The richness and strength of their nature and fortunate circumstances have enabled some women to continue in their adult lives their passionate projects from adolescence. But these are exceptions. George Eliot had Maggie Tulliver and Margaret Kennedy had Tessa die for good reason. It was a bitter destiny that the Brontë sisters had. The girl is touching because she rises up against the world, weak and alone; but the world is too powerful; she persists in refusing it, she is broken. Belle de Zuylen, who overwhelmed all of Europe with her mind’s originality and caustic power, frightened all her suitors: her refusal to make concessions condemned her to long years of celibacy that weighed on her since she declared that the expression “virgin and martyr” was a pleonasm. This stubbornness is rare. In the immense majority of cases, the girl is aware that the fight is much too unequal, and she ends up yielding. “You will all die at fifteen,” writes Diderot to Sophie Volland. When the fight has only been—as happens most often—a symbolic revolt, defeat is certain. Demanding in dreams, full of hope but passive, the girl makes adults smile with pity; they doom her to resignation. And in fact, the rebellious and eccentric girl that we left is found two years later, calmer, ready to consent to her woman’s life. This is the future Colette predicted for Vinca; this is how the heroines of Mauriac’s early novels appear. The adolescent crisis is a type of “work” similar to what Dr. Lagache calls “the work of mourning.” The girl buries her childhood slowly—this autonomous and imperious individual she has been—and she enters adult existence submissively.
Of course, it is not possible to establish defined categories based on age alone. Some women remain infantile their whole lives; the behaviors we have described are sometimes perpetuated to an advanced age. Nevertheless, on the whole, there is a big difference between the girlish fifteen-year-old and an older girl. The latter is adapted to reality; she scarcely advances on the imaginary level; she is less divided within herself than before. At about eighteen, Marie Bashkirtseff writes:
The more I advance in age towards the end of my youth, the more I am covered with indifference. Little agitates me and everything used to agitate me.
Irène Reweliotty comments:
To be accepted by men, you have to think and act like them; if you don’t, they treat you like a black sheep, and solitude becomes your lot. And I, now, I’m fed up with solitude, and I want people not only around me but with me … Living now and no longer existing and waiting and dreaming and telling yourself everything within yourself, your mouth shut and your body motionless.
And further along:
With so much flattery, wooing, and such, I become terribly ambitious. This is no longer the trembling, marvelous happiness of the fifteen-year-old. It is a kind of cold and hard intoxication to take my revenge on life, to climb. I flirt; I play at loving. I do not love … I gain in intelligence, in sangfroid, in ordinary lucidity. I lose my heart. It was as if it cracked … In two months, I left childhood behind.
Approximately the same sound comes from these secrets of a nineteen-year-old girl:
In the old days Oh! What a conflict against a mentality that seemed incompatible with this century and the appeals of this century itself! I now have a peaceful feeling. Each new big idea that enters me, instead of provoking a painful upheaval, a destruction, and an incessant reconstruction, adapts marvelously to what is already in me … Now I go seamlessly from theoretical thinking to daily life without attempting continuity.17
The girl—unless she is particularly graceless—accepts her femininity in the end; and she is often happy to enjoy gratuitously the pleasures and triumphs she gets from settling definitively into her destiny; as she is not yet bound to any duty, irresponsible, available, for her the present seems neither empty nor disappointing since it is just one step; dressing and flirting still have the lightness of a game, and her dreams of the future disguise their futility. This is how Virginia Woolf describes the impressions of a young coquette during a party:
I feel myself shining in the dark. Silk is on my knee. My silk legs rub smoothly together. The stones of a necklace lie cold on my throat … I am arrayed, I am prepared … My hair is swept in one curve. My lips are precisely red. I am ready now to join men and women on the stairs, my peers. I pass them, exposed to their gaze, as they are to mine … I now begin to unfurl, in this scent, in this radiance, as a fern when its curled leaves unfurl … I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns; I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way, I say to this one, “Come”… He approaches. He makes towards me. This is the most exciting moment I have ever known. I flutter. I ripple … Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? My peers may look at me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one of you. This is my world … The door opens. The door goes on opening. Now I think, next time it opens the whole of my life will be changed … The door opens. Come, I say to this one, rippling gold from head to heels. “Come,” and he comes towards me.18
But the more the girl matures, the more maternal authority weighs on her. If she leads a housekeeper’s life at home, she suffers from being only an assistant; she would like to devote her work to her own home, to her own children. Often the rivalry with her mother worsens: in particular, the older daughter is irritated if younger brothers and sisters are born; she feels her mother “has done her time,” and it is up to her now to bear children, to reign. If she works outside the house, she suffers when she returns home from still being treated as a simple member of the family and not as an autonomous individual.
