Yates. Chapter 3
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Sex and anger may become fused in middle-class homes also. The best neighborhoods and the nicest schools have youngsters who use sex as an expression of hostility. The harm is produced not by overstimulation but by specific patterns of parenting.

Timothy

Timothy's mother had always been neat and compliant. She was a high achiever throughout high school and business college. She dressed well and attracted many suitors. She spent hours each night combing and styling her long blond hair. Yet she seldom saw a date more than once and was described by friends as aloof. She never masturbated nor allowed heavy petting, until at age twenty-five she made love with a man she had met at a party that evening. Sex was distinctly unpleasant. Yet such unplanned episodes continued to occur sporadically in the years that followed, always with a different partner. When she discovered at age thirty-two that she was pregnant she didn't consider an abortion. As the months went by she found herself anticipating the birth with pleasure. She decorated the infant's room with taste and all the latest baby-tending appliances. Her competence as a secretary extended to her competence in pregnancy and delivery. She arrived for her prenatal checks on the appointed hour of the appointed day, and delivered easily after only four hours of labor. Although she considered nursing Timothy, this seemed messy and would be inconvenient when she returned to work. Drawing on her savings, she hired a baby nurse for the hours that she was away. She secured the services of the most respected and expensive pediatrician in town.

Timothy was a tractable, engaging infant, entirely devoid of diaper rashes and of odors other than those of the vaguely scented commercial baby products. He was rocked, bathed, titillated, and exhibited in the park.

As Timothy grew, he remained the center of his mother's attention. He learned his alphabet by age four and could recite even lengthy poems from Alice in Wonderland. Ensconced in his mother's lap, he was read every Dr. Seuss book in print. Timothy rarely left his mother's side when she was home. Indeed his mother worried that some harm might befall him if he strayed. In the fourth grade he was mercilessly teased by classmates when he walked to school holding his mother's hand. His mother continued to bathe him until he was ten.

During his early years, Timothy was exceedingly happy. His only disappointments were in not being allowed to explore an abandoned freight car or not having permission to join a tree-house club of neighborhood children. Whenever Timothy seemed upset, mother consoled him by a trip to the zoo or a museum tour. After he was ridiculed at public school, mother placed him in a small private academy where he became a favorite of many teachers.

When Timothy was eleven, his mother mentioned to the pediatrician that Timothy had nightmares and still slept in her bed. Following her doctor's instructions, she insisted that he sleep alone. Timothy began to "sleepwalk," stealthily slipping between his mother's sheets at midnight. When Timothy was twelve, his mother woke one morning to find an erection pushed firmly against her satin nightgown. She was alarmed until she realized that Timothy was still sound asleep. She carefully disentangled her nightgown and never mentioned the event to Timothy.

When Timothy was thirteen years old, he began to feel strangely upset. He was restless and it was difficult for him to concentrate. He was terrified by violent nightmares — a car smashed into a building, or a woman was knifed. When younger, he was drawn closer to his mother when frightened. Now he found himself unable to approach her, and too tremulous to sleep. One night, as Timothy tossed restlessly, his mother awoke and attempted to comfort him. Timothy angrily told her to let him be. Confused and hurt, she began to cry. Timothy rose and walked peevishly about the house. Eventually he sat by his mother and consoled her. The next morning, she cooked his favorite breakfast.

When Timothy was fifteen years old, sixteen-year-old Wanda moved into the neighborhood. Her parents were gone almost every night and she soon began to have parties for her friends. Timothy observed her voluptuous dance, heard her laughter, but was afraid to introduce himself. His mother also learned of her liberal young neighbor and was quick to express her disgust.

One Saturday morning, Wanda was mowing the lawn dressed in a bikini. She waved to Timothy and asked him to help her disengage a rock from the mower blade. After that, Timothy talked to her or accepted a soft drink during the hours when his mother was still at work.

During summer vacation, his mother found several issues of Playboy magazine carefully hidden between Timothy's mattress and springs. She was torn between a wish to destroy the magazines silently and her concern that Timothy's interest might stem from a lack of proper parental guidance. That evening she delivered a lecture which covered most of the mechanical and moral aspects of sexuality. Timothy stared at the floor throughout the speech. His mother interpreted this as a sign of remorse. When she finished she rose and stood next to him with her arm about his shoulders. She stroked his hair and told him again how much she loved him.

That evening Timothy lay awake listening to the sounds of the party at Wanda's house. Instead of visiting his mother's bed, he dressed and slipped out the back door. He spent several hours sitting on a lawn under a bush, watching the dancing and listening to the music and laughter. When almost everyone had left the party, he entered the house to offer his services in cleaning the mess. Wanda, somewhat tipsy, assumed that this must be a sexual proposition.

