The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  Reconciling marriage and love is such a feat that at the very least divine intervention is necessary; this is the solution Kierkegaard adopts after complicated detours. He likes to denounce the paradox of marriage:

  Indeed, what a passing strange device is marriage! And what makes it all the stranger is that it could be a step taken without thought. And yet no step is more decisive … And such an important step as marriage ought to be taken without reflection!12

  This is the difficulty: love and falling in love are spontaneous, marriage is a decision; yet falling in love should be awakened by marriage or by decision: wanting to marry; this means that what is the most spontaneous must at the same time be the freest decision, and what is, because of the spontaneity, so inexplicable that it must be attributed to a divinity, must at the same time take place because of reflection and such exhausting reflection that a decision results from it. Besides, these things must not follow each other, the decision must not come sneaking up behind; everything must occur simultaneously, the two things have to come together at the moment of dénouement.13

  This underlines that loving is not marrying and it is quite difficult to understand how love can become duty. But paradoxes do not faze Kierkegaard: his whole essay on marriage is an attempt to elucidate this mystery. It is true, he agrees: “Reflection is the angel of death for spontaneity … If it were true that reflection must take precedence over falling in love, there would never be marriage.” But “decision is a new spontaneity obtained through reflection, experienced in a purely ideal way, a spontaneity that precisely corresponds to that of falling in love. Decision is a religious view of life constructed upon ethical presuppositions, and must, so to speak, pave the way for falling in love and securing it against any danger, exterior or interior.” This is why “a husband, a real husband, is himself a miracle!… Being able to keep the pleasure of love while existence focuses all the power of seriousness on him and his beloved!”

  As for the wife, reason is not her lot, she is without “reflection”; so “she goes from the immediacy of love to the immediacy of the religious.” Expressed in simple language, this doctrine means a man in love chooses marriage by an act of faith in God that guarantees him the accord of both feelings and duty; and the woman wishes to marry as soon as she is in love. I knew an old Catholic woman who, most naively, believed in a “sacramental falling in love”; she asserted that at the moment the couple pronounce the definitive “I do” at the altar, they feel their hearts burst into flame. Kierkegaard does admit there must previously be an “inclination,” but that it be thought to last a whole lifetime is no less miraculous.

  However, in France, late-nineteenth-century novelists and playwrights, less confident in the value of the holy vows, try to ensure conjugal happiness by more human means; more boldly than Balzac, they envisage the possibility of integrating eroticism with legitimate love. Porto-Riche affirms, in the play Amoureuse (A Loving Wife), the incompatibility of sexual love and home life: the husband, worn out by his wife’s ardor, seeks peace with his more temperate mistress. But at Paul Hervieu’s instigation, “love” between spouses is a legal duty. Marcel Prévost preaches to the young husband that he must treat his wife like a mistress, alluding to conjugal pleasures in a discreetly libidinous way. Bernstein is the playwright of legitimate love: the husband is put forward as a wise and generous being next to the amoral, lying, sensual, fickle, and mean wife; and he is also understood to be a virile and expert lover. Much romantic defense of marriage comes out in reaction to novels of adultery. Even Colette yields to this moralizing wave in L’ingénue libertine (The Innocent Libertine), when, after describing the cynical experiences of a clumsily deflowered young bride, she has her experience sexual pleasure in her husband’s arms. Likewise, Martin Maurice, in a somewhat controversial book, brings the young woman, after a brief incursion into the bed of an experienced lover, to that of her husband, who benefits from her experience. For other reasons and in a different way, Americans today, who are both respectful of the institution of marriage and individualistic, endeavor to integrate sexuality into marriage. Many books on initiation into married life come out every year aimed at teaching couples to adapt to each other, and in particular teaching man how to create harmony with his wife. Psychoanalysts and doctors play the role of “marriage counselors”; it is accepted that the wife too has the right to pleasure and that the man must know the correct techniques to provide her with it. But we have seen that sexual success is not merely a technical question. The young man, even if he has memorized twenty textbooks such as Ce que tout mari doit savoir (What Every Husband Should Know), Le secret du bonheur conjugal (The Secret of Conjugal Happiness), and L’amour sans peur (Love Without Fear), is still not sure he will know how to make his new wife love him. She reacts to the psychological situation as a whole. And traditional marriage is far from creating the most propitious conditions for the awakening and blossoming of feminine eroticism.

  In the past, in matriarchal communities, virginity was not demanded of the new wife, and for mystical reasons she was normally supposed to be deflowered before the wedding. In some French regions, these ancient prerogatives can still be observed; prenuptial chastity is not required of girls; and even girls who have “sinned” or unmarried mothers sometimes find a husband more easily than others. Moreover, in circles that accept woman’s liberation, girls are granted the same sexual freedom as boys. However, paternalistic ethics imperiously demand that the bride be delivered to her husband as a virgin; he wants to be sure she does not carry within her a foreign germ; he wants the entire and exclusive property of this flesh he makes his own;14

