The Second Sex (71 page)
Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
Stekel’s work
Frigidity in Woman
essentially focuses on demonstrating the role of psychic factors in feminine frigidity. The following examples clearly show that it is often an act of resentment of the husband or lover:
Miss G.S.… had given herself to a man while waiting for him to marry her, while insisting on the fact “that she did not care about marriage,” that she did not want “to be attached.” She played the free woman. In truth, she was a slave to morality like her whole family. But her lover believed her and never spoke of marriage. Her stubbornness increased more and more until she became apathetic. When he finally did ask her to marry him, she took her revenge by admitting her numbness and no longer wanting to hear anything about a union. She no longer wanted to be happy. She had waited too long … She was consumed by jealousy and waited anxiously for the day he proposed so she could refuse it proudly. Then she wanted to commit suicide just to punish her lover in style.
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
.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.