The Second Sex (67 page)

The situation is profoundly different here for man and woman from the biological, social, and psychological points of view. For man, the passage from childhood sexuality to maturity is relatively simple: erotic pleasure is objectified; now, instead of being realized in his immanent presence, this erotic pleasure is intended for a transcendent being. The erection is the expression of this need; with penis, hands, mouth, with his whole body, the man reaches out to his partner, but he remains at the heart of this activity, as the subject generally does before the objects he perceives and the instruments he manipulates; he projects himself toward the other without losing his autonomy; feminine flesh is a prey for him, and he seizes in woman the attributes his sensuality requires of any object; of course he does not succeed in appropriating them: at least he holds them; the embrace and the kiss imply a partial failure: but this very failure is a stimulant and a joy. The act of love finds its unity in its natural culmination: orgasm. Coitus has a specific physiological aim; in ejaculation the male releases burdensome secretions; after orgasm, the male feels complete relief regularly accompanied
by pleasure. And, of course, pleasure is not the only aim; it is often followed by disappointment: the need has disappeared rather than having been satisfied. In any case, a definite act is consummated, and the man’s body remains intact: the service he has rendered to the species becomes one with his own pleasure. Woman’s eroticism is far more complex and reflects the complexity of her situation. It has been seen that instead of integrating forces of the species into her individual life, the female is prey to the species, whose interests diverge from her own ends;
¹
this antinomy reaches its height in woman; one of its manifestations is the opposition of two organs: the clitoris and the vagina. At the infant stage, the former is the center of feminine eroticism: some psychiatrists uphold the existence of vaginal sensitivity in little girls, but this is a very inaccurate opinion; at any rate, it would have only secondary importance. The clitoral system does not change with adulthood,
²
and woman preserves this erotic autonomy her whole life; like the male orgasm, the clitoral spasm is a kind of detumescence that occurs quasi-mechanically; but it is only indirectly linked to normal coitus, it plays no role whatsoever in procreation. The woman is penetrated and impregnated through the vagina; it becomes an erotic center uniquely through the intervention of the male, and this always constitutes a kind of rape. In the past, a woman was snatched from her childhood universe and thrown into her life as a wife by a real or simulated rape; this was an act of violence that changed the girl into a woman: it is also referred to as “ravishing” a girl’s virginity or “taking” her flower. This deflowering is not the harmonious outcome of a continuous development; it is an abrupt rupture with the past, the beginning of a new cycle. Pleasure is then reached by contractions of the inside surface of the vagina; do these contractions result in a precise and definitive orgasm? This point is still being debated. The anatomical data are vague. “There is a great deal of anatomic and clinical evidence that most of the interior of the vagina is without nerves,” states, among other things, the Kinsey Report. “A considerable amount of surgery may be performed inside the vagina without need for anesthetics. Nerves have been demonstrated inside the vagina only in an area in the anterior wall, proximate to the base of the clitoris.” However, in addition to the stimulation of this innervated zone, “the female may be conscious of the intrusion of an object into the vagina, particularly if vaginal muscles are tightened; but the satisfaction so obtained is probably related more to muscle tonus than it is to erotic nerve
stimulation.”
^*

Yet it is beyond doubt that vaginal pleasure exists; and even vaginal masturbation—for adult women—seems to be more widespread than Kinsey says.
³
But what is certain is that the vaginal reaction is very complex and can be qualified as psychophysiological because it not only concerns the entire nervous system but also depends on the whole situation lived by the subject: it requires profound consent of the individual as a whole; to establish itself, the new erotic cycle launched by the first coitus demands a kind of “preparation” of the nervous system, the elaboration of a totally new form that has to include the clitoral system as well; it takes a long time to be put in place, and sometimes it never succeeds in being created. It is striking that woman has the choice between two cycles, one of which perpetuates youthful independence, while the other destines her to man and children. The normal sexual act effectively makes woman dependent on the male and the species. It is he—as for most animals—who has the aggressive role and she who submits to his embrace. Ordinarily, she can be taken at any time by man, while he can take her only when he is in the state of erection; feminine refusal can be overcome except in the case of a rejection as profound as vaginismus, sealing woman more securely than the hymen; still vaginismus leaves the male means to relieve himself on a body that his muscular force permits him to reduce to his mercy. Since she is object, her inertia does not profoundly alter her natural role: to the extent that many men are not interested in whether the woman who shares their bed wants coitus or only submits to it. One can even go to bed with a dead woman. Coitus cannot take place without male consent, and male satisfaction is its natural end result. Fertilization can occur without the woman deriving any pleasure. On the other hand, fertilization is far from representing the completion of the sexual process for her; by contrast, it is at this
moment that the service demanded of her by the species begins: it takes place slowly and painfully in pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding.

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,

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

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:

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 skin 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.