The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  Mrs. L.M.…, 38 years old, married, tells me she is completely unfeeling when with her husband. She comes to be analyzed. After two sessions only, she admits to having a lover. But he cannot make her reach orgasm. She could only have one by being examined by a gynecologist (her father was a gynecologist!). Every two or three sessions or so, she had the urge to go to the doctor and have an examination. From time to time, she requested a treatment and those were the happiest times. The last time, a gynecologist massaged her at length because of a supposed fallen womb. Each massage brought about several orgasms. She explains her passion for these examinations by the first touch that had caused the first orgasm of her life.

  The woman easily imagines that the man to whom she has exhibited herself is impressed by her physical charm or her soul’s beauty, and she thus is persuaded, in pathological cases, that she is loved by a priest or doctor. Even if she is normal, she has the impression that a subtle bond exists between them; she basks in respectful obedience to him; in addition, she sometimes finds in him a source of security that helps her accept her life.

  There are women, nonetheless, who are not content to prop up their existence with moral authority; they also need romantic exaltation in their lives. If they do not want to cheat on or leave their husbands, they will seek recourse in the same tactic as a girl who fears flesh-and-blood males: they give themselves over to imaginary passions. Stekel gives several examples of this:

  A decent married woman of the better social class suffers from “nervous anxiety” and is predisposed to depressions. One evening during the performance at the opera she falls in love with the tenor. His singing suffuses her with a strange warmth. She becomes the singer’s fanatic admirer. Thenceforth she does not miss a single performance in which he appears. She obtains his photograph, she dreams of him, and once she sent him an imposing bouquet of roses with the inscription: “From a grateful unknown admirer!” She even goes so far as to write him a letter … This letter she also signs, “From an unknown admirer!” but she keeps at a distance. An occasion unexpectedly arises, making it possible for her to meet this singer at a social gathering. She decides very promptly that she will not go. She does not care to become personally acquainted with him. She does not require closer contact. She is happy to be able to love so warmly and still remain a faithful wife!

  I became acquainted with a woman obsessed with the most remarkable Kainz, a famous actor from Vienna. She had a special Kainz room, embellished with numerous portraits of the famous artist. There was a Kainz library in one corner. Here there was to be found everything in the shape of his books, pamphlets, and clippings which she could gather bearing on her hero. She had also gathered in this library a collection of theatre programs, including, of course, Kainz festivals and premières. A particularly precious possession was the portrait of the great artist bearing his autograph. This woman wore mourning for a whole year after the artist’s death. She took long journeys to attend lectures on Kainz … This Kainz cult served to preserve the woman’s physical chastity, it protected her against all temptation, leaving no room for any other erotic thoughts.11

  We recall what tears Rudolph Valentino’s death brought forth. Married women and young girls alike worship cinema heroes. Women often evoke their images when engaged in solitary pleasures, or they call up such fantasies in conjugal lovemaking; these images also often revive some childhood memory in the figure of a grandfather, a brother, a teacher, and so on.

  Nevertheless, there are also men of flesh and blood in women’s circles; whether she is sexually fulfilled, frigid, or frustrated—except in the rare case of a complete, absolute, and exclusive love—the woman places great value on their approbation. Her husband’s too mundane gaze no longer nurtures her image; she needs eyes still full of mystery to discover her as mystery; she needs a sovereign consciousness before her to receive her confidences, to revive the faded photographs, to bring to life that dimple in the corner of her mouth, the fluttering eyelashes that are hers alone; she is only desirable, lovable, if she is desired, loved. While she more or less makes the best of her marriage, she looks to other men mainly to satisfy her vanity: she invites them to share in her cult; she seduces, she pleases, happy to dream about forbidden loves, to think: If I wanted to …; she prefers to charm many admirers than to attach herself deeply to any one; more ardent, less shy than a young girl, her coquetry needs males to confirm her in the consciousness of her worth and power; she is often all the bolder as, anchored in her home and having succeeded in conquering one man, she leads him on without great expectations and without great risks.

  It happens that after a longer or shorter period of fidelity, the woman no longer confines herself to these flirtations or coquetries. Often, she decides to deceive her husband out of resentment. Adler maintains that woman’s infidelity always stems from revenge; this is going too far; but the fact is that she often yields less to a lover’s seduction than to a desire to defy her husband: “He is not the only man in the world—I can attract others—I am not his slave, he thinks he is clever but he can be duped.” It may happen that the derided husband retains his primordial importance for the wife; just as the girl will sometimes take a lover to rebel against her mother or protest against her parents, disobey them, affirm herself, so a woman whose very resentment attaches her to her husband seeks a confidant in her lover, an observer who considers her a victim, an accomplice who helps her humiliate her husband; she talks to him endlessly about her husband under the pretext of subjecting him to his scorn; and if the lover does not play his role well, she moodily turns from him either to go back to her husband or to find another consoler. But very often, it is less resentment than disappointment that drives her into the arms of a lover; she does not find love in marriage; she resigns herself with difficulty to never knowing the sensual pleasures and joys whose expectations charmed her youth. Marriage, by frustrating women’s erotic satisfaction, denies them the freedom and individuality of their feelings, drives them to adultery by way of a necessary and ironic dialectic.

