The Way of the Superior Couple

Lessons from Emmanuelle on transcending egalitarian sexual numbness

What happens when modern couples evolve beyond traditional roles but still hunger for primal connection? Diwan's Emmanuelle, starring the mesmerizing Noémie Merlant, confronts this question with unflinching intimacy. The film left me initially frustrated—until I realized that frustration was precisely the point. Through Merlant's character, we witness a thoroughly modern woman who has integrated her masculine and feminine aspects, yet faces a new dilemma: men who remain fundamentally split between mind and body. Her acceptance of this split—her resignation to it—mirrors what I've witnessed in many conversations with women navigating today's romantic landscape. It's the unspoken current beneath the simplified "alpha/beta" categorizations in popular culture, and it represents a crucial challenge for couples seeking deeper connection beyond their comfortable 50-50 arrangements. For those sensing something vital missing from their partnerships despite achieving equality, this film offers uncomfortable but necessary insights into transcending the mind-body division that plagues modern intimacy.

The male protagonist—a dam engineer haunted by the futility of his work—serves as a perfect metaphor for contemporary masculinity's crisis. His technical brilliance at containing external forces stands in stark contrast to his inability to channel his own internal energies. The film builds toward a revelation that challenges us to consider: what would it take for him to evolve into someone capable of true presence with Emmanuelle—integrated in both mind and body?

What makes this film so resonant is how precisely it captures the current feminine zeitgeist. Many women have done the internal work of developing both their nurturing and assertive capacities, only to encounter men trapped between adolescent emotional immaturity and dissociated intellectual detachment. There's a growing sense that something fundamental has been lost—that the feminine gaze once devoted to helping men integrate their fractured selves now stares into an abyss of resignation. For men willing to recognize it, this resignation serves as a powerful wake-up call.

To understand this dynamic more deeply, I'll draw from two complementary frameworks that illuminate both our evolutionary history and our potential future: Bard/Söderquist's Process and Event philosophy, and David Deida's The Way of the Superior Man. Together, they offer not just analysis but practical wisdom for couples seeking to reclaim the erotic tension that equality often inadvertently sacrifices.

Process and Event

In their philosophical work, Bard and Söderquist go back beyond the Greek axial age, the usual starting point of modern philosophy, and begin with what they call Nomadology (after Gilles Deleuze): the natural world that we inhabited for several hundreds of thousand years—the world that shaped who we are. The basic organization was the family (40 people), the clan (160, the famous Dunbar number), and the tribe (1200-1500). Both nature and life constantly repeated the same patterns: day followed night, spring followed winter, we were born, matured, had children, grew old, and died. There were transformations, but they all recurred. We developed rituals to mark, assist, and contain these transformations, and established stable roles that burned into our collective psyche as archetypes.

First there was the matriarch, who represented and was responsible for containing the ever-repeating way of life. She managed reproduction and the cycles of life, the social cohesion within the tribe, and the continuation of the tribe. She was also the owner of the myth, the story that made narrative order, in which we lived. The clans were on constant move, and the matriarch was the very last person of the group, pushing and holding the tail. If you were behind her, you were dead. She was the last frontier between the fragile nomadic order and the chaos that consumed you.

The masculine, the phallic archetype, was split. First there were the hunters, ancestors of modern-day engineers. They had to provide, go out daily, and return with meat. They were also inventors, tool-makers, and builders, constantly looking for useful objects, perfecting early technologies to shape nature into tools. When they succeeded in bringing back meat, festivities followed, along with sex with the women who could now rely on their men for reproduction and tribal continuation. Hunters' world was the logos—they needed to understand how the outside world worked, developing a map of reality that evolved into the nomological worldview that later became science.

Then there were the warriors. Hunters killed animals, warriors killed other men—something fundamentally different. Territorial conflicts were frequent and bloody. Warriors died, and when all of them did, the tribe died too. But when they returned triumphant, they brought expansion and new hunting territories. They were the heroes women desired even more than hunters. These warriors were predecessors of today's CEOs, athletes, and soldiers. Their world was pathos: the brutal chaos of violence beyond logic or mythic control.

