The Second Sex (11 page)

In any case, it is not always true that the male’s individual privileges confer upon him superiority in the species; the female regains another kind of autonomy in maternity. Sometimes he imposes his domination: this is the case in the monkeys studied by Zuckerman; but often the two halves of the couple lead separate lives; the lion and the lioness share the care of the habitat equally. Here again, the case of the human species cannot be reduced to any other; men do not define themselves first as individuals; men and women have never challenged each other in individual fights; the couple is an original
Mitsein;
and it is always a fixed or transitory element of a wider collectivity; within these societies, who, the male or the female, is the more necessary for the species? In terms of gametes, in terms of the biological functions of coitus and gestation, the male principle creates to maintain and the female principle maintains to create: What becomes of this division in social life? For species attached to foreign bodies or to the substrata, for those to whom nature grants food abundantly and effortlessly, the role of the male is limited to fertilization; when it is necessary to search, chase, or fight to provide food needed for offspring, the male often helps with their maintenance; this help becomes absolutely indispensable in a species where children remain incapable of taking care of their own needs for a long period after the mother stops nursing them: the male’s work then takes on an extreme importance; the lives he brought forth could not maintain themselves without him. One male is enough to fertilize many females each year: but males are necessary for the survival of children after birth, to defend them against enemies, to extract from nature everything they need. The balance of productive and reproductive forces is different depending on the different economic moments of human history, and they condition the relation of the male and the female to children and later among them. But we are going beyond the field of biology: in purely biological terms, it would not be possible to posit the primacy of one sex concerning the role it plays in perpetuating the species.

But a society is not a species: the species realizes itself as existence in a society; it transcends itself toward the world and the future; its customs cannot be deduced from biology; individuals are never left to their nature; they obey this second nature, that is, customs in which the desires and fears that express their ontological attitude are reflected. It is not as a body but as a body subjected to taboos and laws that the subject gains consciousness of and accomplishes himself. He valorizes himself in the name of certain values. And once again, physiology cannot ground values: rather, biological data take on those values the existent confers on them. If the respect or fear woman inspires prohibits man from using violence against her, the male’s
muscular superiority is not a source of power. If customs desire—as in some Indian tribes—that girls choose husbands, or if it is the father who decides on marriages, the male’s sexual aggressiveness does not grant him any initiative, any privilege. The mother’s intimate link to the child will be a source of dignity or indignity for her, depending on the very variable value given to the child; this very link, as has already been said, will be recognized or not according to social biases.

Thus we will clarify the biological data by examining them in the light of ontological economic, social, and psychological contexts. Woman’s enslavement to the species and the limits of her individual abilities are facts of extreme importance; the woman’s body is one of the essential elements of the situation she occupies in this world. But her body is not enough to define her; it has a lived reality only as taken on by consciousness through actions and within a society; biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns us: why is woman the
Other
? The question is how, in her, nature has been taken on in the course of history; the question is what humanity has made of the human female.

The enormous advance psychoanalysis made over psychophysiology is in its consideration that no factor intervenes in psychic life without having taken on human meaning; it is not the body-object described by scientists that exists concretely but the body lived by the subject. The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such. Some essential biological givens are not part of her lived situation: for example, the structure of the ovum is not reflected in it; by contrast, an organ of slight biological importance like the clitoris plays a primary role in it. Nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.

An entire system has been erected based on this outlook: we do not intend here to criticize it as a whole, but only to examine its contribution to the study of woman. Discussing psychoanalysis as such is not an easy undertaking. Like all religions—Christianity or Marxism—it displays an unsettling flexibility against a background of rigid concepts. Sometimes words are taken in their narrowest meanings, the term “phallus,” for example, designating very precisely the fleshy growth that is the male sex organ; at other times, infinitely broadened, they take on a symbolic value: the phallus would express all of the virile character and situation as a whole. If one criticizes the doctrine to the letter, the psychoanalyst maintains that its spirit has been misunderstood; if one approves of the spirit, he immediately wants to limit you to the letter. The doctrine is unimportant, he says: psychoanalysis is a method; but the success of the method strengthens the doctrinaire in his faith. After all, where would the true features of psychoanalysis be found if not with psychoanalysts themselves? But among them, as among Christians and Marxists, there are heretics: more than one psychoanalyst has declared that “the worst enemies of psychoanalysis are psychoanalysts themselves.” Many ambiguities remain to be dissolved, in spite of an often-pedantic scholastic precision. As Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
have observed, the proposition “sexuality is coextensive with existence” can be understood in two very different ways; it could mean that every avatar of the existent has a sexual signification, or that every sexual phenomenon has an existential meaning: these two affirmations can be reconciled; but often one tends to slip from one to the other. Besides, as soon as “sexual” and “genital” are distinguished, the notion of sexuality becomes blurred. “The sexual for Freud is the intrinsic aptitude to trigger the genital,” says Dalbiez.
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But nothing is murkier than the notion of “aptitude,” or of possibility: only reality can indubitably prove possibility. Not being a philosopher, Freud refused to justify his system philosophically; his disciples maintain that he thus eludes any attacks of a metaphysical sort. There are, however, metaphysical postulates behind all of his affirmations: to use his language is to adopt a philosophy. It is this very confusion that, while making criticism awkward, demands it.

