NOTE: This post originated as a reply to Catlord’s question on another thread, on the Men’s Forum. I’ve decided to start a new thread, because it is a long post that really begins a different topic. Those of the female gender, welcome, but please understand this was originally written to a male target audience, so adjust your sensitivities accordingly.
Short explanation: Preoedipal would be, like, you know, before Oedipal.
Longer explanation:
Anthology of Exotic Dancer Character Types
The Oedipus Complex, as described by Freud, is when the child grows to the point (3-5 years according to Freud) where he begins to have sexual desires toward the parent of the opposite sex and competitive (murderous) impulses toward the parent of the same sex. The development of a normal sense of guilt, amongst other things, prevents the child from acting on these impulses. A person who fails to develop a normal sense of guilt is referred to as a sociopath or, interestingly enough, in the vulgar slang, a “mother fucker”.
During the sexually repressive times during which Freud wrote, much of the psychopathology described revolved around the strictly enforced sexual guilt and repression. Hence much pathology was traced to emotional roots during the time when the conscience was formed and guilt was learned. This type of psychopathology was referred to as a psychoneurosis or simply a neurosis.
The really crazy people, who were totally out of touch with reality, were referred to as psychotics. Putting aside the question of what neurochemical imbalances may exist, the emotional regression that would be assumed to have occurred is to an extremely early period of infancy, even prenatal. On a good night, strippers are not this crazy or they would never even make it to work.
In between the psychoses and the neuroses were the borderline disorders, which were not well understood in Freud’s day. These are your preoedipal issues. Since the times when orthodox psychoanalytic thought was dominant, the term borderline disorder has taken on a more specific meaning. These preoedipal disorders are sometimes collectively referred to, today, as the “boderline spectrum”. It covers a lot of different symptomology.
If one asks specifically about the term exhibitionism, the psychoanalyst will typically discuss the exhibitionistic sexual perversion of the male flasher. He is fixated at the emotional level of the little boy who desires his mother and fears the jealous father will retaliate by cutting off his penis, which the Freudians referred to as castration. As an adult, the possibility of actual sexual contact still arouses unbearable “castration anxiety,” which he counters by exposing himself to women and children, whose fright not only makes him feel powerful, but reassures him that his organ is still intact.
Topless vs Nude: Penis envy and the histrionic character
The Oedipus phase for the little girl is quite different. Upon discovering that her little brother has an organ which she does not, she is beset with penis envy. She compensates by libidinizing her entire body as though her body were one large phallus. This is an explanation for female’s desire to make herself beautiful. One explanation for exhibitionistic tendencies in a female might be for her to compensate for the lack of a male organ by the flaunting of the feminine charms of her entire body. This would be completely inconsistent with a woman shaving her pubic hair and flaunting her humiliatingly penisless genital. And that’s my point, preoedipal, not oedipal.
There are dancers, typically histrionic characters, however, who work at this emotional level. They work in topless clubs or in those strangely proper all nude gentlemen’s clubs, which have all kinds of rules about legal dance moves to prevent vulgar behavior. These are the clubs which might as well be topless. Women in this category live in constant, mortifying fear that someday the bar’s management will change the rules. They despise those nasty girls at the club down the street. They wait until the last dance of their set before they remove their bottoms. They lightly trim, but never shave their pubic hair. There is this strange hand gesture, resembling a straight arm in football. The arm is streched downward with the heel of the wrist resting at the top of the pubis. The fingers are outstretched tauntly, strategically blocking her view of her crotch in an apparent attempt to protect her from what’s “down there”. If you’ve been to several nudie bars, you’ve seen this fairly common maneuver.
I remember a particular evening in a topless club when it had been someone’s birthday. They had all these long thin balloons. The girls would spontaneously grab a balloon, hold it between their legs and then throw it on the ground to pop it with their heels and giggle, thus expressing both sides of the penis envy coin, the wish for a penis and the “castrating bitch.” This kind of acting out is commonplace in a topless club, but virtually nonexistent in an all nude place.
Histrionic characters – traditionally referred to as hysterical characters – are tense, proud and attractive. Back in the 1930s, when the female castration complex was the cool thing for psychoanalysts to write about, the upright rigid bearing of these women was equated to the symbolic erect phallus, compensating for her penis envy. The extensor muscles are chronically tense, reflecting a hyperenergized sympathetic nervous system, symptomatic of repressed rage. The pelvic muscles are especially tense to suppress sexual impulses – all the more reason for her to prefer displaying her charms in a topless rather than nude establishment. These are the women who look great in fuck me pumps. Not only do the high heels make their otherwise tense asses wiggle, but the taunt calf muscles make it impossible for her to put her feet flat on the ground, anyway. If you manage to take such a woman home, massage her calf muscles; she’ll like that better than sex.