Early in the morning, Wanda's parents returned home to an indescribable scene. Not only was their daughter dead, but her vagina was packed with and lacerated by kitchen utensils. Some had perforated the vaginal vault and had entered the abdominal cavity.

The police quickly apprehended Timothy, who was wandering about on the periphery of the crowd. He readily confessed to the crime, although he gave no motive. He denied anger although he admitted that it seemed like an angry thing to do. He saw no reason why he would have used the kitchen utensils in such a bizarre fashion.

This example, however extreme, could be used to illustrate the dangers of sexual overstimulation. Timothy was a very sexy boy. He had been stimulated by his mother for years in ways that could be socially condoned, or at least rationalized. He invaded his mother's bed and certainly savored her physical attentions. Yet Timothy never attempted incest, nor was he lewd or promiscuous. Did overstimulation cause him to rape and kill? And why the savage, senseless mutilation? How did anger come to be linked so closely with pleasure?

Timothy was well taught and well behaved. He renounced other outlets and was a willing captive of his mother's stimulation. At the age of five he realized every boy's oedipal fantasy, for he did indeed possess his mother. In an attempt to please, he restricted himself to the role of good student, engaging child, and mother's helper. As he received considerable gratification for his efforts, he didn't undergo significant conflict until early adolescence. Then he experienced vigorous sexual urgings which, in his setting, were terrifying. His mother aggravated his confusion through her fondling and physical closeness. She teased and stimulated but never satisfied. She noted his erections, but acted as if they were unimportant. Through criticism and moral judgment, she systematically eliminated any other outlets, however innocuous. The invasive quality of her closeness both threatened and disparaged.

Timothy could not express anger at his mother because she was the source of all gifts and goodness. Yet Timothy did feel angry, and his rage mounted as his frustration increased. At last he vented his fury against the second seductive woman in his life. He finally and forcibly ruptured the bond with mother. While in custody, Timothy slept by himself.

Peter

Peter was a five-year-old boy presented by his father for evaluation. Peter's parents had been divorced two years before. Now both had remarried. Peter began to spend weekends and vacations with his father, stepmother, and stepmother's young son. During the first visit, Peter did some unusual things. Although well toilet-trained, he stood at the side of the bed and urinated on the carpet. A very concerned father reported to me that Peter's eyes seemed glazed at the time and that Peter could give no reason for urinating. Shortly thereafter, Peter stealthily removed some filmy panties from his stepmother's dresser. He was caught masturbating with them. This pattern persisted in spite of admonitions, counseling, and physical punishment. On the stepmother's advice, the father became increasingly severe, and repeatedly spanked Peter, but the habit persisted. Now Peter made a cache of underwear filched from the laundry pile to assure himself an uninterrupted supply.

Peter later complained to his therapist that no matter how hard he attempted to conceal this activity, it seemed that he was always apprehended. His habit was far more worrisome than it was pleasurable. His therapist offered him a silver dollar if he could put such thoughts out of his mind for one day. That day Peter pilfered no underwear, but he dreamed about it continuously. Finally he stole another forbidden object, a package of matches, and hid with them behind shrubs in the back yard. His stepmother found Peter lighting a small fire, and he was again whipped. Peter had been imagining his stepmother's panties on fire. Sex for Peter had become a compulsive, angry thing.

Faith

Faith was the five-year-old subject of a curbside consultation with a pediatric colleague. She was the eldest of three daughters in a stable, strongly religious family. The mother had discovered Faith rubbing her clitoris while bathing. The mother was upset and held Faith's hands under very hot water, saying that she needed to cleanse them from dirty activity. To the parents' surprise, Faith repeated this performance at times and in places where she was certain to be discovered. After spanking her, sending her to her room, and reading her the Bible, they feared she might be diseased and sought the counsel of their pediatrician. This little girl had already transformed a pleasurable act into an expression of anger at her parents. Indeed she had found a weapon which caused them considerable emotional upset and frustration.

The commonest root of the confusion between sex and anger is child abuse. In the slum, harsh punishment, abandonment in the hallway, and persecution by peers converge to make sex a weapon in the battle for existence. But abuse is by no means limited to the slum. In a "good" neighborhood an infant who refuses a heaping teaspoonful of pureed string beans is slapped. A four-year-old who forgets to pick up his toys is called stupid, lazy, and just like his father. A seven-year-old girl is told to fix lunch and then ruthlessly criticized because there are too many sandwiches and she forgot the milk. An eight-year-old boy arriving minutes late for dinner is restricted to his bedroom for a week.

