Lawrence’s phallic marriage makes desire for variety inconceivable

Evidence

Lawrence does not want the woman to be tense in the search for pleasure, separated from the male by the spasm that jolts her; he deliberately refuses to bring her to orgasm; Don Cipriano withdraws from Kate when he feels her close to this nervous pleasure; she renounces even this sexual autonomy. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 503 (#expands, via linked claim)

That is why there is often an aftertaste of vice in these seemingly most legitimate embraces. The woman often helps herself along with erotic imaginings. Stekel cites a twenty-five-year-old woman who “could reach a slight orgasm with her husband by imagining that a strong, older man is taking her by force, so she cannot defend herself.” She sees herself as being raped, beaten, and her husband is not himself but an Other. He indulges in the same dream: in his wife’s body he possesses the legs of a dancer seen in a music hall, the breasts of this pinup whose photo he has dwelled on, a memory, an image; or else he imagines his wife desired, possessed, or raped, which is a way to give her back her lost alterity. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1194 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Lawrence’s ideal denies woman even clitoral sexual autonomy in eroticism — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 503; Married partners invent erotic fantasies to restore the alterity marriage erased — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1194; Lawrence frames the possessive woman as dragging man back into immanence — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 500

Broader Connections

• Lawrence’s ideal denies woman even clitoral sexual autonomy in eroticism #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 503
• Married partners invent erotic fantasies to restore the alterity marriage erased #complicates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1194