For years I was meaning to read this book. So attests one of the notes recorded in the
first of many quixotic blog projects, and there it hung around for over a decade, gathering whatever the internet equivalent of dust is. As my friends in Boston back then would quote from time to time, after awhile one has to ask:
What is the quality of your intent? It hardly helps that it took the publisher, too, several decades to bring out a full translation of Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex, appearing in 2010, by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier, with a foreword by Judith Thurman. But now that I have finally read that book--for anyone similarly so moved,
the full text can be found online, whence I copied and pasted some favorite passages--in what follows, I'll attempt to distill some of what the work has meant to me, working on the quality of my intent to share literary, philosophical, and scientific ideas in this way.
Beauvoir states her project in the introduction:
... we have more or less won the game...I said that there are more essential problems;
but this one still has a certain importance from our point of view:
How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What
precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been
denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which
direction should we point them?...In our opinion, there is no public good other than one that assures the citizens’ private good; we judge institutions from the
point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals.
But neither do we confuse the idea of private interest with happiness:...The perspective we have adopted is one of existentialist
morality. Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely,
through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual
surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for
present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open
future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is
degradation of existence into “in-itself,” of freedom into facticity; this
fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted
on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both
cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned with justifying
his existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to
transcend himself. But what singularly defines the situation of woman
is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers
and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself
as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her
to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by
another essential and sovereign consciousness. Woman’s drama lies
in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which
always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that
constitutes her as inessential. How, in the feminine condition, can a
human being accomplish herself? What paths are open to her? Which
ones lead to dead ends? How can she find independence within
dependence? What circumstances limit women’s freedom and can she
overcome them? These are the fundamental questions we would like
to elucidate. This means that in focusing on the individual’s
possibilities, we will define these possibilities not in terms of
happiness but in terms of freedom. (16-17)
What strikes me about the categories laid out here is how the public good is expressed in individuals' striving to become better, how conflicts arise among individuals unwilling or unable to see in others (Others, perhaps) the right to that same striving, and how this tension gives rise to questions, possibilities, and freedom. There are no definitive answers to political or individual difficulties--no telos, such as complete justice or happiness--simply because we know nothing about the limits of human potential; and yet the process of working them out constitutes an expanding circle of sympathy, freedom, and realizations, for better or worse, of our limits. Winning one game, we confront more essential problems. Such tension, Beauvoir contends, impinges more dramatically on women's experience, as women have been made to live out the answers arrived at by men, which understandably fail to hold up on inspection. Unmistakably, though, the right to question in this way is part of the public good to uphold, for men and women alike. And if a certain amount of happiness cannot be maintained in the face of beautiful possibilities and ugly truths, the relative freedom within which their pursuit can be shared openly may become impossible due to any number of interesting forms of political and psychological breakdown.
Twentieth century France was hardly the first time a serious project of cultural rethinking was undertaken, and even in making women its focus it was not unique. Beauvoir cites in passing some of the outmoded ideas she does not have the burden of dismantling:
On allegory:
One should not get
carried away with the pleasure of allegories: the ovum has sometimes
been likened to immanence and the sperm to transcendence (28)
On alchemy and determinism:
I suppose that vestiges of the old medieval philosophy—that
the cosmos was the exact reflection of a microcosm—are floating
around in these foggy minds: it was imagined that the ovum is a
female homunculus and woman a giant ovum. These reveries
dismissed since the days of alchemy make a weird contrast with the
scientific precision of descriptions being used at this very moment:
modern biology does not mesh with medieval symbolism; but our
people do not look all that closely (29)
In these passages, Beauvoir carves out some space between poetry and science for her own thought to develop. Throughout the first volume of
The Second Sex, "Facts and Myths," she builds on the philosophical framework of existentialism and critiques the theories of Freud and Marx as well as the dogmas of religion; in the second, "Lived Experience," she draws copious examples from literary and psychological sources to fill out her descriptive account. See further:
We also repudiate any frame of
reference that presupposes the existence of a natural hierarchy of
values—for example, that of an evolutionary hierarchy; it is pointless
to wonder if the female body is more infantile than the male, if it is
closer to or further from that of the higher primates, and so forth. All
these studies that confuse a vague naturalism with an even vaguer
ethic or aesthetic are pure verbiage. Only within a human perspective
