and identity, 187
Envy and materiality, 122, 152
and materiality, 134, 138 and motherhood, 88, 89, go, 105,109
and mothering, 93, 109, 110 and personal sovereignty, 187, 188
and personal sovereignty, 189 and power, 187
and sex, 74, 82 role models for, 37
and spirituality, 166-67 and sex, 63
and wanting to be wanted, 32 and shopping, 137
Episcopal Church, 171-72, 179 and spirituality, 155, 169, 171, 173,
Epstein, Mark, 143, 147, 163, 164 174-82, 183, 184, 185
Equality and wanting to be wanted, 1, 3, 19
and materiality, 125-27, 132-35 Financial matters
and sex, 68-72, 74, 76, 83 and competence, 130-32
and trust, 132-35 and emotional dependency, 124
and wanting to be wanted, 24 and equality, 125-27
and working women, 123, 128 and fears, 124
Eve (Biblical character), 45 importance of, 124, 126
Evil, women as, 45, 46 and men as providers, 122-23, 124
and spiritual nourishment, 150
Fairbairn, Ronald, 132 See also Working women
Fantasies Fraser, Laura, 38, 39, 40
of dependency, 124-25 Free will, 11, 29, 164, 189-90
and materiality, 124-25, 141 Freedom. See Free will; Personal
of men, 63, 65, 66, 82-83 sovereignty
of mothers, 98 Freud, Sigmund, 7
244 Index

Gawain (fictional character), 9, 10-14, Hungry Ghosts

15, 16-17, 20, 29, 199 and materiality, 138-41, 142, 143, 146,
Gilligan, Carol, 21, 68 147, 149-50, 151, 152, 153, 198
God, 174-75 and personal sovereignty, 187-88,
Goodness, 161-63 198
Great Britain, attachment studies in, Hunt, Mary, 177-78
IOI-2, 104
Great Man, 191 Idealization
Great Quest(ion)s, 158-61 of children, 99, 106-13, 118
Gromer (fictional character), 8, 9, 11, 12, of motherhood, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91,
13, 17-18 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, IOI, 104,
Gross, Rita, 171, 181 106, 108
Guilt and sex, 81
and materiality, 134 of women, 62, 73
of mothers, 86, 90, 93, 96, 99, 100, Identity
IOI and appearance, 33-35
and personal sovereignty, 189, 193, and death, 73
205 and feminism, 187
and sex, 60 formation of children’s, 85, 102
and spirituality, 166-67 and marriage, 73
and wanting to be wanted, 32 and personal sovereignty, 187, 192,
19Q, 200, 205, 206
Hag/hag-bitch and sex, 80
and beauty, 46-47, 48, 49, 51 and spirituality, 156, 185
confronting self-, 48 and wanting to be wanted, 23, 25
and conversational style, 130 Image
and false power of muse, 17-18 and age, 36-37
fear of, 50 archetypes as, 106-7
invention of, 14 of child, 106-13
mothers as, 99, 109-10 dissatisfaction with, 35-38
and patriarchy, 13-14, 16-17, 18 and materiality, 140, 147
and personal sovereignty, 187, 193-94, of mothers, 85, 86
198-99, 205 and personal sovereignty, 206
and power, 17-18, 23 and roles of women, 39
and sex, 57, 65, 73, 80 and sex, 60-62, 63, 64
as slut, 49 and shopping, 145
as soul-sucking, 23-24, 66 and spirituality, 154, 155 162-63,
and spirituality, 156 166-67, 170
and wanting to be wanted, 13-18, ro, used against women, 41
20, 23-24, 25, 20, 31 and wanting to be wanted, 2, 3, 17, 18,
working women as, 127, 128, 130, 222M
131 women’s historical, 60-61
Hate, 98, 99, 108-0, 121 of working women, 130-31
Heart See also Appearance; Beauty;
and personal sovereignty, 206 Thinness
and wanting to be wanted, 21—22, 32, “Impulsive shopping,” 144-46
206 Intentionality
Henry (case study), 110-13, 118, 159 and personal sovereignty, 188-91, 197,
Hero myth, 191-93 203, 204, 205, 206
Hiding in woods analogy. See Ragnell and spirituality, 164, 166, 1609
“Hothouse mothers,” 85, 86, 91-96, Interdependency, 166, 197
99-100, 101, 108, 109, 110-17, Intuitions, and sex, 75
118, 121 Is it worth it?, 170, 171-73
 Index 245

