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-(ns pages.second-sex
-  (:require [components :refer [page blockquote]]
-            [borkdude.html :refer [html]]))
-
-(defn second-sex []
-  (page
-   (html
-    [:<>
-     [:h1 "The Second Sex: Select Excerpts"]
-     [:p "One of my goals for 2025 was to finally crack the spine on Simone de
-Beauvoir's " [:em "The Second Sex"] ". Having now achieved that goal, I can say
-that it is without a doubt one of the most transformative books I have ever
-read."  [:p "This page includes various excerpts that spoke to me for one reason
-or another, taken from the 2011 edition translated by Constance Borde and
-Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. (Note: I transcribed these by hand; please shoot me
-a note if you find any errors.)"]]
-     [:p "I have decided to publish this snippet of my personal marginalia mostly to
-encourage others to pick up her masterpiece and give it a read. It is a challenging
-book that asks a lot of its reader, but I promise it is worth the effort. As my partner
-pointed out to me, " [:em "The Second Sex"] " can be understood as the first major
-effort to build a comprehensive history and philosophy of women's place in the
-world. Particularly in an era of regressive politics, " [:em "The Second Sex"]
-      " serves as an important reminder of just how oppressive women's condition
-was prior to the sexual revolution. I fear that many of today's conservative
-voices are pushing an antifeminist narrative on young women who may not
-understand just how much they have to lose."]
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Insofar as woman is concerned the absolute Other, that is–whatever magic
-powers she has–as the inessential, it is precisely impossible to regard her as
-another subject. Women have thus never constituted a separate group that posited
-itself " [:em "for-itself"] " before a male group; they have never had a direct or
-autonomous relationship with men. \"The relationship of reciprocity which is the
-basis of marriage is not established between men and women, but between men by
-means of women, who are merely the occasion of this relationship\", said
-Lévi-Strauss. Woman's concrete condition is not affected by the type of lineage
-that prevails in the society to which she belongs; whether the regime is
-patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, or undifferentiated (undifferentiation
-never being precise), she is always under men's guardianship; the only question
-is if, after marriage, she is still subjected to the authority of her father or
-her oldest brother–authority that will also extend to her children– or of her
-husband. In any case: \"The woman is never anything more than the symbol of her
-lineage. Matrilineal descent is the authority of the woman's father or brother
-extended to the brother-in-law's village.\" She only mediates the law; she does
-not possess it. In fact, it is the relationship of two masculine groups that is
-defined by the system of filiation, and not the relation of the two sexes."])
-      [80 81])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Here is an important fact that recurs throughout history: abstract rights
-cannot sufficiently define the concrete situation of woman; this situation
-depends in great part on the economic role she plays; and very often, abstract
-freedom and concrete powers vary inversely."])
-      [100])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "\"Woman is a possession acquired by contract; she is personal property, and the
-possession of her is as good as a security–indeed, properly speaking, woman is
-only man's annexe.\" Here [Balzac] is speaking for the bourgeoisie, which
-intensified its antifeminism in reaction to eighteenth-century license and
-threatening progressive ideas. Having brilliantly presented the idea at the
-beginning of " [:em "They Physiology of Marriage"] " that this loveless institution
-forcibly leads the wife to adultry, Balzac exhorts husbands to rein in wives to
-total subjugation if they want to avoid the ridicule of dishonor. They must be
-denied training and culture, forbidden to develop their individuality, forced to
-wear uncomfortable clothing, and encouraged to follow a debilitating dietary
-regime. The bourgeoisie follows this program exactly, confining women to the
-kitchen and to housework, jealously watching their behavior; they are enclosed
-in daily life rituals that hindered all attempts at independence. In return, they
-are honored and endowed with the most exquisite respect. \"The married woman is
-a slave who must be seated on a throne,\" says Balzac; of course men must give
-in to women in all irrelevant circumstances, yielding them first place; women
-must not carry heavy burdens as in primitive societies; they are readily spared
-all painful tasks and worries: at the same time this relieves them of all
-responsibility. It is hoped that, thus duped, seduced by the ease of the
-condition, they will accept the role of mother and housewife to which they are
-being confined. And in fact, most bourgeois women capitulate. As their education
-and their parasitic situation makes them dependent on men, they never date to
-voice their claims: those who do are hardly heard. It is easier to put people in
-chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard
-Shaw. The bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class
-privileges. It is drilled into her and she believes that women's liberation
-would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned
-to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property
-subordinated to her husband's, she would deplore even more having this property
-be abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women; she feels closer
-to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own."])
