The Second Sex

  A very jealous woman who until then had found pleasure with her husband imagines that her husband is cheating on her while she was ill. Coming home, she decides to be cold to her husband. She would never be aroused by him again because he did not appreciate her and used her only when in need. Since her return she has been frigid. At first she used little tricks not to be aroused. She pictured to herself that her husband was flirting with her girl friend. But soon orgasm was replaced by pain.

  A young seventeen-year-old had an affair with a man and derived intense pleasure from it. Pregnant at nineteen, she asked her lover to marry her; he was ambivalent and advised her to get an abortion, which she refused to do. Three weeks later, he declared he was ready to marry her and she became his wife. But she never forgave those three tormented weeks and became frigid. Later on, a talk with her husband overcame her frigidity.

  Mrs. N.M.… learns that two days after the wedding, her husband went to see a former mistress. The orgasm she had had previously disappeared forever. She was obsessed by the thought that she no longer pleased her husband whom she thought she had disappointed; that is the cause of frigidity for her.

  Even when a woman overcomes her resistance and eventually experiences vaginal pleasure, not all her problems are eliminated: the rhythm of her sexuality and that of the male do not coincide. She is much slower to reach orgasm than the man. The Kinsey Report states:

  For perhaps three-quarters of all males, orgasm is reached within two minutes after the initiation of the sexual relation … Considering the many upper level females who are so adversely conditioned to sexual situations that they may require ten to fifteen minutes of the most careful stimulation to bring them to climax, and considering the fair number of females who never come to climax in their whole lives, it is, of course, demanding that the male be quite abnormal in his ability to prolong sexual activity without ejaculation if he is required to match the female partner.

  It is said that in India the husband, while fulfilling his conjugal duties, smokes his pipe to distract himself from his own pleasure and to make his wife’s last; in the West, it is more the number of “times” that a Casanova boasts of; and his supreme pride is to have a woman beg for mercy: according to erotic tradition, this is not often a successful feat; men often complain of their partners’ exacting demands: she is a wild uterus, an ogre, insatiable; she is never assuaged. Montaigne demonstrates this point of view in the third book of his Essays:

  They are incomparably more capable and ardent than we in the acts of love—and that priest of antiquity so testified, who had been once a man and then a woman … and besides, we have learned from their own mouth the proof that was once given in different centuries by an emperor and an empress of Rome, master workmen and famous in this task: he indeed deflowered in one night ten captive Sarmatian virgins; but she actually in one night was good for twenty-five encounters, changing company according to her need and liking,

  Adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine vulvo

  Et lassata viris, necdum satiata recessite.13

  We know about the dispute that occurred in Catalonia from a woman complaining of the over-assiduous efforts of her husband: not so much, in my opinion, that she was bothered by them (for I believe in miracles only in matters of faith)… There intervened that notable sentence of the Queen of Aragon, by which, after mature deliberation with her council, this good queen … ordained as the legitimate and necessary limit the number of six a day, relinquishing and giving up much of the need and desire of her sex, in order, she said, to establish an easy and consequently permanent and immutable formula.

  It is true that sexual pleasure for woman is not at all the same as for man. I have already said that it is not known exactly if vaginal pleasure ever results in a definite orgasm: feminine confidences on this point are rare, and even when they try to be precise, they remain extremely vague; reactions seem to vary greatly according to the subject. What is certain is that coitus for man has a precise biological end: ejaculation. And certainly many other very complex intentions are involved in aiming at this end; but once obtained, it is seen as an achievement, and if not as the satisfaction of desire, at least as its suppression. On the other hand, the aim for woman is uncertain in the beginning and more psychic than physiological; she desires arousal and sexual pleasure in general, but her body does not project any clear conclusion of the love act: and thus for her coitus is never fully completed: it does not include any finality. Male pleasure soars; when it reaches a certain threshold, it fulfills itself and dies abruptly in the orgasm; the structure of the sexual act is finite and discontinuous. Feminine pleasure radiates through the whole body; it is not always centered in the genital system; vaginal contractions then even more than a true orgasm constitute a system of undulations that rhythmically arise, subside, re-form, reach for some instants a paroxysm, then blur and dissolve without ever completely dying. Because no fixed goal is assigned to it, pleasure aims at infinity: nervous or cardiac fatigue or psychic satiety often limits the woman’s erotic possibilities rather than precise satisfaction; even fully fulfilled, even exhausted, she is never totally released: “Lassata necdum satiata,” according to Juvenal.

