Sexual technique alone cannot produce desire within marriage’s constraints.
Evidence
Many books on initiation into married life come out every year aimed at teaching couples to adapt to each other, and in particular teaching man how to create harmony with his wife. Psychoanalysts and doctors play the role of “marriage counselors”; it is accepted that the wife too has the right to pleasure and that the man must know the correct techniques to provide her with it. But we have seen that sexual success is not merely a technical question. The young man, even if he has memorized twenty textbooks such as Ce que tout mari doit savoir (What Every Husband Should Know), Le secret du bonheur conjugal (The Secret of Conjugal Happiness), and L’amour sans peur (Love Without Fear), is still not sure he will know how to make his new wife love him. She reacts to the psychological situation as a whole. And traditional marriage is far from creating the most propitious conditions for the awakening and blossoming of feminine eroticism. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1160
Categorization
- XREF: Resonates with the reader’s interest in mechanisms — the technical-rational framing of sex being insufficient. — connects to: Convention-based marriage cannot reliably generate love or lifelong sexual satisfaction — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1191; Erotic attraction alone is an insufficient foundation for a lifelong union; Marriage’s frustrated eroticism causally drives wives into adultery — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1617 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Convention-based marriage cannot reliably generate love or lifelong sexual satisfaction
#expands(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1191 - Erotic attraction alone is an insufficient foundation for a lifelong union
#exemplifies(0.85) - Desire is non-reflective and cannot posit its own suppression as end
#corroborates(0.82) - Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it
#corroborates(0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1179 - Marriage’s frustrated eroticism causally drives wives into adultery
#qualifies(0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1617