can the female and the male be compared in the human species. But
the definition of man is that he is a being who is not given, who
makes himself what he is. As Merleau-Ponty rightly said, man is not
a natural species: he is a historical idea. Woman is not a fixed reality
but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming;
that is, her possibilities have to be defined: what skews the issues so
much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is
today, while the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her
capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have been
realized: but the fact is also that when one considers a being who is
transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the books. (45)
Discussing psychoanalysis as
such is not an easy undertaking. Like all religions—Christianity or
Marxism—it displays an unsettling flexibility against a background of
rigid concepts. Sometimes words are taken in their narrowest
meanings, the term “phallus,” for example, designating very precisely
the fleshy growth that is the male sex organ; at other times, infinitely
broadened, they take on a symbolic value: the phallus would express
all of the virile character and situation as a whole. If one criticizes the
doctrine to the letter, the psychoanalyst maintains that its spirit has
been misunderstood; if one approves of the spirit, he immediately
wants to limit you to the letter. (49)
Replacing value with authority, choice with drives, psychoanalysis
proposes an ersatz morality: the idea of normality (59)
Accustomed as we are at present to run up against the rigidity of PC, reading Beauvoir and seeing the philosophical underpinnings of this now-normative worldview worked out in such persuasive fashion is illuminating and bracing. Ironies abound: the impulse to tread lightly is motivated by a concern to fence in some safety in the midst of free inquiry, yet it manages to rile defenders of the very freedom it seeks to perfect; the celebration of others inevitably accompanies the denigration of elites as well as norms; the deep distrust and ignorance of scientific or historical evidence for anything upsetting to our camp's ideology operates hand in hand with the optimistic embrace of technology with which to connect to like-minded others. Paradoxically, but perhaps inevitably, the existentialist project has given rise to its own partisan idea of normality, at once vaguely flexible and conceptually rigid at need.
One of the most surprising things about Beauvoir's view is her approach to masculinity:
The warrior risks his own life to
raise the prestige of the horde—his clan. This is how he brilliantly
proves that life is not the supreme value for man but that it must serve
ends far greater than itself. The worst curse on woman is her
exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in
risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why
throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that
gives birth but to the one that kills.
Here we hold the key to the whole mystery. On a biological level, a
species maintains itself only by re-creating itself; but this creation is
nothing but a repetition of the same Life in different forms. By
transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of
Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure
repetition. (73-4)
Masculine conquest was a reconquest: man only took possession of
that which he already possessed; he put law into harmony with reality.
There was neither struggle, nor victory, nor defeat. Nevertheless,
these legends have profound meaning. At the moment when man
asserts himself as subject and freedom, the idea of the Other becomes
mediatory. From this day on, the relationship with the Other is a
drama; the existence of the Other is a threat and a danger. The ancient
Greek philosophy, which Plato, on this point, does not deny, showed that alterity is the same as negation, thus Evil. To posit the Other is to
define Manichaeism. This is why religions and their codes treat
woman with such hostility. By the time humankind reaches the stage
of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively
established: it is males who write the codes. (88)
Corresponding to this wry appreciation of the physical strength and thoroughgoing, if narrow, reason she ascribes to heroic males, Beauvoir's take on femininity is surprisingly harsh. Not only for her dim view of maternity, but for sweeping dismissals of her female intellectual forebears:
And Christine [de Pizan] intervenes once again. Her main demand is
for women’s right to education: “If the custom were to put little girls
in school and they were normally taught sciences like the boys, they
would learn as perfectly and would understand the subtleties of all the
arts and sciences as they do.”[...]While railing against society as it is,
the satire of farces and fabliaux does not claim to change it: it mocks
women but does not plot against them. Courtly poetry glorifies
femininity: but such a cult does not in any way imply the assimilation
of the sexes. The querelle is a secondary phenomenon in which
society’s attitude is reflected but which does not modify it. (117)
...women’s entire history
has been written by men. Just as in America there is no black problem
but a white one, just as “anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, it’s
our problem,” so the problem of woman has always been a problem
of men (148)
The quotation embedded in the preceding excerpt is from Sartre. In the following, from another of Beauvoir's favorites, Stendhal: '“All the geniuses who are born women are lost for the
public good.” If truth be told, one is not born, but becomes, a genius;
and the feminine condition has, until now, rendered this becoming
impossible' (152). Her comment upon this provides an echo of one of Beauvoir's most famous lines, coming at the opening of Volume II: 'One is not born, but becomes, woman.' There it is preceded by another line of Sartre and one of Kierkegaard's as epigraphs. All this returns us to the discussion of public good from which the entire work endeavors to depart, which it seeks to reframe in terms of individual becoming. Somewhere on the interpersonal scale between the single individual and political republic, in that space between a reader and a book, between neighbors of different race, sex, etc., or between members of a scientific community, is where the inquiry, the becoming, is going on.
