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FEMALE EXHIBITIONISM
The limitations of the phallocentric cast of earlier psychoanalytic formula-
tions of “female exhibitionism” linger into the present. In part this con-
nects to certain historical expectations for women’s social behavior, and
to the vicissitudes of Freud’s insufficient knowledge of women in his libid-
inal 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 regard-
ing 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 fan-
tasy 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 analy-
ses of female “showing off” behavior are included.

Exhibitionism: In the broadest sense, the act of attracting attention to

the self. One of the paired component or 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)

E xhibitionism in females, as well as being a sexual and active provo-

cation directed at desiring others, is closely linked to fantasies
about being watched that relate to procreation. The onlookers become

Training and Supervising Analyst, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis;
Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale Medical School; Staff Psychiatrist,
Department of Student Health, Yale University.
Submitted for publication May 28, 2006.
DOI: 10.1177/0003065108315686 99
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Rosemary H. Balsam

sexually aroused, or yearn, envy, and affirm the performers’ vital and
mysterious bodily importance as females. In other papers I have used
extended case material of women to demonstrate the centrality of the female
body’s significance for psychic representation in all stages of a woman’s
development, as opposed to the old (and even contemporary, at times
psychologically compelled) ubiquitous limited comparison, positive or
negative, between female and male external genitals. A girl’s or woman’s
unconscious and conscious reactions to her body’s capacity for child-
bearing, to her corporeal capacity to deliver a baby into the world, are
especially emblematic for behavior focused on the body as female per se
(Balsam 1994, 1996, 2001, 2003). 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” that connect to
fantasies of childbirth.
Exhibitionism is ambiguously defined in the world of biosocial behav-
ioral disciplines that include psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the humanities.
In the English language, adding the suffix “-ism” to create a noun merely
connotes, say, “the practice of [exhibiting] . . . the result of [exhibiting]” or
“ the qualities characteristic of [exhibiting]” and only lastly “an abnormal
condition caused by [exhibiting] . . . ” (Webster’s Dictionary 1979). As a
“paraphilia” in the DSM-IV categorizations, “exhibitionism” (302.4) takes
the last meaning a step further into a medicalized and legal world of assess-
ment that for this diagnosis specifies sexually “dysfunctional” recurrent fan-
tasies about, urges toward, or acts of genital exposure to “unsuspecting”
strangers. Psychoanalysis, placing itself closer than psychiatry to the
humanities in matters of subjectivity, and as a subjective science in which
“the subject is our object of study/expertise” (Bonnie Litowitz, personal
communication 2006), or as a qualitative social science (Chodorow
1999), finds itself in ambiguous definitional places. For example, modern
psychoanalytic gender study, to which this topic of exhibitionism relates, is
at a crossroads with clinical psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic critical theory,
feminist and queer theory, social and evolutionary psychology, and medical
sciences of the body such as brain, genetic, and endocrinological studies.
The “non-perverse” meanings of exhibiting, as well as its socially abrasive
aspects, are interesting to all of these fields, each of which would employ a
different emphasis. The standard psychoanalytic definition (see my epi-
graph from Moore and Fine) is broad, and implies the Freudian psychologi-
cal developmental line that parallels a biological theory of growth. The

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specific childhood roots of exhibitionism could allude to their repetitions in

adult life, covering the range from a temporary preoccupation, to charac-
terological features, to acute transgressive showings of any part of the body
or mind, or indeed even to showing the genitals to strangers.
My emphasis will be on the subjectivity of female patients who in talk-
ing about their bodies and their exhibit warrant the suffix “-ism,” as in
actions and characteristics of showing off. They may not describe the
phenomena to their analysts in any DSM-IV alarming way. I have chosen
individuals on the dramatic side to convey this as a common phenome-
non rooted in the clinically and theoretically underdescribed pleasures in
the female body. I would like to make a case (with many caveats) for the
usefulness of retaining aspects of Freud’s old libido theory, the idea of
psychosexual phases (reformed to include fully both sexes and bisexu-
ality), and ego psychology in these matters. In contrast to all the new ana-
lytic theories beginning with the emergence of self psychology in the
1970s, the body for Freud was refreshingly of prime interest. The emer-
gence of postmodern sex theory in the United States later in the 1990s
further diluted the biological body by radically destabilizing categories of
sexual difference. Urgent questions that arose regarding sex and gender
ontology and foundationalism affected theory in many fields, including
psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Butler 1993; Goldner 2000; Dimen 2000). Sex
and gender categories have since been considered highly fluid and are
regularly believed to be not sustainable on grounds of essential, binary
sexual differences. In many of the influential new psychoanalytic theories
of gender, biology has been sidelined as irrelevant, while object-
relational intersubjectivity is privileged. Benjamin (1995), for example,
who theoretically synthesizes many writers, intensely scrutinizes affects,
meaning, fantasy, mother-baby interactive psychology, fathers and
daughters, identificatory love, and recognition of the other, and very use-
fully challenges binary oppositions in prevailing attitudes, yet she treats
the body as if it were missing. More recently, it is not that the word body
has been absent from psychoanalysts’ preoccupations, or from their book
titles. For example, The Embodied Subject: Minding the Body in
Psychoanalysis, edited by John Muller and Jane Tillman (2007), is a
series of essays essentially on theory construction, in which “embodi-
ment” in psychoanalysis is used in a kind of double entendre—the body
as a trope for psychological containment. There are many other examples
in which peripheral aspects of the body are employed only secondarily
to further enrich theories of the mind. If in our theoretical progress it