-      [129 130])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Abortion was officially recognized, but only for a short time, in Germany
-before Nazism and in the Soviet Union before 1936. But in spite of religion and
-laws, it has been practiced in all countries to a large extent. In France, every
-year 800,000 to 1 million abortions are performed–as many as births–and
-two-thirds of the women are married, many already having one or two children. In
-spite of the prejudices, resistance, and an outdated morality, unregulated
-fertility has given way to fertility controlled by the state or individuals.
-Progress in obstetrics has considerably decreased the dangers of childbirth;
-childbirth pain is disappearing; at this time–March 1949–legislation has been
-passed in England requiring the use of certain anesthetic methods; they are
-already generally applied in the United States and are beginning to spread in
-France. With artificial insemination, the evolution that will permit humanity to
-master the reproductive function comes to completion. These changes have
-tremendous importance for woman in particular; she can reduce the number of
-pregnancies and rationally integrate them into her life, instead of being their
-slave. During the nineteenth century, woman in her turn is freed from nature;
-she wins control of her body. Relieved of a great number of reproductive
-servitudes, she can take on the economic roles open to her, roles that would
-ensure her control over her own person."])
-      [138 139])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:<>
-        [:p
-         "[Of man:] But he does not like difficulty; he is afraid of danger. He has
-contradictory aspirations to both life and rest, existence and being; he knows
-very well that \"a restless spirit\" is the ransom for his development, that his
-distance from the object is the ransom for his being present to himself; but he
-dreams of restfulness in restlessness and of an opaque plenitude that his
-consciousness would nevertheless still inhabit. This embodied dream is,
-precisely, woman; she is the perfect intermediary between nature that is foreign
-to man and the peer who is too identical to him. She pits neither the hostile
-silence of nature nor the hard demand of a reciprocal recognition against him;
-by a unique privilege she is a consciousness, and yet it seems possible to
-possess her in the flesh. Thanks to her, there is a way to escape the inexorable
-dialectic of the master and the slave that springs from the reciprocity of
-freedoms."]
-        [:p
-         "[...] [Woman] emerged as the inessential who never returned to the
-essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity. [...] She is nature raised
-to the transparency of consciousness; she is a naturally submissive
-consciousness. And therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in
-woman: he hopes to accomplish himself as being through carnally possessing a being
-while making confirmed in his freedom by a docile freedom. No man would consent
-to being a woman, but all want there to be women. [...] Appearing as the Other,
-woman appears at the same time as a plenitude of being by opposition to the
-nothingness of existence that man experiences in itself; the Other, posited as
-object in the subject's eyes, is posited as in-itself, thus as being. Woman
-embodies positively the lack the existent carries in his heart, and man hopes to
-realize himself by finding himself through her."]])
-      [160 161])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "The apologue of the caterpillars provides the key to this attitude: whatever
-his hidden intention, hit is significant in itself. Pissing on caterpillars,
-Montherlant takes pleasure in sparing some and exterminating others; he takes a
-laughing pity on those that are determined to live and generally lets them off;
-he is delighted by this game. Without the caterpillars, the urinary stream would
-have been just an excretion; it becomes an instrument of life and death; in
-front of the crawling insect, man relieves himself and experiences God's
-despotic solitude, without running the risk of reciprocity. Likewise, faced with
-female animals, the male, from the top of his pedestal, sometimes cruel,
-sometimes tender, sometimes fair, sometimes unpredictable, gives, takes back,
-satisfies, pities, or gets irritated; he defers to nothing but his own pleasure;
-he is soverign, free, and unique. But these animals must not be anything but
-animals; they would be chosen on purpose, their weaknesses would be flattered;
-they would be treated as animals with such determination that they would end up
-accepting their condition. In similar faction, the blacks' petty robberies and
-lies charmed the whites of Louisiana and Georgia, confirming the superiority of
-their own skin color; and if one of these Negroes persists in being honest, he
-is treated even worse. In similar fashion, the debasement of man was
-systematically practiced in the concentration camps; the ruling race found proof
-in this abjection that it was of superhuman essence."])