As Beauvoir surely recognizes:
But
friendship and generosity, which accomplish this recognition of
freedoms concretely, are not easy virtues; they are undoubtedly man’s highest accomplishment; this is where he is in his truth: but this truth
is a struggle endlessly begun, endlessly abolished; it demands that
man surpass himself at each instant. Put into other words, man attains
an authentically moral attitude when he renounces being in order to
assume his existence; through this conversion he also renounces all
possession, because possession is a way of searching for being; but
the conversion by which he attains true wisdom is never finished, it
has to be made ceaselessly, it demands constant effort. (159-160)
The topic of possession is a vexed one, as we have already seen in the discussion of who owns, who contributes meaningfully to, the writing of history and the working out of intractable problems:
First of all, the idea of possession is always
impossible to realize positively; the truth is that one never has
anything or anyone; one attempts to accomplish it in a negative way;
the surest way to assert that a good is mine is to prevent another from
using it. And then nothing seems as desirable to man as what has
never belonged to any other human: thus conquest is a unique and
absolute event (173)
In what I found to be one of the most remarkable syntheses of the book, Beauvoir traces the fraught desire for transcendence, from Voltaire to Kierkegaard:
Uniting himself, then, with this other whom he makes his own,
he hopes to reach himself. Treasure, prey, game, and risk, muse,
guide, judge, mediator, mirror, the woman is the Other in which the
subject surpasses himself without being limited, who opposes him without negating him; she is the Other who lets herself be annexed to
him without ceasing to be the Other. And for this she is so necessary
to man’s joy and his triumph that if she did not exist, men would have
had to invent her.
They did invent her. But she also exists without their invention. This is why she is the
failure of their dream at the same time as its incarnation. There is no
image of woman that does not invoke the opposite figure as well: she
is Life and Death, Nature and Artifice, Light and Night. Whatever the
point of view, the same fluctuation is always found, because the
inessential necessarily returns to the essential. In the figures of the
Virgin Mother and of Beatrice lie Eve and Circe.
“Through woman,” wrote Kierkegaard, “ideality enters into life and
what would man be without her? Many a man has become a genius
through a young girl,… but none has become a genius through the
young girl he married … It is only by a negative relation to her that man is rendered
productive in his ideal endeavors. Negative relations with woman can
make us infinite … positive relations with woman make the man finite
to a far greater extent.” This means that woman is necessary as long
as she remains an Idea into which man projects his own
transcendence; but she is detrimental as objective reality, existing for
herself and limited to herself. In refusing to marry his fiancée,
Kierkegaard believes he has established the only valid relation with
woman. And he is right in the sense that the myth of woman posited
as infinite Other immediately entails its opposite (203)
And she touches upon Nietzsche for good measure:
The “warrior”
loves danger and plays, says Nietzsche. “For that reason he wants
woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” (201)
Beauvoir's uses of literature provide the bridge between the more theoretical, problem-posing Volume I and the various concrete realizations of woman's possibilities at her time in Volume II.
In order to confirm this analysis of the feminine myth, as it is
collectively presented, we will look at the singular and syncretic form
it takes on in certain writers. The attitude to women seems typical in,
among others, Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, and
Stendhal. (214)
Beauvoir's breadth of reading and painstaking marshaling of research for her topics make
Second Sex a potent distillation in itself, like
Maps of Meaning, The Master and His Emissary,
The Origins and History of Consciousness, etc. Each opens up a luminous library of further reading, and each provides a thread through the labyrinth, much as I am attempting to do in my own way here. Among the works she most admires, clearly, stand Stendhal's novels:
“Perfectly reasonable, concerned by the success of her projects,” she
focuses all of her ambition on making her husband a minister; “her
mind was arid”; careful and conformist, she always kept herself from
love, she is incapable of a generous movement; when passion sets
into this dry soul, it burns without illuminating her.
