Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  J. H. Bachofen1

  When a couple is new to swinging and the woman has never been exposed to another woman, she usually says that she would find this repulsive and cannot imagine it. After the first two or three parties where she sees women obviously enjoying each other, she is likely to modify her stand and say, “I do enjoy having a woman work on me, but I could never be active with another woman.” Then, when she has been in swinging for several months and attended many parties, she may well say, “I enjoy everything and anything with a woman, either way she wants to go.” … At large open parties we observed that almost all the women were engaged in homosexual activity with obvious satisfaction, especially if a younger group was involved.

  Gilbert D. Bartell2

  MOST PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORISTS either sincerely misunderstood or severely condemned lesbianism. Some did both. The “condition,” they said, was biologically and/or hormonally based. No, said others, it was really an environmental phenomenon. In any event, all agreed, it was maladaptive, regressive, and infantile: even if it wasn’t, it led to undeniable suffering, and was therefore maladaptive, regressive, etc.

  More moderate voices suggested that lesbianism was not infantile, just limited. We are all bisexual by nature, they said, and conditioning (society, the patriarchal family) cripples and restricts both women and men to heterosexuality. Bolder voices disagreed. Women are naturally more bisexual as well as more sensual than men. From a physiological point of view, women are better sexual and emotional love partners for each other than patriarchal men can be to them. Still bolder voices rejected the supposedly “advanced” view of our bisexuality: no, they said, in our culture, bisexuality for women is limited, is a compromise, a blatant and cowardly “cop-out.” Dr. Charlotte Wolff, in her book, Love Between Women, inadvertently and only partially explains this last view in the following way:

  The lesbian’s yearning for her mother’s love is always put in jeopardy through the existence of a male … one wonders why [lesbians] are so much resented by men and women. Because of the pride and vanity of the male, only few men would consider lesbians to be serious rivals. Men’s dislike of them goes back to a fundamental psychological cause: the need for the mother in a woman. The male wants to be “fed” by the female. He needs ego support throughout his life. A lesbian who “feeds” (loves) another woman puts him and his world into chaos; she is a rival because she takes away maternal support which should be HIS not HERS.3

  Women who “feed” both men and women cannot successfully “feed” the long-starving (and often swollen-bellied) women in patriarchal society. From a psychological point of view, it is only women who can “make up” to each other for their lack of mothering. At this moment in history, only women can (if they will) support the entry or re-entry of women into the human race. In order for most women to overthrow their “feminine” conditioning, women must receive the kind of emotional, sexual, economic, and intellectual support from others—both older and younger than themselves—that men do. However, I am not suggesting that either the means or goals of feminism will necessarily be accomplished by women “becoming” lesbians or by women following the lifestyles or values of pre-feminist lesbians.

  Many researcher-clinicians have confused, or equated, lesbianism with male homosexuality. Many researchers have also studied and “sympathized” more with the latter than with the former group of “patients.” Most have not “sympathized” at all. Merle Miller “came out” in the New York Times; some of the letters he received from psychiatrists had the following advice: “While I sympathize with Mr. Miller’s failure to be cured of the disease … [and feel] that homosexuals have the same civil rights as anyone else, they also have the right to try and get treatment for their ‘illness.’” Another psychiatrist offered to “counsel” Miller “free of charge because it is clear from your tone that you are in desperate, even frantic need of help.”

  Of course, since whatever men do is considered more important than anything that women do, male homosexuality has certainly been more overtly punished, socially, legally, and economically, than lesbianism has. Probably the fear of male physical force, coupled with male sexual aggressiveness, is an important factor here. Male homosexuals are perceived as potentially combining these two forms of force—and using them against other, perhaps weaker or younger men. This threat is an intolerable one to men, who psychologically must retain the initiative of force or action, in order to be “men.” This same threat is, however, a daily fact of life for most women. Heterosexual men threaten all women, especially young girls, with a combination of greater physical and “sexual” force—but they are neither feared nor punished by our culture for this. The very same behavior has a totally different meaning as a function of whether it is performed by men or women, and as a function of who the recipient of that action is.

  Male homosexuality is often perceived as having a more “glorious” tradition and a more legitimate or valued meaning than lesbianism. Historically, for example, many male homosexuals have waged “heroic” wars together, have headed governments, churches, and industries, and created artistic and intellectual masterpieces. Some people think that male homosexuals are the keepers of Western culture: in a sense, they are quite right—but my feeling about what this means is probably different from theirs. It means, among other things, that our culture is anti-female, wildly egotistical, and pro-war.

  Male homosexuals are sometimes seen as embodying a culturally valued concern for beauty, love, violence, and death. Like Thomas Mann’s hero in Death in Venice, male homosexuals are seen as martyrs to a cause that is both more spiritual and sexual than is the cause of biological reproduction. The love of men for men has been seen as more real and more elevating than those sorry domestic events that involve women and one’s own children. Platonic “spiritualism,” and everything it implies (from sex without “love” and love without sex—to modern science), is a basic value of Western culture.