-      [222 223])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:<>
-        [:p
-         "As for Stendhal, we saw that woman barely takes on a mythical value for him: he
-considers her also being a transcendence; for this humanist, it is in their
-reciprocal relations that freedoms are accomplished; and it is sufficient that
-the " [:em "Other"] " is simply another for life to have, according to him, a little spice;
-he does not seek a stellar equilibrium, he does not nourish himself with the
-bread of disgust; he does not expect miracles; he wishes to concern himself not
-with the cosmos or poetry but with freedoms."]
-
-        [:p "That is, he also experiences
-himself as a translucent freedom. The others–and this is one of the most
-important points–posit themselves as transcendents but feel they are prisoners
-of an opaque presence in their own hearts: they project onto woman this
-\"unbreakable core of night\". In Montherlant there is an Alderian complex where
-heavy bad faith is born: these pretensions and fears are what he incarnates in
-woman; the disgust he feels for her is what he fears to feel for himself; he
-intends to trample in her the ever possible proof of his insufficiency; he asks
-scorn to save him; woman is the ditch in which he throws all the monsters that
-inhabit him. Lawrence's life shows us that he suffered from an analogous complex
-but more purely sexual: woman in his work has the value of a compensatory myth;
-through her is found an exalted virility of which the write was not very sure;
-when he describes Kate at Don Cipriano's feet, he believes he has won a male
-triumph over Frieda; nor does he accept that his female companion challenges
-him: if she contested his aims, he would probably lose confidence in them; her
-role is to reassure him. He asks for peace, rest, and faith from her, just as
-Montherlant asks for the certitude of his superiority; they demand what they
-lack. Self-confidence is not lacking in Claudel: if he is shy, it is only the
-secret of God. Thus, there is no trace of the battle of the sexes. Man bravely
-takes on the weight of woman: she is the possibility of temptation or of
-salvation. For Breton it seems that man is only true through the mystery that
-inhabits him; it pleases him that Nadja sees that star he is going toward and
-that is like a \"heartless flower\"; his dreams, intuitions, and the spontaneous
-unfolding of his inner language: it is in these activities that are out of the
-control of the will and reason that he recognizes himself: woman is the tangible
-figure of this veiled presence infinitely more essential than her conscious
-personality."]
-
-        [:p
-         " As for Stendhal, he quietly coincides with himself; but he needs
-woman as she does him so that his dispersed existence is gathered in the unity
-of a figure and a destiny; it is as for-another that the human being reaches
-being; but another still has to lend him his consciousness: other men are too
-indifferent to their peers; only the woman in love opens her heart to her lover
-and shelters in its entirety. Except for Claudel, who finds a perfect witness in
-God, all the writers we have considered expect, in Malraux's words, woman to
-cherish in them this \"incomparable monster\" known  to themselves alone. In
-collaboration or combat, men will come up against each other in their
-generality. Montherlant, for his peers, is a writer, Lawrence a doctrinaire,
-Breton a leader of a school, Stendhal a diplomat or a man of wit; it is women
-who reveal in one a magnificent and cruel prince, in another a disturbing
-animal, in still another a god or a sun or a being \"black and cold...like a man
-struck by lightning, lying at the feet of ths Sphinx,\" and in the other a
-seducer, a charmer, a lover. "]
-
-        [:p
-         "For each of them, the ideal woman will be she
-who embodies the most exactly the " [:em "Other"] " able to reveal him to himself. [...]
-[The] only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman, sould
-sister, woman-sex, and female animale is always man. Regardless of the ego
-looking for itself through her, it can only attain itself if she consents to be
-his crucible. In any case, what is demanded of her is self-forgetting and love.
-[...] Feminine devotion is demanded as a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence; less
-arrogant, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal admire it as a generous choice; they
-desire it without claiming to deserve it; but–except for the astonishing
-" [:em "Lamiel"] "–all their works show they expect from woman this altruism that Comte
-admired in and imposed on her, and which, according to him, also constituted
-both a flagrant inferiority and an equal superiority."]
-
-        [:p
-         " We could find many more
-examples: they would always lead to the same conclusions. In defining woman,
-each writer defines his general ethic and the singular idea he has of himself:
-it is also in her that he often registers the distance between his view of the
-world and his egotistical dreams. [...] [In all cases, woman] as other still
-plays a role inasmuch as even to transcend himself, each man still needs to take
-consciousness of himself."]])
