ABSTRACT
In the mainstream, heterosexist culture, women are complimented for looking feminine: soft, slim, sexy, and elegant. Relational psychotherapy is a practice of freedom. It is about finding, if only for a brief moment, an idiom that is uniquely-one's-own-in-the-other's-presence, experiencing the pleasure of sharing it with that other, and feeling the other's reverberation. In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a handmaid who has been deprived of all vestiges of her own identity and autonomy finds pleasure in sex with a lover, which is forbidden to her as she belongs to her master, even as she expects to be discovered and killed at any moment. Heterosexual men face disapproval if they are attracted to "lower caste" women—those who do not fit the beauty ideal. Sisgenders and transgenders, first-, second-, and third-world women, queers, and men face different forms of this oppression.