Jane (case study), 169-70 Materiality

Judaism, 171, 176-77, 180 and beauty/appearance, 124, 125-26,
Julie (case study), 93-96 139, 140, 141, 147-48
Jung, Carl, 26, 55, 106, 157, 204 and Buddhism, 149-50
Just (word), 119 and competence, 130-32
and earning power of women, 125-27
Kernberg, Otto, 58 and equality, 125-27, 132-35
and fantasies, 124-25, 141
Lacan, Jacques, 1-2 and feminism, 122, 152
Lesbianism, 59, 63, 133-34 and Hungry Ghosts, 138-41, 142, 143,
Lewinsky, Monica, 48-49 146, 147, 149-50, 151, 152, 153,
Life of meaning, 184-85 198
Lifton, Robert Jay, 157 and longing for abundance, 147-50
Linda (case study), 65, 66, 74 and men, 122-23, 124, 125-26, 127-30
Liz (case study), 93-96, 99 and Object of Desire, 122-23, 124-25,
Longings, 28, 186-88, 197, 198 128, 129, 137, 138, 143
Love and pathologies of female desire,
of children, 87, 108, 121 141-46, 198
emergence of, 81-82 and patriarchy, 127, 131, 147, 152
between equals, 68-72 and personal sovereignty, 198
erotic, 82, 83 and pleasure, 123-24, 136, 138, 151
give-and-take of, 83 and pooling resources, 133-35
and hate, 98 and power, 122, 124-27, 129, 130, 131,
and materiality, 126-27 134, 138, 144, 147, 151
mature, 63 and self-determination, 125, 126-27
meaning of, 81 and spirituality, 149-52, 153, 185
and personal sovereignty, 198, 200, and Subject of own Desire, 124, 137
205 151
and power, 66, 67, 83 and trust, 126-27, 132-35
and sex, 58, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68-72, and wanting to be wanted, 127, 128,
81-82, 83 131-32, 137
and spirituality, 165 See also Financial matters; Shopping;
true, 81-82, 200 Working women
and vulnerabilities, 82 Maternal instincts, 62
and wanting to be wanted, 22, 31, 32 Matriarchal goddesses, 53
Mature dependence, 132-35, 150, 192,
Macy, Joanna, 168 193
Main, Mary, 102 Meaning, life of, 184-85
Mairs, Nancy, 178-79, 185 Media
Malave, Idelisse, 117, 119 and beauty, 34, 40, 42
Marjorie (case study), 110-13, 159-61, and motherhood, 84, 89-90, 93, 99, 121
168-69 Meditation, 168-70, 181
Marla and Jack (case study), 77-81, Men
193-95 and beauty/appearance of women,
Marriage 42-43,
45, 46, 55, 67
as death, 73, 76, 80, 200 communication styles of, 129-30, 131
and identity, 73 fantasies of, 63, 65, 66, 82-83
leaving, 202-3 fears of, 42-43, 46, 61, 63, 65, 66, 79,
patriarchal, 198-99 82-83
and trust, 203 and god as male, 174-75
and wanting to be wanted, 8-13, 24-27 and hero myth, 191-93
See also Ragnell; Relationships and materiality, 122-23, 124, 125-26,
Material Girl, 150-52 127-30
246 Index