  virginity has taken on a moral, religious, and mystical value, and this value is still widely recognized today. In France, there are regions where friends of the husband stay outside the door of the bridal suite, laughing and singing until the husband comes out triumphantly showing them the bloodstained sheet; or else the parents display it in the morning to the neighbors.15 The custom of the “wedding night” is still widespread, albeit in a less brutal form. It is no coincidence that it has spawned a whole body of ribald literature: the separation of the social and the animal necessarily produces obscenity. A humanist morality demands that all living experience have a human meaning, that it be invested with freedom; in an authentically moral erotic life, there is the free assumption of desire and pleasure, or at least a deeply felt fight to regain freedom within sexuality: but this is only possible if a singular recognition of the other is accomplished in love or in desire. When sexuality is no longer redeemed by the individual, but God or society claims to justify it, the relationship of the two partners is no more than a bestial one. It is understandable that right-thinking matrons spurn adventures of the flesh: they have reduced them to the level of scatological functions. This is also why one hears so many sniggers at wedding parties. There is an obscene paradox in the superimposing of a pompous ceremony on a brutally real animal function. The wedding presents its universal and abstract meaning: a man and a woman are united publicly according to symbolic rites; but in the secrecy of the bed it is concrete and singular individuals who confront each other face-to-face, and all gazes turn away from their embraces. Colette, attending a peasant wedding at the age of thirteen, was terribly consternated when a girlfriend took her to see the wedding chamber:

  The young couple’s bedroom … Under its curtains of Adrianople red, the tall, narrow bed, the bed stuffed with down and crammed with goose-down pillows, the bed that is to be the final scene of this wedding day all steaming with sweat, incense, the breath of cattle, the aroma of different sauces … Shortly the young couple will be arriving here. I hadn’t thought of that. They will dive into that deep mound of feathers … They will embark on that obscure struggle about which my mother’s bold and direct language and the life of animals have taught me both too much and too little … And then?… I’m afraid of that bedroom, afraid of that bed which I hadn’t thought of.16

  In her childish distr
ess, the girl felt the contrast between the pomp of the family feast and the animal mystery of the enclosed double bed. Marriage’s comic and lewd side is scarcely found in civilizations that do not individualize woman: in the East, in Greece, in Rome; the animal function appears there in as generalized a form as do the social rites; but today in the West, men and women are grasped as individuals, and wedding guests snigger because it is this particular man and this particular woman who, in an altogether individual experience, are going to consummate the act that we disguise in rites, speeches, and flowers. It is true that there is also a macabre contrast between the pomp of great funerals and the rot of the tomb. But the dead person does not awaken when he is put into the ground, while the bride is terribly surprised when she discovers the singularity and contingence of the real experience to which the mayor’s tricolored sash and church organ pledged her. It is not only in vaudeville that one sees young women returning in tears to their mothers on their wedding night: psychiatric books are full of this type of account; several have been told to me directly: they concern young girls, too well brought up, without any sexual education, and whose sudden discovery of eroticism overwhelmed them. Last century, Mme Adam thought it was her duty to marry a man who had kissed her on the mouth because she believed that was the completed form of sexual union. More recently, Stekel writes about a young bride: “When during the honeymoon, her husband deflowered her, she thought he was of unsound mind and did not dare say a word for fear of dealing with an insane person.”17

  It even happens that the young girl is so innocent she marries a woman invert and lives with her pseudo-husband for a long time without doubting that she is dealing with a man.

  If on your marriage day, returning home, you set your wife in a well to soak for the night, she will be dumbfounded. No comfort to her now that she has always had a vague uneasiness …

  “Well now!” she will say, “so that’s what marriage is. That’s why they keep it all so secret. I’ve let myself be taken in.”

  But being annoyed, she will say nothing. That is why you will be able to dip her for long periods and often, without causing any scandal in the neighborhood.

  This fragment of a poem by Michaux, called “Nuit de noces” (Bridal Night), accurately conveys the situation.18 Today, many young girls are better informed; but their consent remains abstract; and their defloration has the characteristics of a rape. “There are certainly more rapes committed in marriage than outside of marriage,” says Havelock Ellis. In his work Monatsschrift für Geburtshülfe (1889, vol. 9), Neugebauer found more than 150 cases of injuries inflicted on women by the penis during coitus; the causes were brutality, drunkenness, false position, and a disproportion of the organs. In England, Ellis reports, a woman asked six intelligent, married, middle-class women about their reactions on their wedding night: for all of them intercourse was a shock; two of them had been ignorant of everything; the others thought they knew but were no less psychically wounded. Adler also emphasized the psychic importance of the act of defloration:

  The first moment man acquires his full rights often decides his whole life. The inexperienced and over-aroused husband can sow the germ of feminine insensitivity and through his continual clumsiness and brutality transform it into permanent desensitization.

  Many examples of these unfortunate initiations were given in the previous chapter. Here is another case reported by Stekel:

  Mrs. H.N.…, raised very prudishly, trembled at the idea of her wedding night. Her husband undressed her almost violently without allowing her to get into bed. He undressed, asking her to look at him nude and to admire his penis. She hid her face in her hands. And so he exclaimed: “Why didn’t you stay at home, you halfwit!” Then he threw her on the bed and brutally deflowered her. Naturally, she remained frigid forever.