-      [263 265])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Certainly fidelity is necessary for sexual love, since the two lovers' desire
-encompasses their singularity; they do not want it contested by outside
-experiences, they want to be irreplaceable for each other; but this fidelity has
-meaning only as long as it is spontaneous; and spontaneously, erotic magic
-dissolves rather quickly. The miracle is that it gives to each of the lovers, in
-the instant and in their carnal presence, a being whose existence is an
-unlimited transcendence: and " [:em "possession"] " of this being is undoubtedly
-impossible, but at least each of them is reached in a privileged and poignant
-way. But when individuals no longer want to reach each other because of
-hostility, disgust, or indifference between them, erotic attraction disappears;
-and it dies almost as surely in esteem and friendship; two human beings who come
-together in the very moment of their transcendence through the world and their
-common projects no longer need carnal union; and further, because this union
-has lost its union, they are repelled by it [...] Eroticism is a movement toward
-the " [:em "Other"] ", and this is its essential character; but within the couple, spouses
-become, for each other, the " [:em "Same"] "; no exchange is possible between them
-anymore, no giving, no conquest."])
-      [466 467])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Throughout her childhood, the little girl was bullied and mutilated; but she
-nonetheless grasped herself as an autonomous individual; in her relations with
-her family and friends, in her studies and games, she saw herself in the present
-as a transcendence: her future passivity was something she only imagined. Once
-she enters puberty, the future not only moves closer: it settles into her body;
-it becomes the most concrete reality. It retains the fateful quality it always
-had; while the adolescent boy is actively routed toward adulthood, the girl
-looks forward to the opening of this new and unforeseeable period where the plot
-is already hatched and toward which time is drawing her. As she is already
-detached from her childhood past, the present is for her only a transition; she
-sees no valid end in it, only occupations. In a more or less disguised way, her
-youth is consumed by waiting. She is waiting for Man."])
-      [341])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "At about thirteen, boys serve a veritable apprenticeship in violence,
-developing their aggressiveness, their will for power, and their taste for
-competition; it is exactly at this moment that the little girl renounces rough
-games. [...] [The] attitude of defiance, so important for boys, is unknown to
-them; true, women compare themselves with each other, but defiance is something
-other than these passive confrontations: two freedoms confront each other as
-having a hold on the world whose limits they intend to push; climbing higher
-than a friend or getting the better in arm wrestling is affirming one's
-sovereignty over the world. These conquering actions are not permitted to the
-girl, and violence in particular is not permitted to her. [...] 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. [...] In the South of the
-United states, it is strictly impossible for a black person to use violence
-against whites; this rule is the key to the mysterious \"black soul\"; the way
-the black experiences himself in the white world, his behavior in adjusting to
-it, the compensations he seeks, his whole way of feeling and acting, are
-explained on the basis of the passivity to which he is condemned. [...] In the
-same way, for the adolescent boy who is allowed to manifest himself imperiously,
-the universe has a totally different face from what it has for the adolescent
-girl whose feelings are deprived of immediate effectiveness; the former
-ceaselessly calls the world into question, he can at every instance revolt
-against the given and thus has the impression of actively confirming it when he
-accepts it; the latter only submits to it; the world is defined without her, and
-its face is immutable. This lack of physical power expresses itself as a more
-general timidity: she does not believe in a force she has not felt in her body,
-she does not dare to be enterprising, to revolt, to invent; doomed to docility,
-to resignation, she can only accept a place that society has already made for
-her. She accepts the order of things as a given."])
