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Patricia Reis takes on female sexual perversions with the same scholarship, astuteness, and moral integrity we have come to appreciate in her writings on Jungian subjects over the years. In this review she locates female perversion at the heart of women's current search for place in the culture. Women's bodies become the significant site in this quest because body shape and adornment is the critical canvas of gender
identity. Women learn from infancy to wear pink, not blue. Reis says the ‘pursuit of a cultural ideal is … a major (and often perverse) female occupation’ (p. 58).
Reis discusses two antithetical works, the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan's Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, and two interviews, a book, and one video by Madonna. Kaplan's book describes gender norms ‘perversely pursued’; Madonna's work reflects a rebellious resistance to the norm, an ‘adolescent strategy’ (p. 47).
Reis guides us into the arena of sexual perversion through the classic definitions of Freud and Krafft-Ebing, then cites the more recent work of Masud R. Kahn, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, and Robert J. Stoller. This reviewer has done her homework and is prepared to weigh Kaplan and Madonna against the main scholarship in the field.
Kaplan's thesis is that we are ‘looking in the wrong place’ for female sexual perversion, that it is not ‘sexual activity per se, nor even Stoller's criterion of hostility, but rather a perverse strategy' that makes a perversion a perversion (p. 44). Women's unconscious striving in relation to the culture's gender ideal of the feminine produces the perversions Kaplan cites - ‘kleptomania, homovestism, extreme submissiveness, mutilations (delicate self-cutting, addictive surgeries, hair pulling), anorexia, and … female impersonation’ (p. 45). Through these strategies women pursue masculine goods and power or the coveted prize of male attention.
Madonna on the other hand, Reis tells us, pushes sexual freedom to the edge, flouting the cultural n