Now consider

Now consider: when a French person travels for a holiday to a sea-side resort, s/he expects to have an affair, the affair of the summer. Isn’t this wonderful? Here is the hero, at dinner table, discussing with the (sexy) wife of a friend, his own love interest:

Her friendly concern enchanted me. So was I mistaken? In this hostility I detected something more than the usual rivalry between women. Impossible to see Irène, this magnificent brunette, without immediately being aware that she’s above all the woman, with all the appetites, the needs, the blinkered vision of her sex. Not even the most banal, hackneyed gallantries could fail to spring automatically from the lips of someone faced with a woman who’s been more mercilessly depersonalized by her sex than anyone I’ve ever seen. I don’t wish to be improper—yet it’s perfectly obvious that that mouth, that backside, those breasts rebel against the thought of appealing to anything except the brief caress of a palm, lips, words of sexual arousal. And what makes most women proud, Irène experiences as humiliation. Tucked up so snugly in her prison of flesh, she’s got something against Christel for being able to play the angel, stir the imagination, dreams, more directly than the senses. It’s a sign of a far and away rarer jealousy, because prejudices scoff at it, which I think I found in that word “Sphinx” which she used with such scorn.

Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger