Female Exhibitionism and Women Showing Off: Freud’s castration complex and exhibitionistic female psychic states and the infantile fantasies of little girls
Updated: February 4, 2025; 12:47 PM
“In the broadest sense, exhibitionism, is the act of attracting attention to the self. One of the paired component of partial instincts that Freud (1905) described as part of infantile sexuality, exhibitionism is evident in the child’s wish to exhibit the body, especially the genitals, particularly in the phallic phase it is closely related to scopophilia- exhibitionism involves turning the looking impulse onto the self. Other parts of the body as a whole may replace the genitals, or achievements and behavior may be displayed instead … In psychoanalysis the term is used mostly in its non-perverse meaning … (Moore and Fine, 1995)
Some case vignettes on female exhibitionistic fantasies, there was evidence of strong attachments and confidence in the subject’s bodies as pleasurable and female, with a well-developed body image of their power to attract males, compete with other females sexually, and procreatively (and this is where conflict can come in secondarily), and or sexually attract other females. The thesis statement of Rosemary Balsam’s paper, “Women Showing Off: Notes on female exhibitionism” (2008) states:
“The focus … on female exhibitionism suggest a normative spectrum for pleasurable active sex-seeking and pleasurable procreative desire and fantasy that is present in female’s use of her body and, which of course, but secondarily, can become caught up in conflict.”
I might add, to a greater or lesser degree, all women seek to do this within mainstream American culture.
The other day, I discussed the haunted history of America with its history of racism, sexism, and homophobia — as history and temporal time is one of the factors affecting psychic states — and I compared it to the haunting in the perpetrator’s mind to carry out wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture. I compared how denial of one’s weaknesses and inferiority can create fantasy spaces that allow us to elude the castration complex and deny Truth and evade death. In the psychic colonization of wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture in shaping the mind, advancing technology grants the Colonizer’s wish fulfillment into the position of a “superior-dominant” position, while the target remains in the “inferior -subordinate” position. Here, we can pull in some psychoanalytic theories on exhibitionism.
Recognition of such body fantasies and female body meanings from early childhood into maturity tends to be marginalized within all of the psychoanalytic theories current today according to Rosemary Balsam. “The focus here on female exhibitionism suggest a normative spectrum for pleasurable active sex seeking and pleasurable procreative desire and fantasy that is present in a female’s use of her body and, which of course, but secondarily, can become caught up in conflict (Balsam, 2008).” For me, this conflict can be aroused when the onlookers become envious or jealous, offended to the point of motification, sexually aroused, even curious, with a dire yearning to have what the exhibitionistic “Object-Other” has as a part of their own embodied state of being or with a dire yearning to erase from reality the exhibitionistic “Object-Other” from their orbital surroundings. This can create a manic wish that their own identity be affirmed in some way. This first is formed in fantasy, then is planned and acted out in reality. In my opinion, body image is connected to the ego and “this demonstrates the centrality of female body significance for psychic representation.” It’s one of the reasons we have the cosmetic industries, plastic surgery, gyms, health spas and clinics, and other retail industries touting a guarantee to make one look and feel “youthful” and “beautiful” as well as the sports industry, modeling industry and, even prostitution. The latter three are strong supporters of exhibistionitic desires. The wish to be the “object of desire” is normative for women. Manic defenses and repetition drives are not only connected to the ways how those with power tear other women down, but also how the dominant male patriarchy subordinates and controls women as well through advertisements, social media, and federal, state, and local policy. So I suggest that, using this theory, it is the reason why I am being targeted with wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture. “Exhibitionism, as a prototypical body behavior, is worth looking at from this angle, especially as an opportunity to develop novel psychoanalytic formulations on female soma / psyche dynamics, using case demonstrations of “showing off” connected to fantasies of procreation (i.e. sexual intercourse) and childbirth. Thus, we can logically determine that wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture was delivered to my body for exercising my personal “practice of exhibiting the body” and the result for exercising to gain personal reward for that “exhibiting of the body” where possibly an envious onlooker or offended onlooker, who got “caught up in the gaze” of my body, and, perhaps, was even denied recognition for it. In my opinion, this individual is pathological and “hates women.” To tear down another female human being with wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture IS the definition of “female hate,” exposing clues to the personality of the perpetrator as a possible paranoid schizoid. Psychoanalysis places itself closer to psychiatry and humanities, in matters of subjectivity, and as a subjective science in which the subject is psychoanalysis' object of study / expertise, or as a qualitative social science finds itself in ambiguous definitional places (Balsam, 2008).” So I have to place into question,
“Why would someone intentionally use a wireless electromagnetic frequency tether (microwave signal) to inflict pain and suffering in a female subject, thereby using them as pain’s container for suffering?”