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Rosemary H. Balsam

seems important to deconstruct categorizations, as a renunciation of our

inheritance of an old-fashioned, linear psychoanalytic theory, we risk
rendering redundant the otherwise grounding holistic differences
between “males” and “females” as categories that still do hold, after all,
for the macrostructure of the biological body. No matter how our minds
work, individuals are still housed in sexed bodies, the majority of which
are capable of procreation.
I would argue that analytic thinking about sex and gender can benefit
still from maintaining certain aspects of its original biological emphasis.
Central here is Stoller’s fortuitous separation of the concepts of sex and
gender in the 1970s. “Sex” in this scheme is biologically fundamental, and
concerns only body morphology and physiology, whereas “gender,” indeed
as fluid as postmodern thinkers note, and the site of much of our sentient
individuality, is the mind’s interpretation of this body and experience. This
dual set of concepts allows for the legitimacy and usefulness of the post-
modern challenge to the severely limited binary gender categories of the
past—a challenge in tune with the gendered fantasies and enactments
encountered in the clinical setting—while recognizing a person’s simul-
taneous need to manage and integrate his or her usually stable body-
morphological assignment and the secondary sexual characteristics of the
mature female or male body. The dual processes of sex and gender can
come together dynamically in harmony or in conflict (or both) at each junc-
ture of development throughout the life cycle. Following this scheme, my
focus in this paper is on the biologically sexed adequate female body that
I argue has inherent capacities to bring joy to its owner. Excessive pain and
difficulty, when they occur, can be viewed as secondary expressions of
conflict and development gone awry.1
Because Freud (1905) so vividly illuminated the childhood roots of
exhibitionism, the desire to look and be seen is still located psychically
as stemming from a developmentally ancient desire by psychoanalysts of
various schools. When it comes to adult male exhibitionism, the “-ism”
connoting pathology and social boundary crossing is clear. 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. On the one hand the social response has often been severe

1
This is a direct reversal of the original Freudian notion that pleasure for females
can be only hard-won, by working against the grain of a natural biological deficiency.

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and condemning; on the other, encouragements abound for female exhi-

bitionists and scopophilic entertainment and profit. From the inner sub-
jectivity of the woman, my main focus, neither global license nor
condemnation is easy to categorize. The female’s relationship to her body
throughout life allows her to confront (even if she cannot integrate) her
biological capacities for procreation from the earliest times. Their links
to her sexual seeking capabilities are intricately entwined, and at times
the two will overlap. Sex and procreation, I contend, need not be split into
binary, either/or categories in assumed intractable conflict; indeed, they
may articulate in women’s for the most part pleasurable exhibitionistic
desire. Critics of my view about how thoroughly embedded even in tiny
girls is the potential notion that their bodies must be exactly like their
mothers in the ability to produce babies reprise the classical position that
a preoedipal level of development puts strict limitations on the girl child’s
information about her future adult capabilities. We need not deny the
girl’s other nongenital fantasies or her elaborations on other attitudes that
are environmentally present. In the case of the body per se, infantile fan-
tasies can be comparative; they are based on watching, feeling, and hear-
ing grown-up physical activities. Why then is the mother’s pregnancy not
granted the same major level of exposure and encoding vis-à-vis the
child’s curiosity and perceptions as the primal scene or the sight of the
penis? Reactions to the growth of a baby inside the mother’s body are no
more a test of a child’s mental exactitude than the other acknowledged
and storied nursery preoccupations with the parents’ bodies—but they
all are equal opportunity events for body comparisons, mirroring, and
related fantasy.

C A S E P R E S E N TAT I O N : M S . A

Ms. A, an elegant married woman in her mid-thirties with a four-year-old

daughter, was very aware of the effects on onlookers of her tall carriage,
turquoise eyes, and wavy black shoulder-length tresses. At our first meet-
ing, her fashionable trouser suit was chic, tailored with a hint of lace at the
throat, and I noticed that the band of her watch was exactly the same color
as her eyes. Over time one could tell she was aware of her looks: the tex-
tures and colors of her clothing and accessories were exquisitely chosen to
highlight today her pearly skin, tomorrow her smooth throat, and the day
after the sparkle of her eyes or her long limbs. She related in a friendly and
articulate manner. Her main complaints were about her love relationships.