If you don’t find a psychological explanation for strip clubs under exhibitionism, the word you’re looking for may be scopophilia. Voyeurism implies that one is looking, without being seen, also not the right word. Scopophilia is a “love of looking”. It is often associated with the oral stage. Picture the child at the breast innocently making eyes at mama and touching her with its little hands. This is not so different from many of the interactions with girls at an American strip club, especially the merely topless ones. No one, who is realistic about the setting, believes the making of eyes and playful flirting is a prelude to sex. What touching there is is generally touching of the hands, an occasional hug. And if you disagree, you are probably one of those who find American strip clubs annoyingly frustrating.
With the hysterical character, we have been discussing so far, this is where the problem begins. Freud described full blown hysterical neurosis as the result of being molested by the father. When the paternal “powers that be” objected, he decided the girls must merely be fantasizing, projecting their prepubescent lust. That controversy aside, there is agreement on an overly sexualized father-daughter relationship. This begins with the very young child, frustrated by poor mothering and turning prematurely to the father for acceptance. This is the origin of the oral rage and hypertonic extensor muscles. The father is quite possibly also frustrated by his wife’s cold intimacy. For whatever reason, the small girl learns to hold the father’s attention by flirtatious behavior. For her, it is not about sex; it is about attention, acceptance. She doesn’t even know what sex is, and any precocious introduction to the topic, for her young self, is clearly a nasty thing. Just because the histrionic stripper loves to flirt with you, doesn’t mean she wants to fuck you, quite the contrary.
Single Mothers: Virtual parthenogenesis
The mothers without fathers are a slightly different story. In her book, Out of Wedlock, based on research in Columbus, Ohio and originally published in 1954, Leontine Young described an, at the time, shocking pattern of white, middle class, attractive, educated single mothers in their mid twenties. They missed the stereotypes of juvenile delinquency or underclass illegitimacy. Ms Young noted that, “The urge for a child is a fundamental biological force.” These girls were uninterested in the father, to them no more than a “tool” or “necessary biological accessory.”
What I find most instructive, in Ms Young’s work, is the generational pattern and the dissociated state in which pregnancy was typically achieved. Immediately before getting pregnant these girls were often virgins, conceiving their first time. They often had no memory of having sex with a relative stranger, in whom they had no further interest. Labor and delivery were, in most cases, remarkably quick and free of pain. The fertile animal seems to have simply split itself off from the rest of the personality and done what was necessary, at the proper time, to make a baby. The mother and grandmother, also a single parent, are delighted with the baby. In the phallocentric orthodoxy of early twentieth century Freudian psychoanalysis, this would seem to be a case of penis envy expressing itself as “baby as phallus”, replacing “body as phallus”.
I met a girl at a topless bar in Los Angeles who seemed to have stepped right out of the pages of Leontine Young’s book. She was attractive and popular with many men, who saw her as a 10, though, to a few, who saw a fakeness about her, she was no more than a 2. By her own admission she was emotionally incapable of a relationship with a man. She raised her son, whom she spoke of as more a prized possession (penis substitute) than a person, with her mother. She had a frozen flame quality about her and eyes a man could see twinkle from forty feet away. She loved to dance and there is no doubt that her heterosexuality was thereby gratified. I hold out no chance that enough of her narcissism could be freed up for her to make an emotional investment in a man, a creature too different from herself. One night her mother came to see her dance and, as her mother’s prize, she obediently danced for her mother all night, completely ignoring the regular customers who normally tipped her quite well.
Oral Character: Not as sexy as it sounds
The oral character was relatively well cared for as an infant, but as she developed the ability to walk and talk and take care of herself in the most basic ways, parental support evaporated fast. Perhaps the mother was ill or injured or depressed herself. Perhaps there were too many other children or the parents lived a hectic lifestyle either feeding their own narcissism or, more commonly in postmodern America, just struggling to keep the rent or mortgage paid. There wasn’t time for the small child. In back of everything, the oral character secretly (unconsciously) longs for the carefree days of infancy when all needs were met. In adulthood, this longing may be filled with alcohol or drug abuse. She was forced to grow up fast, too fast. She learns to act strong and independent and to deny her own needs, but she is really weak and hungry for attention.