-      [343 344])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "There is an obscene paradox in the superimposing of a pompous ceremony on a
-brutally real animal function. The wedding presents its universal and abstract
-meaning: a man and a woman are united publicly according to symbolic rites; but
-in the secrecy of the bed it is concrete and singular individuals who confront
-each other face-to-face, and all gazes turn away from their embraces. [...] It
-is stupid and barbaric to want to put it all into one night; it is absurd to
-transform an operation as difficult as the first coitus into a duty. The woman
-is all the more terrorized by the fact that the strange operation she is
-subjected to is sacred; and that society, religion, family, and friends
-delivered her solemnly to the husband as to a master; and in addition, that the
-act seems to engage her whole future, because marriage still has a definitive
-character. This is when she feels truly revealed in the absolute: this man to
-whom she is pledged to the end of time embodies all of Man in her eyes; and he
-is revealed to her, too, as a figure she has not heretofore known, which is of
-immense importance since he will be her lifelong companion. However, the man
-himself is anguished by the duty weighing on him; he has his own difficulties
-and his own complexes that make him shy and clumsy or on the contrary brutal;
-many men are impotent on their wedding night because of the very solemnity of
-marriage. [...] Too much impetuousness frightens the virgin, too much respect
-humiliates her; women forever hate the man who has taken his pleasure at the
-expense of their suffering; but they feel an eternal resentment against the one
-who seems to disdain them, and often against the one who has not attempted to
-deflower them the first night or who was unable to do it. [...] The \"wedding
-night\" transforms the erotic experience into an ordeal that neither partner is
-able to surmount, too involved with personal problems to think generously of
-each other; it is invested with a solemnity that makes it formidable; and it is
-not surprising that it often dooms the woman to frigidity forever. The difficult
-problem facing the husband is this: if he \"titillates his wife too
-lasciviously,\" she might be scandalized or outraged; it seems this fear
-paralyzes American husbands, among others, especially in college-educated
-couples, says the Kinsey Report, because wives, more conscious of themselves,
-are more deeply inhibited. But if he \"respects\" her, he fails to waken her
-sensuality. This dilemma is created by the ambiguity of the feminine attitude:
-the young woman both wants and rejects pleasure; she demands a delicateness from
-which she suffers."])
-      [458 462])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:<>
-        [:p
-         "A normal man considers objects around him as instruments; he arranges them
-according to the purpose for which they are intended; his \"order\"–where woman
-will often see disorder–is to have his cigarettes, his papers, and his tools
-within reach. [...] But to find a home in oneself, one must first have realized
-oneself in works or acts. Man has only a middling interest in his domestic
-interior because he has access to the entire universe and because he can affirm
-himself in his projects. Woman, instead, is locked into the conjugal community:
-she has to change this prison into a kingdom. Her attitude to her home is
-dictated by this same dialectic that generally defines her condition: she takes
-by becoming prey, she liberates by abdicating; by renouncing the world, she
-means to conquer a world."]
-        [:p " She regrets closing the doors of her home behind
-herself; as a young girl, the whole world was her kingdom; the forests belonged
-to her. Now she is confined to a restricted space; Nature is reduced to the size
-of a geranium pot. [...] But she is going to make every attempt to refuse this
-limitation. She encloses faraway countries and past times within her four walls
-in the form of more or less expensive earthly flora and fauna; she encloses her
-husband, who personifies human society for her, and the child who gives her the
-whole future in a portable form. [...] Especially at evening time, when the
-shutters are closed, woman feels like a queen; the light shed at noon by the
-universal sun disturbs her; at night she is no longer dispossessed, because she
-does away with that which she does not possess; from under the lamp shade she
-sees a light that is her own and that illuminates her abode alone: nothing else
-exists."]])
-      [470 471])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Logic in masculine hands is often violence. Chardonne explained this kind of
-sly oppression well in " [:em "Epithalaminum"] ". Older, more cultivated, and more
-educated than Berthe, Albert uses this pretext to deny any value to opinions of
-his wife that he does not share; he untiringly " [:em "proves"] " he is right; for her
-part she becomes adamant and refuses to accept that there is any substance in
-her husband's reasoning: he persists in his ideas, and that is the end of it.
-Thus a serious misunderstanding deepens between them. He does not try to
-understand feelings or deep-rooted reactions she cannot justify; she does not
-understand what lives behind her husband's pedantic and overwhelming logic. He
-even goes so far as to become irritated by the ignorance she never hid from him,
-and challenges her with questions about astronomy; he is flattered nonetheless,
-to tell her what to read, to find in her a listener he can easily dominate. In a
-struggle where her intellectual shortcomings condemn her to losing every time,
-the young wife has no defense other than silence, or tears, or violence."])
-      [498])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:<>
-        [:p
-         "Many young couples give the impression of perfect equality. But as long as the
-man has economic responsibility for the couple, it is just an illusion. He is
-the one who determines the conjugal domicile according to the demands of his
-job: she " [:em "follows"] " him from the provinces to Paris, from Paris to the provinces,
-the colonies, abroad; the standard of living is fixed according to his income;
-the rhythm of the days, the weeks, and the year is organized on the basis of his
-occupations; relations and friendships most often depend on his profession.
