path: root/src/pages/second_sex.clj

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" 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 _for-itself_ before a male group; they have never had a direct or
autonoous 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"

"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"

"109"

"\"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 _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, cnofining women to the
kitchen and to housework, jealously watching their behavior; they are enclosed
in daily life rituals that indered 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
"

"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 milion 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 obsterics has considerably decreased the dangers of childbirth;
chidbirth 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"


"[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 restfullness 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. Thans to her, there is a way to escape the inexorable
dialectic of the master and the slave that springs from the reciprocity of
freedoms.\n [...] [Woman] emerged as the inessential who never returned to the
essential, as the absolte Other, without reciprocity. [...] She is nature raised
to the transparency of sonsciousness; she is a naturally submissive
consciousness. And therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in
woman: he opes to accoplish 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"

"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 dna 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"

"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 sufficent that
the _Other_ is simply another for life to have, according to him, a litle 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.\nThat is, he also experiences
himself as a translucent freedom. The others–and this is one of the most
important points–posit themselves as transcendences 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 alalogous 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 ystery 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 invinitely more essential than her conscious
personality.\n 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 somen
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. \nFor each of them, the ideal woman will be she
who embodies the most exactly the _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
_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
buth a flagrant inferiority and an equal superiority.\n 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"

"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 irreplacable 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 _possession_ of this being is undoubtedly
impossible, but at least each of them is reached in a privelaged 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
commpon 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 _Other_, and this is its essential character; but within the couple, spouses
become, for each other, the _Same_; no exchange is possible between them
anymore, no giving, no conquest. 466-467"

"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"

"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"

"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 oepration 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 truely 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 imporent on their wedding night because of the very solmnity of
marriage. [...] Too much impetuousness frightens the virtin, too much respet
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 sonscious 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"

"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 univers 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.\n 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 confiend to a restriced 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"

"Logic in masculine hands is often violence. Chardonne explained this kind of
sly oppression well in _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 _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 dep-rooted reactons she cannot justify; she does not
understand what lives behind her husand'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"

"514-515"

"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 _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. [...]\n 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 concemned to; to realize an apparent equality in their
association, he has to give her more because he posesses 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. [...]\n 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 forbiddent o rely on herself; he will free
himself by freeing her, that is, by giving her something _to do_ in this world.
522-523"

"564"

"568"

"612-613"

"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 pparasite of the rich bourgeoisie, and she adhers 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 wates to \"arrive\" does
not dispose her to feelings of brotherhood and human solidarity; she paid for
huccess with too much slavish compliance to sincerly wish for universal freedom.
615"

"630"

"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, sanitiation\", says Philip Wylie, speaking of the American Mom, \"she
seldom has any especial interest in _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 solitare; 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 effictively participate in the building of a better world. 635-636"

"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"

"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 wif 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 murmered: \"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.\nIt 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 soncequences 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.\n The woman does not positively think that the
truth is _other_ than what men claim: rather, she holds that there _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"

"There is a justification, a suprememe compensation, that society has always
been bent on dispensing to woman: religion. There must be relition 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 converred 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 constrant 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"

"661-662"

"674"

"693"

"An authentic love should take on the other's contingence, that is, his lacks,
limitations, and originary gratituousness; 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: \"_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
a supreme being loves; she is dupedy by that spirit of seriousness which refuses
to put values \"in parentheses,\" not recognizing that they stem from human
existence; her bad faith erects barrirs 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"

"[...] 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 indespensible; 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 soman of scrupulous mind asks herself: Is it really _me_ he needs? The man cherishes her, desiers her with singular tenderness and desire: But would he not have just as singular feelings for another? Many women in loe 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"

"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 revalation of self through the gift of self and the enrichment of the universe. 706"

"731"

"739"

"742-743"


"412"

"405"
"365"
"257"

"254"
"160"
"137"

"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 excues 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."

"Women–except in certain abstract gatherings suh 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 reeived. 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 non solicarity of labor or
interests; they evenn 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 solicarity with bourgeois men and not
with woen proletarians; as white women, they are in solicarity 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 rivited 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"