It obfusicates and forecloses the “doer-done to connection” (Benjamin, 2018), foreclosing linguistic dialogue by silencing the “offender” and silences argument with imposed violent assault, transgression, and bodily boundary violation.
The specific childhood roots of exhibitionism could allude to the female’s repetitions in adult life, covering the range from a temporary preoccupation, to characterological features, to acute transgressive showings of any part of the body or mind, or indeed even to showing the genitals to strangers (Balsam, 2008).” With the emergence of postmodern sex theory in the United States, sex and gendered categories have since been considered highly fluid from Freud’s time and are regularly believed to be not sustainable on grounds of essential, binary sexual differences. The non-perverse as well as the perverse aspects of exhibitionism are worth noting. It would seem the female body itself, as an intersecting site of identity that embodies time/historical period, class, gendered, race, social-economics, etc. (Harris, 2017) has been missing from feminist psychoanalytic theory according to Rosemary Balsam. Human beings are still housed in sex bodies. Many of which are capable of procreation. While the dual processes of sex and gender can come together dynamically in harmony or in conflict (or both) at each step of development and throughout life, I might add that it is this conflict (not with my own body) but in conflict with someone else’s perceptions of my way of being, “masculine” vs. “feminine” that precipitated the onslaught of wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture to deny my active, aggressive, and dominant characteristics being exhibited in my daily routine exercise which included decidedly “masculine sports performance drills” — boxing, kickboxing, football drills, basketball drills, dynamic plyo, high intensity interval training, etc. This also draws into question the absence of the conflict with the female body in the psychic arrangement of sexual orientations known as transgender identities as when one desires to be female, but has been born male, and desires feminine longings for a “female pregnant body” and to display that body to the public is largely absent from psychoanalytic theory in my opinion. With regard to exhibitionism, if a man shows his naked, usually erect penis where it is not welcome, this behavior is considered deviant. If an adult woman shows her naked, sexually charged parts in public, or to attract “the gaze of an onlooker”, the world’s response is sharply split (Balsam 2008). On one hand, the response received could be condemning abjection; on the other hand, the response received maybe scopophilic entertainment for profit that is encouraged in a capitalistic patriarchial social order. The truth one must acknowledge is that the female’s relationship to her body allows her to confront her childbearing capacities, which are intricately intertwined with sex-seeking.
Little girls, from an early age, are embedded with an enigmatic message that transmits the knowledge of feminine potential to create, carry to term, and bear children as a capacity starkly different from that of boys. This knowledge can put strict limitations on the girl child’s information about herself and her future capabilities. While it can create inhibitions in the little girl, it can also create what has mostly been considered social perversions to acquire superior phallic significance. It is contended that Mother’s pregnancy is not granted the same major level of exposure and encoding face-to-face the child’s curiosity and perceptions surrounding the primal scene or the site of the penis and where “bigger is better” with regard to male endowments. In my opinion, One of the reasons for this unconscious turn away from male pattern desire of largeness as “King” for women is because the woman evaluates their secondary sex characteristics after puberty and not their primary sex characteristics granted at birth. I suppose if one had a very large clitoris and a large vaginal opening, this might empower the woman’s ego like a man’s. However, it’s more likely not to, and to earn her a name like “whore”. When it comes to phallic desire of ‘largeness’, a woman’s desire emerges as a desire to undergo breast augmentation and cosmetic surgery. This is a move toward the desire of “superior phallic omnipotence” and to “survive castration” rooted in her infantile fantasies for the “superior-dominant phallus.” Additionally, in her move away from pregnancy and childbirth after