Gauguin returned to this culture full of such rigid and socially immobile women he was inspired to write his autobiographical journal Noa Noa in 1893 and 1894. His return to France marked the end of his first two-year stay in Tahiti and it was during this time that he was able to collect his thoughts about the Polynesian culture in order to write a narrative of his experiences that both shocked and enlightened the French people. His descriptions of sexual freedom and gender equality sounded quite opposite from the way in which French society lived. Nancy Mathews, author of Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life, argues that Gauguin wrote the book in order to pass himself off as “a man whose sexual passions and experiences were unusual – involving pleasure and pain with young men and women of other races� (Mathews 197). Along these lines, Mathews presents Noa Noa as Gauguin’s salacious explication of the sex culture in Tahiti as well as his proud involvement in it. Her stance takes into account only the sexually stimulating passages in the book and ignores Gauguin’s overarching theme of gender dynamics. For example in one passage he wrote that “together [men and women] engage in the same tasks with the same activity or the same indolence. There is something virile in the women and something feminine in the men. This similarity of the sexes make their relations easier� (Gauguin 47). These “relations� to which he refers are not sexually driven. Rather, what he means is that the Tahitians did not forcefully isolate men and women into opposing and competing categories but instead let the women realize the same status as any man. The writing of Noa Noa allowed Gauguin to express his belief that the system in Tahiti was, indeed, a much more functional social model than the one in place in France. More specifically, though, he identified the Tahitian women’s status to be the mechanism of this functionality as they were allowed and willing to participate in activities whose equivalents had been ordained as solely “male� in French society.