Autogynephilia as a private religion
Select paragraphs from The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
The text for today's thought experiment comes from the 1971 Nobel Prize winning book, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Ernest writes about a phenomenon known today as autogynephilia. Psychiatry has advanced significantly over the past 20 years as has our understanding of paraphilia. His book is filled with misunderstandings of mental illness and enough trigger warnings to make it unassignable in today's universities. However, it's insights and observations about fetish give us a glimpse into why we use words like "menstruators", "uterus hivers." Let's look at a few examples.
Female can be defined by physical appearance, by chromosome constitution, or by gender identification. (Extract from a much longer entry on medicinenet.com. The entry for “male” reads: “The sex that produces spermatozoa”) Link
Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation… I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another…[The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes (Andrea Long Chu, American transwoman and author of “Females: A Concern") .
As a good feminist, I know there’s no such thing as a woman. As a woman, I resent this. Link
I also wrote another article about this fetishization. So buckle up and think about people and things you've seen online. fetishization acts are performed by men for the enjoyment of men.
It is also more useful to view this from a societal perspective rather than a personal one.
“But somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure, and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism. The anal protest of culture can be self-defeating, especially if we like our women to walk or if we want to relate to them as full human beings. That is precisely what the fetishist cannot do. Secret magic and private dramatization may be a hold on reality, the creation of a personal world, but they also separate the practitioner from reality, just as cultural contrivances do on a more standardized level. Greenacre has understood this very acutely, remarking that the secret is Janus-faced, a subterfuge that weakens the person’s relationships to others.
The transvestite in his secret internal marriage actually does without the marriage relationship entirely. In all of this we must not forget the general impoverishment of the fetishist and transvestite: the insecure identification with the father, the weak body-ego. Perversion has been called a “private religion’—and that it really is, but it testifies to fear and trembling and not to faith. It is an idiosyncratic, symbolic protest of control and safety by those who can rely on nothing—neither their own powers nor the shared cultural map for interpersonal action. This is what makes their ingenuity pathetic. As the fetishist, unlike the matter-of-fact cultural performer, is not secure in his repressions and body-ego, he is still overwhelmed by the sexual act, the demand that he do something responsible to someone else with his entire body. Romm says of her patient: “While he had a very sensitive need for his wife’s sexual compliance, all desire left him whenever his wife indicated any sexual drive.” We can look at this as the refusal of the impersonal, instrumental species role, but it is a refusal based in insecurity, when one is called upon to perform. Remember we said, with Rank, that a major characteristic of neurosis was seeing the world as it is, in all its superordinacy, power, overwhelmingness. The fetishist must feel the truth of his helplessness vis-à-vis the ponderous object and the task he has to perform. He is not securely enough “programmed” neurally by solid repressions and body-ego, to be able to falsify his real situation and hence act his animal role with indifference. The object must be overwhelming in its massiveness of hair, pendulous breasts, buttocks, and stomach. What attitude to take toward all this “thingness” when one feels so empty in himself? One of the reasons that the fetish object is itself so splendid and fascinating to the fetishist must be that he transfers to it the awesomeness of the other human presence. The fetish is then the manageable miracle, while the partner is not. The result is that the fetish becomes supercharged with a halo-like effect.
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All perversions, then, can truly be seen as “private religions,” as attempts to heroically transcend the human condition and to achieve some kind of satisfaction in that condition. That is why perverts are forever saying how superior and life-enhancing their particular approach is, how they cannot understand why anyone would not prefer it. It is the same sentiment that animates all true believers, the trumpeting of who is the true hero and what is the only genuine path to eternal glory.”