It is only necessary to reverse this image to discover what Stendhal
asks of women: first, not to fall prey to the traps of seriousness;
because the supposedly important things are out of their reach,
women risk alienating themselves in them less than men; they have a
better chance of preserving this natural side, this naïveté, this
generosity that Stendhal places higher than any other merit; what he
appreciates in them is what we would call today their authenticity: that
is the common trait of all the women he loved or invented with love; all are free and true beings. (255)
Yet as practically all of the great writers and thinkers Beauvoir integrates into her project are men (and as anyone can see, most of those I've been reading are, too), she can respond with an appeal to her own ethos as woman (and I can appreciate, but not claim much insight into, this ability):
But what is called mystery is not the subjective solitude of
consciousness, or the secret of organic life. The word’s true meaning
is found at the level of communication: it cannot be reduced to pure
silence, to obscurity, to absence; it implies an emerging presence that
fails to appear. To say that woman is mystery is to say not that she is
silent but that her language is not heard; she is there, but hidden
beneath veils; she exists beyond these uncertain appearances. Who is
she? An angel, a demon, an inspiration, an actress? One supposes that
either there are answers impossible to uncover or none is adequate
because a fundamental ambiguity affects the feminine being; in her
heart she is indefinable for herself: a sphinx.
The fact is, deciding who she is would be quite awkward for her;
the question has no answer; but it is not that the hidden truth is too
fluctuating to be circumscribed: in this area there is no truth. An
existent is nothing other than what he does; the possible does not
exceed the real, essence does not precede existence: in his pure
subjectivity, the human being is nothing. He is measured by his acts.
It can be said that a peasant woman is a good or bad worker, that an
actress has or does not have talent: but if a woman is considered in
her immanent presence, absolutely nothing can be said about that, she
is outside of the realm of qualification (269-70)
In similar fashion, she brings masculine vanity down a peg:
Everyone can draw on myth to sublimate his own modest
experiences: betrayed by a woman he loves, one man calls her a slut;
another is obsessed by his own virile impotence: this woman is a
praying mantis; yet another takes pleasure in his wife’s company: here
we have Harmony, Repose, Mother Earth. The taste for eternity at
bargain prices and for a handy, pocket-sized absolute, seen in most
men, is satisfied by myths. The least emotion, a small disagreement,
become the reflection of a timeless Idea; this illusion comfortably
flatters one’s vanity.
The myth is one of those traps of false objectivity into which the
spirit of seriousness falls headlong. It is once again a matter of
replacing lived experience and the free judgments of experience it
requires by a static idol. The myth of Woman substitutes for an
authentic relationship with an autonomous existent the immobile
contemplation of a mirage. (272)
It might hit still closer to home if Beauvoir ever gave us an image of what an authentic relationship looked like in practice, if such a thing were yet possible when she wrote, but the closest we come seems to be with the hints in Stendhal's novels, or in those of Colette. When we consider lived experience, we see that words, even the most powerful stories, only take us so far:
It should be said that even coherent instruction would not resolve
the problem; in spite of the best will of parents and teachers, the
sexual experience could not be put into words and concepts; it could
only be understood by living it; all analysis, however serious, will
have a comic side and will fail to deliver the truth. When, from the poetic loves of flowers to the nuptials of fish, by way of the chick, the
cat, or the kid, one reaches the human species, the mystery of
conception can be theoretically elucidated: that of voluptuousness and
sexual love remains total. How would one explain the pleasure of a
caress or a kiss to a dispassionate child? Kisses are given and
received in a family way, sometimes even on the lips: Why do these
mucus exchanges in certain encounters provoke dizziness? It is like
describing colors to the blind. As long as there is no intuition of the
excitement and desire that give the sexual function its meaning and
unity, the different elements seem shocking and monstrous. (317)
Once more, Beauvoir draws attention to the unique position of men to find fulfillment in their violent potential:
The male has recourse to his fists and fighting when he encounters any affront or attempt to reduce him to an object:
he does not let himself be transcended by others; he finds himself
again in the heart of his subjectivity. Violence is the authentic test of
every person’s attachment to himself, his passions, and his own will;
to radically reject it is to reject all objective truth, it is to isolate one’s
self in an abstract subjectivity; an anger or a revolt that does not exert
itself in muscles remains imaginary. It is a terrible frustration not to be
able to imprint the movements of one’s heart on the face of the earth. (343)
In her account, women fascinated by what is Other to them, the range of masculine experience from violence to tenderness, can become lost:
