MEN, WOMEN AND SEX
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any but their single biological difference, their difference of procreative
function.
And once we understand this motivation, we understand, of course,
not only Dr. Mead's resistance to the Freudian castration theory but
also her refusal of the Freudian explanation of homosexuality. For to
follow the Freudian line, which traces sexual inversion to the adjust–
ment to his or her own sex membership of each of the subject's parents
and to the disquieting sphere where sex and aggression have such
mysterious but intimate association with each other, is to give more im–
portance to the mother's real femaleness and the father's real maleness
than Dr. Mead is ready to give-however sensible she may try to be of
the values which accrue to each sex and to society from an acceptance
of our specific sexuality. Indeed, to follow the Freudian line is to raise
the uncomfortable question whether a social parity between the sexes
is possible without a large and ramifying consequence of hostility. We
may not know with any certainty that there is more sexual competition
and strain between a feminist mother and her husband than between
a "female" mother and her husband. But the homosexual story of this
century at least seems to suggest a connection between the increase in
women's rights and an increase in inversion.
Then, too, Dr. Mead's view of the deterministic process is bound
to be colored by her wish for immediate social effectiveness. The
Freudian explanation of homosexuality does not readily incorporate itself
into a program of public instruction. It is easier to teach tolerance of
the homosexual divergence from the sexual norm, like tolerance of Negro
or Jewish divergence from the white Protestant norm, than to try to
penetrate the dark regions of the unconscious whence flows the stream
of causation.
The final chapter of
Male and Female
in which Dr. Mead an–
nounces her social-sexual program for Americans is called, facilely
enough, To Both their Own.
If
it is basically the familiar old plea for
women to be permitted to pursue their work-lives without sexual bias,
this is at least feminism with a significant new approach-Dr. Mead not
only assumes a certain amenity and graciousness on the part of women
and a certain concessiveness on the part of men, but she also insists on
a possible difference of gift according to difference of sex: gone are the
heat and acerbity, the desperateness of the feminism of even twenty
years ago. Thus, Dr. Mead does not demand, as she would have in
another decade, she merely
asks
that men not exclude women from
jobs which are usually designated as masculine. And she does not ask
that women be treated like men in these jobs, but, on the contrary,
