Let Talk about Sex

By Hayley Turner

In the society that I live, I feel that talking about my own sexuality might make my grandparents uncomfortable and perhaps even my parents but talking about it with my friends or even the media (Radio Shows) would be far less uncomfortable and even part of a new trend that views female sexuality as natural and something to be praised and understood. Female sexuality is currently in a transformation from the believes of the Victorian area, to the rebellion on the 1920’s, to the freedom of the 1960, to perhaps complete understanding in the twenty first century.

Although changes have been taking place over the course of a couple centuries, it is important to examine the role of Freud in jumpstarting the understanding of Female Sexuality and Femininity. The article Freud, the Feminist? By Suzanne Brom outlines some of Freud’s case studies to showcase how Freud’s radical understanding of the female helped in the creation of a Female identity. The article begins by outlining the women of Freud’s time, I found this interesting because I forget how far women have come.  During the time of Freud women were a part of an “extremely restrictive morality”, women were required to have no sexual desire not even during marriage, they were supposed to obey the husband at any cost, women genitalia were seen as shameful and secret and divorce was never an option.  

Freud studied women with hysteria and thus began his radical understanding of the female. Freud believed that hysteria was the result of anxiety caused by the threat of lost love, he believed that women had more to lose by loving. Freud also saw women as completely devoted to being a wife and mother, so much so, that she can not raise in the world. From the three case studies that Freud did of Hysteric women it is known that Freud approached these women differently that other physicians. Freud allowed the women to speak for themselves and treated them as equals. Freud viewed these women as gifted, ambitious, outspoken, and intelligent. The conclusion drawn from the case studies is that hysteria rose in the population because of the women’s independent nature and the anxiety caused by lack of control.

The way that Freud hoped to help these women was radical and can contribute to the belief that Freud could possibly be a Feminist. At the time Freud attempted to liberated female sexuality because it was being repressed by the culture. Freud believed that women should start to accept their sexual desires and in turn the women would be freed from rigid cultural constrains that lead to their hysterical neurosis. Freud challenged the understanding the women were not sexual beings.  Thus women view sex, which is natural, as shameful, but Freud shed light of the fact that sex is natural for women. The natural connection to women and sex was liberating!!