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This is a bold, daunting book—written with a moral sense of courage, breaking new ground in various ways about gender and social, cultural, and political supports that enhance and also diminish who we are as infants, children, adolescents, and adults. Erotic and intimate relations are the focus of what parents do and do not do to us in primal relations that shape the tissue and texture of our gender, our orientation. This shaping is consumed with masquerade,
diversity, deception. Perversity and perversion are reflected in all our erotic relations, and they can become caricatures of love's raging fault lines of the comedic and the violent. They may also exhibit jouissance. Kaplan's originality and courage are displayed by her adherence to classical drive theory with some revisions of Freud's and Abraham's attitudes toward women. The book's originality is evident in the dialectic she weaves, combining classical drive theory with a synthesis of literary-imaginative text. These are “deconstructed” to reflect clinical and aesthetic images and signs of gender development and its vicissitudes. Gender development is hooked into the bourgeois family structure of the early industrial age of late 18th and early 19th century. This development is combined with the postindustrial age that has developed consumer fetishism as a release, an appropriation, and a cultural oppression of men and women in a liberal capitalist structure. Here Kaplan's approach is both Marxist and neo-Marxist.
All perversions (both male and female) are strategies for deception. As enacted by men, most sexual perversions are demonstrations of genital prowess, beneath which hide feminine longing for submission, motives to denigrate, via projection, what the man considers weak about himself. For women, the hidden agendas, according to Kaplan are parodies of male aggression or virility.
There are previous hints at the seemingly uncharted territories Kaplan cuts through. Dijkstra (1986) makes broad connections