ME N . WOMEN AND
SEX
371
of the infant's response to this particular sexual confusion. But we are
not inclined to isolate this female organic emphasis until we meet an–
other and more marked divergence from Freudian doctrine, Dr. Mead's
reversal of the concept of female organic inferiority. Refusing the
Freudian castration theory, which is of course of major importance in
the whole Freudian system and which rests on the belief that because
the female lacks an external genital the girl-child suffers the fear that
she
has
lost this valuable appendage which she once had, and the boy–
child fears he
will
lose this most necessary token of his masculinity,
Dr. Mead elaborates the quite opposite idea of a pervasive masculine
sense of inadequacy engendered by the male's non-primary role in child–
bearing. There is but passing reference to penis-envy in her study, but
Dr. Mead devotes considerable space to what she takes to be the
womb-envying symbolism of certain primitive initiation rites-ignoring
the possibility that these puberty ceremonials may be simply a reenact–
ment of the birth process, such as many religions include in their rituals,
or even the possibility that they represent a counter-magic of castrating
the female against the fear of being castrated by her. And she makes a
recurrent point of man's need for compensation for his poor remote
share in producing babies. Inevitably we are reminded of Dr. Horney
who, a woman too, built up a systematic dissent from Freudian analysis
on a similar refusal of a concept which she evidently found invidious to
her sex. And we are not surprised that when Dr. Mead comes to our
own culture, she not only ignores the part which male castration fear
plays in the protections men have built up against the encroachments of
women upon their occupations, recurring-instead-to men's woeful need
to compensate for their inferior biological endowment, but that she also,
in the very face of her own case for differentiation, insists on the social
and personal loss which follows when women are debarred from any of
the activities of their society.
*
But this substitution of womb-envy for penis-envy, if it is the most
arresting, is not Dr. Mead's sole significant divergence from the Freudian
method which in general she finds so helpful. Dr. Mead also rejects the
system of masked identifications and suppressed aggressions in terms
of which Freud explains homosexuality, and herself accounts for the
homosexual deviation as a reaction-formation within the individual
*
Dr. Mead makes the compelling statement that in every known society the
activities which engage men-whether they be active or passive, hunting or
religion, war or art-are regarded as the more desirable activities of that society.
Even this observation does not, however, convince her that, at least in womens'
eyes, men have a biologically-derived advantage over women.
