“He Desires Me; He Loves Me Not:” #MeToo and an Analysis of Freudian Sexual Economics

The #MeToo movement struck like a thunderbolt leaving scorch marks in its wake. On October 15, 2017, in response to the Harvey Weinstein sexual allegations, Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet” (@Alyssa_Milano). As a suggested reply, she provided the following statement: “Me too. Suggested by a friend: ‘If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote, ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem’” (@Alyssa_Milano). Approximately one in five women will be raped in their lifetime according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

When Milano’s tweet was published, women’s shared experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault proceeded to hit social media, radio, and TV with force. Celebrity women’s voices soared and social media was a flurry with friends spreading stories of sexual harassment and sexual assault under the powerful umbrella of the #MeToo movement. No longer were women going to be silenced by male sexual harassment and sexual assault. Women were coming together and wielding their collective power on the path to retribution.

There is much literature on the debilitating effects of sexual harassment and sexual assault, but why do men do it? In his article, “A Male Perspective on Sex and Power in the Age of #MeToo” (2020), David Lotto endeavors to answer this question from a male perspective. Following John Pryor’s research in which he provides a personality profile of men most likely to commit sexual harassment with impunity (“a lack of empathy, belief in traditional sex roles, and tendencies toward Dominance/Authoritarian-ism”), Lotto provides an alternative suggestion for why men sexually harass women: “men have a great deal of resentment and anger at being at a disadvantage in the arena of sexual power, specifically the reality that most of the time, in most situations, particular-

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ly around the initiation of the sexual relationship, it is the woman who has far more control than the man.” As a result of this perceived lack of sexual power, Lotto adds that if a man’s sexual advances are rejected, particularly in circumstances provided by Pryor, he will seek revenge for inflicted narcissistic wounds.

From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective in which the narcissistic injury is suffered, one suggestion Lotto provides is that there is a difference between women as mothers and women as sexually desirable: “the female power role or attribute… is not that of the nurturing caretaker whose power is that of the adult in comparison to the child, but of the one who holds the power of sexual desirability. It is her ability to please and satisfy so much of what the adult heterosexual male desires; a sexual relationship with a woman and the many gratifications that can go with it that is the source of her power.” While Lotto navigates away from the powerful influence of a man’s mother as sexually desirable, in other psychoanalytic literature it is suggested that in his unconscious the mother’s role as nurturer and as sexually desirable may remain confused in his relationships with other women. In some circumstances, this confusion may lead to women being mistreated as sexual objects with impunity by men, especially by those who have an unresolved Oedipal complex as a result of an incestuous fixation.

In “Contributions to the Psychology of Love” (1918), a compilation of three essays, Sigmund Freud begins on his long road of modification of the Oedipus complex with an analysis of love and desire. In the first of these essays, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men” (1910), it is a necessary requirement that, in childhood, the boy unconsciously debases his mother as if she were a prostitute in order to transfer his desires onto a healthy love-object. Eventually, he recaptures the reverence he feels for his mother in the new love-object and achieves his purpose, which is to symbolically marry his mother. However, as Freud observes, that “the object chosen should be like a prostitute – seems energetically to oppose a derivation from the mother-complex” (The Standard Edition, vol. 11, 170).

In Freud’s second essay in the sequence, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), he claims that due to the anxiety of psychical impotence in men of “strongly libidinous natures,” men of usually high sexual prowess find themselves in a situation in which they cannot get an erection when sexual intercourse presents itself with certain individuals who they

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love, such as their wives (The Standard Edition, vol. 11, 179). Freud suggests that an “incestuous fixation on the mother or sister, which has never been surmounted, plays a prominent part in this pathogenic material and is its most universal content,” and thus becomes a neurotic disturbance in which neurotic men are unable to separate love from desire (180). The solution for psychical impotency, it appears, is for neurotic men to be able to consciously differentiate between love and desire in order to debase the women with whom they wish to have sexual intercourse: “Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love. They seek objects which they do not need to love, in order to keep their sensuality away from the objects they love” (183).

Furthermore, according to Freud, “any [man] who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister. Any [man] who subjects himself to a serious self-examination on the subject of this requirement will be sure to find that he regards the sexual act basically as something degrading, which defiles and pollutes not only the body” (186). Nevertheless, a man who suffers from psychical impotence can find immense and gratifying sexual satisfaction in a “debased sexual object,” such as a prostitute—or, perhaps, a woman who is in a subordinate position in the workplace—whose moral values are perceived as much lower down on the scale compared with that of his chosen love object to replace his mother.

A problematic question arises about a male-driven theory that I suggest is relevant today: can we infer that when a man begins to suffer sexual impotence with his wife because he unconsciously values her too highly, as a man does his mother, he should actively seek sexual gratification in women with whom he can disengage himself from emotional attachment? This question is not satisfactorily answered by Freud. (Perhaps one solution is for women to not get married for fear of inadvertently triggering the mother-complex.)

In contrast to men, women have no need to debase their sexual objects because “they are subsequently often unable to undo the connection between sensual activity and prohibition, and prove to be psychically impotent, that is, frigid, when such activity is at last allowed them” (186). This view is developed in Freud’s third essay in the sequence, “The Taboo of Virginity” (1917), in which he approaches incest from primitive kinship bonds to modern Western

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women. Freud initially found that a woman’s frigidity prior to sexual intercourse is paradoxically joined to a hostility she displays to the man after sexual intercourse occurs. Freud considers that the defloration of a woman’s virginity and the physical pain incurred may contribute to frigidity throughout her sexual relations with men. However, Freud acknowledges that this theory is inadequate and concedes that what actually occurs is a narcissistic injury to the woman, “which proceeds from the destruction of an organ” and that the “loss of virginity brings a diminution of sexual value” (The Standard Edition, vol. 11, 202). A woman’s virginity, as Christine Mitchell observes, is still a hot commodity in many cultures, even leading to hymen reconstruction requests (“The Value of Virginity,” The Journal of Clinical Ethics, 26[2], 2015).

Freud believes that if men were not held to such high cultural expectations (women do not have these expectations), they would be less inclined to become, for example, sexual perverts. Several years earlier in “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908), Freud observed that with education perverse sexuality can be suppressed. However, while it appears to have succeeded, it is merely redirected “and make[s] [a man] quite as useless for society as satisfaction of the suppressed instincts in an unmodified form would have done” (The Standard Edition, vol. 9, 191). At some point, then, there will be a perverse rebellion in the name of sexual freedom, despite civilization’s efforts to encourage the unconscious sublimation of sexual instincts toward superficial non-sexual and socially-driven conducive ends.

Freud prophesied a perverse male sexual freedom as a result of what Lotto identifies as a narcissistic wound. Given the sheer number of women who are still sexually harassed and sexually assaulted, society has failed them. The #MeToo movement is evidence of women now coming together to fight against a social system that has broken down, which includes through litigation, but this is not enough. We need to make fundamental changes to societal and cultural norms so that boys are not raised to fear failure. This may be a good start toward men feeling more secure in themselves and reduce deeply-rooted feelings of inadequacy being projected onto women.

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