The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  The suffocating wedding day in the narrow Saint-Clair church, where the women’s cackling drowned out the wheezing harmonium, and the body odor overpowered the incense—this was the day when Thérèse realized she was lost. She had entered the cage like a sleepwalker and, as the heavy door groaned shut, the miserable child in her reawakened. Nothing had changed, but she had the sensation that she would never again be able to be alone. In the thick of a family, she would smolder, like a hidden fire that leaps up onto a branch, lights up a pine tree, then another, then step by step creates a whole forest of torches …

  On the evening of that half-peasant, half-bourgeois wedding day, groups of the guests crowded around their car, forcing it to slow down; the girls’ dresses fluttered in the crowd … Thérèse, thinking of the night that was coming, murmured, “It was horrible …” but then caught herself and said, “no—not so horrible.” On their trip to the Italian lakes, had she suffered so much? No—she played the game; don’t lie … Thérèse knew how to bend her body to these charades, and she took a bitter pleasure in the accomplishment. This unknown world of sensual pleasure into which the man forced her—her imagination helped her conceive that there was a real pleasure there for her too, a possible happiness—but what happiness? As when, before a country scene pouring with rain, we imagine to ourselves what it looks like in the sunshine—thus it was that Thérèse looked upon sensuality.

  Bernard, the boy with the vacant stare,… what an easy dupe! He was as sunk in his pleasure as those sweet little pigs you can watch through the fence, snorting with happiness in their trough (“and I was the trough,” thought Thérèse) … Where had he learned it, this ability to classify everything relating to the flesh, to distinguish the honorable caress from that of the sadist? Never a moment’s hesitation …

  “Poor Bernard! He’s no worse than others. But desire transforms the one who approaches us into a monster, a different being … I played dead, as if the slightest movement on my part could make this madman, this epileptic, strangle me.”

  Here is a blunter account. Stekel obtained this confession from which I quote the passage about married life. It concerns a twenty-eight-year-old woman, brought up in a refined and cultivated home:

  I was a happy fiancée; I finally had the feeling I was safe, all at once I was the focus of attention. I was spoiled, my fiancé admired me, all this was new for me … our kisses (my fiancé had never attempted any other caresses) had aroused me to such a point that I could not wait for the wedding day … The morning of the wedding I was in such a state of excitation that my camisole was soaking with sweat: Just the idea that I was finally going to know the stranger I had so desired. I had the infantile image that the man was supposed to urinate in the woman’s vagina … In our room, there was already a little disappointment when my husband asked me if he should move away. I asked him to do that because I was really ashamed in front of him. The undressing scene had played such a role in my imagination. He came back, very embarrassed, when I was in bed. Later on, he admitted that my appearance had intimidated him: I was the incarnation of radiant and eager youth. Barely had he undressed than he shut out the light. Barely kissing me, he immediately tried to take me. I was frightened and asked him to let me alone. I wanted to be very far from him. I was horrified at this attempt without prior caresses. I found him brutal and often criticized him for it later. It was not brutality but very great clumsiness and a lack of sensitivity. All the attempts that night were in vain. I began to be very unhappy, I was ashamed of my stupidity, I thought I was at fault and badly formed … Finally, I settled for his kisses. Ten days later he succeeded in deflowering me, I had felt nothing. It was a major disappointment! Then I felt a little joy during coitus but success was very disturbing, my husband laboring hard to reach his goal … In Prague in my brother-in-law’s bachelor apartment I imagined my brother-in-law’s feelings learning I had slept in his bed. That is when I had my first orgasm, making me very happy. My husband made love with me every day during the first weeks. I was still reaching orgasm but I was not satisfied because it was too short and I was excited to the point of crying … After two births … coitus became less and less satisfying. It rarely led to orgasm, my husband always reaching it before me; I followed each session anxiously (how long is it going to continue?). If he was satisfied leaving me at halfway, I hated him. Sometimes, I imagined my cousin during coitus or the doctor who had delivered me. My husband tried to excite me with his finger … I was very aroused but, at the same time, I found this means shameful and abnormal and experienced no pleasure … During the whole time of our marriage, he never caressed even one part of my body. One day he told me that he did not dare do anything with me … He never saw me naked because we always kept on our nightclothes, he performed coitus only at night.

  This very sensual woman was later perfectly happy in the arms of a lover.

  Engagements are specifically meant to create gradations in the young girl’s initiation; but mores often impose extreme chastity on the engaged couple. When the virgin “knows” her future husband during this period, her situation is not very different from that of the young bride; she yields only because her engagement already seems to her as definitive as marriage and the first coitus has the characteristics of a test; once she has given herself—even if she is not pregnant, which would keep her in chains—it is very rare for her to assert herself again.

