The Second Sex (69 page)

In any case, however deferential and courteous a man might be, the first penetration is always a rape. While she desires caresses on her lips and breasts and perhaps yearns for a familiar or anticipated orgasm, here is a male sex organ tearing the young girl and introducing itself into regions where it was not invited. The painful surprise of a swooning virgin—who thinks she has finally reached the accomplishment of her voluptuous dreams and who feels in the secret of her sex an unexpected pain—in a husband’s or lover’s arms has often been described; the dreams faint away, the excitement dissipates, and love takes on the appearance of a surgical operation.

In the confessions gathered by Dr. Liepmann, there is the following and typical account. It concerns a very sexually unaware girl from a modest background:

In this case, the defloration was a kind of rape. But even if it is consensual, it can be painful. Look at the fevers that tormented young Isadora Duncan. She met an admirably handsome actor with whom she fell in love at first sight and who courted her ardently:

She was soon to know the paradise she lyrically described, first with this lover and then with others.

However, in actual experience, as previously in one’s virginal imagination, it is not pain that plays the greatest role: the fact of penetration counts far more. In intercourse the man introduces only an exterior organ: woman is affected in her deepest interior. Undoubtedly, there are many young men who tread with anguish in the secret darkness of woman; their childhood terrors resurface at the threshold of caves and graves, and so does their fright in front of jaws, scythes, and wolf traps: they imagine that their swollen penis will be caught in the mucous sheath; the woman, once penetrated, does not have this feeling of danger; but she does feel carnally alienated. The property owner affirms his rights over his lands, the housewife over her house by proclaiming “no trespassing”; because of their frustrated transcendence, women, in particular, jealously defend their privacy: their room, their wardrobe, and their chests are sacred. Colette tells of an old prostitute who told her one day: “In my room, Madame, no man has ever set foot; for what I have to do with men, Paris is quite big enough.” If not her body, at least she possessed a plot of land where entry was prohibited. The young girl, though, possesses little of her own except her body: it is her most precious treasure; the man who enters her
takes
it from her; the familiar word is confirmed by her lived experience. She experiences concretely the humiliation she had felt: she is dominated, subjugated, conquered. Like almost all females, she is
under
the man during intercourse.
¹⁰
Adler emphasized the feeling of inferiority resulting from this. Right from infancy, the notions of superior and inferior are extremely important; climbing trees is a prestigious act; heaven is above the earth; hell is underneath; to fall or to descend is to degrade oneself, and to climb is to exalt oneself; in wrestling, victory belongs to the one who pins his opponent down, whereas the woman lies on the bed in a position of defeat; it is even worse if the man straddles her like an animal subjugated by reins and a bit. In any case, she feels passive: she
is
caressed, penetrated; she undergoes intercourse, whereas the man spends himself actively. It is true that the male sex organ is not a striated muscle commanded by will; it is neither plowshare nor sword but merely flesh; but it is a voluntary movement that man imprints on her; he goes, he comes, stops, resumes, while the woman receives him submissively; it is the man—especially when the woman is a novice—who chooses the amorous positions, who decides the length and frequency of intercourse. She feels herself to be an instrument: all the freedom is in the other. This is what is poetically expressed by saying that woman is comparable to a violin and man to the bow that makes her vibrate. “In love,” says Balzac, “leaving the soul out of consideration, woman is a lyre which only yields up its secrets to the man who can play upon it skilfully.”
¹¹
He
takes
his pleasure with her; he
gives
her pleasure; the words themselves do not imply reciprocity. Woman is imbued with collective images of the glorious aura of masculine sexual excitement that make feminine arousal a shameful abdication: her intimate experience confirms this asymmetry. It must not be forgotten that boy and girl adolescents experience their bodies differently: the former tranquilly takes his body for granted and proudly takes charge of his desires; for the latter, in spite of her narcissism, it is a strange and disturbing burden. Man’s sex organ is neat and simple, like a finger; it can be innocently exhibited, and boys often show it off to their friends proudly and defiantly; the feminine sex organ is mysterious to the woman herself, hidden, tormented, mucous, and humid; it bleeds each month, it is sometimes soiled with bodily fluids, it has a secret and dangerous life. It is largely because woman does not recognize herself in it that she does not recognize her own desires. They are expressed in a
shameful manner. While the man has a “hard-on,” the woman “gets wet”; there is in the very word infantile memories of the wet bed, of the guilty and involuntary desire to urinate; man has the same disgust for his nocturnal unconscious wet dreams; projecting a liquid, urine or sperm, is not humiliating: it is an active operation; but there is humiliation if the liquid escapes passively since the body then is no longer an organism, muscles, sphincters, and nerves, commanded by the brain and expressing the conscious subject, but a vase, a receptacle made of inert matter, and the plaything of mechanical caprices. If the flesh oozes—like an old wall or a dead body—it does not seem to be emitting liquid but deliquescing: a decomposition process that horrifies. Feminine heat is the flaccid palpitation of a shellfish; where man has impetuousness, woman merely has impatience; her desire can become ardent without ceasing to be passive; the man dives on his prey like the eagle and the hawk; she, like a carnivorous plant, waits for and watches the swamp where insects and children bog down; she is sucking, suction, sniffer, she is pitch and glue, immobile appeal, insinuating, and viscous: at least this is the way she indefinably feels. Thus, there is not only resistance against the male who attempts to subjugate her but also internal conflict. Superimposed on the taboos and inhibitions that arise from her education and society are disgust and refusals that stem from the erotic experience itself: they all reinforce each other to such an extent that often after the first coitus the woman is more in revolt against her sexual destiny than before.

