The Second Sex

  Every young girl carries in her all sorts of ridiculous fears that she barely dares to admit to herself. One would not believe how many young girls suffer from the obsession of being physically abnormal and torment themselves secretly because they cannot be sure of being normally constructed. One young girl, for example, believed that her “lower opening” was not in the right place. She thought that sexual intercourse took place through the navel. She was unhappy because her navel was closed and she could not stick her finger in it. Another thought she was a hermaphrodite. And another thought she was crippled and would never be able to have sexual relations.7

  Even if they are unfamiliar with these obsessions, they are terrified by the idea that certain regions of their bodies that did not exist for them or for anyone, that absolutely did not exist, will suddenly be seen. Will this unknown figure that the young girl must assume as her own provoke disgust? Indifference? Irony? She can only submit to male judgment: the die is cast. This is why man’s attitude will have such deep resonance. His ardor and tenderness can give woman a confidence in herself that will stand up to every rejection: until she is eighty years old, she will believe she is this flower, this exotic bird that made man’s desire bloom one night. On the contrary, if the lover or husband is clumsy, he will arouse an inferiority complex in her that is sometimes compounded by long-lasting neuroses; and she will hold a grudge that will be expressed in a stubborn frigidity. Stekel describes striking examples:

  A woman of 36 years of age suffers from such back pain across “the small of her back” for the past 14 years. These pains are so unbearable that she is forced to stay in bed for weeks … she felt the great pains for the first time during her wedding night. On that occasion, during the defloration, which caused her considerable pain, her husband exclaimed: “You have deceived me! You are not a virgin!” Her pains in the back represent the fixation of this painful episode. Her illness is her vengeance on the man. The various cures have cost him considerable money for her innumerable treatments … This woman was anaesthetic during her wedding night and she remained in this condition throughout her marital experience … The wedding night was for her a terrible mental shock that has influenced her whole life.

  A woman consults me for various nervous troubles and particularly on account of her complete sexual frigidity … During her wedding night, her husband, after uncovering her, exclaimed: “Oh, how stubby and thick your limbs are!” Then he tried to carry out intercourse. She felt only pain and remained wholly frigid … She knows very well that the slightest remark he made about her during the wedding night was responsible for her sexual frigidity.

  Another frigid woman says that “during her wedding night, her husband deeply insulted her” seeing her get undressed, he allegedly said: “My God, how thin you are!” Then he nevertheless decided to caress her. For her this moment was unforgettable and horrible. What brutality!

  Mrs. Z.W. is also completely frigid. The great traumatism of her wedding night was that her husband supposedly said after the first intercourse: “You have a big hole, you tricked me.”

  The gaze is danger; hands are another threat. Woman does not usually have access to the universe of violence; she has never gone through the ordeal the young man overcame in childhood and adolescent fights: to be a thing of flesh on which others have a hold; and now that she is grasped, she is swept away in a body-to-body clasp where man is the stronger; she is no longer free to dream, to withdraw, to maneuver: she is given over to the male; he disposes of her. These wrestling-like embraces terrorize her, she who has never wrestled. She had let herself go to the caresses of a fiancé, a fellow student, a colleague, a civilized and courteous man: but he has assumed an unfamiliar, selfish, and stubborn attitude; she no longer has recourse against this stranger. It is not uncommon that the young girl’s first experience is a real rape and that man’s behavior is odiously brutal; particularly in the countryside, where customs are harsh, it often happens that a young peasant woman, half-consenting, half-outraged, in shame and fright, loses her virginity at the bottom of some ditch. What is in any case extremely frequent in all societies and classes is that the virgin is rushed by an egotistical lover seeking his own pleasure quickly, or by a husband convinced of his conjugal rights who takes his wife’s resistance as an insult, to the point of becoming furious if the defloration is difficult.

  In any case, however deferential and courteous a man might be, the first penetration is always a rape. While she desires caresses on her lips and breasts and perhaps yearns for a familiar or anticipated orgasm, here is a male sex organ tearing the young girl and introducing itself into regions where it was not invited. The painful surprise of a swooning virgin—who thinks she has finally reached the accomplishment of her voluptuous dreams and who feels in the secret of her sex an unexpected pain—in a husband’s or lover’s arms has often been described; the dreams faint away, the excitement dissipates, and love takes on the appearance of a surgical operation.