Angry children grow to become angry adults. (Kempe, 1972) The anger can invade any or all areas of expression, but especially eroticism. This is because of the importance of sex, its range and diversity of expression, intrinsic malleability, and above all the fact that the sex drive evolves within the early, intense relationship to the mothering one. Thus the infant who ardently desires his mother's warmth and is left alone in his crib for hours, and the toddler who tugs at his mother's skirt and is roughly pushed away, are seeking erotic, as well as other, pleasures. Instead of pleasure, they receive pain. They feel abandoned and angry. As these youngsters grow they continue to feel deprived and bitter, and they expect the same shoddy treatment from others. They have little left to give to their children, and are more than likely to repeat the injury.

Cathy

When Cathy was small her mother had beaten her with an electric cord and locked her out of the house without shoes in the snow. But the event which she remembered most vividly was when her mother brought her a kitten for her very own. She carefully collected scraps to feed this small, warm, furry being, and slept with it next to her cheek at night. After a week, the mother decided the kitten was too much trouble and drowned it in a pail.

When Cathy was a young woman, she still felt helpless and frightened much of the time. She devoted herself to keeping other people happy. She cleaned the house, cared for her younger brothers and sisters, and worked as a nurse's aide. She dressed plainly, and never flirted. She shyly refused when a quiet young man who lived nearby invited her to a dance. She had decided that she was too clumsy to dance.

At age twenty, Cathy met Roy, a painter who had contracted to refinish the house. He asked for a cup of coffee and insisted on repaying Cathy by taking her out. Handsome, impulsive, and irrationally jealous, Roy soon monopolized all Cathy's free time. Her housework was left undone and her mother was furious. Caught between her mother and Roy, Cathy decided to elope. At least Roy seemed to care.

Marriage became a grim repetition of Cathy's early life. Roy was often unemployed and never helped around the house. So Cathy worked both at home and on the job. Roy accused her of having affairs with patients and occasionally hit her. He demanded that she respond in bed to prove her love for him. This requirement annihilated what little response Cathy could muster. She attempted to soothe Roy by faking a climax, by returning home immediately after work, and by never leaving the house without his permission.

Too frightened and depressed to separate from Roy, Cathy found herself pregnant. At first she was happy because Roy was more considerate, but by the end of her pregnancy her misery was compounded by swollen ankles and a huge abdomen. Labor commenced while she was at work in the nursing home. The call to Roy was unanswered, so she completed her duties, and at the end of her shift, took a bus to the hospital.

Alone and in pain, Cathy delivered a baby girl. Roy arrived the next day and expressed disappointment in the baby's sex. He presented her with a bouquet of flowers and announced that he was leaving with a construction crew shortly.

Three weeks later, Cathy was home with baby Mitzi awaiting word from Roy. Mitzi cried incessantly from late afternoon until early morning. Cathy fed her repeatedly, burped her, rocked and changed her, to no avail. Finally she called the hospital and was told to put the baby to bed. Mitzi continued to fuss, and Cathy became more and more upset. She shook Mitzi violently, and for a few moments there was silence. Then Mitzi began again, this time with a high-pitched whine like a cat's cry. Cathy suddenly lunged forward, snatched Mitzi and threw her against the wall, screaming, "I'll teach you!" Two hours later, Mitzi was dead.

Cathy was reared not in the slums, but in a privileged, middle-class neighborhood. Yet she developed the same helplessness, terror, and resentment as the women who lived in the high-rise apartment house. Cathy expected to be overburdened and victimized; her choice of a mate fulfilled these expectations. To ward off criticism and abuse, she strove to please everyone, thus eliminating her own needs as unimportant. Her fear, depression, and inability to accept passive pleasure severely compromised her sexual response, even before Roy commanded her to climax. Ordinarily, Cathy was a kind, responsible girl. Underneath lay rage which erupted into irrational violence when she could no longer please Roy by bearing a boy infant, or Mitzi through soothing her suffering.

The link between anger and sex is even clearer when a woman such as Cathy marries a reasonable man. Such a choice is a fluke or an intellectual decision, as she commonly picks a cruel, fearsome, or rejecting male who will recapitulate her childhood. A few months after a more conventional marriage she becomes the wrathful, controlling, critical partner who abuses. She may withhold sex, prefer masturbation to making love, criticize her husband's technique, or openly take a lover.