-Being more positively integrated than his wife into society, he leads the couple
-in intellectual, political, and moral areas. Divorce is only an abstract
-possibility for the wife, if she does not have the means to earn her own living:
-while alimony in America is a heavy burden for the husband, in France the lot of
-the wife and mother abandoned with a derisory pension is scandalous. But the
-deep inequality stems from the fact that the husband finds concrete
-accomplishment in work or action while for the wife in her role as a wife,
-freedom has only a negative form. [...]"]
-        [:p " It is also true that the man is more
-defenseless than previously against this despotism; he recognizes his wife's
-abstract rights, and he understands that she can concretize them only through
-him: it is at his own expense that he will compensate for the powerlessness and
-the sterility the wife is condemned to; to realize an apparent equality in their
-association, he has to give her more because he possesses more. But precisely
-because she receives, takes, and demands, she is the poorer. The dialectic of
-the master and slave has its most concrete application here: in oppressing, one
-becomes oppressed. Males are chains by their very sovereignty; it is because
-they alone earn money that the wife demands checks, because men alone practice a
-profession that the wife demands that they succeed, because they alone embody
-transcendence that the wife wants to steal it from them by taking over their
-projects and successes. [...]"]
-        [:p " The situation has to be changed in their common
-interest by prohibiting marriage as a \"career\" for the woman. Men who declare
-themselves antifeminist with the excuse that \"women are already annoying enough
-as it is\" are not very logical: it precisely because marriage makes them
-\"praying mantises,\" \"bloodsuckers,\" and \"poison\" that marriage has to be
-changed and, as a consequence, the feminine condition in general. woman weighs
-so heavily on man because she is forbidden to rely on herself; he will free
-himself by freeing her, that is, by giving her something " [:em "to do"] " in this world."]])
-      [522 523])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Very often the kept woman interiorizes her dependence; subjected to public
-opinion, she accepts its values; she admires the \"fashionable world\" and
-adopts its customs; she wants to be regarded according to bourgeois standards.
-She is a parasite of the rich bourgeoisie, and she adheres to its ideas; she is
-\"right thinking\"; in former times she would readily send her daughters to a
-convent school, and as she got older, she even went to Mass and openly
-converted. She is on the conservative's side. She is too proud to have made her
-place in this world to want to change. The struggle she wages to \"arrive\" does
-not dispose her to feelings of brotherhood and human solidarity; she paid for
-success with too much slavish compliance to sincerly wish for universal freedom.
-615"])
-      [615])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "In the United States, the influence of venerated \"Moms\" is strong; this is
-explained by the leisure time their parasitic existence leaves them; and this is
-why it is harmful. \"Knowing nothing about medicine, art, science, religion,
-law, sanitation\", says Philip Wylie, speaking of the American Mom, \"she
-seldom has any especial interest in " [:em "what"] ", exactly, she is doing as a member of
-any of these endless organizations, so long as it is _something.\" Their effort
-is not integrated into a coherent and constructive plan, it does not aim at
-objective ends: imperiously, it tends only to show their tastes and prejudices
-or to serve their interests. 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 a 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. [...] Not being specialized in politics or economics or any
-technical discipline, old women have no concrete hold on society; they are
-unaware of the problems action poses; they are incapable of elaborating a
-constructive program. Their morality is abstract and formal, like Kant's
-imperatives; they issue prohibitions instead of trying to discover the paths of
-progress; they do not positively try to create new situations; they attack what
-already exists in order to do away with the evil in it; this explains why they
-are always forming coalitions against something–against alcohol, prostitution,
-or pornography–they do not understand that a purely negative effort is doomed to
-be unsuccesssful, as evidenced by the failure of prohibition in America or the
-law in France voted by Marthe Richard. As long as woman remains a parasite, she
-cannot effectively participate in the building of a better world."])
