Man’s voluntary motion over passive woman makes her feel like an instrument.

Evidence

“Making the other come,” says Stekel, “means dominating him; giving oneself to someone is abdicating one’s will.” Woman will accept pleasure more easily if it seems to flow naturally from man’s own pleasure, as happens in normal and successful coitus. “Women submit themselves joyously as soon as they understand that the partner does not want to subjugate them,” continues Stekel; inversely, if they feel this desire, they resist. Many shy away from being caressed by the hand because it is an instrument that does not participate in the pleasure it gives, it is activity and not flesh; and if sex itself does not come across as flesh penetrated with desire but as a cleverly used tool, woman will feel the same repulsion. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 988 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

As she pointed out, woman is indeed ‘other’ for man — but man is not exactly ‘other’ for woman, or not in the same way. Both sexes tend to agree in taking the male as the defining case and the centre of all perspectives. Even language reinforces this, with ‘man’ and ‘he’ being the default terms in French as in English. Women try constantly to picture themselves as they would look to a male gaze. Instead of looking out to the world as it presents itself to them (like the person peering through the keyhole) they maintain a point of view in which they are the objects (like the same person after becoming aware of footsteps in the hall). This, for Beauvoir, is why women spend so much time in front of mirrors. It is also why both men and women implicitly take women to be the more sensual, the more eroticised, the more sexual sex. In theory, for a heterosexual female, men should be the sexy ones, disporting themselves for the benefit of her gaze. Yet she sees herself as the object of attraction, and the man as the person in whose eyes she glows with desirability. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 681 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Woman serves man as a risk-free stage for performing his own emotions; Women resist pleasure that feels inflicted or actively engineered by the man. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 988; Both sexes implicitly center perspective on the male, making woman the object — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 681

Broader Connections

• Women resist pleasure that feels inflicted or actively engineered by the man. #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 988
• Both sexes implicitly center perspective on the male, making woman the object #expands (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 681