Now, individual men were not split, everyone was a hunter and a warrior to a certain extent, but may have had different positions in the two hierarchies. Hunters were thinkers but hunting was also physical, and fighting was of course physical but also mental, you know this if you practice martial art. Everyone was (did not just have) a body and a mind. Everyone had to develop both sides to be called a man: you went to see the chieftain to develop your body, and to the priest to develop your mind. The unification of body and mind was not automatic, it was very much controlled and contained by the environment and the rituals.

The Historical Evolution of Desire

When written civilization emerged around four thousand years ago, an Event happened that changed life forever. This Event didn't just transform social structures - it began a long process of reshaping how we understand and express desire, particularly female desire. The archetypal split in masculine roles (hunter/warrior, logos/pathos) became increasingly institutionalized, while the containment role of the feminine underwent subtle but profound transformations.

This evolution is perfectly traced through literary and cinematic representations of female desire, from Flaubert's Madame Bovary to the various incarnations of Emmanuelle. Emma Bovary, like the first Emmanuelle of the 1974 film, represented women trapped within societal constraints, their desires threatening to overflow the rigid containers of marriage and bourgeois respectability. These characters were revolutionary precisely because they exposed the tension between primal feminine energy and social containment - a tension that existed since the tribal era but became increasingly problematic with civilization.

In Diwan's 2024 adaptation, we see how this dialectic has evolved. Her Emmanuelle is no longer a constrained housewife but a professionally successful, independent woman. Yet she faces a new kind of frustration: not from external constraints, but from the inability of modern men to fully engage with her integrated feminine-masculine nature. The dam engineer she encounters symbolizes perfectly the modern manifestation of the split phallus - technically competent but disconnected from his warrior essence, capable of building containers but unable to channel the very energy he seeks to contain.

The engineer in Diwan's film embodies the culmination of a historical process that began with Platonic dualism and reached its apex with Descartes. From these philosophical origins, the body/mind separation evolved from abstract theory into our culture's foundational assumption. This dualism has shaped modern masculinity in profound ways, creating what we can call the split phallus.

While women's emancipation has paradoxically freed them to begin integrating their feminine and masculine aspects (as we see in Merlant's Emmanuelle), men often remain trapped in this ancient dualistic prison. The engineer can intellectually understand systems of energy and flow in his professional life, yet remains disconnected from the flow of his own embodied energy. He represents the modern professional man: competent in logos but alienated from pathos.

Even our supposedly "integrated" modern worldviews perpetuate this split. Contemporary atheism, despite claiming materialist monism on paper, often reduces everything to physical mechanisms while paradoxically ignoring the lived experience of embodiment. This creates a performative contradiction: the scientistic ontology has no place for the conscious subject that performs science itself. The engineer lives this contradiction - masterful with physical systems yet unable to fully inhabit his own physicality in relation to Emmanuelle's desire. His dam-building capabilities become a poignant metaphor for his inability to channel his own life-force.

The Superior Man and Woman

This evolution of female desire and male response finds its theoretical framework in David Deida's three levels, which mirror the historical development we see from Madame Bovary through the Emmanuelle adaptations. The 'first level' relationship - where men and women occupy traditional, separated roles - is what Emma Bovary was trapped within and rebelling against. The 1974 Emmanuelle began to imagine an escape from these constraints, but still within a male-directed fantasy of female liberation.

Today's couples have largely achieved Deida's 'second level' - the fifty-fifty partnership that emerged after women's emancipation. This is the world Diwan's Emmanuelle inhabits, but finds ultimately unsatisfying. She has developed her phallic side significantly, yet hasn't fully reached the status of a Superior Woman. Like many modern women, Emmanuelle has mastered many container-building aspects traditionally associated with masculinity and can navigate between professional competence and desire, but she hasn't fully integrated these aspects in a way that would allow her to guide others toward similar integration.