-      [635 636])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "The \"feminine world\" is sometimes contrasted with masculine universe, but it
-must be reiterated that women have never formed an autonomous and closed
-society; they are integrated into the group governed by males, where they occupy
-a subordinate position; they are united by a mechanical solidarity only insofar
-as they are similar: they do not share that organic solidarity upon which any
-unified community is founded; they have always endeavored–in the period of the
-Eleusinian mysteries just like today in clubs, salons, and recreation rooms–to
-band together to assert a \"counter-universe,\" but it is still within the
-masculine universe that they frame it. "])
-      [638])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:<>
-        [:p
-         "The notion of miracle differs from the idea of magic: from within a rationally
-determined world a miracle posits the radical discontinuity of an event without
-cause against which any thinking shatters, whereas magic phenomena are united by
-secret forces of which a docile consciousness can embrace the continuous
-becoming–without understanding it. The newborn is miraculous for the demigod
-father, magic for the mother who has undergone the ripening in her womb. Man's
-experience is intelligible but full of holes; that of the wife is, in its own
-limits, obscure but complete. This opacity weighs her down; the male is light in
-his relations with her: he has the lightness of dictators, generals, judges,
-bureaucrats, codes, and abstract principles. This is undoubtedly what the
-housewife meant when, shrugging her shoulders, she murmured: \"Men, they don't
-think!\" Women also say: \"Men, they don't know; they don't know life.\" As a
-contrast to the myth of the praying mantis, they juxtapose the symbol of the
-frivolous and importunate bumblebee."]
-
-        [:p "It is understandable why, from this
-perspective, woman objects to masculine logic. Not only does it not have bearing
-on her experience, but she also knows that in men's hands reason becomes an
-insidious form of violence; their peremptory affirmations are intended to
-mystify her. They want to confine her in a dilemma: either you agree or you
-don't; she has to agree in the name of the whole system of accepted principles:
-in refusing to agree, she rejects the whole system; she cannot allow herself
-such a dramatic move; she does not have the means to create another society: yet
-she does not agree with this one. Halfway between revolt and slavery, she
-unwillingly resigns herself to masculine authority. He continuously uses force
-to make her shoulder the consequences of her reluctant submission. He pursues
-the chimera of a freely enslaved companion: he wants her to yield to him as
-yielding to the proof of a theorem; but she knows he himself has chosen the
-postulates on which his vigorous deductions are hung; as long as she avoids
-questioning them, he will easily silence her; nevertheless, he will not convince
-her, because she senses their arbitrariness. Thus will he accuse her, with
-stubborn irritation, of being illogical: she refuses to play the game because
-she knows the dice are loaded."]
-
-        [:p " The woman does not positively think that the
-truth is " [:em "other"] " than what men claim: rather, she holds that there " [:em "is"] " no
-truth. It is not only life's becoming that makes her suspicious of the principle
-of identity, nor the magic phenomena surrounding her that ruin the notion of
-causality: it is at the heart of the masculine world itself, it is in her as
-belonging to this world, that she grasps the ambiguity of all principles, of all
-values, of all that exists. "]])
-      [650 651])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "There is a justification, a supreme compensation, that society has always
-been bent on dispensing to woman: religion. There must be religion for women as
-for the people, for exactly the same reasons: when a sex or a class is condemned
-to immanence, the mirage of transcendence must be offered to it. It is to man's
-total advantage to have God endorse the codes he creates: and specifically
-because he exercises sovereign authority over the woman, it is only right that
-this authority be conferred on him by the soverign being. [...] Woman adopts an
-attitude of respect and faith before the masculine universe: God in his heaven
-seems barely farther from her than a government minister, and the mystery of
-Genesis matches that of an electrical power station. But more important, if she
-throws herself so willingly into religion, it is because religion fills a
-profound need. In modern civilization, where freedom plays an important
-role–even for the woman–religion becomes less of an instrument of constraint than
-of mystification. The woman is less often asked to accept her inferiority in the
-name of God than to believe, thanks to him, that she is equal to the male lord;
-even the temptation to revolt is avoided by pretending to overcome injustice.
-The woman is no longer robbed of her transcendence, since she will dedicate her
-immanence to God; souls' merits are judged only in heaven and not according to
-their terrestrial accomplishments; here below, as Dostoevsky would have said,
-they are never more than occupations: shining shoes or building a bridge is the
-same vanity; over and above social discriminations, equality of the sexes is
-reestablished."])
