This generosity is often hampered in man by his vanity and in woman by her timidity; if she does not overcome her inhibitions, she will not be able to make it thrive. This is why full sexual blossoming in woman arrives rather late: she reaches her erotic peak at about thirty-five. Unfortunately, if she is married, her husband is too used to her frigidity; she can still seduce new lovers, but she is beginning to fade: time is running out. At the very moment they cease to be desirable, many women finally decide to assume their desires.
The conditions under which woman’s sexual life unfolds depend not only on these facts but also on her whole social and economic situation. It would be too vague to attempt to study this further without this context. But several generally valid conclusions emerge from our examination. The erotic experience is one that most poignantly reveals to human beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as subject. Woman experiences this conflict at its most dramatic because she assumes herself first as object and does not immediately find a confident autonomy in pleasure; she has to reconquer her dignity as transcendent and free subject while assuming her carnal condition: this is a delicate and risky enterprise that often fails. But the very difficulty of her situation protects her from the mystifications by which the male lets himself be duped; he is easily deceived by the fallacious privileges that his aggressive role and satisfied solitude of orgasm imply; he hesitates to recognize himself fully as flesh. Woman has a more authentic experience of herself.
Even if woman accommodates herself more or less exactly to her passive role, she is still frustrated as an active individual. She does not envy man his organ of possession: she envies in him his prey. It is a curious paradox that man lives in a sensual world of sweetness, tenderness, softness—a feminine world—while woman moves in the hard and harsh male universe; her hands still long for the embrace of smooth skin and soft flesh: adolescent boy, woman, flowers, furs, child; a whole part of herself remains available and wishes to possess a treasure similar to the one she gives the male. This explains why there subsists in many women, in a more or less latent form, a tendency toward homosexuality. For a set of complex reasons, there are those for whom this tendency asserts itself with particular authority. Not all women agree to give their sexual problems the one classic solution officially accepted by society. Thus must we envisage those who choose forbidden paths.
1. See Volume I, Chapter 1. [In Part One, “Destiny.”—TRANS.]
2. Unless excision is practiced, which is the rule in some primitive cultures.
* The Kinsey Reports are two books on human sexual behavior: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and others.—TRANS.
3. “The use of an artificial penis in solitary sexual gratification may be traced down from classic times, and doubtless prevailed in the very earliest human civilization … In more recent years the following are a few of the objects found in the vagina or bladder whence they could only be removed by surgical interference: Pencils, sticks of sealing-wax, cotton-reels, hair-pins (and in Italy very commonly the bone-pins used in the hair), bodkins, knitting-needles, crochet-needles, needle-cases, compasses, glass stoppers, candles, corks, tumblers, forks, tooth-picks, toothbrushes, pomade-pots (in a case recorded by Schroeder with a cockchafer inside, a makeshift substitute for the Japanese rin-no-tama), while in one recent English case a full-sized hen’s egg was removed from the vagina of a middle-aged married woman … the large objects, naturally, are found chiefly in the vagina, and in married women” (Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume I).
4. Uriel’s Report.
5. Frigidity in Woman.
* At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand, trans. Gillian Spraggs.—TRANS.
6. We will see further on that there can be psychological reasons that modify her immediate attitude.
7. Frigidity in Woman.
8. Published in French under the title Jeunesse et sexualité (Youth and Sexuality).
9. My Life.
10. The position can undoubtedly be reversed. But in the first experiences, it is extremely rare for the man not to practice the so-called normal coitus.
11. Physiology of Marriage. In Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental (A Ritual for Married Lovers), Jules Guyot also says of the husband: “He is the minstrel who produces harmony or cacophony with his hand and bow. From this point of view woman is really a many-stringed instrument producing harmonious or discordant sounds depending on how she is tuned.”
* Frigidity in Woman. Discrepancy in initials: “K.L.” in the English translation of Stekel’s German text.—TRANS.
† Not in the English translation of Stekel’s German text.—TRANS.
12. Frigidity in Woman.
13. Juvenal. [“Her secret parts burning are tense with lust, / And, tired by men, but far from sated, she withdrew.”—TRANS.]
14. Lawrence clearly saw the opposition of these two erotic forms. But it is arbitrary to declare as he does that the woman must not experience orgasm. It might be an error to try to provoke it at all costs, but it is also an error to reject it in all cases, as Don Cipriano does in The Plumed Serpent.
15. The Black Sail.
16. J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
| CHAPTER 4 |
The Lesbian
People are always ready to see the lesbian as wearing a felt hat, her hair short, and a necktie; her mannishness is seen as an abnormality indicating a hormonal imbalance. Nothing could be more erroneous than this confusion of the homosexual and the virago. There are many homosexual women among odalisques, courtesans, and the most deliberately “feminine” women; by contrast, a great number of “masculine” women are heterosexual. Sexologists and psychiatrists confirm what ordinary observation suggests: the immense majority of “cursed women” are constituted exactly like other women. Their sexuality is not determined by anatomical “destiny.”