I adore women with a developed phallic side. If it is fully integrated and does not suppress their natural feminine, rather helps them to contain it, that combination is what we can call the Superior Woman. I live with such a woman—an artist who understood that to nurture her boundless feminine creativity, she needed to build containers. To perform, sing, and access transcendent spiritual space—to fully embody her feminine energy before an audience—she first needed to build the band, establish trust, and create a viable production company. This could have been delegated to a masculine manager, but such arrangements create their own complex dynamics. She ultimately realized that to create the perfect container, she needed to temporarily access her masculine energy and build it herself.

A similar process unfolds in her songwriting. Her inspiration emerges from liminal-spiritual space—she must access this realm to extract something concrete for a song. During this gathering phase, she creates safe passage to and from that threshold world where angels, demons, genius, and madness coexist. Once the raw material is collected, structuring it into lyrics, rhymes, melody, and orchestration becomes primarily a masculine engineering task: creating frameworks and fitting material into structures. This is familiar territory for me as a software engineer—a space I find both comforting and generative, yet one where Platonic dualism originates, the same dualism that has fractured the modern male psyche. She also likes this masculine phase of the process, moreover, she even created a course, an ultimate container, to teach others how to do it, with a complete success that surprises most of her students: basically, anyone can write a deeply personal song that marks, assists, and contains their own self-transcendence. A deep and hard-earned example of integrating the feminine and masculine.

Yet here lies the film's central tension: while many modern men and women have begun the journey toward integrating masculine and feminine energies, they haven't fully completed it. Many men remain stuck in what Bard calls the 'split phallus' - divided between their logical-professional selves and their embodied-passionate natures. The engineer character represents this modern male predicament perfectly. He's competent in his professional domain of containing and directing energy (the dam), but cannot apply this same mastery to his own sexual and emotional energy. Neither character has achieved their superior potential - they're both aspirants rather than embodiments of integration.

The film suggests, however, that this split isn't insurmountable. The engineer has potential - played by Will Sharpe, he carries a dormant sexual energy that could be awakened. But here we encounter a modern dilemma: while Emmanuelle recognizes this potential, she lacks the theoretical framework to guide him toward integration. She has mastered her own feminine-masculine integration but cannot articulate the path for others.

The film's engineer resonates deeply with my own journey. As a software engineer myself, I recognize intimately the challenge of bridging the gap between technical mastery and embodied presence. My initial frustration watching the film stemmed from seeing the engineer so close to breakthrough—just as I once was—yet ultimately falling short. But my path diverged from his: it was my partner's own masculine essence that first encouraged my journey toward integration. She recognized my potential and, in contained moments separate from our erotic life, helped guide my personal development toward fuller masculinity. This apparent contradiction—a woman accessing her masculine to guide her partner toward his masculine—dissolves when properly contained. The path I outline below isn't theoretical—it emerges from years of experimental practice with my partner, from our ongoing attempts to dance between containment and wildness, structure and flow. While we haven't achieved perfect integration (and perhaps that isn't even the goal), we've discovered certain practices that help create the conditions for deeper connection.

A Path Forward for Modern Couples

For couples seeking to transcend the comfortable but often sexually numbing 50-50 partnership, the path forward requires understanding that integration happens through contained experimentation rather than theoretical understanding alone. Drawing from both Deida's framework and the film's insights, here's what this journey might look like:

First, both partners need to recognize that their current egalitarian setup, while valuable for daily life management, may be precisely what's dampening their erotic potential. The engineer in the film excels at his professional containment of energy, just as many modern professional men excel at being reasonable, supportive partners. Yet this very reasonableness can become a barrier to the kind of passionate presence that deeper intimacy requires.