Lastly, there is another factor that often gives man a hostile look and changes the sexual act into a grave danger: the danger of a child. An illegitimate child in most civilizations is such a social and economic handicap for the unmarried woman that one sees young girls committing suicide when they know they are pregnant and unwed mothers cutting the throats of their newborns; such a risk constitutes a quite powerful sexual brake, making many young girls observe the prenuptial chastity prescribed by customs. When the brake is insufficient, the young girl, while yielding to the lover, is horrified by the terrible danger he possesses in his loins. Stekel cites, among others, a young girl who for the entire duration of intercourse shouted: “Don’t let anything happen! Don’t let anything happen!” Even in marriage, the woman often does not want a child, her health is not good enough, or a child would be too great a burden on the young household. Whether he is lover or husband, if she does not have absolute confidence in her partner, her eroticism will be paralyzed by caution. Either she will anxiously watch the man’s behavior, or else, once intercourse is over, she will run to the bathroom to chase the living germ from her belly, put there in
spite of herself. This hygienic operation brutally contradicts the sensual magic of the caresses; she undergoes an absolute separation of the bodies that were merged in one single joy; thus the male sperm becomes a harmful germ, a soiling; she cleans herself as one cleans a dirty vase, while the man reclines on his bed in his superb wholeness. A young divorcée told me how horrified she was when—after a dubiously pleasurable wedding night—she had to shut herself in the bathroom and her husband nonchalantly lit a cigarette: it seems that the ruin of the couple was decided at that instant. The repugnance of the douche, the beaker, and the bidet is one of the frequent causes of feminine frigidity. The existence of surer and more convenient contraceptive devices is helping woman’s sexual freedom a great deal; in a country like America where these practices are widespread, the number of young girls still virgins at marriage is much lower than in France; such practices make for far greater abandon during the love act. But there again, the young woman has to overcome her repugnance before treating her body as a thing: she can no more resign herself to being “corked” to satisfy a man’s desires than she can to being “pierced” by him. Whether she has her uterus sealed or introduces some sperm-killing tampon, a woman who is conscious of the ambiguities of the body and sex will be bridled by cold premeditation; besides, many men consider the use of condoms repugnant. It is sexual behavior as a whole that justifies its various moments: conduct that when analyzed would seem repugnant seems natural when bodies are transfigured by the erotic virtues they possess; but inversely, when bodies and behaviors are decomposed into separate elements and deprived of meaning, these elements become disgusting and obscene. The surgical and dirty perception that penetration had in the eyes of the child returns if it is not carried out with the arousal, desire, and pleasure a woman in love will joyfully experience as union and fusion with the beloved: this is what happens with the concerted use of prophylactics. In any case, these precautions are not at the disposal of all women; many young girls do not know of any defense against the threats of pregnancy, and they feel great anguish that their lot depends on the goodwill of the man they give themselves up to.

It is understandable that an ordeal experienced through so much resistance, fraught with such weighty implications, often creates serious traumas. A latent precocious dementia has often been revealed by the first experience. Stekel gives several examples: