Marriage’s ethical dignity actually suppresses rather than dignifies women’s sexuality

Evidence

This points out that for a woman it is not at all a question of establishing individual relations with a chosen husband, but rather of justifying the exercise of her feminine functions in their generality; she should have sexual pleasure only in a generic form and not an individualized one; this results in two essential consequences that touch upon her erotic destiny. First, she has no right to sexual activity outside marriage; for both spouses, sexual congress becoming an institution, desire and pleasure are superseded by the interest of society; but man, as worker and citizen transcending toward the universal, can savor contingent pleasures prior to marriage and outside of married life: in any case, he finds satisfaction in other ways; but in a world where woman is essentially defined as female, she must be justified wholly as a female. Second, it has been seen that the connection between the general and the particular is biologically different for the male and the female: in accomplishing his specific task as husband and reproducer, the male unfailingly finds his sexual pleasure; on the contrary, very often for the woman, there is a dissociation between the reproductive function and sexual pleasure. This is so to the extent that in claiming to give ethical dignity to her erotic life, marriage, in fact, means to suppress it. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1136

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the earlier chapters’ biology of female sexuality and the dissociation of reproduction from pleasure Beauvoir established; also resonates with Freud’s theory of female frigidity that Beauvoir critiques elsewhere. — connects to: The humane within marriage develops only within the savagery it veils — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 73; Universal social inhumanity takes revenge on marriages that seemed exempt — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 27; Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1179 (+9 more)
• ADDENDUM: The dissociation of female reproduction from pleasure parallels the generalized female-vs-human asymmetry theme; for ‘On Sacrifice’ article the point that institution suppresses genuine erotic life connects to ritualized/coerced sacrifice.

Broader Connections

• Female purity shifted from inner moral conflict to a dogmatic value per se #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 220