6
Limits and Boundaries
To survive the Borderland means you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads. -Gloria Anzaldúa
Borderlands!La Frontera, The New Mestiza
The development of psychological boundaries has been considered extensively in recent feminist and nonfeminist clinical literature. I would like to introduce into the discussion the distinction between limits and boundaries, as I consider their influence upon each other of major consequence in human development in general, and in relational capacity in particular. Limits define the extent to which one may grow, expand, or explore. Limits identify the point beyond which one may not venture due to internally imposed deficits, such as lack of skills or talent, or externally imposed injunctions, such as those introduced by gender training. Limits eventually become internalized and embedded in the concept of self and others.
Strong externally imposed limits, along with certain other conditions, which I will describe, lead to weaker psychological boundaries, while weak limits lead to more extensive, less well defined, or less well internalized psychological boundaries. Limits contribute directly to the development of boundaries, by which I mean a clear and consistent definition of oneself, of one's identity, of exactly "where I end and you begin." This includes knowing who one is and who one is not.
THE MALE PERSPECTIVE
Even for men, who are typically consídered by psychologists to develop a separate and more autonomous self than do women, such an identity líes within the realm of cultural mythology. lt ís certainly possible for roen to appear separare and independent if one ignores all the female supports that permít this illusion. Even more important, from a psychological perspective, one would have to ignore how the masculine subsumes women, children, and even physical space and objects. Men, in general, do not simply have less permeable boundaries than do women, in general; they also have more extensive and inclusive ones, which subsume and engulf. They are not less, but differently, relational.
From early childhood, when they are encouraged to explore the environment physically, to their presence on public streets, to the world of work, boys and roen are permitted and encouraged to go up to and even beyond the physical bounds of their bodies. They tend to use physical and psychological space more expansively and confidently than do women. For example, as children, they wander farther and more comfortably from home. They use larger areas for their play activities and, later on, initiate touch more freely and frequently and interrupt women speakers more than do women. They take up more space in general. From the male perspective, all space, public and prívate, including the women in it, appears to belong to and be owned by men. This belief/feeling/experience has its roots in our legal and social history, whereby women have been considered nothing more than extensions of their fathers or husbands. The word family itself originally referred to all the possessions of a male citizen, including bis wife, children, and slaves. In the United States, married women now generally have the right to own and dispose of their own property, but in sorne states the husband's permission is still required.
In I977, Oregon became the first state to make marital rape illegal. By I983, a husband accused of raping his wife could be prosecuted in Oregon under the same laws as any other man accused of rape (Morgan I984). As of I985, twenty states had abolished the exemption and permitted the prosecution of husbands who rape their wives (Finkelhor and Yllo I985). In the majority of states, marital rape is stilllegally nonexistent, although physically prevalent. Conservative estimares indicate that approximately I4 percent of women ever married have been raped by their husbands. Given the pressures not to report these incidents, this must be considered an underestimate (RussellI982). While men's sense of ownership of women is less formally accepted these days, as a result of legal and social challenges to American laws by feminists, their sense of entitlement and psychological ownership of public and often prívate property is far from eradicated. (But many other countries' laws are not even this "progressive." For an extensive review of these issues throughout the world, see Robín Morgan's Sisterhood ls Global [I984].)
In public spaces, men frequently approach women, even women in pairs or groups, believing and even stating that women are alone when not accompanied by a man. Females are given, and come to require, a smaller area of personal space than do males (Lott and Sommer, I967). Among a group of middle-class children, for example, boys were observed to spend more time playing outdoors than did girls and to take up about one-and-ahalf times more space (Harper and Sanders, I975). Outside the laboratory, women alone or in groups also typically claim less space than do men (Edney and Jordan-Edney, I974). And within all-male groups, dominant or aggressive males use more personal space than do other males (Sommer I969; Kinzel, I970).
Tradition and habit conspire not only to allow women less physical/ psychological space than men but to permit them to make less noise, both vocally and in exercising digestive and other bodily functions. Men can chew and exercise bodily functions overtly and loudly without violating a sense of public propriety or their imputed masculinity.
A therapist and mother writes of her experience in Japan: "When we were toilet training our young son, we taught him to pee on a tree in the backyard. Observing this, a Japanese babysitter taught him to first apologize to the tree" (Bell,I989, p. 52). What does it do to the sense of self and others of the typical young boy in the United States, who is taught that he has the right to pee on whatever he can reach? Indeed, contests between young boys to see who can pee the farthest are common. The masculine vernacular even indudes the term "pissing contest" to describe a competitive situation. Apparently, the further such a male can extend his body, induding its excrement, the more masculine and successful he is judged by bis peers and by himself: more and bigger are better.