Freud was not very concerned with woman’s destiny; it is clear that he modeled his description of it on that of masculine destiny, merely modifying some of the traits. Before him, the sexologist Marañón had declared: “As differentiated energy, the libido is, one might say, a force of virile significance. We can say as much for the orgasm.” According to him, women who attain orgasm are “viriloid” women; sexual fulfillment is a “one-way street” and woman is only at the halfway point.
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Freud does not go that far; he accepts that woman’s sexuality is as developed as man’s; but he barely studies it in itself. He writes: “The libido is constantly and regularly male in essence, whether in man or in woman.” He refuses to posit the feminine libido in its originality: he will thus necessarily see it as a complex deviation from the human libido in general. And this, he thinks, develops first identically in both sexes: all children go through an oral phase that fixes them upon their mother’s breast, then an anal phase, and finally the genital phase; it is then that they become differentiated. Freud brought out a fact whose importance had not previously been recognized: male eroticism is definitively centered on the penis, while the woman has two distinct erotic systems, one that is clitoral and develops in infancy and another that is vaginal and develops only after puberty; when the boy gets to the genital phase, he completes his development; he has to move from the autoerotic attitude,
where subjective pleasure is sought, to a hetero-erotic attitude that will link pleasure to an object, usually a woman; this passage will occur at puberty through a narcissistic phase: but the penis will remain, as in infancy, the favored erotic organ. Woman, also passing through a narcissistic phase, must make man the object of her libido; but the process will be far more complex as she must pass from clitoral to vaginal pleasure. There is but one genital step for man, while there are two for woman; she runs a greater risk of not completing her sexual development, and of remaining at the infantile stage, and consequently of developing neuroses.

At the autoerotic stage, the child is already more or less strongly attached to an object: a boy is fixated on his mother and wants to identify with his father; he is afraid of this ambition and fears that his father will punish him for it by mutilating him; the castration complex emanates from the Oedipus complex; so he develops aggressive feelings toward his father, while at the same time interiorizing his father’s authority: thus develops the superego that censures incestuous tendencies; these tendencies are repressed, the complex is liquidated, and the son is freed from the father, whom he in fact has installed in himself in the form of moral precepts. The more defined and strongly fought the Oedipus complex is, the stronger the superego. Freud first described the history of the girl in a completely symmetrical way; later he named the feminine form of the infant complex the Electra complex; but clearly he defined it less in itself than based on a masculine model; yet he accepts a very important difference between the two: the little girl first has a maternal fixation, while the boy is at no time sexually attracted by the father; this fixation is a carryover from the oral phase; the infant then identifies with the father; but around the age of five, she discovers the anatomical difference between the sexes, and she reacts to the absence of a penis by a castration complex: she imagines having been mutilated, and suffers from it; she must therefore renounce her virile pretensions; she identifies with her mother and tries to seduce her father. The castration complex and the Electra complex reinforce each other; the feeling of frustration for girls is all the more painful as, loving her father, the girl would like to resemble him; and inversely regret strengthens her love: through the tenderness she inspires in her father, she can compensate for her inferiority. The girl experiences feelings of rivalry and hostility toward her mother. Then her superego is constituted as well, repressing her incestuous tendencies; but her superego is more fragile: the Electra complex is less clear than the Oedipus complex, because her first fixation was maternal; and since the father was himself the object of this love that he condemned, his prohibitions had less force than in the case of the rival son. It
can be seen that, as with her genital development, the little girl’s overall sexual drama is more complex than her brother’s: she might be tempted to react to the castration complex by rejecting her femininity, obstinately coveting a penis, and identifying with her father; this attitude will lead her to remain at the clitoral stage, to become frigid, or to turn to homosexuality.

The two essential objections to this description stem from the fact that Freud copied it from a masculine model. He assumes that a woman feels like a mutilated man; but the notion of mutilation implies comparison and valorization; many psychoanalysts accept today that girls miss having a penis without assuming they were ever stripped of one; this regret is not even generalized among all girls; and it could not arise from a simple anatomical encounter; many little girls discover the masculine constitution very late; and if they do discover it, it is only by seeing it; the boy has a living experience from his penis that allows him to take pride in it, but this pride has no immediate correlation with the humiliation of his sisters since they only know the masculine organ in its exteriority; this growth, this delicate stalk of skin, can only inspire their indifference and even disgust; the girl’s envy, when it appears, is the result of a prior valorization of virility: Freud takes this for granted when instead he should account for it.
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Besides, because there is no original description of the feminine libido, the notion of the Electra complex is very vague. Even the presence of a specifically genital Oedipus complex in boys is by no means general; but, apart from very rare exceptions, it cannot be stated that the father is a source of genital excitation for his daughter; one of the great problems of female eroticism is that clitoral pleasure is localized: it is only in puberty, in connection with vaginal eroticism, that many erogenous zones develop in the woman’s body; to say that in a child of ten a father’s kisses and caresses have an “intrinsic aptitude” to arouse clitoral pleasure is an assertion that in most cases makes no sense. If it is accepted that the “Electra complex” has only a very diffuse and affective nature, then the whole question of affectivity is raised, a question that Freudianism does not provide the means to define, once it is distinguished from sexuality. In any case, it is not the feminine libido that deifies the father: the mother is not deified by the desire she arouses in her son; the fact that feminine desire is focused on a sovereign being gives it a unique character; but the girl is not constitutive of her object, she submits to it. The father’s sovereignty is a fact of social order: Freud fails to account for this; he himself admits that it is impossible to
know what authority decided at what moment in history that the father would prevail over the mother: according to him, this decision represents progress, but its causes are unknown. “[In this case] it cannot be the father himself, since it is only this progress that raises him to the rank of an authority,” he writes in his last work.
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