The Second Sex (73 page)

Even in women physiologically normal themselves, it has sometimes been asserted that there is a distinction between “clitoral” and “vaginal” women, the former being destined to sapphic love; but it has been seen that all childhood eroticism is clitoral; whether it remains fixed at this stage or is transformed has nothing to do with anatomical facts; nor is it true, as has often been maintained, that infant masturbation explains the ulterior primacy of the clitoral system: a child’s masturbation is recognized today by sexologists as an absolutely normal and generally widespread phenomenon. The development of feminine eroticism is—we have seen—a psychological situation in which physiological factors are included, but which depends on the subject’s overall attitude to existence. Marañón considered sexuality to be “one-way,” and that man attains a completed form of it, while for woman it remains “halfway”; only the lesbian could possess a libido as rich as a male’s and would thus be a “superior” feminine type. In fact, feminine sexuality has its own structure, and the idea of a hierarchy in male and female libidos is absurd; the choice of sexual object in no way depends on the amount of energy woman might have.

Psychoanalysts have had the great merit of seeing a psychic phenomenon and not an organic one in inversion; to them, nonetheless, it still seems determined by external circumstances. But in fact they have not studied it very much. According to Freud, female erotic maturation requires the passage from the clitoral to the vaginal stage, symmetrical with the change transferring the love the little girl felt first for her mother to her father; various factors may hinder this development; the woman is not resigned to castration, hides the absence of the penis from herself, or remains fixated
on her mother, for whom she seeks substitutes. For Adler, this fixation is not a passively endured accident: it is desired by the subject who, in her will for power, deliberately denies her mutilation and seeks to identify with the man whose domination she refuses. Whether from infantile fixation or masculine protest, homosexuality would appear in any case as unfinished development. In truth, the lesbian is no more a “failed” woman than a “superior” woman. The individual’s history is not an inevitable progression: at every step, the past is grasped anew by a new choice, and the “normality” of the choice confers no privileged value on it: it must be judged by its authenticity. Homosexuality can be a way for woman to flee her condition or a way to assume it. Psychoanalysts’ great error, through moralizing conformity, is that they never envisage it as anything but an inauthentic attitude.

Woman is an existent who is asked to make herself object; as subject she has an aggressive sensuality that does not find satisfaction in the masculine body: from this are born the conflicts her eroticism must overcome. The system is considered normal that, delivering her as prey to a male, restores her sovereignty by putting a baby in her arms: but this “naturalism” is determined by a more or less well understood social interest. Even heterosexuality permits other solutions. Homosexuality for woman is one attempt among others to reconcile her autonomy with the passivity of her flesh. And if nature is invoked, it could be said that every woman is naturally homosexual. The lesbian is characterized simply by her refusal of the male and her preference for feminine flesh; but every adolescent female fears penetration and masculine domination, and she feels a certain repulsion for the man’s body; on the contrary, the feminine body is for her, as for man, an object of desire. As I have already said: men posit themselves as subjects, and at the same time they posit themselves as separate; to consider the other as a thing to take is to attack the virile ideal in the other and thus jointly in one’s self as well; by contrast, the woman who regards herself as object sees herself and her fellow creatures as prey. The homosexual man inspires hostility from male and female heterosexuals as they both demand that man be a dominating subject;
¹
by contrast, both sexes spontaneously view lesbians with indulgence. “I swear,” says the comte de Tilly, “it is a rivalry that in no way bothers me; on the contrary, I find it amusing and I
am immoral enough to laugh at it.” Colette attributed this same amused indifference to Renaud faced with the couple Claudine and Rézi.
²
A man is more irritated by an active and autonomous heterosexual woman than by a nonaggressive homosexual one; only the former challenges masculine prerogatives; sapphic loves in no way contradict the traditional model of the division of the sexes: in most cases, they are an assumption of femininity and not a rejection of it. We have seen that they often appear in the adolescent girl as an ersatz form of heterosexual relations she has not yet had the opportunity or the audacity to experience: it is a stage, an apprenticeship, and the one who most ardently engages in such loves may tomorrow be the most ardent of wives, lovers, and mothers. What must be explained in the female homosexual is thus not the positive aspect of her choice but the negative side: she is not characterized by her preference for women but by the exclusiveness of this preference.

According to Jones and Hesnard, lesbians mostly fall into two categories: “masculine lesbians,” who “try to act like men,” and “feminine” ones, who “are afraid of men.” It is a fact that one can, on the whole, observe two tendencies in homosexual women; some refuse passivity, while others choose to lose themselves passively in feminine arms; but these two attitudes react upon each other reciprocally; relations to the chosen object and to the rejected one are explained by each other reciprocally. For numerous reasons, as we shall see, the distinction given seems quite arbitrary.

