that a woman's fall from the pedestal is particularly painful, as she often becomes economically and emotionally dependent on the man whom she regards as the love of her life, with few of the same economic and social resources to recoup her losses when the relationship flounders. In an article where she argues for a necessary relationship between love and monogamous (not polygamous) sexual exclusivity, Bonnie Steinbock dooms monogamy from the start by admitting that after "the first throes of romantic love[,] it is precisely because this stage does
not
last that we must promise to be faithful through the notoriously unromantic realities of married life."
47
Were Steinbock to appreciate the ways gender informs sexuality, she, like Firestone, might regard this fact as good reason for
not
entering into a relationship of sexual exclusivity.
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The Don Juan who obsesses over, pursues, and ultimately possesses each of his lovers is an impersonal lover precisely because he does not love each of his partners for her own sake as a unique and particular individual but regards each one as a means to sexual conquest, to add to his list of conquests. He pretends to love them for themselves alone, detailing each perfection that he attests is theirs, promising an indefinite future of affection and attention. In other words, he
pretends
to be romantic, luring women with the bait of true love. Once lured to his bed, his partners become interchangeable, and so expendable, sexual objects. Here I disagree with Søoren Kierkegaard, who says that the Don Juan is not deceiving his lovers; he is only fickle and truly believes, in his momentary sexual frenzy, that he will marry each one of them. This way of describing the Don Juan makes his peccadillos purely aesthetic, quite distinct from the ethical stage to which, according to Kierkegaard, he must ultimately aspire, if he does not wish to become bored. My point is that the Don Juan is a cad and a bounder precisely because his sexual behavior is intentionally deceptive, and to regard his behavior as purely aesthetic is to excuse an immoral promiscuity. (I wonder, would Kierkegaard have given solely aesthetic content to an equally promiscuous
woman's
behavior?)
48
The promiscuous man cannot flaunt his promiscuity among women for fear of being rejected as a profoundly unromantic gigolo by the very women he has convinced of the value of monogamy and whom he wishes to possess. On the other hand, sexual conquests are the stuff of serious conversation among many men ready to snicker and boast of a promiscuity encouraged in their peer group. Such conversation has historically been the type that so-called ladies are too delicate to hear, when women's discovery of the pretense, obfuscated by a compliment to our femininity, would ruin the game. Ever in search of new women to conquer, the promiscuous man must
appear
to be romantic even while he "plays around."
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According to Firestone, romantic love is a male invention designed to make women into men's legitimate sexual property. If a woman can be convinced that romance is her only source for sexual intimacy, she will avoid promiscuous affairs for fear of losing access to that intimacy. Ironically, the supposed depersonalization of promiscuity that cultural feminists seek to avoid directs them toward a vision of romantic love that is often neither personal nor affectionate. On the other hand, women's promiscuity, according to Firestone, is typically no more than a false imitation of patriarchal power and another instance of women's co-optation by a system of sexual subordination. Under such circumstances, women are confronted with
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