The Second Sex (72 page)

In this sense, true masochism can be found in some women. The young girl is susceptible to it since she is easily narcissistic and narcissism consists in alienating one’s self in one’s ego. If she experienced arousal and violent desire right from the beginning of her erotic initiation, she would live her experiences authentically and stop projecting them toward this ideal pole that she calls self; but in frigidity, the self continues to affirm itself; making it the thing of a male seems then like a fault. But “masochism, like sadism, is the assumption of guilt. I am guilty due to the very fact that I am an object.” This idea of Sartre’s fits in with the Freudian notion of self-punishment. The young girl considers herself guilty of delivering her self to another, and she punishes herself for it by willingly increasing humiliation and subjugation; we have seen that virgins defied their future lovers and punished themselves for their future submission by inflicting various tortures on themselves. When the lover is real and present, they persist in
this attitude. Frigidity itself can be seen as a punishment that woman imposes as much on herself as on her partner: wounded in her vanity, she resents him and herself, and she does not permit herself pleasure. In masochism, she will wildly enslave herself to the male, she will tell him words of adoration, she will wish to be humiliated, beaten; she will alienate herself more and more deeply out of fury for having agreed to the alienation. This is quite obviously Mathilde de la Mole’s behavior, for example; she regrets having given herself to Julien, which is why she sometimes falls at his feet, bends over backward to indulge each of his whims, sacrifices her hair; but at the same time, she is in revolt against him as much as against herself; one imagines that she is icy in his arms. The fake abandon of the masochistic woman creates new barriers that keep her from pleasure; and at the same time, she is taking vengeance against herself for this inability to experience pleasure. The vicious circle from frigidity to masochism can establish itself forever, bringing sadistic behavior along with it as compensation. Becoming erotically mature can also deliver woman from her frigidity and her narcissism, and assuming her sexual passivity, she lives it immediately instead of playing the role. Because the paradox of masochism is that the subject reaffirms itself constantly even in its attempt to abdicate itself, it is in the gratuitous gift, in the spontaneous movement toward the other, that he succeeds in forgetting himself. It is thus true that woman will be more prone than man to masochistic temptation; her erotic situation as passive object commits her to playing passivity; this game is the self-punishment to which her narcissistic revolts and consequent frigidity lead her; the fact is that many women and in particular young girls are masochists. Colette, speaking of her first amorous experiences, confides to us in
Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeships):

This perfectly expresses the fact that masochism is part of juvenile perversions, that it is not an authentic solution of the conflict created by woman’s sexual destiny, but a way of escaping it by wallowing in it. In no way does it represent the normal and happy blossoming of feminine eroticism.

This blossoming supposes that—in love, tenderness, and sensuality—woman succeeds in overcoming her passivity and establishing a relationship of reciprocity with her partner. The asymmetry of male and female eroticism creates insoluble problems as long as there is a battle of the sexes; they can easily be settled when a woman feels both desire and respect in a man; if he covets her in her flesh while recognizing her freedom, she recovers her essentialness at the moment she becomes object, she remains free in the submission to which she consents. Thus, the lovers can experience shared pleasure in their own way; each partner feels pleasure as being his own while at the same time having its source in the other. The words “receive” and “give” exchange meanings, joy is gratitude, pleasure is tenderness. In a concrete and sexual form the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in the keenest consciousness of the other and the self. Some women say they feel the masculine sex organ in themselves as a part of their own body; some men think they
are
the woman they penetrate; these expressions are obviously inaccurate; the dimension of the
other
remains; but the fact is that alterity no longer has a hostile character; this consciousness of the union of the bodies in their separation is what makes the sexual act moving; it is all the more overwhelming that the two beings who together passionately negate and affirm their limits are fellow creatures and yet are different. This difference that all too often isolates them becomes the source of their marveling when they join together; woman recognizes the virile passion in man’s force as the reverse of the fever that burns within her, and this is the power she wields over him; this sex organ swollen with life belongs to her just as her smile belongs to the man who gives her pleasure. All the treasures of virility and femininity reflecting off and reappropriating each other make a moving and ecstatic unity. What is necessary for such harmony are not technical refinements but rather, on the basis of an immediate erotic attraction, a reciprocal generosity of body and soul.

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.

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 eroticism. 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.