If the girl gives in to her “Ideal one,” she remains
unmoved in his arms and “it happens,” says Stekel, “that obsessed
girls commit suicide after such scenes where the whole construction
of amorous imagination collapses because the Ideal one is seen in the
form of a ‘brutal animal.’” The taste for the impossible often leads
the girl to fall in love with a man when he begins to court one of her
friends, and very often she chooses a married man. She is readily
fascinated by a Don Juan; she dreams of submitting and attaching
herself to this seducer that no woman has ever held on to, and she
kindles the hope of reforming him: but in fact, she knows she will fail
in her undertaking, and this is the reason for her choice. Some girls
end up forever incapable of knowing real and complete love. They
will search all their lives for an ideal impossible to reach. (363)
Then, in her remarks on the psychology of homosexuality, Beauvoir presents her philosophical approach as a corrective:
The individual’s history is not an
inevitable progression: at every step, the past is grasped anew by a
new choice, and the “normality” of the choice confers no privileged
value on it: it must be judged by its authenticity. Homosexuality can
be a way for woman to flee her condition or a way to assume it.
Psychoanalysts’ great error, through moralizing conformity, is that
they never envisage it as anything but an inauthentic attitude (419)
In truth, there is never only one determining factor; it is always a
question of a choice made from a complex whole, contingent on a free
decision; no sexual destiny governs an individual’s life: on the
contrary, his eroticism expresses his general attitude to existence. (430)
Whatever authenticity is, it shapes judgment as well as romantic attachments, choice as well as sexuality. If honesty and commitment to truth are part of this philosophical devotion to self-fulfillment and meaningful relationships, as seems plain, Beauvoir must allow room for us to attend to further developments in psychology and the science of sex and sexuality since her day. Whereas she was taking on the excesses of Freudian generalizations, the heaps of specific evidence gathered by the likes of
Mukherjee,
Pinker,
Ogas and Gaddam make it difficult to simply exalt authentic choice on the one hand or to decry moralizing on the other.
Beauvoir comes close to defining her ideal in contrast to a straw-man-and-wife of marriage:
Advocates of conjugal love readily admit it is not love, which is
precisely what makes it marvelous. For in recent years the
bourgeoisie has invented an epic style: routine takes on the allure of
adventure, faithfulness that of sublime madness, boredom becomes
wisdom, and family hatreds are the deepest form of love. In truth, that
two individuals hate each other without, however, being able to do
without each other is not at all the truest, the most moving of all
human relations; it is one of the most pitiful. The ideal would be, on
the contrary, that each human being, perfectly self-sufficient, be
attached to another by the free consent of their love alone. (511)
Still more complex in its contrariety is her view of motherhood:
When she
feels the child in her heavy belly or when she presses it against her
swollen breasts, the mother accomplishes the fusion she sought in the
arms of the male, and that is refused as soon as it is granted. She is no
longer an object subjugated by a subject; nor is she any longer a
subject anguished by her freedom, she is this ambivalent reality: life.
Her body is finally her own since it is the child’s that belongs to her.
Society recognizes this possession in her and endows it with a sacred
character. She can display her breast that was previously an erotic
object, it is a source of life: to such an extent that pious paintings
show the Virgin Mary uncovering her breast and begging her Son to
save humanity. Alienated in her body and her social dignity, the
mother has the pacifying illusion of feeling she is a being in itself, a
ready-made value. But this is only an illusion. Because she does not really make the
child: it is made in her; her flesh only engenders flesh: she is
incapable of founding an existence that will have to found itself;
creations that spring from freedom posit the object as a value and
endow it with a necessity: in the maternal breast, the child is
unjustified, it is still only a gratuitous proliferation, a raw fact whose
contingence is symmetrical with that of death. The mother can have
her reasons for wanting a child, but she cannot give to this other—who tomorrow is going to be—his own raisons d’être; she engenders
him in the generality of his body, not in the specificity of his
existence (539)
The line about death is one of the most obscure in the entire book, to me. But also packed into this passage are dense refutations of Christianity and of the illusory fulfillment of parenthood, which escape my ken. Would it be too much of a leap, though, to connect Beauvoir's claims here with the resentment of the
intentional fallacy in literary criticism? While making room for freedom initially, each could be--in some circles, perhaps, has been--extended indefinitely to erode all authority and the possibility of interpretation or communication or reason at all. Which if we go down the slippery slope seriously undermines both post-structuralism and existentialism as viable philosophical stances, reducing them to something more along the lines of rhetorical gambits or thought experiments.