If women were to treat physical space as an extension of themselves, for example, by roaming freely in the nighttime streets as men are comparatively free to do, their very lives would be in danger. Men in predatory groups have sometimes justified attacking women, saying they deserved it for being out at night (as in the sensationally publicized attack on the Central Park jogger in New York City). Women enter public (another seemingly neutral term) territory at their own risk. "Public" space is, in fact, not neutral: it does not belong to women. Every woman knows this and has a strategy for dealing with or avoiding the danger of public areas, typically either by limiting the ground she covers or by being accompanied by a male.
Women must pass through a war zone every time they step outside their doors, and often again when they step back inside. These days, there are women who can be professors, lawyers, or physicians, gaining limited access to arenas that masculine privilege had previously dosed off to them. They can lecture, litigare, or medicate, but the moment they step out of this role into the harsh sunlight or the still harsher darkness of the streets, they lose the protection of status and are defined only by those visible characteristics of their appearance, induding gender, race, and age.
At home, in addition to dealing wíth men they know, women must deal with intrusion by strangers at the door or on the telephone. Obscene calls remind women that they are subject to sexual violence. With the development of technology, engulfment takes on new forms: most single women I know either have male friends or relatives record the announcements on their answering machines or indicate in the message that they do not live alone. These messages may confuse the malevolent caller as well as friends or acquaintances. But this form of camouflage is a necessary addition to women's arsenal for survival in supposedly neutral and prívate space. lt is the strategy of invisibility, which both protects and damages women.
In symbolic ways, women's invisibility must remain intact in public as well. If women sat, moved, or touched themselves in public the way men do, they might be accused of being lewd or even asking to be violated. (Recall the different effects of hypothetical identical descriptions of male and female clients.) Men do not put themselves in danger by behaving in these ways. Nor do they shame themselves. A cross-cultural survey of standing and sitting positions revealed that spreading one's legs in genital display is consistently more characteristic of men (Hewes I957). I have already discussed the masculinist tendency to define and locate men's conflicts within women, here demonstrated by the fact that men would see a woman in that position as lewd but would not see themselves or other men as lewd. Since they locate their experience within females, they both neutralize their own behavior and subsume women's. Again, women's behavior is defined by what it arouses in the indeterminate male observer.
A female therapist I was supervising told me in a distraught manner that her male dient, a few minutes before the end of a sessíon, had reached over and dropped a check in her lapas a signa!that he was finished for the day. Another client had removed a soaking wet check from his pocket and handed it to a different female therapist, whom I was also supervising. He explained that he had been sweating a lot that day. He never thought to remove the check from his pocket to permit it to dry out during the session or to avoid inflicting on her the sweat of his body. Could she have been seductive or obnoxious in sorne way to elicit or deserve this behavior? Had she asked for it?
Both of these acts were probably consciously or unconsciously hostile, but it is the sense of entitlement embedded in the hostility that I want to underline. Can you imagine these situations with female clients and male therapists? What different meanings might be inferred? Were a female client to call attention to her own and the therapist's body in these ways, it would undoubtedly be considered seductive. She would not have the same physical and spatial entitlement and would be violating a boundary that does not exist for men. Or perhaps the meaning in both situations would be about her, as she carries this surplus of meaning just by being female.
As another example, feminist attempts to involve fathers in all.aspects of parenting have given rise to a new expression: "We are pregnant." While such a comment by a man may be intended as a sensitive response to feminist requests for equal participation by fathers, consider the perspective. If "we" are pregnant, if "our" womb is carrying our baby, then why was it not impregnated by "our" penis? Just what is shared and by whom? lt is the woman's body that becomes the possession of the couple, while the man's remains his own. Hidden under this modern guise is the traditional sense of a man's possession of his woman or, at least, of her useful body parts. As it was the man's alone in the past, when all the children it produced were his possessions, so has the womb become the possession of the couple.
Ernest Becker, in discussing men's need to triumph over physicalness, gives as an example "the widespread practice of segregating women in special huts during menstruation and all the various taboos surrounding menstruation. lt is obvious that man seeks to control the mysterious processes of nature as they manifest themselves within his own body" (I973, p. 32; italics added). Becker, along with the men of the various cultures to which he refers, considers even women's menstruation to be part of what happens to a man's body. lts cultural meaning derives from men's beliefs and feelings about menstruation, not from women's experience of it.
