In a new study from the University of Michigan psychologist Terri Conley, the findings reveal that women and men are more alike than most are willing to admit. This has even become clearer through Conley’s study on sexual behavior. Like the Kinsey Reports in the 1950’s, the new study reflects on details much of society has already known, but just has not confessed. The study from Terri Conley entitled, “Men, Women, and the Bedroom” demystifies the traditional claims of differences that are not innate and specific to gender. This is not the first time mainstream ‘accepted’ definitions have been disproved. Limited perceptions are classic to mainstream acceptance, yet their very actions prove to differ from their speech towards sexuality and psychology. The very masquerade of reality that the philosopher Julia Kristeva and author Angela Carter have dealt with throughout one another’s respected oeuvre gain resolve with Conley’s new statistical findings.
In Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, she reflects primarily on the subject of melancholia. Within society’s masquerade of reality, when it comes to depression and melancholia, there is a ‘learned helplessness’ that has inhibited the population. For example regarding sexuality, she states, “One cannot overemphasize the tremendous psychic, intellectual and affective effort a woman must make in order to find the other sex as an erotic object” (Kristeva, pg 30). She notes that the cathexes in social bonds between men and women are found through aesthetic substance, and that an individual must visually create an attraction that supersedes natural instinct in today’s culture. She states: “Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bear witness to the affect … the semiotic and the symbolic become communicable imprints” over choice and action (Kristeva, pg 22). One’s perceptions of sexuality and perceptions on sadness, in respect to depictions in the Black Sun, tend to be too often generalized with false perimeters. “Sadness is the fundamental mood of depression … Mood is a ‘generalized transference’.” Yet the institutions of psychiatry and even psychology blur the borders of clinical melancholy with excessive prescriptions dependent on drugs and Freudian definitions.
In likeness to Kristeva’s theory, the Surrealist novelist Angela Carter embodies in her fiction the “dangerous pleasure of demystifying the individual self” from the role-playing masquerade of reality. Carter’s characters, in her novels Shadow Dance and The Magic Toyshop, whether it is through shadow puppets or individuals toyed with like objects for play, find their treatment disheartening and nearly helpless in a world limited to false institutions.
The characters of Angela Carter’s two novels react to their depression or emotions in different ways and they find that the very predicaments, which follow them, in a sense, within society are determined where ‘women are not born, but made’ or even further, ‘humans are products of their society’. Their predetermined emotions, sexuality, and rules begin to crumble the more each character comes to terms with actual reality.
Depression, like madness, either due to obvious or metaphysical reasons, with regards to subjects who may merely have a different temperament than accepted norms, becomes a means for society to control individuals. Historically, confirmed perceptions of ‘accepted norms’ have been decided through church, therapy, and especially today through film and media. Sexual norms and psychological norms have been limited throughout history, but with more and more outlets of influence, certain elites try to control our emotional reactions and our physical activity. However, prohibition did not work for controlling alcohol, nor does it work for sexuality. When it comes to depression, the power of drug companies seems to hope to control human alienation as well.
Freud was never able to understand the concept of female in a social context let alone in a psychology context. Yet this did not stop the greater Western society to use his definitions to maintain the psychiatry industry, which is now usurped via the pharmaceutical industry. Sigmund Freud was the benchmarker for 20th Century sexual and mental politics. However, long before Freud, back in the 18th Century, Marquis de Sade reflected on a different analysis of human politics. Angela Carter was a strong admirer of Sade.
In Angela Carter’s analysis on the ideology of pornography entitled the Sadeian Woman, she states: “The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation. Flesh has lost its common factor; that is the substance of which we are all made and yet that differentiates us. It has acquired, instead, the function of confusing kind and gender, man and beast, woman and fowl. The subject itself becomes an ‘object de luxe’ in these elaborately choreographed masques of abstraction and of alienation” (Carter, pg 146).
How can one grasp the world outside of the conventional limitations, when the real world is beyond conventionality, but culture has simply been misguided over the centuries? In parallel to Kristeva and Carter, the poet Marianne Moore, described by Cynthis Hogue, used poetry to “eschew conventionally feminine identifications” that masquerade positions constructed through contradictory fabrications, and her texts “indeed fray the orthodox views she quite literally scraps,” instead Moore stitches new fragments to create new ways of knowing, new truths, and new identities” (Cynthia Hogue). Like Marianne Moore, Kristeva and Carter break down the false parameters of understanding psychological, social, and sexual identity. In Kristeva’s Black Sun, she uses the notion of seeing and going ‘beyond the looking-glass’ referring to the infamous Alice in Wonderland motif. In Carter’s novel, A Passion of a New Eve, the main character goes through countless forced transformations from male to female to male and back to female. When the story nears completion the entire concept of gender has been twisted and eschewed that one can no longer keep track of the changes, creating a new paradox of identity.
The displacement of systematic personal projections and role reversal leads Sue Roe to compare Carter’s work with that of the Surrealist, Leonora Carrington, who she quoted from My Mother is a Cow, “To be one human creature is to be a legion of mannequins. These mannequins can become animated according to the choice of the individual creature” (Carrington). Nowhere in society has the masquerade of reality taken place most than in the modern and contemporary expectations of sexual politics. Hampered realization through depression and selective routes leads to internal and external acts that often do not pass over the illusion but leads to new illusions or delusional non-meaning. “I am that which is not.” Sublimation requires additional energy to overcome the obstacles rather than lead to depression for not living up to a false standard.
In Ally Foggs, Gaurdian article on Terri Conley’s findings ‘Forget Mars and Venus: There is no great sex difference’ (October 25, 2011), Foggs reports on the finding that though the myth that “men think about sex more than women is confirmed, they do, about 18 times a day as opposed to 10 for women. But men also think more about their other physical needs too, such as food and sleep. The authors point out that this is in keeping with models of socialization where females are raised to worry about the needs of others more than their own” (Foggs). Yet these minor differences are highly generalized and there can be no universal.
Foggs confirms Conley’s report, stating: “Fundamentally, what Conley et al are claiming does seem to be true. Gender differences in sexuality are not immutable and are certainly affected by the social environment. They're also remarkably small.”
Terri Conley reflects the importance of her study on-line in the faculty profile of University of Michigan, she confirms: “Gender differences in sexual experiences and attitudes are among the largest gender differences demonstrated empirically. My goal is to understand the socio-cultural reasons for these differences and to determine situations in which these prominent differences are absent. Currently, I am examining the large differences between women and men in preferences for casual sex. Two main explanations for these differences are a) pleasure or anticipated pleasure in casual sexual experiences (expectations of pleasure seem to be higher for men than for women) and b) stigma against women engaging in sexual activity” (Conley).
Conley’s findings are not dramatically huge or rather new under the sun. However, the findings strengthen with research the definitive voice that both Kristeva and Carter have been expressing for decades that gender difference is highly fabricated through cultural conditioning. Society and cultural norms nurture sexual and emotional behavior in unconscious and conscious ways. Many times, these forced or fabricated illusions society force onto men, women, and those individuals who do not align with either gender or who align with both genders can be alienating. This alienation can lead to depression, where yet another institutional code book attempts to control or prescribe limited metrics on individual choice. What Angela Carter and Julia Kristeva attempt to do in their reflections and abstractions are to challenge the eye and the mind on the social cultural limitations and to create a new identity. Will the masquerade of reality be overcome leading to a more healthy reality? One cannot be sure. It will take a lot of energy. Going beyond the looking-glass is a good first step. One cannot create utopia through force.
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