BABY AND CHILDHOOD SEXUALITY: GENDER IDENTITY
The processes by which a child eventually comes to feel with certainty that he or she is a boy or a girl — so-called gender identity — proceed slowly and with confusion. (The process can go awry and this is discussed later under transsexualism.) One process which affects the issue is the one of identification with the same-sex parent. Whether it is instinctive or whether they are identifying with and copying their mothers, many young girls display marked femininity in their behaviour. Many are like miniature women and by three or so have developed social skills which many a young man would like to have.
Girls also seem to be able to discern the sex of another individual earlier and more reliably than can boys. When a girl discovers the genital differences between the sexes, or even before, she pays more attention to her father than before, and where her relationship with both her parents is good the change is marked. She wants to attract her father’s attention and to involve him in her life. In an elementary way she may compete with her mother to take trouble on his behalf and be of service to him. She may want to get into his bed and drive her mother from it. Later she may say she is going to grow up and marry daddy. Clearly her father is her first heterosexual love and in some way she is involved with him physically. She wants him to kiss and cuddle her and may show signs of jealousy at any attention her mother receives. Many a little girl uses her feminine skills effectively to get her own way with her father. If he is really cross with her it can emotionally disturb her for hours or even days, but maternal displeasure has much less effect. If she learns from him that she is attractive, lovable and valuable she will have confidence in herself as a woman later in life. Nevertheless, if the father is over-close, as some are, perhaps out of a latent fear of adult women, she can later have difficulty in leaving him psychosexually for another man. The balance, as in so much to do with sexuality, is a fine one.
A part of a girl’s mind may in one sense hate and fear her mother, because she thinks that her mother realises that she wants an exclusive relationship with her father. She fears her mother will retaliate. However, she also loves her mother and realises that her mother is her care-giver. As a result she remains attentive to her mother, to see if her secret has been discovered. It is thought that the greater empathy that women have compared with men comes from this developmental stage, as does a woman’s skill at concealing her true feelings.
A boy does not have to make the same switch from his mother, but his feelings about her and his father are similar to, but the reverse of, those of a girl. The intensity of such feelings tends to increase during the phallic stage. Physical contact with his mother may lead to an erection and his interest in her body may intensify. Many men who say they find partially dressed women more arousing than naked ones may have started this notion at this stage because they are more likely to have seen their mother partially, rather than wholly undressed. A mother may be unconsciously provocative to her son of around the age of five but at the same time sharply rebuke him for his sexual interest in her. Simultaneously his increasing fear of retaliation by his father leads to this so-called Oedipal interest in his mother being controlled rather than given free rein.
From clinic work with adult men it seems that two important consequences follow from this. The first is the establishment of a notion of female sexlessness. This view of women is, of course, reinforced by our culture which declares that girls are ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’. The second consequence is that the boy enters the world of men. Females and their interests are spurned as inconsequential. The view develops that girls are best avoided and they are often banned, to the chagrin of many of them, from boys’ games. Identification with the father, or another, available male person, proceeds more rapidly and the boy strives for mastery over male pursuits. One reason why boys identify with their fathers later than girls do with their mothers is that mothers are more continuously available as models for girls than are fathers for boys. In any case a boy probably first identifies with the mother as it is she, rather than his father, who first outlines the conventional male role for a boy. Women teachers may later continue the process which rewards boys for masculine behaviour and disparages them for feminine interests.
Most boys stop masturbating as the phallic stage ends and gives way to the stage of latency which roughly corresponds with the infant and junior-school years. Curiously, adult men seem to have no conscious recollection of childhood masturbation and its later rediscovery at puberty is regarded as a new acquisition. This is in contrast with women, about a third of whom say they cannot remember a time when they did not masturbate.
Girls do not resolve the problems of the Oedipal stage in the same brisk fashion in which most boys do. Their interest in their father continues although perhaps in a weakened form. Sometimes it is later displaced on to horses, which may symbolise masculine power, although, no doubt, there are other reasons for a girl’s love of her horse.
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