ABSTRACT
The chapter considers both male and female stalking to be motivated by one or another perverse scenario, usually sadomasochistic. Extreme bondage and submission, then, are perversions of romantic love, either in the acts themselves or in the fantasies that motivate them, and are key factors in the stalking of and by either gender. E. F. Kales have captured the essence, psychoanalytically speaking, of erotomanic revenge in sexual stalking. In men, according to E. Jones, aphanisis takes the specific form of castration anxiety that ensues from loss of arousal or desire. In women, it consists of separation anxiety and oedipal anxieties about loss of sexual feeling. People perceive female stalking, Orit Kamir says, as subverting patriarchal sexual norms; and people see male stalking as serving the patriarchal social order. In Peeping Tom, as in other films with similar subject matter, voyeurism–exhibitionism almost imperceptibly blends with its close psychosexual counterpart, sadism–masochism.