  The difficulties of the first experiences are easily overcome if love or desire generates total consent from the two partners; physical love draws its strength and dignity from the joy lovers give each other and take in the reciprocal consciousness of their freedom; thus there are no degrading practices since, for both of them, their practices are not submitted to but generously desired. But the principle of marriage is obscene because it transforms an exchange that should be founded on a spontaneous impulse into rights and duties; it gives bodies an instrumental, thus degrading, side by dooming them to grasp themselves in their generality; the husband is often frozen by the idea that he is accomplishing a duty, and the wife is ashamed to feel delivered to someone who exercises a right over her. Of course, relations can become individualized at the beginning of married life; sexual apprenticeship is sometimes accomplished in slow gradations; as of the first night, a happy physical attraction can be discovered between the spouses. Marriage facilitates the wife’s abandon by suppressing the notion of sin still so often attached to the flesh; regular and frequent cohabitation engenders carnal intimacy that is favorable to sexual maturity: there are wives fully satisfied in their first years of marriage. It is to be noted that they remain grateful to their husbands, which makes it possible to pardon them later for the wrongs they might be responsible for. “Women who cannot get out of an unhappy home life have always been satisfied by their husbands,” says Stekel. It remains that the young girl runs a terrible risk in promising to sleep exclusively and for her whole life with a man she does not know sexually, whereas her erotic destiny essentially depends on her partner’s personality: this is the paradox Léon Blum rightfully denounced in his work Marriage.

  To claim that a union founded on convention has much chance of engendering love is hypocritical; to ask two spouses bound by practical, social, and moral ties to satisfy each other sexually for their whole lives is pure absurdity. Yet advocates of marriages of reason have no trouble showing that marriages of love do not have much more chance of ensuring the spouses’ happiness. In the first place, ideal love, which is often what the girl knows, does not always dispose her to sexual love; her platonic adorations, her daydreaming, and the passions into which she projects her infantile or juvenile obsessions are not meant to resist the tests of daily life nor to last for a long time. Even if there is a sincere and violent erotic attraction between her and her fiancé, that is not a solid basis on which to construct the enterprise of a life. Colette writes:

  But voluptuous pleasure is not the only thing. In the limitless desert of love it holds a very small place, so f
laming that at first one sees nothing else … All about this flickering hearth there lies the unknown, there lies danger … After we have risen from a short embrace, or even from a long night, we shall have to begin to live at close quarters to each other, and in dependence on each other.23

  Moreover, even in cases where carnal love exists before marriage or awakens at the beginning of the marriage, it is very rare for it to last many long years. Certainly fidelity is necessary for sexual love, since the two lovers’ desire encompasses their singularity; they do not want it contested by outside experiences, they want to be irreplaceable for each other; but this fidelity has meaning only as long as it is spontaneous; and spontaneously, erotic magic dissolves rather quickly. The miracle is that it gives to each of the lovers, in the instant and in their carnal presence, a being whose existence is an unlimited transcendence: and possession of this being is undoubtedly impossible, but at least each of them is reached in a privileged and poignant way. But when individuals no longer want to reach each other because of hostility, disgust, or indifference between them, erotic attraction disappears; and it dies almost as surely in esteem and friendship: two human beings who come together in the very movement of their transcendence through the world and their common projects no longer need carnal union; and further, because this union has lost its meaning, they are repelled by it. The word “incest” that Montaigne pronounces is very significant. Eroticism is a movement toward the Other, and this is its essential character; but within the couple, spouses become, for each other, the Same; no exchange is possible between them anymore, no giving, no conquest. If they remain lovers, it is often in embarrassment: they feel the sexual act is no longer an intersubjective experience where each one goes beyond himself, but rather a kind of mutual masturbation. That they consider each other a necessary tool for the satisfaction of their needs is a fact conjugal politeness disguises but which bursts out when this politeness is rejected, for example in observations reported by Dr. Lagache in his work The Nature and Forms of Jealousy:* the wife regards the male member as a certain source of pleasure that belongs to her, and she guards it in as miserly a way as the preserves she stores in the cupboard: if the man gives some away to a woman neighbor, there will be no more for her; she looks at his underwear to see if he has not wasted the precious semen. In Chroniques maritales (Marcel and Élise: The Bold Chronicle of a Strange Marriage), Jouhandeau notes this “daily censure practised by the legitimate wife who scrutinises your shirt and your sleep to discover the sign of ignominy.” For his part, the man satisfies his desires on her without asking her opinion.

  This brutal satisfaction of need is, in fact, not enough to satisfy human sexuality. That is why there is often an aftertaste of vice in these seemingly most legitimate embraces. The woman often helps herself along with erotic imaginings. Stekel cites a twenty-five-year-old woman who “could reach a slight orgasm with her husband by imagining that a strong, older man is taking her by force, so she cannot defend herself.” She sees herself as being raped, beaten, and her husband is not himself but an Other. He indulges in the same dream: in his wife’s body he possesses the legs of a dancer seen in a music hall, the breasts of this pinup whose photo he has dwelled on, a memory, an image; or else he imagines his wife desired, possessed, or raped, which is a way to give her back her lost alterity. “Marriage,” says Stekel, “creates gross transpositions and inversions, refined actors, scenarios played out between the two partners who risk destroying the limits between appearance and reality.” Pushed to the limit, real vices appear. The husband becomes a voyeur: he needs to see his wife, or know she is sleeping with a lover to feel a little of her magic again; or he sadistically strives to provoke her to refuse him, so her consciousness and freedom show through, assuring it is really a human being he is possessing. Inversely, masochistic behavior can develop in the wife who seeks to bring out in the man the master and tyrant he is not; I knew an extremely pious woman, brought up in a convent, who was authoritarian and dominating during the day and who, at night, begged her husband to whip her, which, though horrified, he consented to do. In marriage, vice itself takes on an organized and cold aspect, a somber aspect that makes it the saddest of possible choices.