To define the lesbian as “virile” because of her desire to “imitate man” is to doom her to inauthenticity. I have already said how psychoanalysts create ambiguities by accepting masculine-feminine categories as currently defined by society. Thus, man today represents the positive and the neuter—that is, the male and the human being—while woman represents the negative, the female. Every time she behaves like a human being, she is declared to be identifying with the male. Her sports, her political and intellectual activities, and her desire for other women are interpreted as “masculine protest”; there is a refusal to take into account the values toward which she is transcending, which inevitably leads to the belief that she is making the inauthentic choice of a subjective attitude. The great misunderstanding upon which this system of interpretation rests is to hold that it is
natural
for the human female to make a
feminine
woman of herself: being a heterosexual or even a mother is not enough to realize this ideal; the “real
woman” is an artificial product that civilization produces the way eunuchs were produced in the past; these supposed “instincts” of coquetry or docility are inculcated in her just as phallic pride is for man; he does not always accept his virile vocation; she has good reasons to accept even less docilely the vocation assigned to her. The notions of inferiority complex and masculinity complex remind me of the anecdote that Denis de Rougemont recounts in
La part du diable (The Devil’s Share):
a woman imagined that birds were attacking her when she went walking in the country; after several months of psychoanalytical treatment that failed to cure her of her obsession, the doctor accompanied her to the clinic garden and realized that
the birds were attacking her
. Woman feels undermined because in fact the restrictions of femininity undermine her. She spontaneously chooses to be a complete individual, a subject, and a freedom before whom the world and future open: if this choice amounts to the choice of virility, it does so to the extent that femininity today means mutilation. Homosexuals’ confessions collected by Havelock Ellis and Stekel—platonic in the first case and openly declared in the second—clearly show that feminine
specificity
is what outrages the two subjects:

This revolt by no means implies a sapphic predestination; most little girls feel the same indignation and despair when they learn that the accidental conformation of their bodies condemns their tastes and aspirations; Colette Audry angrily discovered at the age of twelve that she could never become a sailor;
³
the future woman naturally feels indignant about the limitations her sex imposes on her. The question is not why she rejects them: the real problem is rather to understand why she accepts them. Her conformism comes from her docility and timidity; but this resignation will easily turn to revolt if society’s compensations are judged inadequate. This is what will happen in cases where the adolescent girl feels unattractive as a woman: anatomical configurations become particularly important when this happens; if she is, or believes she is, ugly or has a bad figure, woman rejects a feminine destiny for which she feels ill adapted; but it would be wrong to say that she acquires a mannish attitude to compensate for a lack of femininity: rather, the opportunities offered to the adolescent girl in exchange for the masculine advantages she is asked to sacrifice seem too meager to her. All little girls envy boys’ practical clothes; it is their reflection in the mirror and the promises of things to come that make their furbelows little by little all the more precious; if the mirror harshly reflects an ordinary face, if it offers no promise, then lace and ribbons are an embarrassing, even ridiculous, livery, and the “tomboy” obstinately wishes to remain a boy.

Even if she has a good figure and is pretty, the woman who is involved in her own projects or who claims her freedom in general refuses to abdicate in favor of another human being; she recognizes herself in her acts,
not in her immanent presence: male desire reducing her to the limits of her body shocks her as much as it shocks a young boy; she feels the same disgust for her submissive female companions as the virile man feels for the passive homosexual. She adopts a masculine attitude in part to repudiate any involvement with them; she disguises her clothes, her looks, and her language, she forms a couple with a female friend where she assumes the male role: this playacting is in fact a “masculine protest”; but it is a secondary phenomenon; what is spontaneous is the conquering and sovereign subject’s shame at the idea of changing into a carnal prey. Many women athletes are homosexual; they do not perceive this body that is muscle, movement, extension, and momentum as passive flesh; it does not magically beckon caresses, it is a hold on the world, not a thing of the world: the gap between the body for-itself and the body for-others seems in this case to be unbreachable. Analogous resistance is found in women of action, “brainy” types for whom even carnal submission is impossible. Were equality of the sexes concretely realized, this obstacle would be in large part eradicated; but man is still imbued with his own sense of superiority, which is a disturbing conviction for the woman who does not share it. It should be noted, however, that the most willful and domineering women seldom hesitate to confront the male: the woman considered “virile” is often clearly heterosexual. She does not want to renounce her claims as a human being; but she has no intention of mutilating her femininity either; she chooses to enter the masculine world, even to annex it for herself. Her robust sensuality has no fear of male roughness; she has fewer defenses to overcome than the timid virgin in finding joy in a man’s body. A rude and animal nature will not feel the humiliation of coitus; an intellectual with an intrepid mind will challenge it; sure of herself and in a fighting mood, a woman will gladly engage in a duel she is sure to win. George Sand had a predilection for young and “feminine” men; but Mme de Staël looked for youth and beauty only in her later life: dominating men by her sharp mind and proudly accepting their admiration, she could hardly have felt a prey in their arms. A sovereign such as Catherine the Great could even allow herself masochistic ecstasies: she alone remained the master in these games. Isabelle Eberhardt, who dressed as a man and traversed the Sahara on horseback, felt no less diminished when she gave herself to some vigorous sharpshooter. The woman who refuses to be the man’s vassal is far from always fleeing him; rather she tries to make him the instrument of her pleasure. In certain favorable circumstances—mainly dependent on her partner—the very notion of competition will disappear, and she will enjoy experiencing her woman’s condition just as man experiences his.