There are certainly cases where physiological givens create particular situations. There is no rigorous biological distinction between the two sexes; an identical soma is modified by hormonal activity whose orientation is genotypically defined, but can be diverted in the course of the fetus’s development; this results in individuals halfway between male and female. Some men take on a feminine appearance because of late development of their male organs, and sometimes girls as well—athletic ones in particular—change into boys. Helene Deutsch tells of a young girl who ardently courted a married woman, wanted to run off and live with her: she realized one day that she was in fact a man, so she was able to marry her beloved and have children. But it must not be concluded that every homosexual woman is a “hidden man” in false guise. The hermaphrodite who has elements of two genital systems often has a female sexuality: I knew of one, exiled by the Nazis from Vienna, who greatly regretted her inability to appeal to either heterosexuals or homosexuals as she loved only men. Under the influence of male hormones, “viriloid” women present masculine secondary sexual characteristics; in infantile women, female hormones are deficient, and their development remains incomplete. These particularities can more or less directly trigger a lesbian orientation. A person with a vigorous, aggressive, and exuberant vitality wishes to exert himself actively and usually rejects passivity; an unattractive and malformed woman may try to compensate for her inferiority by acquiring virile attributes; if her erogenous sensitivity is undeveloped, she does not desire masculine caresses. But anatomy and hormones never define anything but a situation and do not posit the object toward which the situation will be transcended. Deutsch also cites the case of a wounded Polish legionnaire she treated during World War I who was, in fact, a young girl with marked viriloid characteristics; she had joined the army as a nurse, then succeeded in wearing the uniform; she nevertheless fell in love with a soldier—whom she later married—which caused her to be regarded as a male homosexual. Her masculine behavior did not contradict a feminine type of erot
icism. Man himself does not exclusively desire woman; the fact that the male homosexual body can be perfectly virile implies that a woman’s virility does not necessarily destine her to homosexuality.
Even in women physiologically normal themselves, it has sometimes been asserted that there is a distinction between “clitoral” and “vaginal” women, the former being destined to sapphic love; but it has been seen that all childhood eroticism is clitoral; whether it remains fixed at this stage or is transformed has nothing to do with anatomical facts; nor is it true, as has often been maintained, that infant masturbation explains the ulterior primacy of the clitoral system: a child’s masturbation is recognized today by sexologists as an absolutely normal and generally widespread phenomenon. The development of feminine eroticism is—we have seen—a psychological situation in which physiological factors are included, but which depends on the subject’s overall attitude to existence. Marañón considered sexuality to be “one-way,” and that man attains a completed form of it, while for woman it remains “halfway”; only the lesbian could possess a libido as rich as a male’s and would thus be a “superior” feminine type. In fact, feminine sexuality has its own structure, and the idea of a hierarchy in male and female libidos is absurd; the choice of sexual object in no way depends on the amount of energy woman might have.
Psychoanalysts have had the great merit of seeing a psychic phenomenon and not an organic one in inversion; to them, nonetheless, it still seems determined by external circumstances. But in fact they have not studied it very much. According to Freud, female erotic maturation requires the passage from the clitoral to the vaginal stage, symmetrical with the change transferring the love the little girl felt first for her mother to her father; various factors may hinder this development; the woman is not resigned to castration, hides the absence of the penis from herself, or remains fixated on her mother, for whom she seeks substitutes. For Adler, this fixation is not a passively endured accident: it is desired by the subject who, in her will for power, deliberately denies her mutilation and seeks to identify with the man whose domination she refuses. Whether from infantile fixation or masculine protest, homosexuality would appear in any case as unfinished development. In truth, the lesbian is no more a “failed” woman than a “superior” woman. The individual’s history is not an inevitable progression: at every step, the past is grasped anew by a new choice, and the “normality” of the choice confers no privileged value on it: it must be judged by its authenticity. Homosexuality can be a way for woman to flee her condition or a way to assume it. Psychoanalysts’ great error, through moralizing conformity, is that they never envisage it as anything but an inauthentic attitude.