Less romantic than before, she begins to think much more of marriage than love. She no longer embellishes her future spouse with a prestigious halo: what she wishes for is to have a stable position in this world and to begin to lead her life as a woman. This is how Virginia Woolf describes the imaginings of a rich country girl:
For soon in the hot midday when the bees hum round the hollyhocks my lover will come. He will stand under the cedar tree. To his one word I shall answer my one word. What has formed in me I shall give him. I shall have children; I shall have maids in aprons; men with pitchforks; a kitchen where they bring the ailing lambs to warm in baskets, where the hams hang and the onions glisten. I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.
A similar dream dwells in poor Prue Sarn:
It seemed such a terrible thing never to marry. All girls got married … And when girls got married, they had a cottage, and a lamp, maybe, to light when their man came home, or if it was only candles it was all one, for they could put them in the window, and he’d think “There’s my missus now, lit the candles!” And then one day Mrs. Beguildy would be making a cot of rushes for ’em, and one day there’d be a babe in it, grand and solemn, and bidding letters sent round for the christening, and the neighbours coming round the babe’s mother like bees round the queen. Often when things went wrong, I’d say to myself, “Ne’er mind, Prue Sarn! There’ll come a day when you’ll be queen in your own skep.”19
For most older girls, whether they have a laborious or frivolous life, whether they be confined to the paternal household or partially get away from it, the conquest of a husband—or at the least a serious lover—turns into a more and more pressing enterprise. This concern is often harmful for feminine friendships. The “best friend” loses her privileged place. The girl sees rivals more than partners in her companions. I knew one such girl, intelligent and talented but who had chosen to think herself a “faraway princess”: this is how she described herself in poems and literary essays; she sincerely admitted she did not remain attached to her childhood friends: if they were ugly and stupid, she did not like them; if seductive, she feared them. The impatient wait for a man, often involving maneuvers, ruses, and humiliations, blocks the girl’s horizon; she becomes egotistical and hard. And if Prince Charming takes his time appearing, disgust and bitterness set in.
The girl’s character and behavior express her situat
ion: if it changes, the adolescent girl’s attitude also changes. Today, it is becoming possible for her to take her future in her hands, instead of putting it in those of the man. If she is absorbed by studies, sports, a professional training, or a social and political activity, she frees herself from the male obsession; she is less preoccupied by love and sexual conflicts. However, she has a harder time than the young man in accomplishing herself as an autonomous individual. I have said that neither her family nor customs assist her attempts. Besides, even if she chooses independence, she still makes a place in her life for the man, for love. She will often be afraid of missing her destiny as a woman if she gives herself over entirely to any undertaking. She does not admit this feeling to herself: but it is there, it distorts all her best efforts, it sets up limits. In any case, the woman who works wants to reconcile her success with purely feminine successes; that not only requires devoting considerable time to her appearance and beauty but also, what is more serious, implies that her vital interests are divided. Outside of his regular studies, the male student amuses himself by freely exercising his mind, and from there emerge his best discoveries; the woman’s daydreams are oriented in a different direction: she will think of her physical appearance, of man, of love, she will give the bare minimum to her studies to her career, whereas in these areas nothing is as necessary as the superfluous. It is not a question of mental weakness, of a lack of concentration, but of a split in her interests that do not coincide well. A vicious circle is knotted here: people are often surprised to see how easily a woman gives up music, studies, or a job as soon as she has found a husband; this is because she had committed too little of herself to her projects to derive benefit from their accomplishment. Everything converges to hold back her personal ambition while enormous social pressure encourages her to find a social position and justification in marriage. It is natural that she should not seek to create her place in this world by and for herself or that she should seek it timidly. As long as perfect economic equality is not realized in society and as long as customs allow the woman to profit as wife and mistress from the privileges held by certain men, the dream of passive success will be maintained in her and will hold back her own accomplishments.
