Sex and Marriage Theme Analysis

In the absence of valuable work or a sense of personal achievement, women often turned to sex to feel “alive” again. Friedan strongly objected to the notion that women could find a sense of identity through sex, believing it to be foolhardy. Many women reported gaining little pleasure from being with their husbands, while others sought sex outside of their marriages. As more and more women realized that having a marriage and a family did not guarantee happiness, men too realized that having a wife at home at all times did not always make their lives easier. In this way, Friedan shows that the feminine mystique had created a model of marriage that left both men and women unhappy.

For women who had pursued marriage instead of an education, sexual fulfilment (which Friedan defines largely by the ability to orgasm) and marital bliss were more elusive than they were for women who had attended graduate school. Female professionals reported more sexual and marital satisfaction than their peers who had accomplished less academically and professionally. This finding revealed that personal satisfaction correlated with the ability to find satisfaction in sexual union. Women who had achieved less before marriage often pursued a feeling of completeness through extramarital affairs. The woman who had embraced the feminine mystique at the expense of all else had a view of love that was antithetical to any real type of individuality. This woman accepted the culture’s message that love required her to forfeit her distinct sense of self. On the other hand, the woman who had known independence before marriage was more often able to find a love based on desire, not need, and used it to strengthen her individuality. Friedan argues that the “emancipated” woman’s independence and strong sense of identity not only increased her ability to reach orgasm, but also made her better suited to marriage, as she did not marry to achieve selfhood, but rather to share the self she had already constructed with someone who loved her.

Less “emancipated” women reported being very interested in sex, but they did not experience it with the same degree of pleasure as more accomplished married women. When Friedan asked her subjects what they did when they were not busy with domestic concerns, they chose to talk about sex. They were eager to talk about the topic and some reported having affairs. However, Friedan noted how “unsexual” they sounded when introducing the subject. They were not really interested in sex, but instead wanted to recover a “feeling” they had lost—a “feeling of identity,” or the feeling of happiness they experienced when they married—through performing the act.

While women had affairs to achieve a sense of identity, men often had them to escape from “the devouring wife.” Both men and women were looking to escape from the strictures of domesticity, which had resulted in the devolution of the “human relationship.” Both, as a result of their mutual discontents, had eliminated the relational aspect from sex. According to the Kinsey report, most American men’s sexual outlets were not with their wives. Though their wives were clearly very sexual, and popular culture exploited the stereotype of the American woman’s large sexual appetite, many men took little interest in their wives. Instead, they sought office romances, both casual and intense affairs, or a sexual relationship “totally divorced from any human relationship.” Others preferred relationships with “Lolita” types—girlish women who would not be aggressive like their grown wives and would not seek to live vicariously through them. Girlish women such as these would make no demands on men at all. Rather, they would assume the states of passivity and compliance that men had originally hoped to find and foster in their housewives. The feminine mystique had made it more difficult to view wives as lovers. Instead, they became, for their husbands, a source of frustration. The suburban housewife’s status-seeking, which resulted in always wanting to buy more products, and her dominance as the manager of the household, bred hostility between her and her husband. Her role, even as expressed toward her husband, was maternal. This resulted in the juxtaposition of “the devouring wife” with “the devouring mother”—a stock character in Tennessee Williams’s plays—in the popular imagination. Both types were aggressive in their femininity and dominated their husbands through a strong assertion of their domestic roles.

The feminine mystique had contributed to turning marriage into a state of disunion and alienation between husbands and wives. Women pursued feminine ideals to obtain a husband and, in that pursuit, garnered men’s hostile resentment, which men then directed toward other women. Men wanted wives whose sole pursuits were domestic, then recoiled when those seemingly passive women became aggressive taskmasters. Thus, sex became a means for both men and women to escape the “mystique.”