Voyeurism as Method?

Niya here: Chapter twenty-five “The Return of the Repressed” by Ewen and Ewen discusses the book Sex and Character by Otto Weininger. A young Vietnamese man, Weininger’s book addressed many of the typical misogynist themes relevant in his day. His thoughts that a women’s life is completed by her husband and her child while men possess more worldly and social concerns did not strike the public as revolutionary. However, it was his proclamation that no human being can be purely man or woman which sensationalized his writing. He argues that man and woman are socially constructed concepts. The true human condition lies somewhere “between two absolute states of matter [and] serve merely as a starting for investigation of the types” (Ewen and Ewen, 376).

            From this platform, much of Weininger’s work discusses the fluidity of sexuality and argues that bisexuality among humans in a natural condition. Within this condition there is still a hierarchy which reflects his misogynist thoughts ranking masculine types above the amoral and mindless feminine types. His work is also filled with arguments criticizing and demoing Jews, and most specifically Jewish women. His works even went so far as to fault modern Judaism and its overly masculine women for the uprising of feminist thoughts.

            What truly sets Weininger’s work apart from those of his contemporaries is his use of voyeurism as a main technique. Against the advice of Sigmund Freud to employ “extensive empirical research”, Weininger continued on with his voyeuristic foundation.

Ewen and Ewen’s discussion of Weininger ends without noting much about his research technique. When reading this however, I was struck by the level of contempt towards such an unsophisticated methodology. As a Sociology major, I have spent a great deal of time learning of both the quantitative and qualitative sides of research. While quantitative work does not lend itself to more radical research, I cannot help but wonder why voyeurism ranks so low as a legitimate source of research.

            Many will agree that much of what a person knows, as an individual, is learned from his or her personal experience. What is seen, heard, or felt has a much greater impact than the factual details of a circumstance. It seems Weininger was one of the first to truly write as he saw. His abandonment of formal empirical research opens the door to the multiplicity of sexual variety and allows his work to live on as a work of genius.