ABSTRACT
Gynecologists exhibited mad impatience, addiction to chance, ferocious competitiveness with other men—and a paradoxical dependence upon them for judgment of success in self-making. Their anxiety over identity, their measurement of themselves in terms of what I describe in Chapter 15 as “the spermatic economy” and “proto-sublimation,” and the consequent and interactive responses to women were typical of democratic American men as Tocqueville had described them in the first half of the century, and as they were of their contemporaries in other fields. They thought of themselves and the world as John Todd and the other popular, Franklinesque stylists of male behavior had assumed and advised. Selfmaking was a particularly clear (and self-defeating) reproductive goal in the hands of gynecologists. 1
