stop making sense

A casual reading of the opening pages of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality seriously jeopardizes and even humiliates the popular contemporaneous disavowal of Freud. I am reminded of how much he was able to throw light on; how much he contributed towards contemporary theory, and how silly and ignorant the common complaint, always a marred, grotesque misinterpretation, is. Right off the bat in The Sexual Aberrations, he questions the generally thought absence of childhood sexuality, and the traditional narrative of love: namely that two people of opposite sex are irresistibly attracted under the eventual pretense of reproduction. Freud points out that this narrative, is, well, just a narrative.

To enhance this claim, he draws on, for instance, the figure of the homosexual, to question not just its assumed deviance, but the reality of sexual identity and even gender. He notes the hermaphrodite, psychical hermaphroditism, drag, etc., to determine that the object of our sexual desire is in no way related to a sexual instinct (what we are attracted to). A male can be attracted to a male with female characteristics. A male prostitute dressed in drag may well be a sexual object for another male. In Greek times, for instance, men were sexually attracted to boys precisely because of their gender duality.

This said, equating sexual instinct with object is as problematic today as ever. And yet we continue to run its course: to be straight (sexual instinct) is to be attracted to the opposite gender (object), and so on. This makes me wonder how much we've really advanced on this front.