One of the systemic consequences of this growing up too fast is that she never learns to regulate herself. Think of Captain Kirk demanding that Scotty make a forty-eight hour overhaul of the warp drive in only fifteen minutes. This is the world of the oral character, and in the real world edition, the Klingons (or their counterpart) blast her starship outta the sky on a regular basis. Everyone can see it coming but her. She’s been trained, since infancy, not to. She regularly starts out enthusiastic and energized to accomplish grandiose tasks and, like a Richard Rodriguez coached football team, collapses into abject failure in the third quarter. She gets fired from her job as a dancer because she is too exhausted to get to work and too exhausted to perform when she does. She has asked for more shifts than she can handle, fills in for other girls who call in sick, works full time toward a college degree during the day and drives back to her boyfriend’s hometown 100 miles away every night, because he needs her. He’s unemployed! After collapsing into a depressive stupor for a couple of weeks, she is quickly hired by another club because she is so energetic and enthusiastic.
To some of us, this girl can be very attractive. I admire her apparent inner strength and determination, while at the same time I sense her inner weakness and loneliness, which tugs at my heart. I want to give her the love she craves, but she has trouble taking, she’s learned to be fiercely independent. Her first week or so as a dancer she is especially weak and wobbly on her feet. This is not a physically strong character, but an energetically deprived one. For me, the first immediate clue that I’m dealing with an oral character is the way the head reaches forward. In some ways her posture resembles a suit dangling from a clothes hanger. Countering/denying the oral longing and neediness, sheer strength of will seems to hold her up by the shoulders. If you get close enough to this girl, massage her shoulders, which are chronically kinked into the tightest knots your tired, sore hands have ever encountered. Her first few times on stage she is overwhelmed by what seems to be the kind of attention she secretly craved but has never been allowed to experience before. Thusly overwhelmed, early in her career, she will become quite obviously sexually aroused on stage.
Recall that the histrionic character is rooted in oral conflicts. There is a kind of continuum between the two with the histrionic’s life maturing to be dominated by Oedipal conflicts and the oral character, usually a Dependent Personality Disorder in DSM IV terms, struggling with the above described issues of need and independence. Massage both her calfs and her shoulders and the harder tension will tell you which character type you’re dealing with.
A relationship with an oral character becomes an ordeal. The general cyclothymic pattern of her existence is a disruption, which alone can pound you into the dirt. If you try to interrupt the virulent pattern, you’ll quickly grow tired of trying to rescue her and, in her attitude of defiant independence, she’ll resent your help. Despite a sense of determination in all aspects of her life, she is weak and easily exhausted. She will turn out to be a selfish lover and a burden in ways she is unable to recognize. Her neediness will overwhelm her ability to love and her propensity to idealize her love object will lead to abrupt episodes of disillusionment and rage in a manner parallel to the overexertion / exhaustion cycle in her work life.
Bisexuals: Cock teasing lesbians
Be we male or female, our first intimate relationship is with our mother, during infancy. For boys that is a heterosexual relationship. For girls it is a homosexual relationship. Logically speaking, periods of stress are more likely to emotionally regress a woman’s libidinal object choice to that of another female. An immature woman might never make the switch from loving a female to desiring a man. Statistically speaking, there are more lesbians than gay men, and a straight woman is more likely to have had (and been forgiven for) a same sex erotic interlude, in her past, than is a heterosexual man. It is not unusual to see dancers, including those known to have strong heterosexual interests, showing affection for each other, even displaying obvious crushes. My own bitter observation, however, is that “bisexual” is often a euphemism for “lesbian”. With the homosexual/heterosexual distinction being so fluid amongst females, if you were a gay woman looking for work in a strip club, would you not bill yourself as bi?
Sexual identity is most likely formed during what Margaret Mahler referred to as the Rapprochement subphase of separation-differentiation. This is roughly the second half of the second year of life, more specifically 15 - 24 months. During the 1960s and 1970s Mahler’s research on child development showed that this was the period during which children displayed aggressive curiosity concerning what Freud called “the anatomical distinction between the sexes.” Freud put this childhood discovery much later, Melanie Klein much earlier. Mahler was observing, over a long career, the development of actual children rather than extrapolating from the recovered memories of psychiatric patients.
Homosexuals, both male and female, are typically raised by a narcissistic mother. Rapprochement is a time when the toddler, having learned to walk and talk, is ready to take advantage of her new independence. She is torn between the desire to explore the world and the urge to cling to mama, on whom she is still very dependent. The good parent encourages the child to develop its independence but is there to reassure the child when she feels scared that she has gone too far and abruptly comes running back to cling to her mother to “recharge”. To the narcissistic parent, the child’s developing independence is insulting. The narcissist is unable to appreciate other people an anything more than an extension of one’s self. This is touched on in my section on Leontine Young’s description of single mothers. The narcissistic parent disrupts the child’s sense of existence as a separate being, its self image and sexual identity are never well formed.