menopause and towards an aging body, evading death, at least in symbolic terms of youth and beauty, as the women no longer possesses the genital begetting capacity. In addition, to elaborate further on Rosemary Balsam’s theory about exhibitionism and female largeness as opposed to male largeness when it comes to the genital endowments, I might add that perceptions by the larger social order revolving around obesity and largeness touch on elements of wealth vs poverty, black vs. white (racism), economic security vs. economic instability, control over one’s appetites vs. no control at all (the “upper class” value of temperance), as well as level of education vs. no education at all. To be fat reflects the image “to be slow” and this image is associated with lower IQ, lower social standing, learning disabilities such as down syndrome, as well as poverty and economic insecurity. An additional problem, not all little girl’s childhood experiences are the same. Infantile fantasies can be comparative; they are based on watching, feeling, and hearing grown-up physical activities. Therefore, female infantile fantasies can differ from little boy’s infantile fantasies in the sexed paradigm of the oedipal arrangement, in a general way. Generally speaking, men kill women at a higher statistical percentage than women kill other women (Violence and Gender, date?). Thus, not all little girl’s experiences an intimate connection to Mother’s female pregnant body and, thus, are denied the opportunity for intimate body comparisons, mirroring, with their related fantasies. These little girl’s may grown-up to repudiate the image the female pregnant body comes to embodies. Perceived as weak, inferior, and dominanted by a male her fantasies may not entail childbirth. However, this may be do to a familial connection that promotes sexist ideologies or a larger cultural order that supports them as well. However, for the most part, this is not the norm as most little girls enjoy having their sexed bodies and fantasize about their future procreative capabilities. In addition, the larger social order seems to repudiate largeness in women. I can only assume the larger social order possesses matricidal fears surrounding “largeness” with the original preoedipal and oedipal mother imposing anxieties and fears surrounding “impending destruction.”
Yet, in the extraordinary case vignettes of exhibitionists who “work shamelessly” to “show off” their bodies to those onlookers, wearing tight provocative dresses and clothing with low-cut cleavage that exposes the jiggling subcutaneous fat of rotund breasts are frowned upon by upper-middle class professional women in psychoanalysis who wish them “safely married” and more “stay at home” with probably larger body sizes and smaller boobs, an image associated more closely with the traditional “safety” of “domesticized women” thereby echoing the ideologies of Sigmund Freud’s time. There still seems to be a reverberation from Freud’s ideologies in the psychoanalytic literature of modern times. I can hear its whispering in various psychoanalytic feminist case vignettes, of women who do not dress conservatively, who are aggressive financial winners and sexually promiscuous, who embrace defiance and perversion are sometimes frowned upon by the professional upper-middle class women of our time, thereby echoing a chaste, silent, obedience to male patriarchy.
Usually the features associated with Mother’s abdomen as “big and rotund” as a “female pregnant body” and as a “domesticized woman,” the very image of a “dowdy dependency” can be evoked and repudiated in the minds of some women as is indicated in some female case vignettes fantasies. These feminine characteristics can become the unconscious symbols of repudiation when a patriarchial hegemony requires women to be in the workforce emaciated, ill, and sickly as was the case with the fashion model industry in the 1980s and 1990s and when real wage increases completely stopped. When a patriarchial hegeimony that does not extend a quality of wages in the same way they extend real wage increases to the upper executive classes of men, a woman can always resort to using her body as a sex symbol, and as a prop, to elicit the “grand prize” of ALL, winning Daddy’s love AND that is the real envy of most other females when it comes to “clinching the gold.” This should be any and EVERY women’s right and privilege to shape, form, and use her body for whatever her procreative capacities entail to secure her ego and her wage. Sadly, many women do not agree with this.