Men (cont.) importance of, 84, 85

as Object of desire, 79 and mother subs, 97-98, 100, 101,
and personal sovereignty, 191-93 102-3, 105, 120-21
and sex, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 72, 79, motherhood as distinct from, 91
82-83 mothers of, 86-91
and spirituality, 163, 169, 179, 184 and naming the problem, 117-19, 120
vulnerabilities of, 67, 78, 79 as perfect, 85, 91, 98, 121, 124, 159
and women in workplace, 127-30, 131 and personal sovereignty, 188, 198,
See also Patriarchy 200-1
Miller’s daughter. See Rumpelstiltskin and power, 84, 85-86, 101, 109,
Millman, Marcia, 126 110-13, I16, 117, 118, 11g, 120,
Mother subs, 97-98, 100, 101, 102-3, 105, 198, 201
120-21 as resource for needs of others, 86
Motherhood responsibility of, 8-99, 100, 101, 104,
experts’ views about, 100, 121 120-21
and femininity, 96-97 as role models, 40-41
and feminism, 88, 89, 90, 105 in Rumpelstiltskin, 113-19
idealization of, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91, and sex, 62
92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, IOT, 104, and spirituality, 155, 159
106, 108 and spousal relationships, 95, 99
invention of, 96-100 Victorian, 96-97, 98
and media, 84, 89-90, 93, 99, I21 and wanting to be wanted, 84, 85, 100,
mothers as distinct from, 91 118
and personal sovereignty, 195-96, 202 as working women, 100-5, 123-24
See also Mothers See also Divine Child; Motherhood
Mothers Muse
abusive, 99 and beauty, 46, 47 48-50, 55
accountability of, 86 as curse of Venus, 72—76
advice to, 89 false power of, 17-21
ambivalence of, 87-88, 91, 99, 121, modern, 18, 20-21
159 and Object of Desire, 18-19
and attachment, 93, 100-5 and personal sovereignty, 188, 193
and authenticity, 120 and sex, 65, 73, 80
and competence, 123-24 standards for, 47
criticism/rejection of, 99, 110, 120 and wanting to be wanted, 17-21
daughters’ relationship with, 40-41, See also Desire-awakening maiden
109-10, II3—IQ, 160
deciding to be, 195-96 Naming the problem, 117—19, 120
and dependency/autonomy of children, Neo-Pagan movement, 182-84
93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 108-0, 117, 118, New Age beliefs, 160, 161 168-69,
120, 121 182-84
and discordant source, 112-17, 118-19, No right answers, 195-97
120
exploitation of, 86 Object of Desire
fears of, 98-99, 109, 117 and beauty, 34, 42, 43, 45, 46 49-50
full-time, 84-85, 91-96, 100-5, 109, Diana as, 20-21, 143
123-24, 188 and image, 31
as hag-bitch, 99, 109-10 and materiality, 122-23, 124-25, 128,
hate and love of, 98, 99, 108-0, 121 129, 137, 138, 143
“hothouse,” 85, 86, 91-96, 99-100, men as, 79
101, 108, 109, 110-17, 118, 120, and mothers, 117
121 and personal sovereignty, 188, 190-91,