  In the confessions gathered by Dr. Liepmann, there is the following and typical account. It concerns a very sexually unaware girl from a modest background:

  “I often imagined that one could have a child just by the exchange of a kiss. During my eighteenth year, I made the acquaintance of a man with whom I really fell madly in love.” She often went out with him, and during their conversations he explained to her that when a young girl loves a man, she must give herself to him because men cannot live without sexual relations and that as long as they cannot afford to get married, they have to have relations with young girls. She resisted. One day, he organized an excursion so that they could spend the night together. She wrote him a letter to repeat that “it would harm her too much.” The morning of the arranged day, she gave him the letter, but he put it in his pocket without reading it and took her to the hotel; he dominated her morally, she loved him, she followed him. “I was as if hypnotized. As we were going along, I begged him to spare me … How I arrived at the hotel, I do not know at all. The only memory that remained is that my whole body trembled violently. My companion tried to calm me; but he succeeded only after much resistance. I was no longer mistress of my will, and in spite of myself I let myself go. When I found myself later in the street, it seemed to me that everything had only been a dream I had just awakened from.” She refused to repeat the experience and for nine years did not have sexual relations with any other man. She then met one who asked her to marry him and she agreed.8

  In this case, the defloration was a kind of rape. But even if it is consensual, it can be painful. Look at the fevers that tormented young Isadora Duncan. She met an admirably handsome actor with whom she fell in love at first sight and who courted her ardently:

  I myself felt ill and dizzy, while an irresistible longing to press him closer and closer surged in me, until, losing all control and falling into a fury, he carried me into the room. Frightened but ecstatic, the realisation was made clear to me. I confess my first impressions were a horrible fright, but a great pity for what he seemed to be suffering prevented me from running away from what was at first sheer torture… [The next day], what had been for me only a painful experience began again amid my martyr’s sobs and cries.9

  She was soon to know the paradise she lyrically described, first with this lover and then with others.

  However, in actual experience, as previously in one’s virginal imagination, it is not pain that plays the greatest role: the fact of penetration counts far more. In intercourse the man introduces only an exterior organ: woman is affected in her deepest interior. Undoubtedly, there are many young men who tread with anguish in the secret darkness of woman; their childhood terrors resurface at the threshold of caves and graves, and so does their fright in front of jaws, scythes, and wolf traps: they imagine that their swollen penis will be caught in the mucous sheath; the woman, once penetrated, does not have this feeling of danger; but she does feel carnally alienated. The property owner affirms his rights over his lands, the housewife over her ho
use by proclaiming “no trespassing”; because of their frustrated transcendence, women, in particular, jealously defend their privacy: their room, their wardrobe, and their chests are sacred. Colette tells of an old prostitute who told her one day: “In my room, Madame, no man has ever set foot; for what I have to do with men, Paris is quite big enough.” If not her body, at least she possessed a plot of land where entry was prohibited. The young girl, though, possesses little of her own except her body: it is her most precious treasure; the man who enters her takes it from her; the familiar word is confirmed by her lived experience. She experiences concretely the humiliation she had felt: she is dominated, subjugated, conquered. Like almost all females, she is under the man during intercourse.10 Adler emphasized the feeling of inferiority resulting from this. Right from infancy, the notions of superior and inferior are extremely important; climbing trees is a prestigious act; heaven is above the earth; hell is underneath; to fall or to descend is to degrade oneself, and to climb is to exalt oneself; in wrestling, victory belongs to the one who pins his opponent down, whereas the woman lies on the bed in a position of defeat; it is even worse if the man straddles her like an animal subjugated by reins and a bit. In any case, she feels passive: she is caressed, penetrated; she undergoes intercourse, whereas the man spends himself actively. It is true that the male sex organ is not a striated muscle commanded by will; it is neither plowshare nor sword but merely flesh; but it is a voluntary movement that man imprints on her; he goes, he comes, stops, resumes, while the woman receives him submissively; it is the man—especially when the woman is a novice—who chooses the amorous positions, who decides the length and frequency of intercourse. She feels herself to be an instrument: all the freedom is in the other. This is what is poetically expressed by saying that woman is comparable to a violin and man to the bow that makes her vibrate. “In love,” says Balzac, “leaving the soul out of consideration, woman is a lyre which only yields up its secrets to the man who can play upon it skilfully.”11 He takes his pleasure with her; he gives her pleasure; the words themselves do not imply reciprocity. Woman is imbued with collective images of the glorious aura of masculine sexual excitement that make feminine arousal a shameful abdication: her intimate experience confirms this asymmetry. It must not be forgotten that boy and girl adolescents experience their bodies differently: the former tranquilly takes his body for granted and proudly takes charge of his desires; for the latter, in spite of her narcissism, it is a strange and disturbing burden. Man’s sex organ is neat and simple, like a finger; it can be innocently exhibited, and boys often show it off to their friends proudly and defiantly; the feminine sex organ is mysterious to the woman herself, hidden, tormented, mucous, and humid; it bleeds each month, it is sometimes soiled with bodily fluids, it has a secret and dangerous life. It is largely because woman does not recognize herself in it that she does not recognize her own desires. They are expressed in a shameful manner. While the man has a “hard-on,” the woman “gets wet”; there is in the very word infantile memories of the wet bed, of the guilty and involuntary desire to urinate; man has the same disgust for his nocturnal unconscious wet dreams; projecting a liquid, urine or sperm, is not humiliating: it is an active operation; but there is humiliation if the liquid escapes passively since the body then is no longer an organism, muscles, sphincters, and nerves, commanded by the brain and expressing the conscious subject, but a vase, a receptacle made of inert matter, and the plaything of mechanical caprices. If the flesh oozes—like an old wall or a dead body—it does not seem to be emitting liquid but deliquescing: a decomposition process that horrifies. Feminine heat is the flaccid palpitation of a shellfish; where man has impetuousness, woman merely has impatience; her desire can become ardent without ceasing to be passive; the man dives on his prey like the eagle and the hawk; she, like a carnivorous plant, waits for and watches the swamp where insects and children bog down; she is sucking, suction, sniffer, she is pitch and glue, immobile appeal, insinuating, and viscous: at least this is the way she indefinably feels. Thus, there is not only resistance against the male who attempts to subjugate her but also internal conflict. Superimposed on the taboos and inhibitions that arise from her education and society are disgust and refusals that stem from the erotic experience itself: they all reinforce each other to such an extent that often after the first coitus the woman is more in revolt against her sexual destiny than before.