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Rosemary H. Balsam

Ms. A had divorced two years earlier. She never seemed able to sustain a
boyfriend for more than six months thereafter. As we talked more, it
became obvious that she was a psychologically minded person with abun-
dant energy and talents in her field of work, but with significant anxieties
about intimacy. I recommended analysis.
I will tell her analytic story emphasizing the meanings of her use of
her body, in her life and in our work together.
Ms. A was the fourth of five children in a Midwestern family. Her
father, a building contractor, was successful and wealthy; her mother was
a teacher. Everyone in her family was highly intelligent, and she, like her
siblings, was always head of the class; they all went to Ivy League
colleges and professional schools. The fifth sibling, “the baby,” four
years her junior and the only boy, had been killed by a car as he crossed
the road to the shops opposite their home. He was eight when he died and
she twelve and in puberty, just taking an interest in boys. Ms. A had been
very close to him; in fact, she said, “I couldn’t wait for him to be born. I
was devastated when he died.” Her eyes glistened with tears in the telling.
She rightly felt that his life and premature death had a great deal to do
with her present difficulty in sustaining close relationships with “boys,”
as she called her lovers.
Her lifestyle at this juncture included a live-in nanny and work in a
nearby town for the advertising branch of a big construction company,
where she was getting rapid promotions. Her job, to which she was ded-
icated, involved presenting her firm and visiting dignitaries with “pitches”
for allegiances with advertising interests. It was-fast paced work that
depended for its success not only on her business smarts but also on her
persuasiveness in creating financial deals. Many of the members of her
audience were males. I heard the following kind of statement as a com-
mentary on her perception of how these onlookers were responding to her
sexualized business come-on: “I can tell when they light up, put the spot-
light on me; when they gesture toward me, when they are captured by my
graphics, and when they stumble when talking to me afterward and avert
their gaze one-to-one but still give stealthy glances at my boobs or ass [gig-
gles]. I can tell the ones that are totally intrigued. And then they phone
afterward, ask me to drinks, and then I know I’ve got them.” Her excite-
ment in the telling and her pleasurable wriggle on the couch caused her
phone to fall out of her pocket and onto the floor.
I asked her what she made of that moment. “A phone-fall! Just as I
was thinking of that last one Joe and his phone-call . . . oh I don’t know

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. . . suppose I want you to witness something—like how it is I get them to

fall for me.” In this session, about two years into her analysis, Ms. A had
analogized me to her watching mother, fearing my disapproval of her
“unbounded pleasures in showing off,” as she called it. Later she fanta-
sized envy on my part. She was sure I would want her to be “safely mar-
ried” and more stay-at-home; there, we agreed, she (and I) would in her
imagination be protected from these “shameless” adventures. We worked
on how she attributed shame-provocation to me in my analytic role of
asking for more detail, and she was regularly angry at my intrusion into
an inner life she had preferred to keep private from “grown-ups,” espe-
cially senior women like me. We thus were involved in her oedipal con-
figurations. Her father had been a dashing guy in her estimate, and she
consciously saw her mother as “pretty dowdy” and “in truth no match for
me.” These classically oedipal scenarios illuminated the great trauma of
Ms. A’s life.
Albert, her little brother, had been her favorite, born just when she
was at the height of excited curiosity about babies in Mommy’s tummy.
He died when she was becoming excited about assuming at last the
longed-for shape of a mature woman. Being a highly competitive child,
with both her older sisters and her mother, she began to remember as a
young girl actively yearning to be the same shape as her mother. “I
thought her shape was so great—I still am drawn to doodle these pumpkin
shapes over and over in every gorgeous detailed texture with my felt col-
ored pens.” The features of the mother’s body that she stressed were the
big abdomen, the feel of the hidden creature’s motions and kicks inside,
and her mother’s big breasts. Evidence that we were dealing with mate-
rials that were partly unconscious emerged in dreams, or in references
right in the office. One such was her reaction to a painting by Georgia
O’Keeffe. For Ms. A the voluptuous red and purple flowers were associ-
ated to images of the vulva, the introitus, and the vaginal canal, and at
times to images of genitals interlocked in coitus. Ms. A then remembered
being especially fascinated and excitedly horror-struck by how her baby
brother got out of the mother’s vulva. She talked intensely to her bigger
sisters, even in later years, about her curiosity regarding childbirth. The
girls shared fantasies and giggles. They were preoccupied with how the
head of a baby could get out of their mother’s vulva. How much did it
hurt? Did she bleed? Buckets worth? Did she scream? Was it fun? Oh-
my-god! How could they witness this for themselves? They lay in bed
together some nights that must have been in the first years of little

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Albert’s life, endlessly wondering what it would be like to “do that”—

that is, give birth some day and have sex with a man. “We looked at each
other to see how we grew as one or another reached puberty. We end-
lessly compared our sizes.”
Unfolding these stories bit by bit in the context of daily happenings,
or in reference to something about my behavior or her fantasies about it,
Ms. A re-created both a past history of her female body preoccupations
and her successful sublimations in her present work life. Occasionally
she would speak about her fascination with her little brother’s baby body,
but she was more interested in her father’s attitudes to sex, and in
glimpses of his body, than she seemed to be in the little brother. Familial
sexual associations emerged in her associations as she talked of having
sex with one of her boyfriends or feeling competition with a girlfriend.
Ms A. did not seem to me to be very troubled with “penis envy” in a
rivalrous way, as are some women who view their brothers more as peers,
or as sexed and gendered favorites of the parents. The death of her brother
may have rendered this material more repressed than this treatment allowed
to surface. Ms. A had vaguely at first, and then with stronger conviction
because of the accounting of various family scenes, remembered having
had a “secret crush” on her father; she suspected herself that she could eas-
ily imagine having wanted his baby, but in association it seemed to be her
baby. In fact, in speaking of her daughter one day and remarking that the
girl’s coloring was similar to that of her own father, Ms. A touched on the
idea that this child was in fantasy the child of her oedipal longings. That
proved to her that she was “the head of her class,” triumphing over her
mother and sisters. She came to an insight that her young husband and
other males were “boys” because none of them could measure up to Dad.
Being Daddy’s girl had been greatly prized, but it was Mother’s body that
had been the richest source of envy and admiration and mystery for these
girls to share in this family. The 101 percent, the grade to beat, the clinched
deals: the big payoff. The measure of success was to be filled with the
essence of their mother’s power in order to get a male sexually interested
and to end up with the best prize of all, one’s own baby production. Each
business “presentation” that Ms. A gave to her audience of males was
therefore a vehicle to show her wares, to compete unconsciously with her
mother’s body, especially in its potentially procreative state. Her psyche
had the fluidity of an artist in her ability to regress, fantasize, and play out
a past superimposed on a present and still utilize the interconnections
between past and present, animated now as the analysis progressed, pro-
pelling a present tense without losing touch with her reality.
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Here is a seminal fantasy scenario that will demonstrate her attach-