  Man commits a grave error when he attempts to impose his own rhythm on his partner and when he is determined to give her an orgasm: often he only manages to destroy the form of pleasure she was experiencing in her own way.14 This form is malleable enough to give itself a conclusion: spasms localized in the vagina or in the whole genital system or coming from the whole body can constitute a resolution; for certain women, they are produced fairly regularly and with sufficient violence to be likened to an orgasm; but a woman lover can also find a conclusion in the masculine orgasm that calms and satisfies her. And it is also possible that in a gradual and gentle way, the erotic phase dissolves calmly. Success requires not a mathematical synchronization of pleasure, whatever many meticulous but simplistic men believe, but the establishment of a complex erotic form. Many think that “making a woman come” is a question of time and technique, therefore of violence; they disregard the extent to which woman’s sexuality is conditioned by the situation as a whole. Sexual pleasure for her, we have said, is a kind of spell; it demands total abandon; if words or gestures contest the magic of caresses, the spell vanishes. This is one of the reasons that the woman often closes her eyes: physiologically there is a reflex that compensates for the dilation of the pupil; but even in the dark she still lowers her eyelids; she wants to do away with the setting, the singularity of the moment, herself and her lover; she wants to lose herself within the carnal night as indistinct as the maternal breast. And even more particularly, she wants to abolish this separation that sets the male in front of her; she wants to merge with him. We have said already that she desires to remain a subject while making herself an object. More deeply alienated than man, as her whole body is desire and arousal, she remains a subject only through union with her partner; receiving and giving have to merge for both of them; if the man just takes without giving or if he gives pleasure without taking, she feels used; as soon as she realizes herself as Other, she is the inessential other; she has to invalidate alterity. Thus the moment of the separation of bodies is almost always painful for her. Man, after coitus, whether he feels sad or joyous, duped by nature or conqueror of woman, whatever the case, he repudiates the flesh; he becomes a whole body; he wants to sleep, take a bath, smoke a cigarette, get a breath of fresh air. She would like to prolong the bodily contact until the spell that made her flesh dissipates completely; separation is a painful wrenching like a new weaning; she resents the lover who pulls away from her too abruptly. But what wounds her even more are the words that contest the fusion in which she believed for a moment. The “wife of Gilles,” whose story Madeleine Bourdouxhe told, pulls back when her husband asks her: “Did you come?” She puts her hand on his mouth; many women hate this word because it reduces the pleasure to an immanent and separated sensation. “Is it enough? Do you want more? Was it good?”
The very fact of asking the question points out the separation and changes the love act into a mechanical operation assumed and controlled by the male. And this is precisely the reason he asks it. Much more than fusion and reciprocity, he seeks domination; when the unity of the couple is undone, he becomes the sole subject: a great deal of love or generosity is necessary to give up this privilege; he likes the woman to feel humiliated, possessed in spite of herself; he always wants to take her a little more than she gives herself. Woman would be spared many difficulties were man not to trail behind him so many complexes making him consider the love act a battle: then it would be possible for her not to consider the bed as an arena.

  However, along with narcissism and pride, one observes in the young girl a desire to be dominated. According to some psychoanalysts, masochism is a characteristic of women, by means of which they can adapt to their erotic destiny. But the notion of masochism is very confused and has to be considered attentively.

  Freudian psychoanalysts distinguish three forms of masochism: one is the link between pain and sexual pleasure, another is the feminine acceptance of erotic dependence, and the last resides in a mechanism of self-punishment. Woman is masochistic because pleasure and pain in her are linked through defloration and birth, and because she consents to her passive role.