  We have, thus far, seen all the resistance the virgin has to overcome to accomplish her sexual destiny: her initiation demands “labor,” both physiological and psychic. It is stupid and barbaric to want to put it all into one night; it is absurd to transform an operation as difficult as the first coitus into a duty. The woman is all the more terrorized by the fact that the strange operation she is subjected to is sacred; and that society, religion, family, and friends delivered her solemnly to the husband as to a master; and in addition, that the act seems to engage her whole future, because marriage still has a definitive character. This is when she feels truly revealed in the absolute: this man to whom she is pledged to the end of time embodies all of Man in her eyes; and he is revealed to her, too, as a figure she has not heretofore known, which is of immense importance since he will be her lifelong companion. However, the man himself is anguished by the duty weighing on him; he has his own difficulties and his own complexes that make him shy and clumsy or on the contrary brutal; many men are impotent on their wedding night because of the very solemnity of marriage. Janet writes in Les obsessions et la psychasthénie (Obsessions and Psychasthenia):

  Who has not known these young grooms ashamed of their bad fortune in not succeeding in accomplishing the conjugal act and who are plagued by it with an obsession of shame and despair? We witnessed a very curious tragicomic scene last year when a furious father-in-law dragged his humble and resigned son-in-law to Salpêtrière: the father-in-law demanded a medical attestation enabling him to ask for a divorce. The poor boy explained that in the past he had been potent, but since his wedding a feeling of awkwardness and shame had made everything impossible.

  Too much impetuousness frightens the virgin, too much respect humiliates her; women forever hate the man who has taken his pleasure at the expense of their suffering; but they feel an eternal resentment against the one who seems to disdain them,19 and often against the one who has not attempted to deflower them the first night or who was unable to do it. Helene Deutsch points out that some timid or clumsy husbands ask the doctor to deflower their wife surgically on the pretext that she is not normally constituted; the reason is not usually valid.20 Women, she says, harbor scorn and resentment for the husband unable to penetrate them normally. One of Freud’s observations shows that the husband’s impotence can traumatize the woman:

  One patient would run from one room to another in which there was a table in the middle. She put on the tablecloth in a certain way, rang for the maid who was supposed to go toward the table, and then sent her away … When she tried to explain this obsession, she recalled that this cloth had a bad stain and that she arranged it each time so that the stain should jump out at the maid … The whole thing was a reproduction of the wedding night in which the husband had not shown himself as virile. He ran from his room to hers a thousand times to try again. Being ashamed in front of the maid who had to make the beds, he poured some red ink on the sheet to make her think there was blood.21

  The “wedding night” transforms the erotic experience into an ordeal that neither partner is able to surmount, too involved with personal problems to think generously of each other; it is invested with a solemnity that makes it formidable; and it is not surprising that it often dooms the woman to frigidity forever. The difficult problem facing the husband is this: if he “titillates his wife too lasciviously,” she might be scandalized or outraged; it seems this fear paralyzes American husbands, among others, especially in college-educated couples, says the Kinsey Report, because wives, more conscious of themselves, are more deeply inhibited. But if he “respects” her, he fails to waken her sensuality. This dilemma is created by the ambiguity of the feminine attitude: the young woman both wants and rejects pleasure; she demands a delicateness from which she suffers. Unless he is exceptionally lucky, the husband will necessarily appear as either clumsy or a libertine. It is thus not surprising that “conjugal duties” are often only a repugnant chore for the wife. According to Diderot,

  Submission to a master she dislikes is a torture to her. I have seen a virtuous wife shiver with horror at her husband’s approach. I have seen her plunge into a bath and never think herself properly cleansed from t
he soilure of her duty. This sort of repugnance is almost unknown with us. Our organ is more indulgent. Many women die without having experienced the extreme of pleasure. This sensation which I am willing to consider a passing attack of epilepsy is rare with them, but never fails to come when we call for it. The sovereign happiness escapes them in the arms of the man they adore. We experience it with an easy woman we dislike. Less mistresses of their sensations than we are, their reward is less prompt and certain. A hundred times their expectation is deceived.22

  Many women, indeed, become mothers and grandmothers without ever having experienced pleasure or even arousal; they try to get out of their soilure of duty by getting medical certificates or using other pretexts. The Kinsey Report says that in America, many wives “report that they consider their coital frequencies already too high and wish that their husbands did not desire intercourse so often. A very few wives wish for more frequent coitus.” We have seen, though, that woman’s erotic possibilities are almost indefinite. This contradiction points up the fact that marriage, claiming to regulate feminine eroticism, kills it.

  In Thérèse Desqueyroux, Mauriac described the reactions of a young “reasonably married” woman to marriage in general and to conjugal duties in particular:

  Perhaps she was seeking less a dominion or a possession out of this marriage than a refuge. What finally pushed her into it, after all—wasn’t it a kind of panic? A practical girl, a child housewife, she was in a hurry to take up her station in life, to find her definitive place; she wanted assurance against some peril that she could not name. She was never so rational and determined as she had been during the engagement period; she embedded herself in the family bloc, “she settled down,” she entered into an order of life. She saved herself …