  The truth is that physical love can be treated neither as an absolute end in itself nor as a simple means; it cannot justify an existence: but it can receive no outside justification. It means it must play an episodic and autonomous role in all human life. This means it must above all be free.

  Love, then, is not what bourgeois optimism promises the young bride: the ideal held up to her is happiness, that is, a peaceful equilibrium within immanence and repetition. At certain prosperous and secure times, this ideal was that of the whole bourgeoisie and specifically of landed property owners; their aim was not the conquest of the future and the world but the peaceful conservation of the past, the status quo. A gilded mediocrity with neither passion nor ambition, days leading nowhere, repeating themselves indefinitely, a life that slips toward death without looking for answers, this is what the author of “Sonnet to Happiness” prescribes; this pseudo-wisdom loosely inspired by Epicurus and Zeno has lost currency today: to conserve and repeat the world as it is seems neither desirable nor possible. The male’s vocation is action; he needs to produce, fight, create, progress, go beyond himself toward the totality of the universe and the infinity of the future; but traditional marriage does not invite woman to transcend herself with him; it confines her in immanence. She has no choice but to build a stable life where the present, prolonging the past, escapes the threats of tomorrow, that is, precisely to create a happiness. In the place of love, she will feel for her husband a tender and respectful sentiment called conjugal love; within the walls of her home she will be in charge of managing, she will enclose the world; she will perpetuate the human species into the future. Yet no existent ever renounces his transcendence, especially when he stubbornly disavows it. The bourgeois of yesterday thought that by conserving the established order, displaying its virtue by his prosperity, he was serving God, his country, a regime, a civilization: to be happy was to fulfill his function as man. For woman as well, the harmonious home life has to be transcended toward other ends: it is man who will act as intermediary between woman’s individuality and the universe; it is he who will imbue her contingent facticity with human worth. Finding in his wife the force to undertake, to act, to fight, he justifies her: she has only to put her existence in his hands, and he will give it its meaning. This presupposes humble renunciation on her end; but she is rewarded because guided and protected by male force, she will escape original abandonment; she will become necessary. Queen of her hive, tranquilly resting on herself within her domain, but carried by man’s mediation through the universe and limitless time, wife, mother, and mistress of the house, woman finds in marriage both the force to live and life’s meaning. We must see how this ideal is expressed in reality.

  The home has always been the material realization of the ideal of happiness, be it a cottage or a château; it embodies permanence and separation. Inside its walls, the family constitutes an isolated cell and affirms its identity beyond the passage of generations; the past, preserved in the form of furniture and ancestral portraits, prefigures a risk-free future; in the garden, seasons mark their reassuring cycle with edible vegetables; every year the same spring adorned with the same flowers promises the summer’s immutable return and autumn’s fruits, identical to those of every autumn: neither time nor space escapes into infinity, but instead quietly goes round and round. In every civilization founded on landed property, an abundant literature sings of the poetry and virtues of the home; in Henry Bordeaux’s novel precisely titled La maison (The Home), the home encapsulates all the bourgeois values: faithfulness to the past, patience, economy, caution, love of family, of native soil, and so forth; the home’s champions are often women, since it is their task to ensure the happiness of the familial group; as in the days when the domina sat in the atrium, their role is to be “mist
ress of the house.” Today the home has lost its patriarchal splendor; for most men, it is simply a place to live, no longer overrun by memories of deceased generations and no longer imprisoning the centuries to come. But woman still tries to give her “interior” the meaning and value a true home possessed. In Cannery Row, Steinbeck describes a woman hobo determined to decorate with rugs and curtains the old abandoned boiler she lives in with her husband: he objects in vain that not having windows makes curtains useless.

  This concern is specifically feminine. A normal man considers objects around him as instruments; he arranges them according to the purpose for which they are intended; his “order”—where woman will often only see disorder—is to have his cigarettes, his papers, and his tools within reach. Artists—sculptors and painters, among others—whose work it is to re-create the world through material, are completely insensitive to the surroundings in which they live. Rilke writes about Rodin:

  When I first came to Rodin … I knew that his house was nothing to him, a paltry little necessity perhaps, a roof for time of rain and sleep; and that it was no care to him and no weight upon his solitude and composure. Deep in himself he bore the darkness, shelter, and peace of a house, and he himself had become sky above it, and wood around it, and distance and great stream always flowing by.*

  But to find a home in oneself, one must first have realized oneself in works or acts. Man has only a middling interest in his domestic interior because he has access to the entire universe and because he can affirm himself in his projects. Woman, instead, is locked into the conjugal community: she has to change this prison into a kingdom. Her attitude to her home is dictated by this same dialectic that generally defines her condition: she takes by becoming prey, she liberates herself by abdicating; by renouncing the world, she means to conquer a world.