Oppression Of Sexual Inequality In Sigmund Freud's Perspective

Firestone argues that the biological sexual opposition, particularly the biological division of labor in reproduction, is the root cause of male domination, economic class exploitation, racism, imperialism and ecological irresponsibility. Sexual inequality is "an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself": in this sense, it has been universal and inevitable, but the cultural and technological preconditions now exist that make its elimination possible and perhaps necessary for human survival. This dependence of the female and the child on the male causes "psychosexual distortions in the human personality", distortions that were described by Sigmund Freud. Firestone describes Freudianism as a "misguided feminism", since she sees the only real difference between Freud's

analysis and that of the radical feminists as being that Freud and his followers accept the social context in which sexual repression develops as immutable. Freud demonstrated that the source of repression and sex-class distinctions is the inherently unequal power relationship in the biological family: women and children are alike oppressed by the more powerful father.

The young boy identifies first with the mother, whose oppression he shares, but soon switches his identification to the father, whose power he fears but will someday inherit. In the process he accedes to the incest taboo and the strict separation of sexuality and emotion which this requires, and which is the psychological foundation of political and ideological oppression. While the young girl also envies the father's power, she learns that she cannot inherit it and can only share in it indirectly, by currying favor with the dominant male. Not only are women and children both inevitably oppressed in the biological family, they are doubly oppressed by the particular form of it which prevails in the industrialized nations: the patriarchal nuclear family, which isolates each couple and their offspring. Compulsory schooling and the romantic mythology of childhood are devices which serve to prolong the isolation of children and their economic

dependence. The socialist-feminist revolution will free both women and children, leaving them with complete economic independence and sexual freedom, and integrating them fully into the larger world. The end of the sex-class system must mean the end of the biological family, that is, the end of women's biological reproductive role through artificial means of gestation. Love between the sexes will remain, for it becomes oppressive only when joined to the reproductive function. The biological family turns sexual love into a tool of oppression. Within it, women give their love to men, thus inspiring the latter to greater cultural creativity, and providing the former with an emotional identity of the sort denied them in the larger world. Yet men, as a result of the Oedipus complex and the incest taboo, are unable to love: they must degrade the women they make love to, in order to distinguish them from the mother, the first and forbidden love object. They cannot simultaneously respect and be sexually attracted to women