Discussion On Pregnancy As Female Power Body Display*
Since evidence of strong attachments and confidence in female bodies as pleasurable and female, with well-developed body images of their power to attract males, compete with female sexually, and procreatively and/or sexually attract other females, and this connects to female exhibitionism and it’s tied to the athletic performance of women competing in swimming tournaments or volleyball tournaments whose bare bottom under cheeks are barely just exposed in their bathing suits. The onslaught of wireless electromagnetic frequency signals during my early routine workouts that would begin at 4:00 A.M. in the morning, with consistency, was aimed at thwarting an active, healthy, lifestyle. These early morning routine workouts would eventually stop. Then, on occasion, they would start up again, only to be reacquainted with the same electromagnetic tether that sought to torture me. The last occurrence, during one of these routine exercise workouts, was in July 2023. In the Spring of 2023, I began a diet and exercise program to lower my A1C and control blood pressure and body weight. Then after a 4th of July celebration, on the following July 5th, I was tortured with wireless electromagnetic tether that caused me to stop performing exercise on that day during my daily routine. Eventually, after several attempts to re-establish a routine, it forced me to withdrawal.
In my study of psychoanalysis, gender and object relations, for me to have a desire to have a child, and the desire to sculpt my body into a lean well-defined athletic muscular form was connected to a form of exhibitionism that, at least for me, seemed healthy. As Rosemary Balsam had said of her case vignette of “Ms. B” her desire to engaged with pregnancy and birthing in relation to her desires to “show off her artwork,” and her body was a form of female exhibitionism. In addition, Rosemary Balsams two case vignettes of “Ms. A” and “Ms. B” had acquired early on in their development a confidence in their female bodies that Rosemary Balsam proposes connects to a pleasurable and pleasure-seeking female autoticism and body attachment that is expressed within the girls biological growth trajectory and the matrix of familial embodied relationships. Both patients sublimated their sexuality in their work. “Ms. A” through her creative formulation of sales pitches for advertising campaigns to male executives which combined her exhibitionist sexuality and clinched deals. “Ms. B” was intensely gratified to show off her “own artwork” and was intensely gratified by showing off her body as a model.
Since displaced exhibition cannot reassure against castration fear it cannot develop into an actual per version. Ergo, exhibitionism exists in women only as a compensation for not being male and being denied phallic primacy. Nor does this theoretical lens allow for the existence of female fetishists. Alternative interpretive schemas might of course occur to a modern analyst in response to this material recorded but not included in Zavitzianos' formulation was the fact that this female student analsand went on her highway exhibition spree free of underwear, right after an analytic hour. Perhaps feeling sexually excited in the transference she was acting out a fantasy of being “Big Enough” like her sexual procreative mother and tempting enough to take on in fantasy tough truckers resembling her violent father, as displacements from taboo excitements with her analysts. I read into the story many elements of female to female competition and revenge toward the mother, as well as pained and triumphant comparisons a female bodies that I think are more obvious than my penis reference (Balsam 2008).
An important insight occurred to the author while reading Balsam’s interpretation of Zavitiano’s formulation. The important insight she gleaned was in a case vignette, where a man desired to have his female loves perform oral sex on him as he drove down the highway, and, passed truckers in their cabs thereby displaying to the onlookers his male phallic potency. This form of exhibitionism in the male subject suggested to the author of this blog a sibling arrangement where this male was the “younger male sibling,” and feeling impotent in childhood when compared to his older brother, needed to reaffirm his dominant male, phallic potency because of feelings of not being “Big Enough” when compared to his older brother during childhood. In Freudian analysis, he didn’t want to be the “Little Hans.”
The literature on sexual exhibition virtually emits references to the experience of women. Authors connect the sentiments to a cultural discourse that excuse any notion that female sexuality can be independent or assertive but rather considers it passive — a familiar and widespread position not confined to Freud alone. Many authors including the Elise and Balsam as well as many other writers in the last two decades have challenged this idea but their critique has not yet been absorbed into psychoanalytic thinking. One of the notable differences between male and female exhibitionism is based on a self psychological formulation that because females exhibit only to assuage feelings of worthlessness there is nothing “sexual” present.
When researchers interviewed female exhibitionistic subjects they discovered the responses they received from these women weren’t the responses they had anticipated. The researchers were struck by how positively these women viewed their opportunities to show off their bodies, as these women described “great enjoyment” in having interested audiences viewing their bodies. In fact, the dancers believed that they did it for personal fulfillment, and they try to preemptively counter any accusations of moral irresponsibility. Of course analytic audiences will say correctly that we have only very controlled, consciously crafted information to go on but this research shows us how that psychoanalysis needs to be a part of an ongoing attempt to better understand female psychology and that old shibboleths are hard to relinquish.