Another instructive example is provided by an initiation cult in New Guinea, in which it is assumed that "men become men only by men's ritualizing birth and taking over-as a collective group--the functions that women perform naturally" (Mead I949, p. 98). In many cultures, the symbolic death of a boy and his rebirth as a man is accomplished by men and often involves circumcision or, in certain tribes in Australia, subincision of the penis. This wound is named "vulva" by the men, and the blood from it is considered the menses of ancestral females, stolen by the men to become the source of male superiority (Kittay I984). Inducing "male menstruation" is a central aspect of these male rebirth rituals. Men thus appropriate for themselves the most physical aspects of childbearing capacity. As they retain the power to make meaning, this ritual is seen not as ridiculous or hopeless but as truly imbuing them with power and superiority. These men then have no reason to envy women, as they wind up possessing all that is female and male.
The sentiment behind such rituals is not confined to far-off cultures. lt is well known that the developers of the atomic bomb considered and spoke of the event as giving birth. A recent book on fathering by Bill Cosby was advertised on New York City buses with large posters proclaiming, "Congratulations, it's a book!" Apparently the birth was accomplished by Cosby, its father, all by himself. The basketball star Rick Barry has been quoted as saying that if his children were horses, their breeding would make them worth a million dollars each. One can only assume that their mother is neither a basketball star nor a horse.
All this points us in an important direction. lt would seem that men have just as much difficulty separating and individuating as do women, and that the ideal of separation and individuality is a somewhat unnatural act which must be accomplished largely by illusion. If men define women, children, and even physical aspects of the environment as extensions of themselves, then their own difficulties with separation are made invisible. Men so often report experiencing women's reactions to their behaviors asan extension of their own that we must consider that men lack a good sense of where their boundaries end and women's begin. They often seem sincerely to believe, for example, that a woman who is raped wants to be, that a woman who is looked at or commented on lasciviously enjoys it, that a woman who is whistled at on the street feels complimented. Pornographic publications and movies are replete with images of women being dominated, violated, and beaten, usually as though they enjoyed it.
In couples therapy, many husbands express difficulty in seeing their wives' feelings or needs as different from their own. One husband repeatedly pointed out to his wife that she simply should not want certain friends because her contact with them hurt him. Many men even have difficulty seeing that their partners' sexual needs are different from their own. If he does what he likes, he may be truly perplexed that she doesn't also like it-not that he demands that his female partner have the same needs and feelings as he does, but that he makes an often unconscious assumption that she does. lt used to be said that, under the maritallaw, a husband and wife become one person: the husband. The psychologicallegacy of that condition remains with us.
The masculine must subsume the feminine. As women's boundaries remain permeable and transitorily defined, so are men's extensive and engulfing. For example, a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle (April 23, I989) discussed female movie stars, such as Kelly McGillis, Brigitte Nielsen, and Sigourney Weaver, who have been successful in spite ofbeing tall. The many male stars (Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, Robett Redford, Tom Cruise, Michael J. Fox, Mel Gibson, Sean Penn) who are shorter than the average man are mentioned, but their height has not been discussed and has not been an impediment in their career paths. It is written as a fact of life that tall actresses have trouble playing against shorter leading men, not the reverse. Of course, to solve the "problem" the camera must somehow create the illusion that the man is taller. The issue is not how tall the woman is, but whether her male counterpart is taller, or can be made to look taller. While men often seem to fear engulfment by the mother or other women, it is women who are daily engulfed, defined, and limited by the father and other men, often without even knowing it. The practice is so pervasive that it seems the natural condition.
THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE
While girls and women learn, through externally imposed limits, who they are not or may not be, they also learn that who they are is, ro a significant extent, defined by others, by men in an oedipal society. A woman's limits are clear, her boundaries not only negatively and externally imposed but subject to redefinition with the introduction of different men into her life. This includes transitory contact with strange males in public, who may define her as desirable, insignificant, invisible, or "asking for it" by being either attractive or unattractive to them.
A girl child's early training involves numerous prohibitions and limitations that do not apply ro the upbringing of male children. Erikson (I950) designares "basic trust" as the initial developmental stage in the formation of the core identity in children. But, as Bart (I985) has aptly noted, the first developmental stage for girls should be mistrust. While it is a cliché that "boys will be boys," meaning that they will explore, disobey, and generally expand their known territory as part of the very essence of maleness, there is no equivalent phrase applied to girls because there is no equivalent permissive injunction appropriate to them.
