Unhappy Bodies: The Frigid Woman in The Second Sex

Abstract

We may find it irritating that The Second Sex was once marketed like a semidirty book, with a naked woman crouching on the cover, or we may find it merely funny; but the characterization of it as a book about sex is not exactly wrong. Readers who have studied only excerpts may find this a surprising claim. Many women’s studies classes tend to assign just the introduction, for sound reasons: feminist theory since the 1960s could be described without huge exaggeration as a series of commentaries on that introduction, even when subsequent theorists have been only hazily aware of what Beauvoir’s text actually says. But even in Parshley’s truncated version, the book is 724 pages long, and the opening theoretical moves that have been subject to such intense exegesis are supported and deepened by a very wide range of empirical evidence, concrete and detailed analysis, and phenomenological exploration of women’s experiences under patriarchy, including the private (or as the jacket copy puts it, “intimate”) experience of the female body and how it feels, from the inside out. Still, anyone who purchased The Second Sex hoping for a dreamy afternoon in the company of the woman pictured on the cover was in for a disappointment, because the sex in The Second Sex is mostly bad sex. As a monumental catalogue of female sexual discontent, it is far from anomalous in Beauvoir’s œuvre. The first manuscript she ever completed and offered to a publisher, a short “novel in stories” that was later renamed Quand prime le spirituel, was an unsentimental, demystifying exploration of young women’s sexual frustration,