  It must first be pointed out that attributing erotic value to pain does not in any way constitute behavior of passive submission. Pain often serves to raise the tonus of the individual who experiences it, to awaken a sensitivity numbed by the very violence of arousal and pleasure; it is a sharp light bursting out in the carnal night, it removes the lover from the limbo where he is swooning so that he might once more be thrown into it. Pain is normally part of erotic frenzy; bodies that delight in being bodies for their reciprocal joy seek to find each other, unite with each other, and confront each other in every possible way. There is a wrenching from oneself in eroticism, a transport, an ecstasy: suffering also destroys the limits of the self, it is a going beyond and a paroxysm; pain has always played a big role in orgies; and it is well-known that the exquisite and the painful converge: a caress can become torture; torment gives pleasure. Embracing easily leads to biting, pinching, scratching; such behavior is not generally sadistic; it expresses a desire to merge and not to destroy; and the subject that submits to it does not seek to disavow and humiliate himself but to unite; besides, it is far from being specifically masculine. In fact, pain has a masochistic meaning only when it is grasped and desired as the manifestation of enslavement. As for the pain of defloration, it is specifically not accompanied by pleasure; and all women fear the suffering of giving birth, and they are happy that modern methods free them from it. Pain has neither more nor less place in their sexuality than in that of man.

  Feminine docility is, moreover, a very equivocal notion. We have seen that most of the time the young girl accepts in her imagination the domination of a demigod, a hero, a male, but it is still only a narcissistic game. She is in no way disposed to submit to the carnal expression of this authority in reality. By contrast, she often refuses to give herself to a man she admires and respects, giving herself to an ordinary man instead. It is an error to seek the key to concrete behavior in fantasy, because fantasies are created and cherished as fantasies. The little girl who dreams of rape with a mixture of horror and complicity does not desire to be raped, and the event, if it occurred, would be a loathsome catastrophe. We have already seen in Maria Le Hardouin a typical example of this dissociation. She writes:

  But there remained an area on the path of abolition that I only entered with pinched nostrils and a beating heart. This was the path that beyond amorous sensuality led me to sensuality itself … there was no deceitful infamy that I did not commit in dreams. I suffered from the need to affirm myself in every possible way.15 The case of Marie Bashkirtseff should also be recalled:

  All my life I have tried to place myself voluntarily under some kind of illusory domination, but all the people I tried were so ordinary in comparison with me that all I felt for them was disgust.

  Moreover, it is true that the woman’s sexual role is largely passive; but to live this passive situation in its immediacy is no more masochistic than the male’s normal aggressiveness is sadistic; woman can transcend caresses, arousal, and penetration toward achieving her own pleasure, thus maintaining the affirmation of her subjectivity; she can also seek union with the lover and give herself to him, which signifies a surpassing of herself and not an abdication. Masochism exists when the individual chooses to constitute himself as a pure thing through the consciousness of the other, to represent oneself to oneself as a thing, to play at being a thing. “Masochism is an attempt not to fascinate the other by my objectivity but to make myself be fascinated by my objectivity for others.”16 Sade’s Juliette or the young virgin from La philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy in the Boudoir), who both give themselves to the male in all possible ways, but for their own pleasure, are not in any way masochists. Lady Chatterley and Kate, in the total abandon they consent to, are not masochists. To speak of masochism, one has to posit the self and this alienated double has to be considered as founded on the other’s freedom.