image of, 85, 86 193, 200
 247
and sex, 60, 61, 63, 68, 74, 76, 82 and mothers/motherhood, 195-96,
and spirituality, 164, 166 198, 200-1, 202
and truth, 32 no right answers for, 195-97
and wanting to be wanted, 18-19, and Object of Desire, 188, 190-91,
20-21, 27, 31; 32 193, 200
and working women, 128, 129 paradox of, 203-4
Of Woman Born (Rich), 88, 89, 90 and power, 187-88, 190, 197, 198,
Oliver, Mary, 167, 170 201
Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 143 and psychological complexes, 204
Other, 154 and resentment, 193-95
and self/selfishness, 189, 191-93, 205
Pandora (myth), 43-46, 48, 49, 53, 54,55 and sex, 193-95, 200
75, 198, 199 and spirituality, 171, 190
Parental complex, 160-61 stories about, 197-201
Parents and Subject of own Desire, 188,
ambivalence of, 108-9 IQO-QI, 192, 194, 195, 196, 198,
children as fulfillment of dreams of, 201-2, 203, 204 205-6
107-8, 118, 198 and transcendence, 205
relationships with, 160-61 and wanting to be wanted, 13, 14, 16,
See also Fathers; Mothers 17, 19, 29, 188, 206
Patriarchy See also Autonomy; Free will; Self-
and beauty,
43-46, 49, 53, 55 determination
and discordant source, 116, 117 Peters, Joan, 105
and hag psychology, 13-14, 16-17, Phelps, Ethel Johnston, 8
18 Plaskow, Judith, 174, 175
in marriage, 198-99 Pleasure
and materiality, 1277, 13 ThA 752 and materiality, 123-24, 136, 138,
and mothers, 116, 117 TS i
and personal sovereignty, 198-99 and mothers, 85
and religion, 155, 162-63, 164, 171, and personal sovereignty, 186, 194-95,
172-73, 175, 178, 182, 185 200
and sex, 80 and power, 64-65, 72-76
and spirituality, 164, 171, 172-73, 175, and sex, 59-63, 64-65, 66, 68, 72-76,
178, 182, 183, 184, 185 82, 83
and working women, 127, 131 Pooling resources, 133-35, 151
Paz, Octavio, 81 Power
Personal sovereignty and appearance, 67, 122 125-26, 147
and authenticity, 204-6 and beauty, 18, 19 20-21, 31, 33-34,
and beauty/appearance, 188, 193-95, 36-37, 38-43, 46, 49, 54-56, 80
199-201, 202 of children, 107-9, 110-13, 120
characteristics of, 186 and competence, 130, 131
and choices/decision-making, 13, 186, constraints on, 3
187, 188-89, 192-93, 195-97, 199, double bind of, 4
202-4, 205, 206 false, 17-21, 108, 117, 125
and control, 188-91, 197, 204-6 and feminism, 187
and feminism, 187, 188 and love, 66, 67, 83
and hag/hag-bitch, 198-99 and materiality, 122, 124-27, 129, 130,
and hero myth, 191-93 131, 134, 138, 144, 147, 151
and Hungry Ghosts, 187-88, 198 of men, 125-26
and identity, 192, 199 and mothers, 84, 85-86, 101, 109,
and intentionality, 188-91, 203, 204, 110-13, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120,
206 198, 201
and materiality, 187-88, 198 of muse, 17-21
248 Index

