emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

Yet such measures present two major disadvantages for the
husband. On the one hand, whatever the methods used, their
effectiveness is invariably limited by man's very notion of
sexuality (nothing will stop him in his desire to appropriate and,
on the contrary, the more inaccessible a woman is, the greater
the challenge to possess her); on the other hand, by protecting
his property in this way, the husband restricts his own sexual
use of his wife. As a consequence of doing his utmost to
repress her desires, he ends up having problems in using her or
appreciating her himself. He frequently complains, like this
Playboy reader who is asking for a solution to the problem that
he brought on himself:
«I have been married for nearly fifteen years. About three
times a week I have the impression I am raping my wife.
Rape? In any case, that's the term Germaine Greer would
use if she knew me. But what else can I do? My wife does
not want a divorce. It is out of the question, because of the
children, her parents, etc. I don't want to be unfaithful to
her. I have neither the time nor the inclination to chase
women, and I must admit, I still love my wife. And so when I
'demand' it, she 'gives in', waits patiently until I've finished
with her eyes glued to the ceiling. This hurts me a lot, it
even affected my performance for a while and then I made
the best of it. Has Germaine Greer a solution, she who
claims to know all the answers? » [4]
[94 / Holy virility]
When his wife does not want to make love, and he is no longer
satisfied with repeatedly raping her, the husband always has
prostitutes to turn to, or adultery, which is, for man, an
extension of marriage. That is why, in the nineteenth century
and at the beginning of the twentieth, during the 'belle epoque'
of the triumphant bourgeoisie, brothels were all the rage and the
fashionable bourgeois had both a wife and a mistress. There
were a whole variety of courtesans, demi-mondaines and
whores; and the husband could appropriate the woman he
wanted completely legally, as long as he did not constantly do it
in his own home, or in the home of the woman's owner (if he
did, it was at his own risk). Moral order under the bourgeoisie
easily collapsed into unholy disorder which, in time, would have
been a serious threat to the institution of marriage. And so, the
specialists, who are taking things in hand more and more, try
today to put things right and restore order in the home.
We have already seen some of the legal modifications made in
France in order to bring the law in line with the new ideology,
but the overall project is in fact much more ambitious than it
first appears: it is an attempt to transcend the eternal
contradiction of private appropriation by at last providing the
husband with a woman who will be simultaneously a wife and a
mistress. The offensive is led (in particular) by the sexologists
who do their best to make marriage sound more attractive by
adding, as a bonus, the hope of multiple orgasms for the
woman. In short, they have brought 'sex' out of the catacombs