Debbie

Wesley, his wife Linda, and their two children lived in a medium-sized town adjacent to a city. Wesley was a tall, neatly groomed, middle-aged man who had worked as a computer programmer for many years. His wife had served as an assistant librarian since her children entered school. Both were active in civic affairs, and Wesley was a deacon of the church. Although the couple seldom went out together, they would often have friends in for dinner. Both of the children did well in school, and Brian, the younger, had had a paper route since he was twelve years old. Debbie, now age sixteen, had begun piano lessons at age six and was capable of performing admirably in local concerts. In the summer, the family took trips and picnicked together.

Wesley and Linda admitted that their children had minor behavioral problems as they grew. These were handled without difficulty by Wesley, who was very firm in enforcing the rules. Corporal punishment had never been necessary except once when Brian had lied to his mother. On that occasion, Wesley applied the belt as generously as his own father had administered the razor strop. Brian stood to eat for a week, and never again lied to his mother.

Family members described their life together as completely happy. The only exception, perhaps, was when a neighbor at a coffee klatch asked Linda about her sex life. Linda seemed embarrassed and then said, "Well, I can't complain about it."

Debbie had not been allowed to date until age sixteen, and she had refused many invitations. Now, after her sweet sixteen party, an attractive boy from a good family had invited her to a school dance. The night of the dance Debbie was excited and happy. Much dinner-table conversation revolved around proper dating protocol, with Debbie both listening and participating. All agreed that she should return home by twelve thirty, a half hour after the end of the dance.

That evening, Wesley and Linda retired at ten thirty. Wesley, unable to sleep, rose to sit in the darkened living room. At twelve fifteen he was standing silently by the window which faced the lighted front porch. Debbie and her boyfriend paused on the top step and briefly embraced one another. Then Wesley observed his daughter laugh and snuggle against the boy's shoulder before parting.

As Debbie closed the door, Wesley seized her by the hair and slapped her furiously across the face. Debbie started to cry out, but her father hissed, "Shut up, slut!" and pushed her stumbling toward her room. After the door slammed, Debbie lay confused and sobbing on her bed. Several minutes later, the door opened and a man she hardly recognized as her father entered. Threatening to kill her if she called out, he tore her clothes and raped her, while calling her every vicious and degrading term he had ever known.

Although Wesley was absent from the breakfast table that Sunday, he did attend church. He didn't seem anxious or guilty. The crime was never discussed at the dinner table. Linda had heard the struggle but assumed that Wesley was disciplining Debbie. Debbie appeared quite depressed and refused to date until she left for college. She no longer sought her father's advice and responded minimally to his questions. Only Brian asked her what was wrong, and was upset when she began to cry.

Debbie entered analysis many years later. She had married an understanding, hardworking, but rather passive husband, who was perplexed by her sudden depressions and by her anger when he tried to comfort her. Eventually he ceased making sexual advances, as she would suddenly burst into tears. His loneliness and sorrow finally became so apparent to her that she sought help from a psychiatrist.

In therapy, she was unable to remember months or even years of her early life. As she became stronger she began to trust that her psychiatrist would not attack her. She remembered and reexperienced earlier events. She recalled reading while nestled in her father's lap and sitting beside him at church. She remembered how strong he seemed, and how much he was respected by others. In contrast, her mother was the one who worried about little things, who nagged and criticized for shoes left in the hallway or doors ajar. She complained of sick headaches but nevertheless kept the house spotless. Her mother expected extra cleaning chores from Debbie because she was a girl, even when Brian was out playing baseball.

Slowly, Debbie came to understand, if not forgive, her father. She realized that his sudden rage stemmed from his rigid, puritanical background and the sexual deprivations of his marriage. She traced the gradual development of his intensely erotic feelings for her and appreciated his enormous effort to control himself. Her vivacity and warmth had been his most precious possession.

After many months of therapy, Linda no longer burst into tears at her husband's advances. It was not until a year had passed that she found words to encourage his sexual advances. At present, the relationship has become comfortable for both, but sexually satisfying only for Debbie's husband.

Encyclopedias have been compiled to list and catalog the distortions of sexuality. Each distortion shows a link between sex and another emotion such as rage or fear. The frightened exhibitionist unzips his fly in order to elicit anxiety in the observer, so he may reassure himself. The ascetic turns anger upon himself and denies all pleasure, but especially sex. The rejected husband may systematically have intercourse with a succession of different women whom he never intends to see again. A woman selects a jealous man to marry, and then provokes him. Whether in victim or aggressor, the link is present. It is firmly fused in early childhood and difficult or impossible to change. The only solution is prevention.

In order to prevent such links from forming, we as parents must do more than intellectualize. We must not cruelly inhibit, abuse, reject, abandon, or severely criticize our children. We must not bind them so closely that they cannot grow. But is there anything positive that we as parents can do? I believe there is.

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