Free Cultures of Fetishism by Louise J. Kaplan

newspaper ads The L Word was promoted as VENUS ENVY. Now that this Venus envy is out in the open, we might look back at Sex in the City and detect something we might never have noticed about its appeal to some men—an opportunity for them to identify with females and give passive expression to their unconscious feminine identifications.
    Two years before his death, in one of his last papers, Freud asserted that the rock bottom of the female personality is her penis envy, her unconscious wish to assume a masculine role in her sexual and domestic arrangements and in society. 57 Most females would protest that they do not have such wishes, or that those wishes are in fact quite conscious and nothing to be ashamed of, except for the sad fact of society labeling such wishes as “masculine.” The corresponding rock bottom for the male is his unconscious wish to assume a feminine position in a relationship with a male. Since this feminine position is shameful to a man, he must make every effort to repudiate it. His so-called masculine protest is but the outward sign of his “repudiation of femininity.” A possibility Freud never considered, however, was that his own insistent and
    re-iterated proclamations on female castration, the female absence of an adequate genital, the inferiority of her genitals, and penis envy, were, at least in part, a masquerade, a duplicity, a very elaborate and clever cover story for Venus envy.

    Behind every proclamation of female inferiority lurks a forbidden and shameful identification with the powers of female sexuality. When a man feels castrated and humiliated by the conditions inflicted on him by his society, his shameful feminine identifications are aroused. A popular response to these social humiliations is the desire to silence the sexuality of females.
    We do know that in cultures where the vast majority of male citizens are treated as if they were beasts of burden or less than human, these men identify with their oppressors. Rather than experience himself as a “castrated” woman, the man acts toward females the way that their oppressors act toward him He denigrates and punishes females for exhibiting their femininity. In such cultures, dominating and humiliating the woman is the screen, the cover story that protects a man from having to acknowledge his own vulnerability. In politically oppressive cultures, women have usually been the most oppressed and humiliated members.
    The tumultuous social, political, and religious upheavals that plagued the country of Iran during the last half of the twentieth century and that now continues into the early years of the twenty-first century, testifies to these observations. 58 In 1957, after a succession of premiers finally restored some degree of order to Iran, there was a temporary end to the oppressive laws that had existed for sixteen years. Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had assumed the reigns of authority from his father, instituted a series of reforms that would give land to the poor and establish closer relationships with the West. His project of industrialization, modernization, and Westernization created extraordinary and ostentatious wealth in some sectors of the popula- tion but alienated and humiliated the urban and rural poor, who grew more and more restless and dissatisfied.
    The SAVAT, the Shah’s secret police, kept a close watch for signs of discontent and punished those who objected to the Shah’s regime with pub- lic humiliation, torture, imprisonment, and death by stoning and execution. The humiliation of the female population in the less-advantaged social classes was accomplished by beatings, desertions, and denigrations by their hus- bands and fathers. On the other hand, under the Shah’s regime, the Westernized middle- and upper-class women were encouraged to serve in public offices, and allowed to vote, dress as they wished, listen to Western music, and read Western books.
    One of those who objected to the policies of