ment to her body and her urges to show it off to gain a pleasurable yield
of some sort from a male—a yield that usually was somehow always con-
nected to her female sexual ability and her pride in thoughts of procreat-
ing and “producing”: Many times Ms. A talked of being called up to the
podium to give a PowerPoint presentation. (The phallic reference titillated
her, but the associative tilt was to her own female “power point”—the
vulva, clitoris, and opening to the vagina—her “cunt” or “hot point,” as she
felt free to say to me or quip with computer lingo after several years.) She
reported a fantasy of taking off her panties, lying down, opening her legs,
and feeling erotic as she imagined showing her vulva—as she said, “pink,
pouting, slightly open and damp”—to the male onlookers for whom she
was showing off. The fantasy would occur when she was excited by
clients “to attract their business.” She felt playful and elated about it, in the
early years with pangs of the forbidden, as she told it to me. Sometimes
she confessed that she would go afterward to a nearby bathroom to mas-
turbate. In her accompanying fantasy, her excitement would culminate
with the image of the head of a baby coming through her widely stretched
perineum, to be followed by the rest of its slithery form. The sexual excite-
ment that accumulated as she progressed in her “floor show” seemed to
“demand” this masturbatory outlet. This is by no means the first time I
have encountered masturbatory, highly excited orgiastic fantasies about
giving birth. They contain sadomasochistic components of fantasizing the
pleasure of anticipated relief in an explosive birth that is “paid for” by a
painful buildup of tension. Anal fantasy is often more closely related to
these birthing scenarios than male phallic fantasy is, but in the sense of
anally passing great “gifts.” Such fantasies are woven into active female
body autoeroticism, analogous perhaps to male masturbatory fantasies of
pleasurable explosion in orgasm. There is undoubted unbridled aggression
melded with erotic pleasures in these fantasies. In listening closely to
these urges of Ms. A, I could not detect tonalities of coexistent loss, or the
characteristic inadequacy or anxiety associated with a feeling of being a
“fraud” in public or with acute depressive feelings of loss (the signs of
which I’ve come to think of as associations to activated fantasies of vulval
“damage,” as in phallic castration fantasies that are often accompanied by
penis envy).
Ms. A sometimes recalled being thrillingly stimulated sexually by
the examining fingers of her obstetrician while in the lithotomy position
during prenatal examinations. Her associations led frequently to all kinds

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of feelings and sensations about giving birth—the “show” beforehand in

the bursting of the waters, the stretching, the pushing, the “crowning” of
the head. And her main memories in this regard would return to her
mother and other women’s “crowning glories”—their babies.
An analytic reader may well wonder how this birthing preoccupation
was influenced by the death of the little brother, and may accurately sur-
mise that Ms. A’s repeated baby-making fantasy was shaped by her wish
to make up to her parents for the family loss. A reader could also intuit
that the sexually tantalizing elements of Ms. A’s floor show might also
encode fears of direct sexual fantasy about her father or actual sex with
other males. A reader could also wonder about her homosexual titillation
of her sisters (and her analyst as transferential sister) and her maternally
derived procreative “pregenital” fantasy systems. Her showing off on the
podium, after all, is filled with the buildup of sexual tension. Elements of
being a “tease” and of the inhibition of heterosexual directness were
also analyzed here, reminiscent of patterns that have been reported about
the sexual behavior of exotic dancers, yet Ms. A was still capable of co-
creating the “big deal” for her firm. She did not become paralyzed in a
teasing mode. Later in the treatment she actually had a relationship with
a male boss, and terminated while pregnant for the second time, with plans
to move from the area. Her great enjoyment in her theater of PowerPoint
presentation continued.
In this account I have purposely emphasized the analysis of the excite-
ments and pleasure encoded in Ms. A’s psyche. In addition, I have noted
her aggressive and defensive uses of sexuality to control men and have
them do exactly what she wants. Partly this expressed her deep resentment
about her parents’ preoccupation with the now idealized brother’s death. It
also expressed her wish to have controlled her brother better, and her guilt
about her fantasied role in his death. There were many twists and turns in
these aggressive and sadistic desires that we learned about that had male
aspects as well as the female ones I have presented. But my report is meant
to bring forward the pleasurable creative forces that might have been
passed over given a different emphasis, but that lent full spirit to her joie de
vivre.