However the girl approaches her existence as an adult, her apprenticeship is not yet over. By small increments or bluntly, she has to undergo her sexual initiation. There are girls who refuse. If sexually difficult incidents marked their childhood, if an awkward upbringing has gradually rooted a horror of sexuality in them, they carry over their adolescent repugnance of men. There are also circumstances that cause some women to have an extended virginity in spite of themselves. But in most cases, the girl accomplishes her sexual destiny at a more or less advanced age. How she braves it is obviously closely linked to her whole past. But this is also a novel experience that presents itself in unforeseen circumstances and to which she freely reacts. This is the new stage we must now consider.
1. Cited by Liepmann, Youth and Sexuality.
* I Am the Most Interesting Book of All.—TRANS.
2. Cited by Debesse, La crise d’originalité juvénile (The Adolescent Identity Crisis).
3. Cited by Marguerite Evard, L’adolescente (The Adolescent Girl).
4. From Borel and Robin, Les reveries morbides. Cited by Minkowski in La schizophrénie. [Borel and Robin wrote Les rêveurs éveillés (Daydreamers). Minkowski wrote an article, “De la rêverie morbide au délire d’influence” (“From Morbid Reverie to Delusions of Grandeur”).—TRANS.]
* A reference to the 1931 German film Mädchen in Uniform.—TRANS.
5. Cited by Mendousse, L’âme de l’adolescente (The Adolescent Girl’s Soul).
6. Cited by Marguerite Evard, The Adolescent Girl.
7. Ibid.
8. A l’heure des mains jointes (At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand). [“Psappha revit,” trans. Gillian Spraggs.—TRANS.]
9. Sillages (Sea Wakes). [“Pareilles,” trans. Gillian Spraggs.—TRANS.]
10. See Chapter 4 of this volume.
11. Psychology of Women.
12. The Black Sail.
13. Frigidity in Woman.
14. See Ibsen, The Master Builder.
15. Sido.
16. We will return to the specific characteristics of the feminine mystic.
17. Cited by Debesse in Adolescent Identity Crisis.
18. The Waves.
19. Mary Webb, Precious Bane.
| CHAPTER 3 |
Sexual Initiation
In a sense, woman’s sexual initiation, like man’s, begins in infancy. There is a theoretical and practical initiation period that follows continuously from the oral, anal, and genital phases up to adulthood. But the young girl’s erotic experiences are not a simple extension of her previous sexual activities; they are very often unexpected and brutal; they always constitute a new occurrence that creates a rupture with the past. While she is going through them, all the problems the young girl faces are concentrated in an urgent and acute form. In some cases, the crisis is easily resolved; there are tragic situations where the crisis can only be resolved through suicide or madness. In any case, the way woman reacts to the experiences strongly affects her destiny. All psychiatrists agree on the extreme importance her erotic beginnings have for her: their repercussions will be felt for the rest of her life.
