The Second Sex

  Man’s “anatomical destiny” is profoundly different from woman’s. Their moral and social situations are no less different. Patriarchal civilization condemned woman to chastity; the right of man to relieve his sexual desires is more or less openly recognized, whereas woman is confined within marriage: for her the act of the flesh, if not sanctified by the code, by a sacrament, is a fault, a fall, a defeat, a weakness; she is obliged to defend her virtue, her honor; if she “gives in” or if she “falls,” she arouses disdain, whereas even the blame inflicted on her vanquisher brings him admiration. From primitive civilizations to our times, the bed has always been accepted as a “service” for a woman for which the male thanks her with gifts or guarantees her keep: but to serve is to give herself up to a master; there is no reciprocity at all in this relationship. The marriage structure, like the existence of prostitutes, proves it: the woman gives herself; the man remunerates her and takes her. Nothing forbids the male to act the master, to take inferior creatures: ancillary loves have always been tolerated, whereas the bourgeois woman who gives herself to a chauffeur or a gardener is socially degraded. Fiercely racist American men in the South have always been permitted by custom to sleep with black women, before the Civil War as today, and they exploit this right with a lordly arrogance; a white woman who had relations with a black man in the time of slavery would have been put to death, and today she would be lynched. To say he slept with a woman, a man says he “possessed” her, that he “had” her; on the contrary, “to have” someone is sometimes vulgarly expressed as “to fuck someone”; the Greeks called a woman who did not have sexual relations with the male Parthenos adamatos, an untaken virgin; the Romans called Messalina invicta because none of her lovers gave her satisfaction. So for the male lover, the love act is conquest and victory. While, in another man, the erection often seems like a ridiculous parody of voluntary action, each one nonetheless considers it in his own case with a certain pride. Males’ erotic vocabulary is inspired by military vocabulary: the lover has the ardor of a soldier, his sexual organ stiffens like a bow, when he ejaculates, he “discharges,” it is a machine gun, a cannon; he speaks of attack, assault, of victory. In his arousal there is a certain flavor of the heroic. “The generative act, consisting of the occupation of one being by another,” writes Benda, “imposes, on the one hand, the idea of a conqueror, on the other of something conquered. Thus when they refer to their most civilized love relationships, they talk of conquest, attack, assault, siege and defense, defeat, and capitulation, clearly copying the idea of love from that of war. This act, involving the pollution of one being by another, imposes a certain pride on the polluter and some humiliation on the polluted, even when she is consenting.”4 This last phrase introduces a new myth: that man inflicts a stain on woman. In fact, sperm is not excrement; one speaks of “nocturnal pollution” because the sperm does not serve its natural purpose; while coffee can stain a light-colored dress, it is not said to be waste that defiles the stomach. Other men maintain, by contrast, that woman is impure because it is she who is “soiled by discharges” and that she pollutes the male. In any case, being the one who pollutes confers a dubious superiority. In fact, man’s privileged situation comes from the integration of his biologically aggressive role into his social function of chief and master; it is through this function that physiological differences take on all their full meaning. Because man is sovereign in this world, he claims the violence of his desires as a sign of his sovereignty; it is said of a man endowed with great erotic capacities that he is strong and powerful: epithets that describe him as an activity and a transcendence; on the contrary, woman being only an object is considered hot or cold; that is, she will never manifest any qualities other than passive ones.

  So the climate in which feminine sexuality awakens is nothing like the one surrounding the adolescent boy. Besides, when woman faces the male for the first time, her erotic attitude is very complex. It is not true, as has been held at times, that the virgin does not know desire and that the male awakens her sensuality; this legend once again betrays the male’s taste for domination, never wanting his companion to be autonomous, even in the desire that she has for him; in fact, for man as well, desire is often aroused through contact with woman, and, on the contrary, most young girls feverishly long for caresses before a hand ever touches them. Isadora Duncan in My Life says,

  My hips, which had been like a boy’s, took on another undulation, and through my whole being I felt one great surging, longing, unmistakable urge, so that I could no longer sleep at night, but tossed and turned in feverish, painful unrest.

  In a long confession of her life to Stekel, a young woman recounts:

  I began vigorously to flirt. I had to have “my nerves tickler (sic).” I was a passionate dancer, and while dancing I always shut my eyes the better to enjoy it … During dancing, I was somewhat exhibitionistic; my sensuality seemed to overcome my feeling of shame. During the first year, I danced with avidity and great enjoyment. I slept many hours, masturbated daily, often keeping it up for an hour … I masturbated often until I was covered with sweat, too fatigued to continue, I fell asleep … I was burning and I would have taken anyone who would relieve me. I wasn’t looking for a person, just a man.5

