The Erotic Phenomenon in the Feminine

ABSTRACT Is pleasure universal? What is the meaning of the gendered nature of pleasure? Is there an obvious chronological teleological relationship between desire and pleasure? First desire, then pleasure. You may indeed wonder why and how it is even possible to think differently. Unless, having read my subtitle, a suspicion has already crept into some limbic corner of your brain. In what follows, I would like to situate my remarks by re-examining what, in the relationship between desire and pleasure, is “proper” to men's experience. Equally, I will explore what, in this desire-pleasure relationship, is “proper” to women's experience. To do so, I will follow the now well-established interpretative schema inspired by Simone de Beauvoir's critical philosophy, which deconstructs the supposedly universality of a conceptuality by showing its situated and gendered de facto expectations.