Part of early female training, through both explicit statements and example, involves learning of the danger and intrusiveness with which they must contend. Mistrust, fear, and restriction thus become integral parts of the developing identity. The female child must learn that sorne males will hurt, others will protect, sorne will do both. Only when "escorted" by aman will she be considered by other mento be "out of bounds," or boundaried, or to have an impermeable boundary. Only men can draw the line for her between attractiveness and "asking for it" (Grady I984), if that line exists at all. Furthermore, only a father or a husband can give her a surname. Nowadays, many married women do not take their husbands' surnames, but even then, it is their fathers' names they are then keeping. Only through relatedness to a man can a woman be safely visible and "bounded" or bound up.
No wonder, then, that women learn to survive in connectedness rather than in the self, with permeable, accommodating, shifting boundaries, and often with a sense of invisibility both outside and within relationships. Women can be safely visible only "in relation to," and since this is culturally approved it tends to add to their self-esteem. Paradoxically, at the same time it weakens self-esteem by virtue of its limits. As their limits are defined by others continually throughout life, women's boundaries must remain relatively reactive, unformed, and situational, vigilantly other-oriented rather than self-defined. Ultimately, it is often only the illusion of safety women gain with these boundaries, since violence toward women in inti-mare situations is epidemic in our society.
A study by Carol Brooks Gardner (I980) focused on the function of men's street remarks to women, including the risk involved in being an unescorted woman in public. It is safer for women to be accompanied by men than to be alone in public, but what does it do to their sense of self? While a certain visibility in the world of men is necessary for the development of a clear and healthy identity, it also presents a tremendous danger. Another paradox is that authenticity, or genuine presence itself, is often gravely dangerous for women. The artist Judy Chicago (I975) writes of women doing art about street harassment; they felt psychically and physically frightened even to discuss the subject among other women and to represent it artistically. As Vivían Gornick has commented, "My father had to be Jewish; he had no choice. When he went downtown he heard 'kike.' . . . When my father heard the word 'kike,' the life- force within him shriveled. When a man on the street makes animal-like noises at me, or when a man at a dinner table does not hear what I say, the same thing happens to me. This is what makes the heart pound and the head fill with blood" (I989, p. 95).
Fear of physical harm by men is considered a natural part of the background of life for women and, as a result, is embodied by women. How often do you see a woman standing straight, eyes forward, confidently striding down the street? Recall the discussion of muggers listening for a woman's footsteps in the street. Now imagine that you are a woman alone at night in the street or in an isolated area, and you hear a man's footsteps rapidly approaching you from behind. What do you feel or imagine?
In a group session with a therapist whom I supervise, one of the men in the group jumped to his feet in agitation and despair. Both the women and the men in the group cringed, fearful that he was going to be violent. They had all had a lot of experience with male violence, but only one, as a child, with female violence. In training classes for psychotherapists, both female and male interns must learn to deal with their fear of anger and especially anget in men, which can turn to violence. Anger in women can be talked about and worked through, or at least contained. Therapists often collude in defining anger as masculine, thus appropriate and acceptable formen but too powerful for women.
At various points in therapy, I have listened to virtually every female client of mine grapple with her physical fear either of men in general or of her male partner. Many have recurrent nightmares about violent men. Severa!will not venture out at night alone, fearing the anonymous assailant. Others fear that their partners will force them ro have sex or that their partners' apparent generalized hostility toward women will be turned on them. Sorne have heard their partners speak of women deserving ro be raped, beaten, or even murdered. Lesbian women often fear ridicule, if not physical attack, both from men they know and from anonymous men in public. Most of these women are not even among the many who have been beaten or raped as children.
Almost any woman can describe a sense of physical and psychological readiness for assault in the streets: "Taking cabs to the airport, sleeping in one's own bed, using public toilets, riding in elevators, driving home, having casual conversations with neighbors or friends, women often feel eerie sensations, 'stomach butterflies' that somehow alert them to danger" (Stanko I988. Women who have been molested often feel tension for the rest of their lives in certain areas of the body and mind, and often cannot experience sexual arousal without a mixture of tension and fear. People who have been physically abused as children often adopt a physical and psychological posture of perpetua!vigílance or defense.
Women are not always actively aware of this fear, as it is so mucha part of daily life thar ir is embedded in the physical, or contained in and by psychological symptoms such as panic attacks, phobias, dissociative disorders, and depression, ro name a few rypically female maladies. Certainly, not all men are free of fears when it comes to dealing with women. lt is my impression, however, that it is rejection, not violence, they fear from women. They fear not measuring up, not being big enough, strong enough, potent enough, wanted enough. They fear the loss of power and entitlement.