  In this sense, true masochism can be found in some women. The young girl is susceptible to it since she is easily narcissistic and narcissism consists in alienating one’s self in one’s ego. If she experienced arousal and violent desire right from the beginning of her erotic initiation, she would live her experiences authentically and stop projecting them toward this ideal pole that she calls self; but in frigidity, the self continues to affirm itself; making it the thing of a male seems then like a fault. But “masochism, like sadism, is the assumption of guilt. I am guilty due to the very fact that I am an object.” This idea of Sartre’s fits in with the Freudian notion of self-punishment. The young girl considers herself guilty of delivering her self to another, and she punishes herself for it by willingly increasing humiliation and subjugation; we have seen that virgins defied their future lovers and punished themselves for their future submission by inflicting various tortures on themselves. When the lover is real and present, they persist in this attitude. Frigidity itself can be seen as a punishment that woman imposes as much on herself as on her partner: wounded in her vanity, she resents him and herself, and she does not permit herself pleasure. In masochism, she will wildly enslave herself to the male, she will tell him words of adoration, she will wish to be humiliated, beaten; she will alienate herself more and more deeply out of fury for having agreed to the alienation. This is quite obviously Mathilde de la Mole’s behavior, for example; she regrets having given herself to Julien, which is why she sometimes falls at his feet, bends over backward to indulge each of his whims, sacrifices her hair; but at the same time, she is in revolt against him as much as against herself; one imagines that she is icy in his arms. The fake abandon of the masochistic woman creates new barriers that keep her from pleasure; and at the same time, she is taking vengeance against herself for this inability to experience pleasure. The vicious circle from frigidity to masochism can establish itself forever, bringing sadistic behavior along with it as compensation. Becoming erotically mature can also deliver woman from her frigidity and her narcissism, and assuming her sexual passivity, she lives it immediately instead of playing the role. Because the paradox of masochism is that the subject reaffirms itself constantly even in its attempt to abdicate itself, it is in the gratuitous gift, in the spontaneous movement toward the other, that he succeeds in forgetting himself. It is thus true that woman will be more prone than man to masochistic temptation; her erotic situation as passive object commits her to playing passivity; this game is the self-punishment to which her narcissistic revolts and consequent frigidity lead her; the fact is that many women and in particular young girls are masochists. Colette, speaking of her first amorous experiences, confides to us in Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeships):

  Ridden by youth and ignorance, I had known intoxication—a guilty raptu
re, an atrocious, impure, adolescent impulse. There are many scarcely nubile girls who dream of becoming the show, the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some middle-aged man. It is an ugly dream that is punished by its fulfillment, a morbid thing, akin to the neuroses of puberty, the habit of eating chalk and coal, of drinking mouthwash, of reading dirty books and sticking pins into the palm of the hand.

  This perfectly expresses the fact that masochism is part of juvenile perversions, that it is not an authentic solution of the conflict created by woman’s sexual destiny, but a way of escaping it by wallowing in it. In no way does it represent the normal and happy blossoming of feminine eroticism.

  This blossoming supposes that—in love, tenderness, and sensuality—woman succeeds in overcoming her passivity and establishing a relationship of reciprocity with her partner. The asymmetry of male and female eroticism creates insoluble problems as long as there is a battle of the sexes; they can easily be settled when a woman feels both desire and respect in a man; if he covets her in her flesh while recognizing her freedom, she recovers her essentialness at the moment she becomes object, she remains free in the submission to which she consents. Thus, the lovers can experience shared pleasure in their own way; each partner feels pleasure as being his own while at the same time having its source in the other. The words “receive” and “give” exchange meanings, joy is gratitude, pleasure is tenderness. In a concrete and sexual form the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in the keenest consciousness of the other and the self. Some women say they feel the masculine sex organ in themselves as a part of their own body; some men think they are the woman they penetrate; these expressions are obviously inaccurate; the dimension of the other remains; but the fact is that alterity no longer has a hostile character; this consciousness of the union of the bodies in their separation is what makes the sexual act moving; it is all the more overwhelming that the two beings who together passionately negate and affirm their limits are fellow creatures and yet are different. This difference that all too often isolates them becomes the source of their marveling when they join together; woman recognizes the virile passion in man’s force as the reverse of the fever that burns within her, and this is the power she wields over him; this sex organ swollen with life belongs to her just as her smile belongs to the man who gives her pleasure. All the treasures of virility and femininity reflecting off and reappropriating each other make a moving and ecstatic unity. What is necessary for such harmony are not technical refinements but rather, on the basis of an immediate erotic attraction, a reciprocal generosity of body and soul.