Similarly, modern women, like Emmanuelle, have often mastered both their professional competence and their sexual autonomy. Yet they may find themselves unconsciously suppressing their desire to be ravished by a fully present masculine force, fearing that such desire somehow betrays their independence. The solution isn't to abandon equality, but to create specific containers - in time and space - where different dynamics can safely emerge.

Practical steps for couples might include:

1. Temporal Containment: Explicitly separating times for different modes of relating. There's a time for running the household together as equals, and a time for consciously stepping into polarized masculine and feminine energies. This isn't about playing roles, but about allowing natural energies to emerge within safe containers.

2. Spatial Containment: Creating physical spaces dedicated to different forms of intimacy. Just as my partner's band created specific containers for artistic expression, couples need to designate spaces where the rules of everyday egalitarian life are consciously suspended.

3. Communication Containers: Establishing clear boundaries between moments of instruction or feedback and moments of pure experience. As the film shows through Emmanuelle's attempts to guide during intimacy, mixing these modes often breaks the erotic spell. Instead, couples need separate containers for discussion and for experience.

What makes this approach different from traditional role-play or scheduled intimacy is its foundation in authentic energy rather than performed roles. The goal isn't to pretend to be dominant or submissive, masculine or feminine, but to create safe containers where these natural energies can emerge organically. It's about recognizing that we all contain both masculine and feminine essences, but that polarity - and thus erotic tension - arises when we consciously allow one or the other to predominate within specific containers.

This is what the film ultimately suggests: the possibility of maintaining both our modern egalitarian achievements and our access to primal erotic energies, not through compromise but through conscious containment. The engineer's journey hints at how men can maintain their professional competence while rediscovering their capacity for raw presence, just as Emmanuelle demonstrates how women can express both their independence and their desire for surrender - each in its proper container.

This integration doesn't mean achieving perfect balance or harmony - and here Lacanian insights become crucial. When Lacan speaks of desire arising from lack, from the "constant postponement of the this is not it," he reveals a fundamental truth that the film honors: sexual energy thrives on imbalance and tension, not perfect equilibrium. The brilliance of conscious containment is that it doesn't eliminate this tension but rather gives it a safe space to express itself. The frustration Emmanuelle experiences isn't something to overcome completely but rather a creative force to channel properly.

As my correspondence with Alexander Bard highlighted, "Sex is never balanced nor harmonious. Exactly there lies its power. The power of frustration. It is the very motor of sexuality." What the film suggests is not eliminating this motor but learning to drive the vehicle it powers. The solution isn't perfect integration that eliminates all tension, but rather the capacity to dance consciously with imbalance, to contain and direct its energy rather than being consumed by it.

The lesson that we can learn here is that the superior skill of the Superior Man and Woman is the full expression and integration of both their feminine and masculine essences, with clear boundaries, both in time and in space, around the expression of their various sides. This is where Emmanuelle falls short. She has both a fully developed masculine and feminine, but her integration is partial, and her propositional knowledge about the dynamics, her masculine side with which she could guide his engineer to become the unified Superior Man she strives for, is non-existing.

The film's final act underscores this challenge powerfully. Without revealing specifics, Diwan crafts a scenario that physically manifests the split phallus - showing how the pathic and logic aspects of masculinity remain divided across different vessels when integration fails. Emmanuelle's attempt to orchestrate connection becomes a fascinating metaphor for the modern feminine predicament: witnessing male fragmentation while lacking the framework to facilitate true unification. The staging of this finale brilliantly illustrates how translation between masculine modes remains necessary when integration hasn't occurred internally.

The film's brilliance lies in how it frames this modern impasse not as a tragedy but as a moment pregnant with possibility. While Emmanuelle cannot fully guide the engineer toward integration, their encounter reveals the outline of what such guidance might look like. The key insight emerges from their professional lives: just as Emmanuelle has learned to build containers for her feminine energy in her work, and just as the engineer has mastered the containment of natural forces, they each possess half of the knowledge needed for sexual-spiritual integration.