CHAPTER 1
The Differences Between Women and Men
A woman is obviously different from a man. The anatomical difference is
clear but, as well, women have a different perception of many
experiences, although how much this is due to prevailing cultural
attitudes and how much to gender difference is not clear.
The anatomical differences are apparent at once, particularly in the
development of a woman's breasts. Among Western communities, the
breast has a unique sexual symbolism, and even if fashion diminishes its
rotundity, the hemispherical mammary glands are a potent attraction for
the male eye. In communities where breasts are habitually exposed, they
have little sexual connotation, being considered for what they are – a
source of nourishment for the infant.
The more specific anatomical differences are of the genital organs. The
male external genitals – the penis and the testicles – are absent in
women, a fact which suggested to Freud that many of women's sexual
problems related to an envy for the absent penis and a complex that the
testicles had been castrated. Woman was therefore a mutilated male, and
inferior to man. Freud was more than unfair to women, and considerably
confused about them, possibly because of his own upbringing in a
traditional Jewish middle-class family. He held that woman had a
smaller intellectual capacity, a far greater vanity, a constitutional
passivity, a weaker sexuality, and a greater disposition to neurosis. At
the same time, he considered her enigmatic, her femininity a
complicated process, her psychology involved. Studies over the past halfcentury
have shown that Freud's view of woman as an inferior, mutilated
male is incorrect, and his assessment of her inferiority and her instability
is more an indictment of the cultural environment in which she is
brought up, than of her inherited make-up. In other words, a woman
behaves in a certain way because she is brought up to believe that
society expects her to behave in that way.