emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

woman, it is considered one of the principal goals of her
existence. But, there again, we must not confuse love as applied
to men and love as applied to women. Nietzsche, in The Gay
Science, gives a definition which gives a good glimpse of the
ideology of love, and the use that man makes of the emotion:
«The single word love in fact signifies two different things
for man and woman. What woman understands by love is
clear enough: it is not only devotion, it is a total gift of
body and soul, without reservation, without regard for
anything whatever. This unconditional nature of her love is
what makes it a faith, the only one she has. As for man, if
he loves a woman, what he wants is that love from her; he
is in consequence, far from postulating the same sentiment
for himself as for woman: if there should be men who also
felt that desire for complete abandonment, upon my word,
they would not be men.»
From the vast collection of stupid remarks about love uttered by
men throughout the ages, Simone de Beauvoir picks out one
from Balzac: 'At the apex of man's life is fame, at the apex of
woman's life is love. Woman is a man's equal only when she
makes her life a perpetual offering, as that of man is perpetual
action.'
And Nietzsche again: 'She demands, therefore, someone to take
her, someone who does not give himself, who does not
abandon himself, but who wishes, on the contrary, to enrich his
ego through love . . . The woman gives herself, the man adds to
himself by taking her.' In spite of the quantity of writings, in
poetry, prose and maxims, the general idea is virtually always
the same: man in love expects the woman he loves to totally
submit to his desires.
Love is, in actual fact, a 'gentle' way of appropriating a woman;
it justifies all the restrictions man imposes, and buys all the
devotion he demands. And so, in the Christian West, it is one of
the pillars ―at the same time the method and the justification―
of exclusive appropriation, and the man class makes constant
ideological use of it. Love stories, for example, whether in
literature, pulp-fiction, or the cinema, go straight to the point:
when possession is impossible they invariably end with the
death of the lovers; otherwise they culminate in the sacrament
of marriage. And when the story is over on the screen or on
paper, it continues in everyday life, where love becomes a
pretext used by man to try and rationalise the free services
provided by his wife; it is also a token of his security as
proprietor, through the absolute fidelity he requires from his
beloved.
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