C A S E P R E S E N TAT I O N : M S . B

Ms. B, an art student whom I saw in intensive psychotherapy, was a young

woman with an avid “stage mother.” She had spent the year she was sixteen

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being a swimsuit model. “It was perfect for me. I thought of myself as being
entirely a grown-up. I was showing—showing off gloriously—I was dis-
playing everything I had—and I knew from Mother it was good—that’s the
other side of those conventional warnings about being sluttish and sexy and
show-offy. It dawns on you that she thinks you’re powerful and that you’re
incredibly, unbearably enticing. I longed to be pregnant—I used to push my
smooth little belly out a little bit, daring to display—here folks, this is what
I have . . . look at my lithe little belly . . . it’ll grow big some day . . . look at
my crotch . . . it’s pretty, it’s wet . . . dirty thoughts . . . I knew I was safe
on the runway. Mother liked watching. Look Mother, everybody’s watching
me. . . . They think I’m good. They want to feast their eyes on me.” And of
course, at this moment in the process the “everybody watching” included me.
Ms. B was excited to display herself to both her mother in the past and me in
the present, even if old guilts and anxieties about competing with her ador-
ing and punitive mother image would emerge.
The patient’s stated and unstated questions in the transference were:
Can I compete with you? Can I show my sex? Can I display my body to
you—in image, in metaphor, in words? Will you admire me, permit me,
encourage me, get anxious, angry, retaliate? Do you need to insist always
that you are bigger than me as a female—weightier, more fecund, bigger-
breasted? “Let me show you my stuff,” she’d say to me when she brought
in artwork. She regularly criticized the art on my walls as amateurish and
fantasized that I had done them myself in my spare time. At these times I
was more in the despised father transference.
“Showing” (and “showing off”) was a very important aspect of this
young woman’s identity as a female. Her internalized male elements2 con-
cerned dynamics of concealment and shame.3 Her father she thought of as
sweet but easily dominated by her mother. Uncles in her family were “losers.”
Her younger brother was a drug addict. Ms. B did not expect much from
men, and we worked over many disappointments and dashed hopes that she
had experienced, as well as her linked despising of me in the transference.
2
Here I do not mean on my part any stereotypic “masculine” societal evaluation,
but experience-near elements for her as an individual that are associatively connected
to her own father and to her experiences, attitudes, and memories vis-à-vis other
males in her life (Balsam 2001).
3
Paradoxically, for “old” theory proponents who believe that sexed lines of devel-
opment are inherently in conflict, and who would therefore be compelled to see this
denigration of males as a female defense against unconsciously “desired” maleness,
the prideful female body dynamic also would be perceived as a defense against obvi-
ously male desirable features.

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For example, though she wished her Dad would show more excitement
about her career, in reviewing her mother’s intense and unrelenting involve-
ment with her throughout her life, she thought that her “stage mother” had
sidelined him; then again, he passively participated in assuming this minor
position. She perhaps overvalued herself as female, but she genuinely felt
that she had a lot of talent to show off. Her attitude, in contrast to the old
phallocratic position linking passivity inevitably to femininity, the essence
of herself as female was deeply connected to an outgoing and active display
of herself. At times it could become a defensive buffer against intolerable
helplessness, but at other times it seemed free and pleasurable.
After about a year in treatment, she revealed to me that her mother had
in her youth actually been an exotic dancer in a big-city nightclub. This
emerged during a session of tears about how her disorganized and impecu-
nious father had not paid her tuition bill. She was enraged, as was her
mother. The father was the main source of a spotty family income. This rage
triggered a set of fantasies about selling her body and being a prostitute to
support herself. She grew excited about this prospect and sounded to me as
if on the verge of taking action.
She reported the approval of her mother. There was an air of “Damn
you, Dr. B!” in the sessions, which we connected to her hope that I would
waive my fee to save her from the streets. Again I was in the “worthless”
male role. New material then began to emerge about the mother’s past. Ms.
B with her mother’s collusion went on the internet, allegedly to “research”
the possibility of work with escort services (to me rather shady-sounding).
She breathlessly reported the websites she had found and admitted taking
great pleasure in her fantasy of me watching her exploring the nude and
explicit postings of female “predators”—“queens of the jungle” she called
them—who were searching for johns to prey on. She accurately sensed my
anxiety in the countertransference, though it stemmed from reasons differ-
ent from those she imagined. From her point of view I was anxious because
I was torn in my desire to encourage her, so that we could have this deli-
cious shared secret of how she was supporting herself financially, a secret
that made her specially interesting to me and allowed us to “share” our con-
tempt for “the establishment and authority,” which she also saw me as a
part of and which would surely find her immoral. It was obvious that within
this split I was at last in the approved sphere of her attachment to her
mother-power. In her imagination the despised father stood outside, watch-
ing, rebuking, and rebuffed. The “girls” could make it on their own by force
of their own sexual ability to “use” males for their own ends. The photos

