Married partners invent erotic fantasies to restore the alterity marriage erased

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s bad faith and the look of the Other, and to the theme of marriage domesticating the erotic that runs through Beauvoir’s dialectic of immanence vs transcendence. — connects to: Lawrence’s phallic marriage makes desire for variety inconceivable; Marriage transforms partners from erotically charged Others into the Same — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1193; Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1179 (+6 more)
• STORYSTEM: The convent-raised woman who dominates her husband by day and pleads to be whipped at night is a vivid character seed for fiction exploring the split between social role and erotic self.
• DEEPTHINKING: This analysis of marriage destroying alterity and erotic fantasy restoring it is core Beauvoir: the couple’s familiarity kills the Otherness that desire requires—dense enough to sit with.

Broader Connections

• A husband’s public prudishness can coexist with private sexual inventiveness in marriage #corroborates (0.78)
• Marital boredom can trigger fantasies of prostitution in young brides #exemplifies (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1274
• Intimacy strips disguises to expose the other’s flesh as pure contingency #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 897
• Erotic disclosure captures otherness by making us at home in the world #expands (0.74) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 658
• Spousal sex becomes mutual masturbation rather than intersubjective exchange #qualifies (0.72)