  The issue here is rather that virginal agitation is not expressed as a precise need: the virgin does not know exactly what she wants. Aggressive childhood eroticism still survives in her; her first impulses were prehensile, and she still has the desire to embrace, to possess; she wants the prey that she covets to be endowed with the qualities which through taste, smell, and touch have been shown to her as values; for sexuality is not an isolated domain, it extends the dreams and joys of sensuality; children and adolescents of both sexes like what is smooth, creamy, satiny, soft, elastic: that which yields to pressure without collapsing or decomposing and slips under the gaze or the fingers; like man, woman is charmed by the warm softness of sand dunes, so often compared to breasts, or the light touch of silk, of the fluffy softness of an eiderdown, the velvet feeling of a flower or fruit; and the young girl especially cherishes the pale colors of pastels, froths of tulle and muslin. She has no taste for rough fabrics, gravel, rocks, bitter flavors, acrid odors; like her brothers, it was her mother’s flesh that she first caressed and cherished; in her narcissism, in her diffuse or precise homosexual experiences, she posited herself as a subject and she sought the possession of a female body. When she faces the male, she has, in the palms of her hands and on her lips, the desire to actively caress a prey. But man, with his hard muscles, his scratchy and often hairy skin, his crude odor, and his coarse features, does not seem desirable to her, and he even stirs her repulsion. Renée Vivien expresses it this way:

  I am a woman, I have no right to beauty

  They have condemned me to the ugliness of men …

  They have forbidden me your hair, your eyes

  Because your hair is long and scented with odors*

  If the prehensile, possessive tendency exists in woman more strongly, her orientation, like that of Renée Vivien, will be toward homosexuality. Or she will become attached only to males she can treat like women: thus the heroine of Rachilde’s Monsieur V’nus buys herself a young lover whom she enjoys caressing passionately, but will not let herself be deflowered by him. There are women who love to caress young boys of thirteen or fourteen years old or even children, and who reject grown men. But we have seen that passive sexuality has also been developed since childhood in the majority of women: the woman loves to be hugged and caressed, and especially from puberty she wishes to be flesh in the arms of a man; the role of subject is normally his; she knows it; “A man does not need to be handsome,” she has been told over and over; she should not look for the inert qualities of an object in him but for strength and virile force. She thus becomes divided within herself: she wants a strong embrace that will turn her into a trembling thing; but brutality and force are also hostile obstacles that wound her. Her sensuality is located both in her s
kin and in her hand: and their exigencies are in opposition to each other. Whenever possible, she chooses a compromise; she gives herself to a man who is virile but young and seductive enough to be an object of desire; she will be able to find all the traits she desires in a handsome adolescent; in the Song of Songs, there is a symmetry between the delights of the wife and those of the husband; she grasps in him what he seeks in her: earthly fauna and flora, precious stones, streams, stars. But she does not have the means to take these treasures; her anatomy condemns her to remaining awkward and impotent, like a eunuch: the desire for possession is thwarted for lack of an organ to incarnate it. And man refuses the passive role. Often, besides, circumstances lead the young girl to become the prey of a male whose caresses move her, but whom she has no pleasure to look at or caress in return. Not enough has been said not only about the fear of masculine aggressiveness but also about a deep feeling of frustration at the disgust that is mixed with her desires: sexual satisfaction must be achieved against the spontaneous thrust of her sensuality, while for the man the joy of touching and seeing merges with the sexual experience as such.

  Even the elements of passive eroticism are ambiguous. Nothing is murkier than contact. Many men who triturate all sorts of material in their hands without disgust hate it when grass or animals touch them; women’s flesh can tremble pleasantly or bristle at the touch of silk or velvet: I recall a childhood friend who had gooseflesh simply at the sight of a peach; the transition is easy from agitation to titillation, from irritation to pleasure; arms enlacing a body can be a refuge and protection, but they also imprison and suffocate. For the virgin, this ambiguity is perpetuated because of her paradoxical situation: the organ that will bring about her metamorphosis is sealed. Her flesh’s uncertain and burning longing spreads through her whole body except in the very place where coitus should occur. No organ permits the virgin to satisfy her active eroticism; and she does not have the lived experience of he who dooms her to passivity.

  However, this passivity is not pure inertia. For the woman to be aroused, positive phenomena must be produced in her organism: stimulation in erogenous zones, swelling of certain erectile tissue, secretions, temperature rise, pulse, and breathing acceleration. Desire and sexual pleasure demand a vital expenditure for her as for the male; receptive, the female need is in one sense active and is manifested in an increase of nervous and muscular energy. Apathetic and languid women are always cold; there is a question as to whether constitutional frigidity exists, and surely psychic factors play a preponderant role in the erotic capacities of woman; but it is certain that physiological insufficiencies and a depleted vitality are manifested in part by sexual indifference. If, on the other hand, vital energy is spent in voluntary activities—sports, for example—it is not invested in sex. Scandinavians are healthy, strong, and cold. “Fiery” women are those who combine their languor with “fire,” like Italian or Spanish women, that is to say, women whose ardent vitality flows from their flesh. To make oneself object, to make oneself passive, is very different from being a passive object: a woman in love is neither asleep nor a corpse; there is a surge in her that ceaselessly falls and rises: it is this surge that creates the spell that perpetuates desire. But the balance between ardor and abandon is easy to destroy. Male desire is tension; it can invade a body where nerves and muscles are taut: positions and movements that demand a voluntary participation of the organism do not work against it, and instead often serve it. On the contrary, every voluntary effort keeps female flesh from being “taken”; this is why the woman spontaneously refuses forms of coitus that demand work and tension from her;6 too many and too abrupt changes in position, the demands of consciously directed activities—actions or words—break the spell. The violence of uncontrolled tendencies can bring about tightening, contraction, or tension: some women scratch or bite, their bodies arching, infused with an unaccustomed force; but these phenomena are only produced when a certain paroxysm is attained, and it is attained only if first the absence of all inhibition—physical as well as moral—permits a concentration of all living energy into the sexual act. This means that it is not enough for the young girl to let it happen; if she is docile, languid, or removed, she satisfies neither her partner nor herself. She must participate actively in an adventure that neither her virgin body nor her consciousness—laden with taboos, prohibitions, prejudices, and exigencies—desires positively.