  Montaigne says:

  We train them from childhood to the ways of love. Their grace, their dressing up, their knowledge, their language, all their instruction, has only this end in view. Their governesses imprint in them nothing else but the idea of love, if only by continually depicting it to them in order to disgust them with it.

  Thus it is folly to try to bridle women’s desire, which is so burning and natural.

  And Engels declares:

  With monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make their appearance on the scene—the wife’s attendant lover and the cuckold husband … Together with monogamous marriage and hetaerism, adultery became an unavoidable social institution—denounced, severely penalised, but impossible to suppress.*

  If conjugal sex has excited the wife’s curiosity without satisfying her senses, like in Colette’s The Innocent Libertine, she tries to complete her education in the beds of strangers. If she has no singular attachment to her husband, but he has succeeded in awakening her sexuality, she will want to taste the pleasures she has discovered through him with others.

  Some moralists have been outraged by the preference shown to the lover, and I have pointed out the efforts of bourgeois literature to rehabilitate the figure of the husband; but it is absurd to defend him by showing that often in the eyes of society—that is to say, other men—he is better than his rival: what is important here is what he represents for the wife. So there are two traits that make him detestable. First of all, it is he who assumes the thankless role of initiator; the contradictory demands of the virgin who dreams of being both violated and respected almost surely condemn him to failure; she remains forever frigid in his arms; with her lover she experiences neither the torment of defloration nor the initial humiliation of modesty overcome; she is spared the trauma of surprise: she knows more or less what to expect; more honest, less vulnerable, less naive than on her wedding night, she does not confuse ideal love an
d physical hunger, sentiment and sexual excitement: when she takes a lover, it is a lover she wants. This lucidity is an aspect of the freedom of her choice. For here lies the other defect weighing on her husband: he was usually imposed and not chosen. Either she accepted him in resignation, or she was given over to him by her family; in any case, even if she married him for love, she makes him her master by marrying him; their relations have become a duty, and he often takes on the figure of tyrant. Her choice of lover is doubtless limited by circumstances, but there is an element of freedom in this relationship; to marry is an obligation, to take a lover is a luxury; it is because he has solicited her that the woman yields to him: she is sure, if not of his love, at least of his desire; it is not for the purpose of obeying laws that he acts upon his desire. He also has this advantage: that his seduction and prestige are not tarnished by the frictions of everyday life; he remains removed, an other. Thus the woman has the impression of getting out of herself in their meetings, of finding new riches: she feels other. This is above all what some women seek in a liaison: to be involved, surprised, rescued from themselves by the other. A rupture leaves them with a desperate empty feeling. Janet cites several cases of this melancholia that show us bluntly what the woman looks for and finds in her lover:

  A thirty-nine-year-old woman, heartbroken at having been abandoned by a writer with whom she worked for five years, writes to Janet: “He had such a rich life and was so tyrannical that all I could do was take care of him, and I could not think of anything else.”

  Another woman, thirty-one, fell ill after breaking with a lover she adored. “I wanted to be an inkwell on his desk to see him, hear him,” she writes. And she explains: “Alone, I am bored, my husband brings me no intellectual stimulation, he knows nothing, he teaches me nothing, he does not surprise me…, he has nothing but common sense, it crushes me.” But by contrast, she writes about her lover: “He is an astonishing man, I never saw in him a moment of confusion, emotion, gaiety, carelessness, always in control, mocking, cold enough to make you die of shame. In addition, an impudence, sangfroid, a sharp mind, a lively intelligence that made my head spin …”12

  There are women who savor this feeling of plenitude and joyful excitement only in the first moments of a liaison; if a lover does not give them instant pleasure—and this frequently happens the first time as the partners are intimidated and ill adapted to each other—they feel resentment and disgust toward him; these “Messalinas” have multiple affairs and leave one lover after another. But it also happens that a woman, enlightened by the failure of her marriage, is attracted this time by a man who suits her well, and a lasting relation is created between them. Often he will appeal to her because he is of a radically different type from her husband. This is without a doubt the contrast that Sainte-Beuve, who seduced Adèle, provides with Victor Hugo. Stekel cites the following case:

  Mrs. P.H. has been married for the past eight years to a man who is a member of an athletic club. She visits the gynecologic clinic on account of a slight inflammation of the ovaries. There she complains that her husband gives her no peace … She perceives only pain and does not know the meaning of gratification. The man is rough and violent … Finally he takes a sweetheart… [This does not trouble her in the least.] She is happy … she wants a divorce and calls on an attorney. In his office she meets a clerk who is the exact opposite of her husband. The clerk is humble, delicate, weak, but he is also loving and tender. They become closely acquainted and he begins to court her. He writes her tender letters. His petty attentions flatter and please her … They find that they have similar intellectual interests … With his first kiss her anaesthesia vanishes … This man’s relatively weak potentia has roused the keenest orgasm in the woman. After the divorce they married; now they live very happily together … He is also able to rouse this woman’s orgasm with kisses and other caresses. This was the same woman whose frigidity in the embrace of a highly potent man drove her to take a lover!