If there were a curfew for males-since men in public areas, such as streets and parks, particularly at night, pose a serious danger to females (and to a much lesser degree to other males, increasing proportionally as they resemble females in size, appearance, or behavior)-would there be an increase in violence in the home? How many Americans, in describing our values and customs toa foreigner, would state that we have a curfew for women? Our informal curfew for women is as taken for granted as is men's violence. Here we must ask why this is simply defined as a problem of women's physical and psychological vulnerability and not of men's irrational violence and lack of self-control. There are no large-scale programs to counteract male violence--for example, to teaeh boys to contain themselves and their aggression, to respect the needs and feelings of girls, or even to understand that those needs may differ from their own.
This would involve not just naming the danger but understanding who has the power to define it. This is the very power to delimit, to bound, to create figure and ground, to make visible and invisible. It is the creator of the ground, the owner of the context, who holds the power. It is also the owner of the context who creares its boundary and defines the problem. Only a change that alters the context, that changes the meaning and evaluation of any intrapsychic or interpersonal event, will be change in the oedipal nature of society itself.
To take sorne everyday examples of the power of ownership of the context, typewriters, when first invented, were considered to be complex machinery that could be operated only by men. Thus, in the United States, the occupation of typist carried a prestige that it lost as it became redefined as a repetitive and trivial task that could be performed by women. Another example is the medical profession, charactérized by enormous prestige and financia!reward in the United States, where doctors are mostly male. In the former Soviet Union, where the same profession is identified with women, it is accorded much lower status, the typical salary being less than that of certain manuallaborers. We may be on the verge of witnessing the same phenomenon in certain branches of law and medicine in the United States, as more and more women gain jobs in those fields. lt is not the task itself, but the meaning attrib.uted to it, the evaluative component, from which it derives its status.
In Victorian times, it was observed by ltalian dentists that female patients fainted from pain less often than did male patients. This difference was defined notas women's greater strength or courage but as their inferior powers of sensation. Similarly, girls, quicker than boys at intellectual tasks in school, were considered not brighter but more shallow than their slower male counterparts (Russett I989). "Not- speed" rather than speed became the virtue. It is obvious to us in retrospect that there is a higher-level abstraction involved: maleness is the virtue, femaleness always inferior by definition.
How much has this perspective changed in one hundred years? Joan Schulman has commented on the manner in which certain legislatures in the United States have extended marital protections to cohabiting couples:
While men in these unmarried cohabiting relationships are increasingly granted the "marital prívilege" of rape, women in these relationships have fared far worse in their attempts to obtain privileges of marriage such as spousal support ("palimony", division of the couple's property or civil orders of protection. In the few states where unmarried women are accorded these rights, courts have first required an express or implied agreement between the parties. No such requirement is made with respect to the expansion of the marital rape exemption. [Schulman I980, pp. 538-40]
The meanings of women's sexuality in this society, and the uses to which men put it, provide another clear example that it is the male who has the power to define, invade, and engulf, violently or not, to interpret female sexuality as an extension of his. Perhaps the most apparent aspect of women's sexuality in this society is that, as demonstrated by much feminist work and highlighted in a book by Carole Vanee (I984), it líes at the intersection of pleasure and danger. Women are constantly at risk in public and in privare for sexual harassment, violence, and abuse. They are in danger from strangers and from the men they know and love and perhaps even trust. Women who are raped by their husbands report more long-lasting effects (Russell I982) and become more sexually dysfunctional than women raped by dates or strangers (Bart I985).
Here is a fraction of the shocking statistics:
In a sample of 3,I87 women, I in 4 had been subject toa completed or an attempted rape; 84 percent of them knew their attackers; 57 percent of the incidents had occurred on dates; the average age of the victim was eighteen and a half (Warshaw I988).
At least one-third of all females are introduced to sex by being molested by a "trusted" family member.
At least half of all women are raped at least once in their lives.
At least half of all adult women are battered in their own bornes by husbands or lovers (Walker I979). Eleven to I5 percent of married women report having been raped by their husbands (Finklehor and Yllo I985).
Attacks on wives by husbands result in more injuries requiring treatment than do rapes, muggings, and automobile accidents combined; one-third of all women murdered are killed by their husbands or boyfriends (New York Times I984).
Approximately 85 percent of working women are sexually harassed at their jobs (New