emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

4
MAN AND SEXUALITY
Man does not allow his sexuality to develop fully, he stifles it by
confining it to his penis. He projects it onto woman by making
her into a sexual creature. The role attributed to Eve in the Bible
illustrates this as does the Ancient Greek myth of Pandora who
is held responsible for all the evils on earth after opening her
'box'. But one of the best illustrations of his attitude is the way
man compares mate and female pleasure and marvels at the
potential for orgasm with which he credits woman.
One of the earliest experts at comparison was probably Tiresias,
the Greek soothsayer who is said to have turned himself into a
woman in order to formulate an unbiased judgement. His
conclusion was categorical: woman's orgasm is nine times as
intense as a man’s. Subsequently, such perfect sex changes
have become rarer, but that has not prevented men's
imaginations from making comparisons. Montaigne,[1] for
example, has no qualms in assuring men that women 'are
incomparably more capable and more ardent than we in the act
of love'. A few centuries later 'M' [2] also warns us: 'I am most
distressed to have to tell you this, but sexually speaking, we are
mistaken if we think we are the stronger sex. Women are
capable of having orgasms ten times as intense as ours.' Even
more recently, Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut in Le
Nouveau Desordre Amoureux, observe that in comparison with
'the sad simplicity of male pleasure', woman's orgasm is like: 'a
small-scale production of the creation of the universe'.
All these comparisons set the tone: man does not see the
richness of his own sexuality and decrees that sex is woman.
Obviously this does not imply that a woman may enjoy her
supposed extraordinary sexuality in her own way, but, on the
contrary, the pleasure that a man keeps for himself is precisely
that of power, in particular, power over woman's pleasure. Man
feels sexual pleasure as a threat to his power; he controls and
channels it as best he can for fear of being submerged by
pleasure. He is at sixes and sevens: he sees its domination as a
way of dominating nature; but whereas sexuality is essentially
letting-go, communication and delight, he represents it as selfcontrol,
struggle and a means of asserting his power.