Female desire is an indissoluble synthesis of attraction and repulsion, not disguised male-derived libido
Evidence
Without wholly rejecting the contributions of psychoanalysis, some of which are productive, we will nevertheless not accept its method. First of all, we will not limit ourselves to taking sexuality as a given: that this view falls short is demonstrated by the poverty of the descriptions touching on the feminine libido; I have already said that psychoanalysts have never studied it head-on, but only based on the male libido; they seem to ignore the fundamental ambivalence of the attraction that the male exercises over the female. Freudians and Adlerians explain woman’s anxiety before male genitalia as an inversion of frustrated desire. Stekel rightly saw this as an original reaction; but he accounts for it only superficially: the woman would fear defloration, penetration, pregnancy, and pain, and this fear would stifle her desire; this explanation is too rational.* Instead of accepting that desire is disguised as anxiety or is overcome by fear, we should consider this sort of pressing and frightened appeal that is female desire as a basic given; it is characterized by the indissoluble synthesis of attraction and repulsion. It is noteworthy that many female animals flee from coitus at the very moment they solicit it: they are accused of coquetry or hypocrisy; but it is absurd to attempt to explain primitive behaviors by assimilating them to complex ones: they are, on the contrary, at the source of attitudes called coquetry and hypocrisy in women. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 130
Categorization
- DEFINE: Beauvoir’s counter-definition of the feminine libido as a pressing-frightened appeal contradicting the psychoanalytic reduction of woman’s sexuality to the male model.
- QUESTION: The empirical claim that female animals flee coitus at the moment they solicit it — worth checking the ethological record she might be drawing on.
- SEED: Essay angle: how a theorist (Beauvoir) diagnoses a rival theory’s category error by moving from ‘primitive behavior is complex behavior in disguise’ to ‘complex behavior grows out of primitive behavior as its source.’
- XREF: connects to: Female desire is experienced as viscous passivity versus male predatory impetuosity.; Virginity myths encode male ambivalence between fear and desire of the feminine — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 342; The virgin-desire myth serves male domination, not biological fact — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 948 (+2 more)