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on the internet that she was drawn to most were pictures of pregnant pros-
titutes. Ms. B, now in competition with these edgy women, began to imag-
ine herself pregnant and to experience an even greater thrill in “showing”
herself on the internet. She vividly recalled her modeling experience as a
teenager. She perceived these women to be “very proud” of themselves and
gleefully untroubled by their public display. She identified with their pos-
sible wish to shock conservative people like me, who “are part of the prob-
lem and not part of the solution.” Again I was in the degraded male position
of duplicitous power. I was a deadbeat dad, whose pretense of virtue was
exposed in the thought “Look what you’re making me do”; yet this posture
was also a defense against the pleasures of showing and being admired and
acquired for money—a deep internalization of her mother’s value system.
“All he ever wanted from my mother must have been sex,” she said bitterly
of her father. “All I ever wanted from you was your fee,” I added.
Ms. B wept. She longed for me to take care of her like a “good father,”
in a pregenital sense of making her feel protected like a baby. But I think I
have told enough of this treatment to demonstrate the exhibitionistic Ms.
B’s use of her body.
The dynamics of Ms. B’s strong desire to display and show her
female body attributes were accompanied by more conflict than Ms. A
evinced, and arose from a much more complexly disturbed background
and set of family relations. However, what their inner stories have in
common is evidence of strong attachments and confidence in their bod-
ies as pleasurable and female, with well-developed body images of their
powers to attract males, compete with females sexually, and procreatively
and/or sexually attract females. Ms. B’s less conflicted ties to her own
body had been reinforced successfully by and with her mother, though not
in a manner that is stereotypically “healthy,” given their twin-like close-
ness. Her mother and she reflected each other more as twin peers than as
mother and daughter. Ms. B voiced notions of exaggerated and defensive
idealized female self-sufficiency, as if her mother alone had created a
classic Madonna-whore split often seen in males. She was also engaged
with pregnancy and birthing in relation to her desires to “show” and sell
her art or her body, signifying defensive abilities to manage on her own
without needing parents.
As young girls Ms. A and Ms. B had acquired early on a confidence in
their female bodies that I propose connects to a pleasurable and pleasure-
seeking female autoerotism and body attachment that is expressed within
the girl’s biological growth trajectory and the matrix of familial embodied

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relationships, and is especially impacted by the mother’s experience with

her own body. The patterning can be traced into more mature sexed and pro-
creative transformations and into adult relationships and work. As a young
artist Ms. B was intensely gratified to show her “own work,” the product of
her sublimations and creativity. Ms. A, too, easily sublimated into work her
sense of her female attributes.

L I T E R AT U R E R E V I E W

My rationale for next looking at the literature, before further discussing

exhibitionism issues, is that I want to draw the reader’s attention to the
exceptionally scant psychoanalytic literature on the topic. Based on pri-
vate discussions of my point of view on women’s positive desire to show
their bodies, on my public presentations on the topic, and on analysts’
informal accounts of experiences in their offices that tend to confirm my
point, my impression is that I am far from alone in appreciating a spec-
trum of female body issues and their mentalization that concern exhibi-
tion. These phenomena in women’s psychology range from a virtual lack
of references to the body in extremely repressed patients, to their most
flamboyantly dominant presence in patients’ associations, to instances of
socially transgressive manifestations. Most often we analysts are focused
on the defensive nature of the showing, and on the undoubtedly significant
encoded aggression of the uses of the body for malignant enticement and
manipulation. I certainly appreciate these important strands in the activities
and fantasies in the cases of Ms. A and Ms. B, but often such formulations
defensively overlook the powerful female pleasures that patients are also
conveying.
There is but a single paper on the topic of “female exhibitionism” in a
search of the PEP CD Archive up to 2002. This paper, published in 1971
by George Zavitzianos, is the story of a female college student who, among
other actions, drove down the highway without panties, aware that truckers
were ogling her from their elevated perches in their cabs. This paper pre-
dictably ignores (although it beautifully records) the young woman’s mem-
ories of her intriguing (to me) reactions as a little girl to feeling painfully
insignificant bodily in comparison to her heavily pregnant mother; it also
records the complicating experiences of traumatic sexual abuse by the
mother and beatings by the father. The author instead focuses on the
abstraction of her female genital as painfully penis-deficient (probably then
the only “classical” dynamic female body formulation that this analyst

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would have considered). While noting that female exhibitionism had never
before been a topic in the literature, and fetishism only rarely, Zavitzianos
presented an argument compelling in its logic and well stated, were one to
begin with the mathematical equation “vulva and vagina” equal “penis
absence”: “The very fact that the woman has no penis, and feels this as a
narcissistic mortification makes her replace the infantile desire to expose
all other parts of the body, with the exception of the genitalia. Since dis-
placed exhibition cannot reassure against castration fear it cannot develop
into an actual perversion” (p. 298). Ergo, exhibitionism exists in women
only as a compensation for not being male. 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’s formulation was the
fact that this student analysand went on her highway spree 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 resem-
bling her violent father, as displacements from taboo excitements with her
analyst. I read into the story many elements of female-to-female competi-
tion and revenge toward the mother, as well as pained and triumphant com-
parisons of female bodies that I think are more obvious than any penis
reference. Other interpretations might occur to other analysts, but my point
is that if the idea of an interpretation based on the female body does not
occur to an analyst, for whatever reason, then it will not appear as a notable
dynamic in the case formulation.
A paper by nonpsychoanalytic psychology researchers from Leeds
(Hugh-Jones, Gough, and Littlewood 2005) affirms too that the “litera-
ture on sexual exhibition virtually omits reference to the experience of
women” (p. 261). Though in a different mental health discipline, they,
like me, cite references from the 1970s that declare that unlike a man, a
woman cannot become erotically aroused by exposing her genitalia.
These authors connect these sentiments to a cultural discourse that
eschews 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. (Elise [personal communication 2006] and
many other writers, especially in the last two decades, have challenged
this idea, but their critique has not yet been absorbed into psychoanalytic
thinking.) The Leeds group cite one case of female exhibitionism
reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry (Hollender, Brown, and