Woman is an existent who is asked to make herself object; as subject she has an aggressive sensuality that does not find satisfaction in the masculine body: from this are born the conflicts her eroticism must overcome. The system is considered normal that, delivering her as prey to a male, restores her sovereignty by putting a baby in her arms: but this “naturalism” is determined by a more or less well understood social interest. Even heterosexuality permits other solutions. Homosexuality for woman is one attempt among others to reconcile her autonomy with the passivity of her flesh. And if nature is invoked, it could be said that every woman is naturally homosexual. The lesbian is characterized simply by her refusal of the male and her preference for feminine flesh; but every adolescent female fears penetration and masculine domination, and she feels a certain repulsion for the man’s body; on the contrary, the feminine body is for her, as for man, an object of desire. As I have already said: men posit themselves as subjects, and at the same time they posit themselves as separate; to consider the other as a thing to take is to attack the virile ideal in the other and thus jointly in one’s self as well; by contrast, the woman who regards herself as object sees herself and her fellow creatures as prey. The homosexual man inspires hostility from male and female heterosexuals as they both demand that man be a dominating subject;1 by contrast, both sexes spontaneously view lesbians with indulgence. “I swear,” says the comte de Tilly, “it is a rivalry that in no way bothers me; on the contrary, I find it amusing and I am immoral enough to laugh at it.” Colette attributed this same amused indifference to Renaud faced with the couple Claudine and Rézi.2 A man is more irritated by an active and autonomous heterosexual woman than by a nonaggressive homosexual one; only the former challenges masculine prerogatives; sapphic loves in no way contradict the traditional model of the division of the sexes: in most cases, they are an assumption of femininity and not a rejection of it. We have seen that they often appear in the adolescent girl as an ersatz form of heterosexual relations she has not yet had the opportunity or the audacity to experience: it is a stage, an apprenticeship, and the one who most ardently engages in such loves may tomorrow be the most ardent of wives, lovers, and mothers. What must be explained in the female homosexual is thus not the positive aspect of her choice but the negative side: she is not characterized by her preference for women but by the exclusiveness of this preference.
According to Jones and Hesnard, lesbians mostly fall into two categories: “masculine lesbians,” who “try to act like men,” and “feminine” ones, who “are afraid of men.” It is a fact that one can, on the whole, observe two tendencies in homosexual women; some refuse passivity, while others choose to lose themselves passively in feminine arms; but these two attitudes react upon each other reciprocally; relations to the chosen object and to the rejected one are explained by each other reciprocally. For numerous reasons, as we shall see, the distinction given seems quite arbitrary.
To define the lesbian as “virile” because of her desire to “imitate man” is to doom her to inauthenticity. I have already said how psychoanalysts create ambiguities by accepting masculine-feminine categories as currently defined by society. Thus, man today represents the positive and the neuter—that is, the male and the human being—while woman represents the negative, the female. Every time she behaves like a human being, she is declared to be identifying with the male. Her sports, her political and intellectual activities, and her desire for other women are interpreted as “masculine protest”; there is a refusal to take into account the values toward which she is transcending, which inevitably leads to the belief that she is making the inauthentic choice of a subjective attitude. The great misunderstanding upon which this system of interpretation rests is to hold that it is natural for the human female to make a feminine woman of herself: being a heterosexual or even a mother is not enough to realize this ideal; the “real woman” is an artificial product that civilization produces the way eunuchs were produced in the past; these supposed “instincts” of coquetry or docility are inculcated in her just as phallic pride is for man; he does not always accept his virile vocation; she has good reasons to accept even less docilely the vocation assigned to her. The notions of inferiority complex and masculinity complex remind me of the anecdote that Denis de Rougemont recounts in La part du diable (The Devil’s Share): a woman imagined that birds were attacking her when she went walking in the country; after several months of psychoanalytical treatment that failed to cure her of her obsession, the doctor accompanied her to the clinic garden and realized that the birds were attacking her. Woman feels undermined because in fact the restrictions of femininity undermine her. She spontaneously chooses to be a complete individual, a subject, and a freedom before whom the world and future open: if this choice amounts to the choice of virility, it does so to the extent that femininity today means mutilation. Homosexuals’ confessions collected by Havelock Ellis and Stekel—platonic in the first case and openly declared in the second—clearly show that feminine specificity is what outrages the two subjects:
Ever since I can remember anything at all I could never think of myself as a girl and I was in perpetual trouble, with this as the real reason. When I was 5 or 6 years old I began to say to myself that, whatever anyone said, if I was not a boy at any rate I was not a girl … I regarded the conformati
on of my body as a mysterious accident … When I could only crawl my absorbing interest was hammers and carpet-nails. Before I could walk I begged to be put on horses’ backs … By the time I was 7 it seemed to me that everything I liked was called wrong for a girl … I was not at all a happy little child and often cried and was made irritable; I was so confused by the talk about boys and girls … Every half-holiday I went out with the boys from my brothers’ school … When I was about 11 my parents got more mortified at my behavior and perpetually threatened me with a boarding-school … My going was finally announced to me as a punishment to me for being what I was … In whatever direction my thoughts ran I always surveyed them from the point of view of a boy … A consideration of social matters led me to feel very sorry for women, whom I regarded as made by a deliberate process of manufacture into the fools I thought they were, and by the same process that I myself was being made one. I felt more and more that men were to be envied and women pitied. I lay stress on this for it started in me a deliberate interest in women as women, I began to feel protective and kindly toward women.