Power (cont.) pooling resources in, 133-35, 151

and personal sovereignty, 187-88, 190, and spirituality, 168
197, 198, 201 spousal, 95, 99
personal versus professional, 4-5 and wanting to be wanted, 22, 24-27,
and pleasure, 64-65, 72—76 28
seduction of, 64-65, 72-76, 80, 122, See also Marriage
124-25, 147 Religion
and sex, 63, 64-65, 66, 67-68, 72-76, and mothers, 155
80, 82, 83 need for, 155
and spirituality, 151, 154, 159, 165, patriarchal, 155, 162-63, 164, 171,
MOS 7 E77 172-73, 175, 178, 182, 185
as unhealthy and overwhelming, 19 role of women in, 153-54, 155, 161,
and wanting to be wanted, 2, 3, 4-7, 162-63, 171, 175-82
14, 17-21, 27, 28, 29 and sex, 155
and working women, 127, 131 and spirituality, 153-54, 155, 156, 158,
See also Control; Desire; Hag 159-60, 161, 162, 163-64, 169,
Prince Charming (fictional character), 8 171-73, 174-82, 185, 190
Prostitutes, 61 working outside traditional, 182-84
Psyche (mythological character), 68-76, working within traditional, 175-82
80, 81, 83, 198, 199-201, 202 Resentment
Psychological complexes living without, 193-95
and archetypes, 106 and wanting to be wanted, 2, 6
and beauty/appearance, 55 Responsibility
and materiality, 141, 151 for breaking double bind of beauty, 52
of mothers, go and materiality, 134, 150
and personal sovereignty, 204 of mothers, 98-99, 100, 101, 104,
and self-determination, 151 120-21
and spirituality, 160-61, 162, 165-66 and personal sovereignty, 188, 190,
and wanting to be wanted, 26-28, 30 197, 203, 205
See also specific complex and sex, 82
and spirituality, 154, 164, 165-66,
Quakerism, 169, 173 185
Quest(ion)s and wanting to be wanted, 7, 28,
engaging, 167—70 29-31, 32
Great, 158-61 See also Financial matters
and spirituality, 158-61, 167-70 Rich, Adrienne, 88, 89, 90
Right answers, no, 195-97
Ragnell (fictional character) Role models, 21, 37, 40, 51-52, 85
and beauty, 48, 51, 52 Roles, women’s
conversational style of, g—10, 22, 30, and image, 39
131 and religion, 153-54, 155, 161,
and personal sovereignty, 198-99, 201 162-63, 171, 175-82
shame of, 23, 135 and sex, 61-62
and wanting to be wanted, 8-18, 19, Rumpelstiltskin (fairy tale), 113-17, 118,
20, 22, 23, 28-29, 30, 31 119, 198, 201
Rape, 43
“Relational superiority,” 126 Sacred, redefining, 165
Relationships Schwartz, Pepper, 133-34
and financial matters, 133-35, 151 Self
mothers and spousal, 95, 99 attitude about, 163
with parents, 160-61 expansion of, 166—70
and personal sovereignty, 192, 193, functioning of, 163, 166
197, 205 giving away of, 166-70
 Index 249

and intentionality, 164 and love, 58, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68-72,
and materiality, 147 81-82, 83
and personal sovereignty, 189, 191, 205 and men, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 72, 79
and spirituality, 158, 163, 164, 166-70 82-83
true, 205 and mothers, 62
and wanting to be wanted, 23 and Object of Desire, 60, 61, 63, 68, 74,
Self-confidence, 2, 15, 101, 102, 123, 130, 76, 82
131-32, 163 and personal sovereignty, 193-95, 200
See also Ragnell and pleasure, 59-63, 64-65, 66, 68,
Self-consciousness 72-76, 82, 83
and mothers, 93, 99-100 and power, 63, 64-65, 66, 67-68,
and personal sovereignty, 189 72-76, 80, 82, 83
and sex, 58, 64, 80, 82, 83 reasons for engaging in, 62
and spirituality, 166-67, 168 and religion, 155
Self-determination and self-determination, 63, 72-81
and beauty, 51 and Subject of own Desire, 61, 63,
and child development, 108 75-81
and materiality, 125, 126-27, 131, 151 surveys about attitudes toward, 58-59
and personal sovereignty, 189, 191, 192 and wanting to be wanted, 66, 75, 83
and psychological complexes, 151 Shame
and sex, 63, 72-81 and beauty, 46-47, 48, 51, 55
and spirituality, 153, 156, 162, 163, and materiality, 134-35, 138, 140, 141,
164, 165, 166, 169, 176, 182, 148
184-85 of mothers, 86, 93, 100, 120
and wanting to be wanted, 2, 16, 19, and personal sovereignty, 187, 189,
29-31 194, 201
See also Ragnell and sex, 57, 58, 64, 80
Self-esteem and spirituality, 166-67, 172
and beauty, 50 and wanting to be wanted, 18, 21,
and materiality, 123, 147 22-20, 31, 32
of mothers, 120 Shoplifting, 139-41, 142-43, 146, 147,
and personal sovereignty, 188 148
and sex, 65 Shopping
and spirituality, 156, 163, 184 compulsive, 141, 143-46, 147, 151, 198
and wanting to be wanted, 20, 24 and control, 146
and working women, 123 and desire, 137, 138
Selfishness, 162, 163-66, 191-93 impulsive, 144-46
Sex and power, 144
and abusive relationships, 63, 67 and women as consumers, 39, 135-38
and beauty/appearance, 57-58, 61, 64, See also Shoplifting
65, 68, 72-76, 78, 80, 83 Siblings, and Divine Child, rr1-12, 118
as burden, 77 Siegel, Rachel Josefowitz, 176, 177
and communication, 81 Sleeping Beauty (folktale), 8
and control, 61, 62, 66, 77-81 Slut, 48-50, 53, 63
and curse of Venus, 72-76 Somebody-nobody dualism, 166
and emotional intimacy, 59, 62-63, “Spiritual nourishment,” 149-52, 153,
77-81 161
and equality, 68—72, 74, 76, 83 Spirituality
fantasies about, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68 and abusive relationships, 164-65, 183
82-83 and authenticity, 161, 180
fears of, 58, 61, 63, 65, 66, 79, 82-83 and Big Story, 156-58, 161, 167
and images of women, 60-62, 63, 64 of children, 154, 185
250 Index