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Robach 1977). This is a story of an exotic dancer who “flashed” open her
coat at the door of her club to attract patrons by the sight of her naked
body. The dynamics that were stressed in this paper were (in tune with
my own proposal) the notable difference between male and female exhi-
bitionists. However, it concluded, based on a self psychological formula-
tion, that because females exhibit only to assuage feelings of
worthlessness, there is nothing “sexual” present.
The Leeds researchers talked on the internet to female exhibitionist
subjects. They did “discourse analysis” on the questionnaires and inter-
views. Recognizing the flaws of this design, however, they felt that the
evidence they could garner just from listening to what the women said
about themselves led them in directions other than the ones they had antici-
pated: poor self-esteem, poor body image, or feelings of “worthlessness”
as the trigger for these activities.
The researchers were struck by how positively these women viewed
these opportunities for body display, as they described greatly enjoying
“showing off” to be admired and affirmed in having a desirable body by an
interested audience. In fact, the dancers believed that they did it for “per-
sonal fulfillment,” and they tried 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 also that psychoanalysis needs to be part of an ongo-
ing attempt to better understand female psychology, and that old shibboleths
are hard to relinquish.
When the horse of exhibitionism comes up for discussion, the cart of
fetishism is seldom far behind. Agreement with Freud regarding the con-
cept of identical “castration anxiety” for both sexes is what has automati-
cally linked the constellations of exhibitionism and fetishism. The latter
has been described as consistent with male body dynamics. Given my
view of female exhibitionism as based in part on female sexual and pro-
creative seeking activities, however, I would reserve “female fetishism”
for females who have taken on, for whatever reasons, 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 in women than on female exhibitionism. The papers I have read
(e.g., a 1989 paper by David Raphling) seem to be again formulated from
the point of view that the male organ is the only one that women recog-
nize. In the case presented by Raphling. the woman’s recorded response
to her mother’s body and her fantasies of pregnancy are recorded in the

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text, but again the female body is granted no significance in the formula-
tion. 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 rationale exists to ignore another equation: “baby equals
female baby-making equipment.”
An interesting book by Louise Kaplan (1991) deals with female per-
versions, with much stress on socialized gender roles. Certainly her
women draw attention to their bodies. I am in agreement with her stress
on female sexuality as the inner genital sensuality described by Judith
Kestenberg, and with her sense that female perversions have dynamics
different from those of male perversions. Unfortunately, her formulations
of perversion are too transgressive and action-filled to help me much with
an argument on behalf of an internal spectrum for everyday life. She
argues less for motivations stemming from female sexuality than for a
cultural overdomination of womens’ 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 uncon-
scious masculinity. (Because I agree with Elise’s critique of socially gen-
dered confusions [1997], I try not to use “femininity” at all in its
stereotypic meaning in my writing or teaching, as it is too hard to assume
that we are all speaking of the same quality. I confine “femininity” to an
individual’s familial connections with qualities of the female figures she
herself internalizes.

DISCUSSION

To talk of showing the body as the expression of a desire for sexual

power, as an orgy of body narcissism, or as 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. Other pieces concern the awe—both maternal and
phallic—within experiences of adolescent and adult sexuality, and the
dread of being the body container of infinite maternal creativity and
destructiveness. Such insights we owe to writers like Deutsch, Greenacre,
Klein, Kestenberg, Kristeva, and many others who have portrayed the
interior life. After Mahler wove separation issues between mother and
child into the developmental sequence in the 1970s, many painful female
body issues were automatically subsumed under problems of separation
between mother and daughter. The frequently noted closeness between

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mothers and daughters tended to be seen as evidence of a primitive fix-

ation reflecting an intense and pathological mirroring of same-sex bod-
ies. There seemed little room for any model of closeness that might be
consistent with a daughter’s health or enjoyment of her body. 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 that early narcissistic territory of the daughter’s pregenital develop-
ment. Hence exhibitionism in an adult female may well have been auto-
matically subsumed under the umbrella of a pathological bid for
separation and ill-directed freedom. This dynamic certainly exists
(Shapiro 2006), but these days, in the light of insights afforded us by
attachment theory—which suggests an infant’s capacity for separateness
greater than 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 Fischer 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 may be overinvolved by some stan-
dards, or underinvolved for fear of her own sexuality (Marcus 2004). In
this mother-daughter literature, the body itself tends to be a passing ref-
erent in terms of its use in solving other conflicts, or in the admixture of
internalized object relations.
If we acknowledge that female exhibitionism is a complex set of
behaviors that is surely replete with compromise formations, the missing
procreative piece is an important window into female fantasy life.
Common though the phenomenon probably is, to my knowledge it has
never been mentioned in the analytic literature. Showing off certainly con-
cerns the inherent powers of the female body—its beauty, ugliness, attrac-
tions, or repulsions 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.
(I am not here privileging an actual concrete pregnancy and therefore do
not address the literature on the actual condition of being pregnant,
although obviously this feature too is displayed for strangers, especially
when the pregnant woman wears the short tight T-shirts that are fashion-
able these days that bare the midriff!) The biological female baby-making,
functioning in fantasy if not in fact, naturally exudes the promise
of an aura of robust health, the promotion of curves in buttock and thigh,
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
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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. The patient’s position on the couch with the
analyst hidden behind as spectator is a ready arena for a woman’s fantasy
of being seen by a captive onlooker whose fantasy life in turn is to be titi-
lated. There is much therefore one can hear in many women’s associ-
ative communications that focuses on the appearance of the body—in pain
or in pleasure.
Childbirth is a very special set of fantasies that specifically engages
a woman’s genital exposure. How common this act is, and yet also how
downplayed in psychoanalytic theory. Listening to Ms. A’s memories and
body experiences—and to many other girls and women with similar
thoughts—one can appreciate the worries or excitements about this kind
of experience.4 Girls’ fantasies of the oral and anal periods, later trans-
formed 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 attendants. As with Ms. A’s talk of “showing,” “crowning,” etc.,
many women know these moments well. Many remember them because
the words accurately reflect the feeling tonalities they experienced. The
preobstetrical folk history of midwifery may account for this.
Few papers have taken childbirth itself as their subject. Deutsch’s
cases in her chapter “Delivery” (1945) is therefore an outstanding contri-
bution. Her experience-near intrapsychic inferences regarding different
kinds of birthing experiences are unsurpassed. The admixture of joy,
excitement, physical exertion, and exhilaration, the exultation in 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 the offspring—all are rendered
eloquently in this text, which is freer than her other chapters from her
4
I want neither to convey to the reader that I deny the pains in the frequent dark
experiences of female sex and procreation, nor to seem that I am romanticizing the
female condition in giving birth. But in order to challenge the veil of darkness, pain,
and negativity surrounding female body experience that predominates in the psycho-
analytic literature, I may well present female body pleasure in a way that will strike
some as defensively unmodulated. This is not because the patients themselves were
necessarily so one-sided but because I wish to highlight the articulated but much less
acknowledged aspects.