The father figure is generally absent either physically or emotionally and is sometimes abusive. The little girl is unable to learn a feminine role through healthy interaction with her father or through healthy identification with the mother. Her sexual identity remaining vague, she may choose “identification with the aggressor” if she decides being like a domineering, abusive father is safer than being the one getting abused. This will lead to a “butch” type lesbian. A revulsion to the father and masculinity, in general, or an obliviousness to its absent form may leave her feminine by default, but seeking an understanding of what that means. She may attempt to repair her inadequate feminine body image though relationships with women or by finding a job where she looks at naked women all day, e.g. a nudie bar!
In all fairness, this woman’s dancing is not, for the most part, aggressively teasing or provocative. It is more smoothly graceful and aesthetic in a manner likely to appeal to another woman. That’s who she’s really dancing for. If she attempts to flaunt her sexuality before a generous male patron, she is likely to appear mechanical or, occasionally, sarcastic, if she has a streak of the butch in her. Frequently, I have seen her completely ignore a man trying to give her money. She is not trying to be rude or arrogant. She just doesn’t see him. Her mind is elsewhere.
If you are to seduce this gem, you first need to show her that a man can be nonthreatening and caring. Then she has to find her true sexual identity. This involves consciously and unconsciously, emotionally identifying herself as a being with a vagina, which is perfect for grasping a male penis. She won’t learn this from looking at other women. She has to find it within herself.
Anal Influences: The so-called ‘masochistic character’
Freud’s anal stage of psychosexual development overlaps Mahler’s Rapprochement subphase. This makes sense: The willfulness, said to be a typical anal trait, corresponds nicely with Mahler’s rapprochement child establishing its independence from the mother. Freud’s work published in Germany between the world wars emphasized the issues of discipline and obedience, whereas Mahler’s work published in America, during the second half of the twentieth century, focuses on the issues of liberty versus security. These are just different perspectives on the child’s process of becoming a separate individual during the second year of its life.
Many of us can recall, usually unsolicited, discussions of bowel regularity with parents or grandparents. Just a couple of generations ago, for reasons I fail to appreciate, Western civilization was far more concerned with the value of regular bowel habits. This and the fact that toilet training was begun earlier, than has become the custom today, generate little wonder that anality provided the lifelong symbolism for power struggles. A child, lacking the psychological – and often physiological – maturity to comply, perceived the imposed discipline as a sadistic attack and could not help but rebel. Overlay this, a few years later, with a good helping of sexual guilt and you had the makings of a full blown obsessive compulsive neurosis. The worst of this societal bullying has now been mitigated. Thank you, Doctor Freud.
You will sometimes see middle-aged people who stand with their heels together and their feet apart, forming the angle of a square. This is not some form of ritualistic stance. This how these people normally stand. Their butt cheeks are tightly clenched and they waddle like pigeons when they walk. They were toilet trained early and harshly. They lacked the internal muscle control to avoid soiling out of turn and in a desperate maneuver learned to use the musculature of their hips to clench their butt cheeks and hold it in. Years later the habit persists, outside of consciousness. When a therapist helps them relax this “body armor” they are consumed with irrational panic and rage, associated with the need to clench decades earlier, when memories were still largely stored in a prelinguistic manner.
The whole body is affected, and it is almost always about more than just toilet training though that’s inevitably part of it, when an insensitive parent’s discipline is harsh, inconsistent and incomprehensible. This person understands the world as a brutal place where any action might be violently punished. She is filled with anger, but develops a strong musculature to hold herself back. She is graceless in her movement and muscle bound in appearance. She is socially submissive despite inner resentment. She has a habit of intentionally (often unconsciously) being rude or sarcastic in a manner that provokes her target and gives her an excuse to release some of her own pent up hostility.
In Neo-Reichian terminology she is referred to as a Masochistic Character because of her self-defeating behavior. In this era of mainstream sadomasochism, the nomenclature is potentially misleading as it is not intended to imply that she is involved in sadomasochistic sex play, fetishes or perversions. But since you wondered… Oral sadism is more the bite of a single-tail whip, whereas anal sadism is more the pounding of a paddle. Oral sadistic might be piercing, candle wax or electroshock. Anal sadistic might be ballbusting or breast slapping. Coprophilia, well… You figure that one out. Proposed but never formally admitted into DSM-IV, self-defeating personality disorder is a label that might get attached to this anally influenced character. Within the BDSM community she might be a SAM (smart-ass masochist), not universally appreciated for her sarcasm.
This girl is particularly easy to pick out on the dance floor. She is thicker and heavier on her feet. Her pelvis appears to have a wider range of motion, or maybe she just dances nastier. With enough P86 and P88 she can be really sexy in her own way. If you get her excited or pissed off she’s the one who’s liable to spill beer on you. We’re talking an anal expulsive rather than anal retentive character.
*To be continued…