Spirituality (cont.) and competence, 131

community for, 162, 173, 178-79, 185 and conversational style, 131
and control, 158-59, 163 and materiality, 124, 137, 151
and engaging Quest(ion)s, 167-70 and personal sovereignty, 188, 190-91,
and feminism, 155, 169, 171, 173, 192, 194, 195, 196, 198 201-2, 203,
174-82, 183, 184, 185 204, 205-6
and god, 174-75 and responsibility, 29-31
and goodness, 161-63 and self-determination, 29-31
and Great Quest(ion)s, 158-61 and sex, 61, 63, 75-81
and image, 154, 155, 162-63, 166-67, and spirituality, 151, 153, 162, 166,
170 171, 176, 182, 184, 185
importance of, 154, 155-56 and wanting to be wanted, 19, 29-31,
and intentionality, 164, 166, 169 32
and Is it worth it?, 170, 171-73 and working women, 124
and life of meaning, 184-85 Supermodels, 18, 40
and materiality, 149-52, 153, 185 Symbolic connections, 155, 157-58,
and men, 163, 169, 179, 184 169
and Object of Desire, 164, 166 Symington, Neville, 112-13, 118-19
and Other, 154
and patriarchy, 164, 171-73, 175, 178, Tannen, Deborah, 128-29, 130-31
182, 183, 184, 185 Taylor, Charles, 205
and personal sovereignty, 171, 190 Thinness, 35-42
and power, 151, 154, 159, 165, 168, Transcendence
iaye and personal sovereignty, 205
and psychological complexes, 160-61, and spirituality, 154, 158, 165, 182
162, 165-66 True self, 205
and religion, 153-54, 155, 158, Trust
159-60, 161, 162, 163-64, 169, and equality, 132-35
171-73, 174-82, 185, 190 and materiality, 126-27, 132-35
and responsibility, 154, 164, 165-66, and mothers, 117
185 and personal sovereignty, 203,
and self, 158, 163, 164, 166-70 206
and self-determination, 153, 156, 162, and sex, 135
163, 164, 165, 166, 169, 176, 182, and spirituality, 165, 170, 183
184-85 and wanting to be wanted, 14, 30
and selfishness, 162, 163-66 Truth
and Subject of own Desire, 151, 153, about beauty, 54-56
162, 166, 171, 176, 182, 184, 185 and conversational style, 131
and symbolic connections, 155, and materiality, 140
157-58, 161, 169 and spirituality, 161
and transcendence, 154, 158, 165, and wanting to be wanted, 22, 28-29,
182 31-32
and trust, 165, 170, 183 See also Directness
women-centered, 182-84
and working outside traditions, United Church of Christ, 179
182-84
and working within traditions, 175-82 Venus (mythological character), 69-76,
Spitz, Rene, ro1—2 200-1
Spoto, Donald, 47 Vulnerabilities
Starhawk, 168 admitting, 21-22
Subject of own Desire and beauty, 55
and beauty, 50-53, 54, 55-56 and love, 82
becoming, 50-53, 75 of men, 67, 78, 79
 Index 250

