Motherhood and Sexuality

One of the major problems I encounter in emphasizing mothering as important to women is that it is immediately and automatically construed as taking sexuality away from women.^[64] To many moderns—feminist and nonfeminist—to speak of mothering conjures up images of the Virgin Mary. But as I tried to make clear in the previous section, sexuality is something both males and females possess and enjoy. To point out that women are maternal does not mean that they are not also sexual. In this society we make a split between the sexual and the maternal;^[65] I would argue, however, that this split has more to do with male thinking (by which we are all influenced) than with female thinking.

The Greeks, too, had a penchant for segregating the maternal from the erotic as can be seen in Greek myths. Paul Friedrich points out that Aphrodite, whom he sees as uniquely synthesizing the maternal and the erotic, has been relatively obscure in the pantheon of goddesses for this very reason.^[66] Only Sappho, the female poet who lived on the isle of Lesbos and from whom the term lesbian derives, celebrated Aphrodite and emphasized the close harmony between maternal and erotic love. Thus it took a lesbian sensibility to appreciate the erotic in the maternal and to connect it with love for women. Generally in Greek myths, erotic, sensuous female figures tend to be somewhat immature and are segregated from the "mature" and asexual motherly ones. Both in this society and in Greece, childlike women are eroticized; this could well be ex-

plained as a defense against and way of coping with the psychological threat to male dominance posed by strong maternal women.^[67] Deeroticizing women's mothering is a way of disempowering women's mothering.

As Jessica Benjamin points out, under current conditions the father is the symbol of desire for both females and males. Benjamin worries that we seem unable to produce a female image or symbol that could counterbalance the phallus and the father as a symbol of desire.^[68] I agree that in this culture the mother image cannot function as a symbol of desire, not because it is a passive image but because it is clearly not syntonic with Western culture to imagine mothers qua mothers as lustful or sexually desiring creatures, certainly not toward their children. But it hardly works for fathers to serve as a symbol of erotic desire either! The father's turning the daughter into an object of desire has been a problem symbolically and in reality. My argument is again that women and men are sexual, have desire, are lustful, are erotic. Sexuality is not a point of gender differentiation, although gender and a maternal identification may affect the meaning of desire and how it is expressed by women.

Benjamin makes a good effort to define this gender-influenced desire and suggests that it can come from the mother. She notes that the girl must identify with the mother not only in her maternal aspects but as a sexual subject, not as a sexual object. I agree. The problem then becomes one of finding not just a symbol of desire to replace the phallus but another "psychic mode"—beyond the father. Benjamin suggests an intersubjective mode that does not distinguish between subject and object. This mode "where two subjects meet, where both woman and man can be subject, may point to a locus for woman's independent desire, a relationship to desire that is not represented by the phallus" (pp. 92–93). Here Benjamin takes a step forward, I believe, in better defining relationality and interdependence in which the desire to be known for oneself and to know the other coalesce: "The desire for the heightened sense of self, 'really being there,' is the central meaning of getting pleasure with the other" (p. 93). As a clinician, Benjamin finds that women have a hard time finding their own inner desire because of the fear of impingement, intrusion, and violation. Ideally, this "other" is experienced not as an intruder but as a holding other,

making a safe place to experience both self and other and to experience one's own desire freely. "It is not a different desire, but a different relation of self to other that is at stake" (p. 97).

Benjamin concludes that women "are seeking to find a relationship to desire in freedom to: freedom to be both with and distinct from the other. This relationship can be grasped in terms of intersubjective reality, where subject meets subject. . . . The discovery of our own desire will proceed, I believe, through the mode of thought that can suspend and reconcile such opposition, the dimension of recognition between self and other" (p. 98).

It is important for women not to let their fear of dependence create suspicion of interdependence. Perhaps there is a female way of expressing sexuality—one that grants the other their own self-space, leaves integrity intact, does not require domination or submission. It would be good if sex could involve a merging with the other in mutual recognition, letting one be fully oneself while at the same time being totally unself-conscious in the sense of wanting to be the self one thinks the other wants. It would be good for both partners to be "present," neither resenting the "presence" of the other. This stance is akin to what Marilyn Frye calls "the loving eye" as opposed to "the arrogant eye." The "loving eye" (in or out of erotic contexts) grants space to others and simultaneously preserves one's own space—appreciating and loving but not feeling dominated or invaded, feeling one's own power but not denying the power or "presence" of the other.^[69]

Benjamin is assuming heterosexual "sex," Frye is assuming lesbian "sex," but the two views seem similar and both in a way transcend narrow "sex" in that they are talking about a far more generalized stance. It is just possible that both men and women could see advantages to this stance—in bed and out. The erotic, however, precisely because it involves both body and mind, is an especially important sphere for really "feeling" how mutual empowerment could be.