Beauvoir makes just such bold leaps. Here she suggests that, after all, there is something to the family drama, and some chance mothers play a role in forming the souls of their children:
There is
no such thing as an “unnatural mother,” since maternal love has
nothing natural about it: but precisely because of that, there are bad
mothers. And one of the great truths that psychoanalysis has
proclaimed is the danger “normal” parents constitute for a child. The
complexes, obsessions, and neuroses adults suffer from have their
roots in their family past; parents who have their own conflicts,
quarrels, and dramas are the least desirable company for children.
Deeply marked by the paternal household, they approach their own
children through complexes and frustrations: and this chain of misery
perpetuates itself indefinitely. In particular, maternal sadomasochism
creates guilt feelings for the daughter that will express themselves in
sadomasochistic behavior toward her own children, without end.
There is extravagant bad faith in the conflation of contempt for
women and respect shown for mothers. It is a criminal paradox to
deny women all public activity, to close masculine careers to them, to
proclaim them incapable in all domains, and to nonetheless entrust to
them the most delicate and most serious of all undertakings: the
formation of a human being. There are many women who, out of
custom and tradition, are still refused education, culture,
responsibilities, and activities that are the privileges of men, and in
whose arms, nevertheless, babies are placed without scruple, as in
earlier life they were consoled for their inferiority to boys with dolls;
they are deprived of living their lives; as compensation, they are
allowed to play with flesh-and-blood toys. (567)
Likewise, in the republic (or rather marketplace) of letters, women matter a great deal for their reading (or spending) habits:
They play a considerable role in
the domain of culture, for example: it is they who buy the most books;
but they read as one plays the game of solitaire; literature takes its
meaning and dignity when it is addressed to individuals committed to
projects, when it helps them surpass themselves toward greater
horizons; it must be integrated into the movement of human
transcendence; instead, woman devalues books and works of art by
swallowing them into her immanence; a painting becomes a
knickknack, music an old song, a novel a reverie as useless as
crocheted antimacassars. It is American women who are responsible
for the degradation of best sellers: these books are only intended to
please, and worse to please idle women who need escape (635)
Finally, Beauvoir's project of questioning, demystifying, and diagnosing yields a prescription for collective liberation, of the sort that today's movements still yearn for:
This liberation can only be collective, and it demands above all that
the economic evolution of the feminine condition be accomplished.
There have been and there still are many women who do seek to attain
individual salvation on their own. They try to justify their existence
within their own immanence, that is, to achieve transcendence through
immanence. It is this ultimate effort—sometimes ridiculous, often
pathetic—of the imprisoned woman to convert her prison into a
heaven of glory, her servitude into sovereign freedom, that we find in
the narcissist, the woman in love, and the mystic. (664)
[...]
No one teacher can today shape a “female human
being” that would be an exact homologue to the “male human being”:
if raised like a boy, the young girl feels she is an exception, and that
subjects her to a new kind of specification. Stendhal understood this,
saying: “The forest must be planted all at once.” But if we suppose,
by contrast, a society where sexual equality is concretely realized, this
equality would newly assert itself in each individual. (761)
We return once more to the interconnection of individuals and body politic, to the problem of self-interest and the fact that the most interesting thing is other people. Beauvoir speaks of political gains for women as winning the game, but if so, it is one played with 'flesh-and-blood toys,' too. In
The Second Sex, she invites women definitively into the arena. Her last word, inspiring many an audacious RSVP, is
fraternité, "brotherhood," and it has been a gleeful
Super Smash Bros. Melee between the sexes ever since.