Given Rosemary Balsams view, female exhibitionism as based in part on female sexual and procreative-seeking activities, however, she would reserve female fetishism for females who have taken on, for whatever reason, male type dynamics, and so like men, suffer castration anxiety or a specific form of genital anxiety in women (Dorsey 1996). More papers have been written on fetishism then on exhibitionism. With regard to female exhibitionism and the female pregnant body to be exhibited, it seems current formulations again point to the view that the male organ is the only one that women recognize. Again, the female body is granted no significance in these formulations. This is such a regular feature of both child and adult published cases that it deserves to be noted. If one calculates solely by the equation “baby equals penis” a rational exists to ignore another equation: “baby equals female baby making equipment.” Louis Kaplan, in 1991, deals with female perversions in her book with the same name, in it women draw attention to their bodies. She stresses on female sexuality as an intergenital sensuality described by Judith Kestenberg and with her sense that female perversions have dynamics different from those of male perversions. She argues less for motivation stemming from female sexuality than for a cultural over domination of women’s infantile gender ideals and social gender stereotypes. She finds a search for love, and for parental and social approval, and often an exaggerated femininity that covers unconscious masculinity. Balsam confines “femininity” to an individual’s familial connections with qualities of the female figures she herself has internalized (Balsam 2008).
According to Rosemary Balsam, “to talk of showing the body as the expression of a desire for sexual power, as an orgy of body narcissism, or as a compensation for poor self-esteem, or to hold the behavior as evidence only of an infantile “phallic narcissistic fixation” or of a woman’s asexual “pregenital issues” is to tell pieces of the story.” When Mahler wove separation issues between mother and child into developmental sequence in the 1970s, noted closeness between mothers and daughters tended to be seen as evidence of a “primitive fixation” reflecting an “intense and pathological mirroring of same-sex bodies.” The idea of the mother as continuing “owner” of the daughter’s body and of pathological fusion for the daughter was assumed always to be expected in the early narcissistic territory of the daughter’s pregenital development.
In light of insights afforded us by attachment theory which suggest an infant’s capacity for separation greater than what Mahler conceived, particularly as it affects mother-daughter dynamics (Bernstein 2004) — closeness between mothers and daughters can be seen to undergo progressive transformations toward maturity (Balsam and Fisher 2006). Within this matrix, as with elements of Ms. B’s relations, there can be powerful affirmations for the female body and eroticism from a mother that at times can be over involved by some standard, or under involved for fear of her own sexuality (Marcus 2004). And this mother-daughter literature the body itself tends to be a passing referent in terms of its use in solving other conflicts or in the admixture of internalized object relations if we acknowledge the female exhibitionism is a complex set of behaviors that is surely replete with compromise formation, the missing procreative piece is an important window into female fantasy life.
Showing off certainly concerns the inherent powers of the female body, it’s beauty, ugliness, attraction, or repulsion for sure but also the capacity for eliciting the fascination of others by displaying concealed mystery — a vital aspect of which is the hidden power of conceiving, growing and containing a baby. When the pregnant woman wears the short, tight T-shirt that are fashionable these days that bear the midriff — this is one form female exhibitionism can take, because according to Balsam, the female pregnant bulging belly is equal to the erect phallus. The biological female baby making, functioning and fantasy if not in fact, naturally exudes the promise of an aurora of robust health, the promotion of curves in the buttocks and thighs, the hormone related sheen to the skin and the hair, the emphasis of large, full breasts — a female body feature much admired in most cultures and is in general a celebration of the mature sexual body. The much admired youthful tiny waist, the opposite of pregnancy, can provoke a fantasy promise of magical elastic expansion to large proportions that echoes a human fascination with how the vagina can stretch for childbirth but recover its small dimensions again. The patient’s position on the couch with the analyst hidden behind a specter is already arena for a woman’s fantasy of being seen by a captive onlooker whose fantasy life in turn is to be titillated. There is much there for one can hear in many women’s associative communications that focuses on the appearance of the body — and pain or in pleasure.
