Female Perversions

Conventional petticoats make ingenious hiding places for what Louise Kaplan calls "stolen phallic trophies" - intellectual mastery and erotic strivings whose full and open display is forbidden to women even now, at the close of the 20th century. In socialized collaboration with the still-prevailing primitive gender stereotypes, women devise strategies that caricature their femininity to disguise "masculine" accomplishments and ambitions. That consignment to bondage, bondage to the myth of primary femininity is, Dr. Kaplan concludes, a perversion. The existing definition of perversion (whereby the manifest focus, whatever the scenario, revolves around the erect penis and its sexual performance), derives from the psychology of males. Applying a new lens - feminist, Freudian and literary - Dr. Kaplan has created a new template for developing ideas regarding the nature of female perversion.