While reading the second book “The Story of a New Name”, we can still find traces of time-travelling. Elena keeps going back and forth in time, trying to explain the events that happened in the past as if they were happening right now. However, I do not find this time-travel that interesting. What intrigues me, is Elena’s point of view on the male body and how she perceives male “superiority”.

Lenù refers to the penis as “gross man flesh” (27); but also as something that she desires a lot. She is going out with Antonio, Melina’s son, and they are having all these intimate moments together, where Antonio is always the one receiving pleasure; but not her. She says “I delayed pulling out his sex; I knew that as soon as I did, he would forget about me” (26) and we can tell that Antonio was really “proud” to have a penis and felt like Elena had no needs or whatsoever. On the other hand, we can see that Antonio also depends on her because at some point, while the two of them are fighting, Antonio stops fighting because he thought that Elena wouldn’t want to please him and she “would deny him those few minutes of pleasure” (29).

Simone de Beauvoir in her book “The Second Sex” sets focus on how a male, even as a little boy, is full of himself for being born with a penis because by “having an organ that can be seen and grasped, he can at least partially identify with it” (282).

De Beauvoir says that a man “learns from an early age to take blows, to scorn pain, to keep back the tears. He undertakes, he invents, he dares, he challenges his own manhood” (284), and these are some of the traits we see through Lila’s husband, Stefano Caracci. During their honeymoon, Lila expresses her disgust towards Stefano and admits that she does not want him. Stefano is furious and says to himself “Be a man Ste” (41) and ends up beating up Lila, with the excuse that “she has to learn right away that she is the female and he is the male and therefore she has to obey” (41).

Lila sees herself as one of “Caracci’s possessions” (39) and even though she would often have bruised arms, swollen eyes and purple cheeks, nobody in the stradone would say anything because they thought that “there was someone who knew how to be a man” (45).

Elena does not seem to approve of Stefano’s behavior; but does not seem to detest it, either. She explains that “we had grown up thinking that a stranger must not touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they like, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us” (52). So even if she hates to see her friend in that condition, there is nothing she can do, because this is perceived as “normal” behavior from someone with a penis towards his “lifeless possession”.