HREQ 1900 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Secondary Sex Characteristic, Libido, Bisexuality

• School: York University
• Department: Human Rights and Equity Studies
• Course: HREQ 1900
• Professor: Nadiah Habib

Document Summary

Freud advanced the idea of the polymorphous perverse, which suggests that infants derive sexual pleasure from all surfaces of the body. For freud it is only later that sexuality gets socially organized, by first going through a bisexual phase and then becoming genitally organized through the difficult psychical tasks of becoming boys and girls, and later, men and women. It is important to note that freud did make an assumption that there were only biological males and females, and it is through this assumption, that he advanced the idea of our bisexuality. What we can take from this, is that freud understood libidinal desire, at least initially, not to be constrained by socially constructed mores. That we have desire for pleasure with and from other bodies regardless of their sex, it is only later in our development that we organize our desire to be for same-sex or opposite sex.