Freud, Misogyny and Contemporary
Advertising
Kate Raynes-Goldie, University of Toronto
Katie@beefchickenpork.org
Since the time of Sigmund Freud’s final writings on women and femininity in the
1930s, opportunities for women in the Western world have opened up
significantly. However, a look at contemporary advertising reveals that the
collective unconscious’ problematic manifestation of its anima has not improved
very much. It is this collective anima manifestation that determines men’s
relationships with women, and women’s relationship with themselves –
ultimately, it reflects how women are represented and treated in society. A close
examination of Freud’s “Female Sexuality”, “Femininity” and “The Taboo of
Virginity” in relation to contemporary advertising reveals that the negative
manifestation of the collective anima image which drove Freud’s misogyny and
ambivalence towards women is still prevalent today.
Freud wrote from the normative standpoint of the male – a perspective still seen
today in the classification of women’s issues as those belonging to a special
interest group, even though women make up over half of the world’s population.
Running through most of Freud’s discussion of women is his essentialist view of
women and women’s nature as that of a lesser man. Not surprisingly, Freud’s
worldview lead him to formulate a psychology of women heavily based on penisenvy and castration anxiety, while his discussions of masculinity were void of any
1
womb- or vagina envy on the part of men. Intertwined with Freud’s notions of
female penis-envy are his notions of women’s dispositions towards shame and
narcissism as normal and healthy.
Freud’s explanation of “the enigma of woman” with his developmental model
based on penis-envy can be seen as a relocation of the ideology of gender roles
from the social and cultural sphere to women’s unconscious minds. Thus, not
only did Freud justify the oppression of women with his new science of
psychoanalysis, but he also attributed the cause to the very attributes of women
themselves.
According to Freud, problems start for women at a young age: when a little girl
first catches sight of a boy’s genitals and realises that something is missing, or
worse: that she has been castrated. Immediately, the girl experiences an intense
desire to have a penis – a desire that Freud suggests is a driving force for
women for most of their lives. The realisation that she has been castrated makes
overt the little girl’s previous frustrations and feelings of inadequacies and gives
her a focus for these frustrations. Thus, Freud puts the cart before the horse with
this assumption because he presumes that girls felt inadequate before they
realised their lack of a penis, thereby hinting at his essentialist view of women as
inferior.
2
Intertwined with the girl’s feelings of inadequacy is her growing contempt for
herself and for all women - a contempt shared by men - for not having a penis
and thus being sexually inferior. So we can see how having a penis is at once
normative, and a justification both for women’s self loathing and feelings of
inferiority, and for men’s misogyny.
Women continue their quest for a penis throughout their lives, thus driving their
need for a man (she only wants the man for his penis), or a baby. Freud
suggests that women’s ability to bear children is nature’s consolation for a lack of
a penis.
Penis envy is also Freud’s justification for women’s feelings of intense bitterness
and frigidity towards men – women resent men for having something they do not
have. Again this smacks of misogyny – if someone hates you, it is perfectly
acceptable for you to feel the same way.
Stemming from Freud’s model of penis-envy is his belief that women naturally
and normally feel shame. Freud suggests that shame is a way for women to hide
their deficiencies, in other words, their lack of a penis. Shame makes women
seem enigmatic and thus inaccessible to men, which at once attracts men to
women, yet also frustrates them - it is only human nature to want something that
cannot be had. Thus, shame works as an excellent justification for men’s feeling
of ambivalence towards women.
3
Similarly, women’s shame and feelings of inadequacy which result from their lack
of a penis are the driving forces behind their inherent and natural disposition
towards narcissism. According to Freud, both male and female children start out
as being narcissistic, but while boys are largely able to overcome it, girls retain
their narcissism as a method of compensating for the defectiveness of their
genital organs. Since women do not have penises, they must value the things
they do have more highly, such as their beauty, charisma or ability to charm men.
Thus, while narcissism can be seen as self-absorption and self-sufficiency, it is
also an indication of an empty interior that constantly needs to be filled by outside
sources. A woman’s narcissism means she can never love a man as much as he
loves her. Put simply, women need to be loved, while men need to love.
Like shame, women’s narcissism at once makes them enigmatic and thus
attractive to men, while at the same time making men feeling unfulfilled and
unloved. Freud’s suggestion that all normal women are narcissistic puts them in
a no win situation: women are at once only valued for their beauty and charm, yet
hated it for it at the same time. A beautiful woman is hated for being beautiful and
self absorbed, while an ugly woman is hated for not being beautiful and having
nothing, not even a penis.
Since the time of Freud, the collective’s relationship with its anima image has not
changed much. The same no-win situation for women discussed in Freud’s work
is aptly reflected in a piece of advertising that now graces the Toronto subway.
4
The ad is for the television show “America’s Next Top Model” and depicts three
attractive white women, their backs to us, all posing for a photo shoot. They are
all wearing bikinis and high-heeled shoes, and all obviously fit into contemporary
beauty standards. The striking element about the photo, which is supposed to be
the joke, is that the women are inflicting violence upon each other, out of the eye
of the camera involved in the photo shoot, yet very obvious to us. The tag line
reads: “Watching them compete is anything but pretty." At once, the women
depicted are being valued and vilified for their beauty – they are beautiful, but
what horrible people they are because of it! In fact, if we dig a little deeper, this
portrayal of women can be seen as an unconscious attempt to contain their
perceived threat to masculinity and to other less beautiful women.
This unconsciously perceived threat of women that points towards a negative
collective anima image brings us back to Freud’s writings. While Freud’s
protégée, Carl Jung, was not much of a feminist himself, he did acknowledge that
his views of women were coloured by his own experience of women and thus he
was projecting the manifestation of his own anima image onto his descriptions of
femininity. It is likely that Jung would argue that Freud’s analyses of women
really say more about him that they do about women. If Freud’s works are
examined from this perspective, it appears as though he is making quite an effort
to contain and diminish women and keep them in their place. It is not much of a
stretch to think that Freud saw women as a threat.
5
The desire to reduce and contain women is even more clearly seen in a series of
advertisements for the “Duffs” clothing line. One picture shows man’s grinning
face next to a large pair of scantily clad breasts. In the other, women wearing
bunny ears and almost nothing else glare at the camera from the inside of small
cages, each stacked one upon the other. Both images symbolically serve to
contain the threat of women, the former through dismemberment and the latter
through physical caging. The unconscious message seems to be that if women
are reduced to nothing more than controllable bodies, or even objects, their
dangerous minds and mouths will pose no threat to male desire. These
ideological, or in other words, unconscious manifestations behind these
contemporary images are startlingly similar to the influences behind Freud’s
writings of almost seventy years ago.
On another level, if Freud’s writings on penis envy are taken to be metaphoric,
rather than given their usual common literal and prescriptive interpretation, then
they become a feminist social critique. A metaphoric reading of Freud presents
women as symbolically castrated by society, thus always desiring what they do
not have: social power, as embodied by the phallus. Certainly, the way that
women are represented in contemporary advertising calls for a crucial change
our relationship with our collective anima image. Perhaps a collective reworking
of our understanding of Freud is a good place to start.
6
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. “Femininity.“ Minksy 215-235.
Freud, Sigmund. On Sexuality. London: Penguin Books, 1997.
Minsky, Rosalind. ed. Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader.
London: Routledge, 1996.
Porter, Catherine. The Enigma of Woman in Freud’s Writings. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
7