Sartre famously said that he liked to masturbate women but did not think much of the sexual act. This was because, according to Simone de Beauvoir (his companion for many years, including intellectual companion), he could never let himself go and become incarnated in his body; he had to remain in control in his head. He wanted to remain active and could not stand being passive. Not to mention the fact that he infamously describes in Being and Nothingness the female sex organ as a ‘voracious mouth which devours the penis and brings about the idea of castration: the sexual act is castration of a man but, above all, the female sex organ is a hole’.

In a letter to Beauvoir, Sartre admits that he does not know how to be sensual. According to the author of The Second Sex, sex with Sartre could be exhausting, waiting for him to climax. In a little-known text on courtly love, Sartre writes that entering into love is a form of death, explaining that when giving or being robbed of one’s empirical self, as in any mystery, one dies. A contemporary literary theorist, Leo Bersani, writes: ‘It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self.’