  Lastly, there is another factor that often gives man a hostile look and changes the sexual act into a grave danger: the danger of a child. An illegitimate child in most civilizations is such a social and economic handicap for the unmarried woman that one sees young girls committing suicide when they know they are pregnant and unwed mothers cutting the throats of their newborns; such a risk constitutes a quite powerful sexual brake, making many young girls observe the prenuptial chastity prescribed by customs. When the brake is insufficient, the young girl, while yielding to the lover, is horrified by the terrible danger he possesses in his loins. Stekel cites, among others, a young girl who for the entire duration of intercourse shouted: “Don’t let anything happen! Don’t let anything happen!” Even in marriage, the woman often does not want a child, her health is not good enough, or a child would be too great a burden on the young household. Whether he is lover or husband, if she does not have absolute confidence in her partner, her eroticism will be paralyzed by caution. Either she will anxiously watch the man’s behavior, or else, once intercourse is over, she will run to the bathroom to chase the living germ from her belly, put there in spite of herself. This hygienic operation brutally contradicts the sensual magic of the caresses; she undergoes an absolute separation of the bodies that were merged in one single joy; thus the male sperm becomes a harmful germ, a soiling; she cleans herself as one cleans a dirty vase, while the man reclines on his bed in his superb wholeness. A young divorcée told me how horrified she was when—after a dubiously pleasurable wedding night—she had to shut herself in the bathroom and her husband nonchalantly lit a cigarette: it seems that the ruin of the couple was decided at that instant. The repugnance of the douche, the beaker, and the bidet is one of the frequent causes of feminine frigidity. The existence of surer and more convenient contraceptive devices is helping woman’s sexual freedom a great deal; in a country like America where these practices are widespread, the number of young girls still virgins at marriage is much lower than in France; such practices make for far greater abandon during the love act. But there again, the young woman has to overcome her repugnance before treating her body as a thing: she can no more resign herself to being “corked” to satisfy a man’s desires than she can to being “pierced” by him. Whether she has her uterus sealed or introduces some sperm-killing tampon, a woman who is conscious of the ambiguities of the body and sex will be bridled by cold premeditation; besides, many men consider the use of condoms repugnant. It is sexual behavior as a whole that justifies its various moments: conduct that when analyzed would seem repugnant seems natural when bodies are transfigured by the erotic virtues they possess; but inversely, when bodies and behaviors are decomposed into separate elements and deprived of meaning, these elements become disgusting and obscene. The surgical and dirty perception that penetration had in the eyes of the child returns if it is not carried out with the arousal, desire, and pleasure a woman in love will joyfully experience as union and fusion with the beloved: this is what happens with the concerted use of prophylactics. In any case, these precautions are not at the disposal of all women; many young girls do not know of any defense against the threats of pregnancy, and they feel great anguish that their lot depends on the goodwill of the man they give themselves up to.

  It is understandable that an ordeal experienced through so much resistance, fraught with such weighty implications, often creates serious traumas. A latent precocious dementia has often been revealed by the first experience. Stekel gives several examples:

  Miss M.G.… suddenly developed an acute delirium in her 19th year. I found her
storming in her room, shouting repeatedly: “I won’t! No! I won’t!” She tore off her clothes and wanted to flee into the street naked … she had to be taken to the psychiatric clinic. There her delirium gradually abated and she passed into a catatonic state … This girl … was a clerk in an office, in love with the head clerk in the company … She had gone to the country with a girl friend … and a couple of young men who worked in the same office … she went to her room with one of the men [who] promised not to touch her and that “it was merely a prank.” He roused her to slight tenderness for three nights without touching her virginity … She apparently remained “as cold as a dog’s muzzle” and declared that it was disgraceful. For a few fleeting minutes her mind seemed confused and she exclaimed: “Alfred, Alfred.” (Alfred was the head clerk’s first name.) She was reproaching herself for what she had done (What would mother say about this if she knew?). Once she returned home, she took to her bed, complaining of a migraine.