In the second part of the chapter I will return to the questions posed in chap. It is not difficult to see in this a connection with the social status and the presence of the father in the life of the son. It is only in the older generation that the father emerges as a powerful figure that one may not be able to match.
In the middle generation, the bland relationship with the father makes him unsuitable as either a strong or a threatening figure. The mother is recognized more as a separate person in the interview with the one middle-class male informant we have in this generation. She is not described with the joy and pride seen in the older and younger generations when sons talk about their fathers, but rather as the 'mother blanket' (Holter and Aarseth 1993: 93).
Sexuality in the older generation feels exclusively male, just as preoccupation with the body feels female. In the middle generation, feelings of guilt and protection of innocent and defenseless women have disappeared. For older and younger generations, gender identities feel secure in the sense that the question of what it means to be a man is not problematic.
However, the content of gender identities and their interaction with gendered subjectivities are very different between the oldest and youngest generations.
The Changing Psychological World of the Women
In the middle generation, the daughters are limited by a mother whose main task is to take care of them, and the way the women talk about this indicates blurred boundaries between themselves and their mothers. The ambivalence towards the mother that we saw in the oldest generation has become stronger in the middle generation. The new welfare state's 'daughter policy', which encouraged girls to do well in the education system (see ch. 4), reinforced this psychological tension.
In the youngest generation, the mother's agency and subjectivity make her a more appropriate object of positive identification. Conversely, as we have also seen with sons, the mother's care can also be something that is taken for granted, a "mother's blanket", which goes unnoticed or rather only noticed in its absence. We see the most pronounced element of idealization among the oldest generation of workers' and farmers' daughters, where the father represents something that the daughters cannot become themselves, but in which they can participate vicariously through him.
For middle-class girls in this generation, the father is a more distant figure, but is still often surrounded by the excitement of being an outsider in the family. In the middle generation, the psychologically complex relationship with the mother gives the father a stronger psychological position as a liberator for the daughter, representing a peaceful space outside of who he is. The psychological need for the father combined with his relative distance from the family may be the reason that the relationship with him in this generation does not have the same warmth as in the older and younger generations.
The general cultural tension between the generations in the 1960s probably also contributed to less idealization of the father. He is the best there is in the family for the girl to identify with, but that does not mean that he is an ideal. This compassion for fragile masculinity was also seen in the oldest generation, while the middle generation women needed to construct their fathers as strong.
In the oldest generation, it is seen as a female curse, something mothers and daughters are equally exposed to. A good enough body is, in this generation, a body that is good enough in the eyes of others. The women identify with both their mothers and their fathers – the mother's competence in the household and the father's knowledge, generosity and attachment to a larger world – but the socio-cultural situation leaves no room for the development of their paternal identification.
The main axis of tension for women of this generation is between their dual gender identity, their single-sex subjectivity and their limited socio-cultural possibilities. At the same time, their increasing individual exposure in the public sphere as young women, combined with their non-identification with their mothers, contributes to their low self-esteem as women.
Evolving Psychoanalytic Theories of Gender and Heterosexuality
In this way, the fact that desire and need are part of longing for desire in both women and men is concealed. Femininity will be built in a generational dimension: the girl is small, the mother is large, but they are of the same species. Another element of the gender identity model is the sociological framing of the separation-individuation process in the post-World War II family arrangement (white, middle class), where the mother is the primary caregiver for the child and the father is a more distant figure.
The father (or other significant person other than the mother) represents the child's first experience of "difference" compared to the mother's "equality"; he becomes 'the knight in shining armor', as Margareth Mahler describes him. This 'over-inclusive' stage of gender identification is reframed by the gender complementarity of the Oedipal stage, in which identifying love is split into love and identification, and the fantasy of object love comes to compensate for the narcissistic loss of identification. with the parent of the opposite sex and the love of the parent of the same sex. Post-Oedipal complementarity can in this way recover some of the multiplicity and reciprocity denied by the Oedipal form, but which exist within the line of gender development.
Thus, according to Benjamin, it is not necessary to look for subversions of the gender dichotomy outside the gender system. The split between sexuality and tenderness can be seen both in the sentimentalized image of the mother, the asexualized figures of the women they marry, the denial of their own dependence and weakness, and perhaps also a fear of homosexuality. The main problem for middle-generation men seems to be to maintain an insecure masculinity that makes them obsessed with gender differences.
Instead of a protective man and an innocent child-woman, we get a culture of boys preying on women. If we turn to the women of this generation, unclear boundaries and relational conflicts between mothers and daughters are striking, but we do not notice mutual intimacy and closeness, which is also an important point in the model of gender identity. However, traditional gender subjectivity, more capable of intimacy than autonomy, close relationships with female friends, acceptance of the reproductive female body, and the intensity of conflicts with the mother can reveal that women still have a deep emotional homosexuality. attachments.
The father clearly emerges as the daughter's liberator from the mother's control, but the emotionally more subdued relationship between fathers and daughters, compared to the stronger idealization of the older and the warmer relationship of the younger generation, reflects the model's claim that the relationship with the father becomes never as intense as the relationship with the mother. Thus we see contours of the more over-inclusive patterns, where both mothers and fathers can be 'love objects' and 'equal subjects'. In the youngest generation, gender has become more diverse – 'different moments of the self', as Dimen describes it (2002: 57).
5 The different generational class composition in our sample may also be part of the picture. We may also have arrived here at one of the foundations of Western culture – that Simone de Beauvoir (1949) analyzed in the figure of "woman as the second sex".
