ABSTRACT
The importance of sexual difference was dismissed by a some feminists, in part because of the confusion that existed between facts and rights. A woman's experience of her body is obviously a little more complicated than the fact of not having a penis. Many different experiences have to be lived through and accepted, and there are marked caesuras: the menarche, menses, defloration, pregnancy and childbirth, and, finally, the menopause — the keynote sign in all of these stages being blood: from when it first appears to the day when it ceases to flow. Among mammals, the dissociation between sexuality and procreation is specific to human beings, given the disappearance of oestrus as a prerequisite for copulation. That is one reason why some colleagues maintain that all human sexuality is perverse in nature: pleasure replaces procreation as its aim. Socially and psychologically, however, this dissociation raises various problems.