The situation is profoundly different here for man and woman from the biological, social, and psychological points of view. For man, the passage from childhood sexuality to maturity is relatively simple: erotic pleasure is objectified; now, instead of being realized in his immanent presence, this erotic pleasure is intended for a transcendent being. The erection is the expression of this need; with penis, hands, mouth, with his whole body, the man reaches out to his partner, but he remains at the heart of this activity, as the subject generally does before the objects he perceives and the instruments he manipulates; he projects himself toward the other without losing his autonomy; feminine flesh is a prey for him, and he seizes in woman the attributes his sensuality requires of any object; of course he does not succeed in appropriating them: at least he holds them; the embrace and the kiss imply a partial failure: but this very failure is a stimulant and a joy. The act of love finds its unity in its natural culmination: orgasm. Coitus has a specific physiological aim; in ejaculation the male releases burdensome secretions; after orgasm, the male feels complete relief regularly accompanied by pleasure. And, of course, pleasure is not the only aim; it is often followed by disappointment: the need has disappeared rather than having been satisfied. In any case, a definite act is consummated, and the man’s body remains intact: the service he has rendered to the species becomes one with his own pleasure. Woman’s eroticism is far more complex and reflects the complexity of her situation. It has been seen that instead of integrating forces of the species into her individual life, the female is prey to the species, whose interests diverge from her own ends;1 this antinomy reaches its height in woman; one of its manifestations is the opposition of two organs: the clitoris and the vagina. At the infant stage, the former is the center of feminine eroticism: some psychiatrists uphold the existence of vaginal sensitivity in little girls, but this is a very inaccurate opinion; at any rate, it would have only secondary importance. The clitoral system does not change with adulthood,2 and woman preserves this erotic autonomy her whole life; like the male orgasm, the clitoral spasm is a kind of detumescence that occurs quasi-mechanically; but it is only indirectly linked to normal coitus, it plays no role whatsoever in procreation. The woman is penetrated and impregnated through the vagina; it becomes an erotic center uniquely through the intervention of the male, and this always constitutes a kind of rape. In the past, a woman was snatched from her childhood universe and thrown into her life as a wife by a real or simulated rape; this was an act of violence that changed the girl into a woman: it is also referred to as “ravishing” a girl’s virginity or “taking” her flower. This deflowering is not the harmonious outcome of a contin
uous development; it is an abrupt rupture with the past, the beginning of a new cycle. Pleasure is then reached by contractions of the inside surface of the vagina; do these contractions result in a precise and definitive orgasm? This point is still being debated. The anatomical data are vague. “There is a great deal of anatomic and clinical evidence that most of the interior of the vagina is without nerves,” states, among other things, the Kinsey Report. “A considerable amount of surgery may be performed inside the vagina without need for anesthetics. Nerves have been demonstrated inside the vagina only in an area in the anterior wall, proximate to the base of the clitoris.” However, in addition to the stimulation of this innervated zone, “the female may be conscious of the intrusion of an object into the vagina, particularly if vaginal muscles are tightened; but the satisfaction so obtained is probably related more to muscle tonus than it is to erotic nerve stimulation.”*
Yet it is beyond doubt that vaginal pleasure exists; and even vaginal masturbation—for adult women—seems to be more widespread than Kinsey says.3 But what is certain is that the vaginal reaction is very complex and can be qualified as psychophysiological because it not only concerns the entire nervous system but also depends on the whole situation lived by the subject: it requires profound consent of the individual as a whole; to establish itself, the new erotic cycle launched by the first coitus demands a kind of “preparation” of the nervous system, the elaboration of a totally new form that has to include the clitoral system as well; it takes a long time to be put in place, and sometimes it never succeeds in being created. It is striking that woman has the choice between two cycles, one of which perpetuates youthful independence, while the other destines her to man and children. The normal sexual act effectively makes woman dependent on the male and the species. It is he—as for most animals—who has the aggressive role and she who submits to his embrace. Ordinarily, she can be taken at any time by man, while he can take her only when he is in the state of erection; feminine refusal can be overcome except in the case of a rejection as profound as vaginismus, sealing woman more securely than the hymen; still vaginismus leaves the male means to relieve himself on a body that his muscular force permits him to reduce to his mercy. Since she is object, her inertia does not profoundly alter her natural role: to the extent that many men are not interested in whether the woman who shares their bed wants coitus or only submits to it. One can even go to bed with a dead woman. Coitus cannot take place without male consent, and male satisfaction is its natural end result. Fertilization can occur without the woman deriving any pleasure. On the other hand, fertilization is far from representing the completion of the sexual process for her; by contrast, it is at this moment that the service demanded of her by the species begins: it takes place slowly and painfully in pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding.
The Second Sex Page 53