  Lesbians do not have a gloriously extensive ancestry. Their mothers and grandmothers, like those of heterosexual women, lived with men and did not control the means of production. Lesbians are women: as such, most are traditionally more domestic, conventional, and sexually monogamous than male homosexuals are—traits to which women are condemned, but for which they are not really valued. Gender is, I believe, a more basic predictor of behavior than is race, class, or sexual preference.

  Lesbianism has not been as legally punished as homosexuality. However, it has been “punished” by being completely legislated out of the realm of possibility for most women. There are probably more male homosexuals than there are lesbians.4 Women are repressed, both sexually and economically, and are therefore more sexually timid (with either women or men), as well as more economically powerless than are either homosexual or heterosexual men. In one sense, it is more difficult for women to become and survive as lesbians than it is for men to survive as homosexuals. For example, men either don’t need or don’t think they need women for economic survival. Most women both need and think they need men in order to survive economically, as well as “psychologically.” (Many married fathers are active homosexuals.) Women have no institutionalized sisterhood that both men and women really respect. Female sisterhoods are based on female self-sacrifice and service to a husband, child, or male God. Even women in certain religious orders are “brides” to a male Christ—and housekeepers to the local governing male prelate.

  In 1969, The New York Times published and article which stated:

  There is no law against the placement of a child with lesbians but, in divorce cases there are generalities about the moral atmosphere in the “home.” “Most judges would not place a child in a house shared by lesbians,” according to Carl Zuckerman, lawyer for the Community Service Society, “but if there were no better alternative, the child would be placed with a homosexual parent.”

  In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association proclaimed that homosexuality was no longer a psychiatric disease. A gay lib
eration movement had begun in the late 1960s. The tragic spread of AIDS (and continued sexual promiscuity) crushed the momentum of the male branch of this movement. At first, lesbian liberationists mainly challenged homophobia among heterosexual feminists; soon enough, their focus turned to lesbian employment, and discrimination issues, and to the problem of lesbian-on-lesbian battering and child custody losses.

  Most lesbians and lesbian communities resisted acknowledging that lesbians could also batter their partners, and that, like heterosexual men and women, lesbians had also internalized sexist values. In addition, because lesbianism was punished and ostracized within the family, and within schools, offices, and the military, lesbians also suffered from many shame and stigma issues. Often, alcoholism and drug addiction remained an unacknowledged part of lesbian life.

  By the late 1980s, gay liberationists were also actively organizing around issues of gays in the military, gay marriage, gay adoption, gay second-parent adoption, and gay custody.

  Over the years, I have been consulted about and have testified in a number of lesbian and homosexual custody cases as well as on behalf of women whose gender or “careers” as psychiatric or psychotherapy patients rendered them vulnerable to a custodial challenge.

  In my first book about custody, Mothers on Trial. The Battle for Children and Custody, which was published in 1986, most lesbian mothers who had been challenged for custody—and whom I had interviewed—lost it. In my opinion, they were all “good enough” mothers. It was clear that throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and the first half of the 1980s, that many mental health professionals, lawyers, and judges still viewed lesbianism as a psychiatric illness.

  Actually, lesbian mothers had one psychological advantage: they knew to expect trouble. The heterosexual mothers were completely surprised when they were custodially challenged and were devastated when they lost custody.

  Although many people believe in some civil rights for homosexuals and lesbians—many do not. The battle for civil rights for gays has not yet been won.

  Most women are more conditioned to want and need motherhood than most men are conditioned to want or need fatherhood. Traditionally, a “bachelor” life is not viewed as tragically as motherless “spinsterhood” is—and often isn’t as tragic in terms of mobility, alternatives, etc., within a given class or race.

  In a sense, it is theoretically easier for women to love women than it is for men to love men. (The so-called “masculinization” of women is more accepted than the “feminization” of men. All things female are despised. It is easier for women to wear pants and work at jobs outside the home than it is for men to wear dresses and high heels and to stay at home in the kitchen. Yet I wonder: why would anyone willingly offer up their feet for binding? And if they do, isn’t it to better attract, support, and worship men?)

  Interestingly, I have been told that many male-to-female transsexuals identify as lesbians and look for lesbian partners.)

  Our mothers were women and, Michelangelo aside, most object-models of sexual or aesthetic beauty in our culture are female. Also, most women know how to be tender (not that they always are) with other people. Traditionally, many men, whether they are homosexual or heterosexual, know more about seduction, rape, and pillage—in bed and on the battlefield.

  The God-of-War ideal of masculinity is so overpowering that few men dare take off their helmets and armor—especially with other men. They probably do so more readily with women, because it is “safe.” This fact no doubt is as painful to male homosexuals as the fact of heterosexual women psychologically “feeding” men and starving women, is to lesbians.5 I suppose that twentieth-century lesbians and homosexuals “suffer” from a similar dream, imprinted by at least three centuries of patriarchal family life: namely, the dream of bourgeois domesticity, approved public coupling, a homecoming—a dream whose reality is denied to both lesbians and homosexuals.

