Women Showing Off: Notes on Female Exhibitionism

Abstract

The limitations of the phallocentric cast of earlier psychoanalytic formulations of “female exhibitionism” linger into the present. In part this connects to certain historical expectations for women's social behavior, and to the vicissitudes of Freud's insufficient knowledge of women in his libidinal psychosexual phasing used as a basis for analytic understanding. The contemporary fade of libido theory contributes to the neglect of such topics as they relate to the biological body. Yet ease and conflict regarding conscious and unconscious female body image representations related to that stepchild of theory—pregnancy and childbirth in particular—play a major role in female body display. 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. The focus here on female exhibitionism suggests a normative spectrum for pleasurably 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. Two cases accenting analyses of female “showing off” behavior are included.