-      [659])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "An authentic love should take on the other's contingence, that is, his
-lacks, limitations, and originary gratuitousness; it would claim to be not a
-salvation but an inter-human relation. Idolatrous love confers an absolute value
-on the loved one: this is the first lie strikingly apparent to all outsiders:
-\"" [:em "He"] " doesn't deserve so much love,\" people whisper around the woman in love;
-posterity smiles pityingly when evoking the pale figure of Count Guibert. It is
-a heartrending disappointment for the woman to discover her idol's weaknesses
-and mediocrity. [...] Even if the chosen one is worthy of the deepest
-attachment, his truth is earthbound: it is not he whom the woman kneeling before
-existence; her bad faith erects barriers between her and the one she worships.
-She flatters him, she bows down before him, but she is not a friend for him,
-since she does not realize he is in danger in the world, that his projects and
-finalities are as fragile as he himself is; considering him the Law and Truth,
-she misunderstands his freedom, which is hesitation and anguish. This refusal to
-apply a human measure to the lover explains many feminine paradoxes. The woman
-demands a favor from the lover, he grants it: he is generous rich, magnificent,
-he is royal, he is divine; if he refuses, he is suddenly stingy, mean and cruel,
-he is a devilish being or bestial. One might be tempted to counter: If a yes is
-understood as a superb extravagance, why should one be surprised by a no? If the
-no manifests such an abject egotism, why admire the yes so much? Between the
-superhuman and the inhuman is there not room for the human?  "])
-      [694 695])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "[...] The woman will be able to find her joy in this enrichment she
-       brings to her loved one; she is not All for him: but she will try to
-       believe herself indispensable; there are no degrees in necessity. If he
-       cannot \"get along without her,\" she considers herself the foundation of
-       his precious existence, and she derives her own worth from that. her joy
-       is to serve him: but he must gratefully recognize this service; giving
-       becomes demand according to the customary dialectic of devotion. And a
-       woman of scrupulous mind asks herself: Is it really " [:em "me"] " he needs? The
-       man cherishes her, desires her with singular tenderness and desire: But
-       would he not have just as singular feelings for another? Many women in
-       love let themselves be deluded; they want to ignore the fact that the
-       general is enveloped in the particular, and the man facilitates this
-       illusion because he shares it at first; there is often in his desire a
-       passion that seems to defy time; at the moment he desires this woman, he
-       desires her with passion, he wants only her: and certainly the moment is
-       an absolute, but a momentary absolute. Duped, the woman passes into the
-       eternal. Deified by the embrace of the master, she believes she has
-       always been divine and destined for the god: she alone. But male desire
-       is as fleeting as it is imperious; once satisfied, it dies rather
-       quickly, while it is most often after love that the woman becomes his
-       prisoner."])
-      [699])
-     [:hr]
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two
-       freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the
-       other; neither would abdicate his transcendence; they would not mutilate
-       themselves; together they would both reveal values and end in the world.
-       For each of them, love would be the revelation of self through the gift
-       of self and the enrichment of the universe."])
-      [706])
-     [:hr]
-     #_(blockquote
-        [:<>
-         "Antifeminists draw two contradictory arguments from examining history: (1)
-women have never created anything grand; (2) woman's situation has never
-prevented great women personalities from blossoming. There is bad faith in both
-of these assertions; the successes of some few privileged women neither
-compensate for nor excuses the systematic degrading of the collective level; and
-the very fact that these successes are so rare and limited is proof of their
-unfavorable circumstances."] [])
-     (blockquote
-      (html
-       [:p
-        "Women–except in certain abstract gatherings such as conferences–do not use
-\"we\"; men say \"women\", and women adopt this word to refer to themselves; but
-they do not posit themselves authentically as Subjects. [...] Women's actions
-have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have
-been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received. It
-is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that
-could posit itself in opposition. they have no past, no history, no religion of
-their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or
-interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American
-blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories.
-They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work economic interests, and
-social conditions to certain men–fathers or husbands–more closely than to other
-women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not
-with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men
-and not with black women. The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole
-ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the
-atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a
-woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her
-oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given,
-not a moment in history. [...] The couple is a fundamental unit with the two
-halves riveted to each other: cleavage of society by sex is not possible. This
-is the fundamental characteristic of women: she is the Other at the heart of a
-whole whose two components are necessary to each other. "])
-      [8 9])
-     [:hr]
-     [:p "Other bookmarked pages, mostly for my own memory: 109, 137, 160, 254, 257, 365, 405, 412, 514-515, 564, 568, 612-613, 630, 661-662, 674, 693, 731, 739, and 742-743."]])))