  Two studies have compared lesbians with male homosexuals, and lesbians with heterosexual women.6 They found that both lesbians and heterosexual women sought psychotherapy with equal frequency (a female institution); and that both groups of women were as frequently depressed (a female “disorder”). However, they discovered that the lesbians attempted suicide, drank alcohol, and dropped out of college more often than did the heterosexual women.

  The lesbians sought psychotherapy more often than did the male homosexuals, and were seen as having a “significantly higher prevalence of ‘psychiatric disorders.’” Their female conditioning was still being viewed, by themselves and by professionals, according to a male standard of mental health. Lesbians also attempted suicide and used drugs more often than did male homosexuals.

  Only some lesbians are sexually “aggressive,” non-monogamous, anti-romantic, or verbally or actually involved in large-scale sexual orgies of the Roman steam bath school. This is understandable since such psychological stances and practices characterize both male homosexuality and male heterosexuality. With all due respect for the importance of sexual freedom for all people, and with a respect doubly necessary because I am not a male homosexual, I must suggest that male homosexuality, in patriarchal society, is a basic and extreme expression of phallus worship, misogyny, and the colonization of certain female and/or “feminine” functions.

  Male homosexuals, like male heterosexuals (and like heterosexual women), prefer men to women. I think that more lesbians have experienced (or have wanted to experience) sexual relationships with men, often pleasurably, and often within a legal marriage, than male homosexuals have experienced or wanted to experience sexual relationships with women. It is as simple as that. In a sense, most male homosexuals are “kinder” and more honest with women than are male heterosexuals (a fact for which they are duly punished). Unlike heterosexuals, most male homosexuals do not seduce, make promises to, or marry those whom they fear, dislike, are jealous of, or have contempt for—i.e., women. Of course, the greater capacity for real friendship and respect that some male homosexuals have for some women is a valuable and often unique experience for the women. However, it is still purchased at the expense of female sexuality, or rather, the possibility of sexual intimacy with a friend. Women are only accepted by men—be they homosexual men or heterosexual men—as either “brains” or “cunt,” as either “heart” or “cunt,” as either “mother” or “cunt.” Women are rarely accepted as emotional, intellectual, and sexual beings. Small wonder that women find it hard to develop all three capacities; with whom would they share them? Lesbians, particularly feminist lesbians who are trying to subdue their self-contempt, sexual timidity, and heterosexually modeled role-playing, feel that at this point in history only women can be a midwife, mother, sister, daughter, and lover to the woman as a human being.

  The only theory I have read about lesbianism by a psychiatrist that begins to make sense to me (or, to be honest, that agrees with some of what I already thought and wrote) is Charlotte Wolff’s presentation in Love Between Women. Dr. Wolff proposes “emotional incest with the mother” as the essence of lesbianism. She locates certain aspects of lesbian psychology in history and mythology:

  The similarity between [the lesbian’s] virility and freedom from the fetters of being an object of the male makes the homosexual woman resemble the image of women in matriarchal times…. The wide range of activities, the undoubted capacity to manage her life without dependence on men, is the ideal of the homosexual woman. Female homosexuality is inseparable from the very qualities which were the prerogative of women in early history. It is of no consequence to these conclusions whether the matriarchate existed as a definite period of history, which I believe it did, or in mythology only. Mythology is history, transcending concrete data and revealing their true meaning.

  Dr. Wolff suggests that “love” flourishes within a context of “sameness and harmony” and is impossible in an “alien” context:

  The alien object may arouse admiration, excitement, and even adoration, but it cannot inspire love. The girl who succeeds in getti
ng the better of her father (and the male in general), without recourse to feminine tricks, may be full of satisfaction and triumph, but she will have learned little about the realities of love in the process.

  Thus, Wolff is very sensitive to the “feminine” heterosexual woman’s isolation and nurturance-deprivation:

  The love a man can give her is found to fall short in essentials, which only a mother can provide. It is she herself who has to supply these. She has to become what she could not possess—the mother—in her relationship with the male.

  Wolff views the “unhappiness” of lesbians in terms of specific social ostracism, general female oppression, and lesbian ambitiousness. Lesbians are more emotionally demanding of each other than heterosexual women are of men.

  Women are conditioned to put up with a lot more from a man, and they will, because he is the provider and the father of the children. Women demand from each other love, kindness, tolerance, understanding, sex—the lot. And if they don’t think they are getting it, it’s easy enough to get out.

  I have no more basic a theory to offer.

  THE INTERVIEWS

  I interviewed nine white lesbians and two black lesbians. Two women (one black, the other white) had no experience with therapy or psychiatric hospitalization. Six of the women had been hospitalized when they were approximately twenty-one years old, for approximately three hundred and twenty days. (“Approximately” means a “total average” for the entire group.) Nine of the women had been in private therapy for approximately forty-four months—thirty-nine months with male therapists and twenty-one months with female therapists.

  Their ages ranged from seventeen to forty-four; the ages at which they “became” lesbians, psychologically and/or sexually, ranged from nine to twenty-four. One woman never finished high school, four had some college experience, five completed college, and one had completed some graduate school. Some of these women were sexually “frigid” with women: most were not. At least half had sexual relationships with men.