  In the conditions just described, it is understandable that woman’s erotic beginnings are not easy. Quite frequently, incidents that occur in childhood and youth provoke deep resistance in her, as has been seen; sometimes it is insurmountable; most often, the young girl tries to overcome it, but violent conflicts build up in her. Her strict education, the fear of sinning, and feelings of guilt toward her mother all create powerful blocks. Virginity is valued so highly in many circles that to lose it outside marriage seems a veritable disaster. The young girl who surrenders by coercion or by surprise thinks she dishonors herself. The “wedding night,” which delivers the virgin to a man whom she has ordinarily not even chosen, and which attempts to condense into a few hours—or instants—the entire sexual initiation, is not a simple experience. In general, any “passage” is distressing because of its definitive and irreversible character: becoming a woman is breaking with the past, without recourse; but this particular passage is more dramatic than any other; it creates not only a hiatus between yesterday and tomorrow; it tears the young girl from the imaginary world where a great part of her existence took place and hurls her into the real world. By analogy with a bullfight, Michel Leiris calls the nuptial bed “a moment of truth”; for the virgin, this expression takes on its fullest and most fearsome meaning. During the engagement, dating, or courtship period, however basic it may have been, she continued to live in her familiar universe of ceremony and dreams; the suitor spoke a romantic, or at least courteous, language; it was still possible to make believe. And suddenly there she is, gazed upon by real eyes, handled by real hands: it is the implacable reality of this gazing and grasping that terrifies her.

  Both anatomy and customs confer the role of initiator on the man. Without doubt, for the young male virgin, his first mistress also provides his initiation; but he possesses an erotic autonomy clearly manifested in the erection; his mistress only delivers to him the object in its reality that he already desires: a woman’s body. The young girl needs a man to make her discover her own body: her dependence is much greater. From his very first experiences, man is ordinarily active and decisive, whether he pays his partner or courts and solicits her. By contrast, in most cases, the young girl is courted and solicited; even if it is she who first flirts with the man, he is the one who takes their relationship in hand; he is often older and more experienced, and it is accepted that he has the responsibility for this adventure that is new for her; his desire is more aggressive and imperious. Lover or husband, he is the one who leads her to the bed, where her only choice is to let go of herself and obey. Even if she had accepted this authority in her mind, she is panic-stricken the moment she must concretely submit to it. She first of all fears this gaze that engulfs her. Her modesty may have been taught her, but it has deep roots; men and women all know the shame of their flesh; in its pure, immobile presence, its unjustified immanence, the flesh exists in the gaze of another as the absurd contingence of facticity, and yet flesh is oneself: we want to prevent it from existing for others; we want to deny it. There are men who say they cannot stand to be naked in front of a woman, except in the state of erection; through the erection, the flesh becomes activity, force, the penis is no longer an inert object but, like the hand or the face, the imperious expression of a subjectivity. This is one reason why modesty paralyzes young men much less than young women; their aggressive role exposes them less to being gazed at; and if they are, they do not fear being judged, because it is not inert qualities that their mistresses demand of them: it is rather their amorous potency and their skill at giving pleasure that will give rise t
o complexes; at least they can defend themselves and try to win their match. Woman does not have the option of transforming her flesh into will: when she stops hiding it, she gives it up without defenses; even if she longs for caresses, she recoils from the idea of being seen and felt; all the more so as her breasts and buttocks are particularly fleshy; many adult women cannot bear to be seen from the rear even when they are dressed; imagine the resistance a naive girl in love has to overcome to consent to showing herself. A Phryne undoubtedly does not fear being gazed at; she bares herself, on the contrary, superbly. Her beauty clothes her. But even if she is the equal of Phryne, a young girl never feels it with certainty; she cannot have arrogant pride in her body as long as male approval has not confirmed her young vanity. And this is just what frightens her; the lover is even more terrifying than a gaze: he is a judge; he is going to reveal her to herself in her truth; even passionately taken with her own image, every young girl doubts herself at the moment of the masculine verdict; this is why she demands darkness, she hides in the sheets; when she admired herself in the mirror, she was only dreaming: she was dreaming through man’s eyes; now the eyes are really there; impossible to cheat; impossible to fight: a mysterious freedom decides, and this decision is final. In the real ordeal of the erotic experience, the obsessions of childhood and adolescence will finally fade or be confirmed forever; many young girls suffer from muscular calves, breasts that are too little or too big, narrow hips, a wart; or else they fear some secret malformation. Stekel writes: