on Genet's belief in inequality in love

The essence of the loved one is his indifference, his profound nature of being a thing, an object. Genet conceives of the couple as the union of body and spirit, but this relation is not reciprocal, since consciousness may be consciousness of body, but body is quite simply body, body is completely itself. The body in itself (en soi) is an autonomous substance; consciousness is in itself and for itself a relation. It is this autonomy of substance that Genet calls indifference. All the words he uses to designate the loved are negations or disguised negations -- for example, ‘immobile and silent’, ‘inflexible’, ‘impenetrable’, ‘the angel of death itself, as unyielding as a rock’. The loved one is absent, or present only as an appearance. His purest virtues are his destructive forces and his lack of positive qualities. In the moment of submission Genet reduces the male to a shadow, an appearance of being which exists only through Genet. This is the principal source of Genet’s treachery.
The loved male is above all the No: non-life, non-love, non-presence, non-good.

- - R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950 - 1960, pg 82.