The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir, Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
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- There is a good principle that created order, light, and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness, and woman. — PYTHAGORASFeb 14 2024 1:13PM
Chapter 2
- Freud was not very concerned with woman’s destiny; it is clear that he modeled his description of it on that of masculine destiny, merely modifying some of the traits.Feb 14 2024 5:38PM
- Freud brought out a fact whose importance had not previously been recognized: male eroticism is definitively centered on the penis, while the woman has two distinct erotic systems, one that is clitoral and develops in infancy and another that is vaginal and develops only after puberty; when the boy gets to the genital phase, he completes his development; he has to move from the autoerotic attitude, where subjective pleasure is sought, to a hetero-erotic attitude that will link pleasure to an object, usually a woman; this passage will occur at puberty through a narcissistic phase: but the penis will remain, as in infancy, the favored erotic organ.Feb 14 2024 5:39PM
- The two essential objections to this description stem from the fact that Freud copied it from a masculine model. He assumes that a woman feels like a mutilated man; but the notion of mutilation implies comparison and valorization; many psychoanalysts accept today that girls miss having a penis without assuming they were ever stripped of one; this regret is not even generalized among all girls; and it could not arise from a simple anatomical encounter; many little girls discover the masculine constitution very late; and if they do discover it, it is only by seeing it; the boy has a living experience from his penis that allows him to take pride in it, but this pride has no immediate correlation with the humiliation of his sisters since they only know the masculine organ in its exteriority; this growth, this delicate stalk of skin, can only inspire their indifference and even disgust; the girl’s envy, when it appears, is the result of a prior valorization of virility: Freud takes this for granted when instead he should account for it.Feb 14 2024 5:42PM
- Adler departed from Freud because he understood the inadequacies of a system that bases the development of human life on sexuality alone: he means to reintegrate sexuality into the total personality; while for Freud all behavior is driven by desire, that is, by seeking pleasure, Adler sees man as aiming at certain goals; he replaces drives with motives, finality, and plans; he raises intelligence to such heights that for him sexuality often has only symbolic value.Feb 14 2024 5:43PM
- It is unnecessary to underline here the theoretical differences between Adler and Freud or the possibilities of reconciliation: neither the explanation based on drive nor the one based on motive is ever sufficient: all drives posit a motive, but motive is never grasped except through drives; a synthesis of Adlerism and Freudianism thus seems possible.Feb 14 2024 5:44PM
- In fact, while bringing in notions of aim and finality, Adler retains in full the idea of psychic causality; his relation to Freud resembles somewhat the relation of energeticism to mechanism: whether it is a question of impact or force of attraction, the physicist always recognizes determinism.Feb 14 2024 5:45PM
- Today as well, every psychoanalyst works at adapting Freudian concepts to suit himself; he attempts compromises; for example, a contemporary psychoanalyst writes: “Whenever there is a complex, there are by definition several components … The complex consists in grouping these disparate elements and not in representing one of them by the others.” But the idea of a simple grouping of elements is unacceptable: psychic life is not a mosaic; it is altogether complete in every one of its moments, and this unity must be respected.Feb 14 2024 5:46PM
- All psychoanalysts systematically refuse the idea of choice and its corollary, the notion of value; and herein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system. Cutting out drives and prohibitions from existential choice, Freud fails to explain their origin: he takes them as givens. He tried to replace the notion of value with that of authority; but he admits in Moses and Monotheism that he has no way to account for this authority.Feb 14 2024 5:48PM
- Bachelard also says it in his works on Earth, Air, and Water: psychoanalysts believe that man’s quintessential truth lies in his relation to his own body and that of others like him within society; but man has a primordial interest in the substance of the natural world surrounding him that he attempts to discover in work, play, and all experiences of the “dynamic imagination”; man seeks to connect concretely with existence through the whole world, grasped in all possible ways.Feb 14 2024 5:49PM
- Psychoanalysts vehemently reject this notion of choice in the name of determinism and “the collective unconscious”; this unconscious would provide man with ready-made imagery and universal symbolism; it would explain analogies found in dreams, lapses, delusions, allegories, and human destinies; to speak of freedom would be to reject the possibility of explaining these disturbing concordances.Feb 14 2024 5:50PM
Chapter 3
- Private property appears: master of slaves and land, man also becomes the proprietor of the woman. This is the “great historical defeat of the female sex.” It is explained by the disruption of the division of labor brought about by the invention of new tools. “The same cause that had assured woman her previous authority in the home, her restriction to housework, this same cause now assured the domination of the man; domestic work thence faded in importance next to man’s productive work; the latter was everything, the former an insignificant addition.” So paternal right replaces maternal right: transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed.Feb 14 2024 5:53PM
- Powerful when technology matched her possibilities, dethroned when she became incapable of benefiting from them, she finds again equality with man in the modern world. Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day this resistance is broken down.Feb 14 2024 5:54PM
- Similarly, it is unclear if private property necessarily led to the enslavement of woman. Historical materialism takes for granted facts it should explain: it posits the interest that attaches man to property without discussing it; but where does this interest, the source of social institutions, have its own source?Feb 14 2024 5:56PM
- Woman’s powerlessness brought about her ruin because man apprehended her through a project of enrichment and expansion. And this project is still not enough to explain her oppression: the division of labor by sex might have been a friendly association. If the original relation between man and his peers had been exclusively one of friendship, one could not account for any kind of enslavement: this phenomenon is a consequence of the imperialism of human consciousness, which seeks to match its sovereignty objectively.Feb 14 2024 5:59PM
- A truly socialist ethic—one that seeks justice without restraining liberty, one that imposes responsibilities on individuals but without abolishing individual freedom—will find itself most uncomfortable with problems posed by woman’s condition.Feb 14 2024 6:00PM
Chapter 4
- His activity has another dimension that endows him with supreme dignity: it is often dangerous. If blood were only a food, it would not be worth more than milk: but the hunter is not a butcher: he runs risks in the struggle against wild animals. 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.Feb 14 2024 6:07PM
- 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.Feb 14 2024 6:07PM
- It is the male who opens up the future toward which she also transcends; in reality, women have never pitted female values against male ones: it is men wanting to maintain masculine prerogatives who invented this division; they wanted to create a feminine domain—a rule of life, of immanence—only to lock woman in it.Feb 14 2024 6:09PM