Don’t Call Me Baby: The Athena Complex and Feminine Masochism

My close reading of Freud’s “The Economic Problem of Masochism” focuses on his claim that masochism is natural to the feminine constitution and challenges this assumption by demonstrating that the cultural oppression of women creates this alleged masochism. Through a study of women in Euripides’ tragedies, I demonstrate that women in Ancient Greek culture were subject to a “cultural suppression of the instincts” and made to sacrifice their lives through compulsory marriage and childbirth. Androcentric fantasy uses this smokescreen—that women are ‘natural’ masochists—in an attempt to justify the enforced servitude and lack of agency women are afforded in androcentric cultures. Ancient Greek marriage practices reveal that marriage was understood as a means of ‘taming’ maidens in order to control their supposedly excessive sexuality and destructive instincts. I argue that androcentric fantasy imagines the feminine to be helpless and infantile as a counter-formation to the abject fear of powerful women and mothers with agency, particularly because women have been associated with death in the androcentric imagination. “The Athena Complex” refers to Zeus’ swallowing of Metis as representation of the “cultural suppression of the instincts” that is inflicted on women in androcentric cultures, making them appear helpless and masochistic.