Girls fantasies of the oral and anal periods — later transformed in the first genital period (Parens 1990) and now in the service of adult sexuality, are closely related to female body competence. The technical medical language of childbirth conveys the impact of the excitement, power, and activity of the event for the mother herself and for her attendance. As with Mrs A’s talk of “showing,” “crowning,” and “birthing a baby” after one of her her advertising sales pitches, many women know these moments well. Many remember them because the words accurately reflect the feeling tonalities they experienced. Deutsch’s chapter “Delivery” in her 1945 book contains the admixture of joy, excitement, physical exertion, and acceleration, the exaltation and physical achievement, the fear of death and mastery over it, the mother’s willingness to give her life for the sake of the life of their offspring are all rendered eloquently in this text which is freer than her other chapters from her questionable theoretical categorizations. Pleasurable exhibitionism is paramount in these recorded experiences. One woman patient said, “To show the world I have it in me to give birth into the world,” another said, “He seemed to shout with joy as he squeezed out into the air. I’m here, look at me! Look at her! She pushed me into life!” Or, as a religious woman said, “I felt like the Lord the Giver of Life.” Body exposure and genital exposure is valued in this context, as well as heightened appreciation and love of the organs that have produced these intense, unique, and exultant world, a world that will continue with the mother’s exposing her full breast of milk for the infant. For either sex, power and fantasies of omnipotence are important associations to exhibitionism. The exhibitionism of childbirth is an actively sexual and sensual, uniquely female body power display.
Regarding female showing off, the female vulva and vagina maybe the most regularly exposed body opening (apart from maybe the throat and the ears) that is acceptable in our society to be scrutinized by a stranger, the gynecologist. It is no wonder then that a patient like Ms. A can have many associations to these experiences including pleasure. I do not mean to suggest at all that there is no room for pain, misery, anxiety, or conflict and doubts related to the body, but many of our cultural accounts and our emphasis in theory still treat female body pleasure as a well-kept secret.
*The information in the section “Discussion On Pregnancy As Female Power Body Display” comes from excerpts from Rosemary Balsam’s paper “Women Showing Off: Notes on female exhibitionism” (2008) and is not the author’s own formulations but are used only to help shed light on how negativity and “hatred of other” can be projected onto cases of female exhibitionisms and suggests that this may be the reason for wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture the author received as an “hated object” due to “masculine athleticism.”
Sources:
Benjamin, J. (2018) Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity, and the Third. New York. Routledge
Balsam, Rosemary (2008). “Women Showing Off: Notes on female exhibitionism.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 56(1):99-121.
Balsam & Fischer (2006). Prologue. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. 26(1):1-7.
Bernstein, D. (1990). Female genital anxieties, conflicts, and typical mastery modes. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 71: 151- 165
Deutsch, H. (1945) The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Volume II. Motherhood. New York. Grune & Stratton.
Dorsey, D.(1996) Castration Anxiety or Female Genital Anxiety? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 44(suppl):283-303
Elise, D. (1997). Primary femininity, bisexuality, and the female ego ideal: A re-examination of female developmental theory. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 66:489- 517
Freud, S. (1905) “Three essays on the theory of sexuality.” In SE, Volume 7. London: Hogarth Press.
Fox, Allen; and PhD Friedel, Emma E. “Gender Differences in Patterns and Trends in U.S. Homicide, 1976-2015.” Violence and Gender. (2017). Vol. 4. No. 2.
Harris, A. (2017) Intimacy: The tank in the bedroom. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. (2017) 98:895- 907.
Kaplan, Louis (1991) Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. New York. Doubleday.
Kerenberger ( )
Moore, B. & Fine, B. (1990). Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts. New Haven: Yale University Press. American Psychoanalytic Association
Mahler, (1970).
Marcus, B. (2004). Female passion and the matrix of mother, daughter, and body: Vicissitudes of the maternal transference in the working through of sexual inhibitions. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. 24:680–712.
Paren, H. (1990). On the girls psychosexual development: Reconsideration suggested from direct observation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 38:743- 772.
Raphling, D. (1989). Fetishism in a woman. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 37:465 -491.
Zavitzianos, G. (1971). Fetishism and exhibitionism in the female and the relationship to psychopathy and kleptomania. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 52:297-301.