and personal sovereignty, 201, 203 Wiedemann, Florence, 4, 68

and sex, 65, 67, 78, 79, 81, 82 “Wild Geese” (Oliver poem), 167, 170
and wanting to be wanted, 21-22 Wilson, E. O., 43
Wilson, Marie, 117, 119
Wanting to be wanted Witchcraft, 183
and appearance/beauty, 2, 14, 17, 19, Wolf, Naomi, 61-62
20, 21, 24-27 Women
case studies about, 5-7, 15, 20-23, as center of spirituality, 182-84
24-27, 28-29, 31 as consumers, 39, 135-38
and competence, 131-32 conversational style of, 129-30, 131
and directness, 15, 28-29, 31-32 demonization of, 98
and feminism, 1, 3, 19 divisions among, 48, 49-50, 55, 72-76
and freedom, 6-7 earning power of, 125-27
and hag/hag-bitch, 13-18, 19, 20, idealization of, 62, 73
23-24, 25, 29, 31 “relational superiority” of, 126
and heart, 21-22, 206 and what they want, 7-13
and hiding in woods analogy, 22-29 Working women
Lacan’s views about, 1-2 and achievement, 128
and love, 22, 31, 32 and benefits of working, 123
and materiality, 127, 128, 131-32, 137 communication styles of, 129-30,
and mothers, 84, 85, 100, 118 131
and muse, 17-21 and competence, 123-24, 129
and mythical dangers of desire, 13-17 criticism of, 128
and Object of Desire, 18-19, 20-21, and desire in workplace, 127-30
27, 31432 double bind of, 128, 130-31
and personal sovereignty, 13, 14, 16, and equality, 128
17, 19, 29, 188, 206 and femininity, 128-29, 131
and power, 2, 3, 4-7, 14, 17-21, 27, 28, as financial independent, 123
29 as hags/hag-bitches, 127, 128, 130, 131
and psychological complexes, 26-28, image of, 130-31
30 as mothers, 100-5, 123-24
and responsibility, 7, 28, 29-31, 32 and Object of Desire, 128, 129
and sex, 66, 75, 83 and patriarchy, 127, 131
and shame, 22-29 and power, 127, 131
and Subject of own Desire, 19, 29-31, and self-determination, 131
32 and Subject of own Desire, 124
and truth, 28-29, 31-32 and wanting to be wanted, 127, 128
and what women really want, 7-13 Workplace, desire in, 127-30
and working women, 127, 128
Wehr, Demaris, 164-65 Young-Eisendrath, Polly
Weight, 35-36, 38-40 appearance of, 50-52
See also Appearance; Beauty; as mother, 86-91
Thinness and spirituality, 167-68, 172-73
What women teally want, 7-13
Wheel of Life, 138, 149 Zen Buddhism, 150, 169-70, 172-73, 174,
Wicca, 183 182
Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., is a psychologist and Jungian
psychoanalyst practicing in Burlington, Vermont. Clinical
associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont
Medical College, she has published ten books, many chapters
and articles, and she lectures widely on topics of women’s
development, resilience, couple relationship, and the interface
of contemporary psychoanalysis and spirituality.
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 POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH, PH.D.. is psychologist
and Jungian psychoanalyst practicing in Burlington,
Vermont, where she is also clinical associate

professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont

Medical College. She has published ten books,
including The Resilient Spirit, You're Not What IExpected,
and Female Authority, as well as many chapters and
articles. Dr. Young-Eisendrath lectures worldwide
on the topic of women’s development.

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