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questionable theoretical categorizations. Pleasurable exhibitionism is

paramount in these recorded experiences. (In spite of the evidence of pri-
mal pleasure that dominates her account, she stresses theoretically the
masochism and narcissism of females as an “explanation,” as if direct
pleasure in this female act must be explained away.) One woman patient
of mine said, “to show the world I have it in me to give a child into the
world”; another, “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 expo-
sure and genital exposure is valued in this context, as well as a heightened
appreciation and love of the organs that have produced this intense,
unique, and exultant world, a world that will continue with the mother’s
exposing her full breasts 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.
Bergler (1959) described the fears that may be aroused in a woman
anticipating childbirth in the context of postpartum depression. He
addressed the issue of shame in the body display of giving birth. He
described violations of modesty, and women’s exhibitionistic fears and
inhibitions. He says that the girl’s entire education emphasizes the idea of
modesty. During pregnancy, he points out, and especially during the deliv-
ery, rules of “decency” are suspended. Not only the medical personnel but
outsiders are involved, as eventually a pregnancy can no longer be con-
cealed. The assumption here is that at base women are automatically deal-
ing with modesty and shame. These days, considering the sights on the
internet and in the streets, it seems that this modesty can no longer be seen
as inherent in being female; rather, it is a cultural phenomenon that shifts
from era to era, or a pathological symptom. Bergler implies, but does not
find credible, modesty’s other side, which I emphasize in this paper: body
exhibitionism and pride. George Simmel in the Berlin Poliklinik, like
Bergler a man of his time, empathically pained, compared the vulnera-
bility and shame of a woman in childbirth to an analytic patient on the
couch. He asked: “Why should a pregnant woman be humiliated, forced by
medical educators to expose her most difficult hour to hundreds of students,
onlookers, and audience members?” (Danto 1999, pp. 1283–1284).
The taboo, the fear and guilt of looking, and yet the urgent desire to
look at the female in her most exposed and awesome corporeal task is
reflected in Simmel’s comment. Many witnesses may not wholeheartedly
want to look, as testified by the ambivalence of fathers in the delivery room.
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Others may crowd the delivery room eager with their cameras, elbowing
out the attending staff. Reactions range across the spectrum. Bergler and
Simmel exemplify fear and awe so stirred up in the observer that they
overidentify with the woman in pity, or shy away from the pleasure as a
taboo. Bedside attendants of the event can become underidentified, cold
and numbed by overstimualtion.
The woman herself may be having a different experience concerning
shame, because, I would argue, she has had a lifetime of preparation (for
good or ill) and is totally absorbed in the given moment. I cannot recall any
of my patients who are mothers (whether psychiatric patients or obstetric
patients in the days when I delivered babies) telling me they were humiliated
or ashamed by the exposure of childbirth at the time of delivery. Many deliv-
ering women themselves will talk more about the delight in seeing in the mir-
ror the baby emerge, or they may talk of impatience at unnecessary time
spent in the lithotomy position for the doctor’s convenience, when they feel
an urgency to be with the infant and their husband or partner. Birthing
mothers often take pleasure in the exposure of their powerful genitals and
bodies in action, and pleasure in the general accolade of those in the
delivery room. As Deutsch points out about the woman in childbirth, “her
awareness is narrowed by her absorption in the progress of the birth”
(p. 210). This means that her acuity vis-à-vis her bodily and inner processes
is in an enhanced state. While analysis and other mental health disciplines
either overlook female showing off as so “normal” that it deserves little
comment, or emphasize only the most disturbing and unconsciously patho-
logical nature of female showing off, the female vulva and vagina may be
the most regularly exposed body opening (apart from maybe the throat
and 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 clinical accounts and our
emphases in theory still treat female body pleasure as a well-kept secret.

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WOMEN SHOWING OFF: NOTES ON FEMALE EXHIBITIONISM

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