  Not all affairs have fairy-tale endings. It happens that just as the young girl dreams of a liberator who will wrest her from under her father’s roof, the wife awaits the lover who will save her from the conjugal yoke: an often-told story is that of the ardent lover who cools off and flees when his mistress starts talking about marriage; she is often hurt by his reluctance, and from then on, their relations become distorted by resentment and hostility. If a relationship becomes a stable one, it often takes on a familiar conjugal character in the end; all the vices of marriage—boredom, jealousy, prudence, deception—can be found in it. And the woman dreams of another man who will rescue her from this routine.

  Adultery, furthermore, has very different characteristics according to customs and circumstances. In our civilization of enduring patriarchal traditions, marital infidelity is still more serious for the woman than for the man. Montaigne says:

  Iniquitous appraisal of vices!… But we create and weigh vices not according to nature but according to our interest, whereby they assume so many unequal shapes. The severity of our decrees makes women’s addiction to this vice more exacerbated and vicious than its nature calls for, and involves it in consequences that are worse than their cause.

  We have seen the primary reasons for this severity: women’s adultery risks introducing the child of a stranger into a family, dispossessing legitimate heirs; the husband is master, the wife his property. Social changes and the practice of birth control have taken much of the force out of these motives. But the will to keep woman in a state of dependency perpetuates the proscriptions that still surround her. She often interiorizes them; she closes her eyes to the conjugal escapades that her religion, her morality, and her “virtue” do not permit her to envisage with reciprocity. The control imposed by her social environment—in particular in “small towns” in the Old as well as the New World—is far more severe for her than for her husband: he goes out more, he travels, and his dalliances are more indulgently tolerated; she risks losing her reputation and her situation as a married woman. The ruses women use to thwart this scrutiny have often been described; I know a small Portuguese town of ancient severity where young women only go out in the company of a mother-in-law or sister-in-law; but the hairdresser rents out rooms above his shop; between hair being set and combed out, lovers steal a furtive embrace. In large cities, women have far fewer wardens: but the old custom of “afternoon dalliances” was hardly more conducive to the happy fulfillment of illicit feelings. Furtive and clandestine, adultery does not create human and free relationships; the lies it entails rob conjugal relations of what is left of their dignity.

  In many circles today, women have partially gained sexual freedom. But it is still a difficult problem for them to reconcile their conjugal life with sexual satisfaction. As marriage generally does not mean physical love, it would seem reasonable to clearly differentiate one from the other. A man can admittedly make an excellent husband and still be inconstant: his sexual caprices do not in fact keep him from carrying out the enterprise of a friendly communal life with his wife; this amity will be all the purer, less ambivalent if it does not represent a shackle. One might allow that it could be the same for the wife; she often wishes to share in her husband’s existence, create a home with him for their children, and still experience other embraces. It is the compromises of prudence and hypocrisy that make adultery degrading; a pact of freedom and sincerity would abolish one of the defects of marriages. It must be recognized, however, that today the irritating formula that inspired Francillon by Dumas fils—“It is not the same thing for women”—retains a certain truth. There is nothing natural about the difference. It is claimed that woman needs sexual activity less than man: nothing is less sure. Repressed women make shrewish wives, sadistic mothers, fanatical housekeepers, unhappy and dangerous creatures; in any case, even if her desires were more infrequent, there is no reason to consider it superfluous for her to satisfy them. The difference stems from the overall erotic situation of man and woman as defined by tradition and
today’s society. For woman, the love act is still considered a service woman renders to man, thus giving him the status of master; we have seen that he can always take an inferior woman, but she degrades herself if she gives herself to a male who is not her equal; her consent, in any case, is of the same nature as a surrender, a fall. A woman often graciously accepts her husband having other women: she is even flattered; Adèle Hugo apparently saw her fiery husband take his ardors to other beds without regret; some women even copy Mme de Pompadour and act as procurers.13

  By contrast, in lovemaking, the woman is changed into object, into prey; it seems to the husband that she is possessed by a foreign mana, that she ceases to belong to him, she is stolen from him. And the fact is that in bed the woman often feels, wants to be, and, consequently, is dominated; the fact also is that because of virile prestige, she tends to approve, to imitate the male who, having possessed her, embodies in her eyes all men. The husband is irritated, not without reason, to hear in his wife’s familiar mouth the echo of a stranger’s thinking: it seems to him in a way that it is he who is possessed, violated. If Mme de Charrière broke with the young Benjamin Constant—who played the feminine role between two virile women—it was because she could not bear to feel him marked by the hated influence of Mme de Staël. As long as the woman acts like a slave and the reflection of the man to whom she “gives herself,” she must recognize the fact that her infidelities wrest her from her husband more radically than do his reciprocal infidelities.