Women are still, for the most part, in a state of subjection. It follows that woman sees herself and chooses herself not insofar as she exists for herself [pour soi] but as man defines her. So we must first describe her as men dream her, since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex1
These three sentences, which close the “History” section of The Second Sex, are to be read, I want to argue, as a reminder of the precarious position from which Beauvoir authors her book. Unless we read her as wishing to exempt herself from being a woman—something that, in the light of my reading of her ambitions in chapter 2 I hope seems highly implausible—then the constraints on women Beauvoir is referring to here, summed up by the idea that their “being-for-men” is an essential part of their lives, are to be seen as constraints on Beauvoir herself. For her the particular character of women’s subjection is such that women’s existential choices, both how they regard themselves and how they choose to act, are constrained by the way that men regard them—that is, as I read her, by Man’s Look. And it is this set of constraints, constraints that Beauvoir is declaring herself to be laboring under even as she writes The Second Sex, that constitute what she calls “women’s situation.” Accordingly, the depiction of this situation takes two forms. The first is the form that constitutes the “Myths” section of book 1, the section (discussed at length in chapter 6) that begins with Beauvoir’s longest sustained invocation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and that explores the breadth and depth of men’s dreams, as Beauvoir puts it, of women. The second form structures book 2, which chronicles what Beauvoir calls women’s “lived experience” from birth to death: as little girls; teenagers; and young, middle-aged, and old women; and across the spectrum of choices currently open to them: as wives, lesbians, mothers, homemakers, “legitimate” wage-earners, and even prostitutes.
In identifying this chronicle as the “second form” of Beauvoir’s depiction of women’s situation, and by defining “situation” as consisting in significant part in the set of constraints placed upon women by Man’s Look, I am suggesting that Beauvoir is herself constrained in book 2 to rely upon resources she has inherited from men.2 She will, for example, help herself to Freud’s analysis of femininity—the very analysis she has argued in the first part of book 1 can neither explain nor justify women’s subjection—to explain how young girls become (or to their peril do not become) feminized as they develop. In the last section of book 2, entitled “Justifications,” Beauvoir sketches what she claims are three common strategies adopted by women in attempts to rationalize and even exalt their own subjection, namely, narcissism, amorousness, and mysticism; and her analysis suggests that in employing these strategies women attempt to live men’s fantasies of them and thus to rid themselves once and for all of the burdens of subjectivity. But where does one draw the line between what I’ve evasively characterized as “helping oneself” to men’s dreams and fantasies and capitulating to them? What could it mean to transcend or otherwise overcome these fantasies, if it is indeed true that women are constrained and to a certain important extent concretely constituted by them? What is a woman?
We will of course misinterpret the point of Beauvoir’s question if we define her simply as a grown female instance of the species. And yet it is essential that we not overlook the fact that on Beauvoir’s analysis female physiology is another important part of women’s “situation.” Beauvoir is absolutely clear about this, as the following passage from the early “Biology” chapter of book 1 shows:
Biological considerations are extremely important. In the history of woman they play a part of the first rank and constitute an essential element of her situation. Throughout our further discussion we shall always bear them in mind. For, the body being the instrument of our grasp upon the world, the world is bound to seem a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another. This accounts for our lengthy study of the biological facts; they are one of the keys to the understanding of woman. (32)
And yet, Beauvoir immediately warns,
I deny that they establish for her [woman] a fixed and inevitable destiny. They are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes; they fail to explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her to remain in this subordinate role forever. (32–33)
Many readers, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin included, are inclined to doubt that this conclusion accurately represents Beauvoir’s considered view of the relationship between a woman’s biology and her destiny. On Lundgren-Gothlin’s reading, it is Beauvoir’s commitment to understanding relations between the sexes in Hegelian terms that ultimately gives her work an “androcentric” cast, so that it “sometimes verges on being misogynist” (81): in validating Hegel’s investment in risking life as opposed to affirming it as it is, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, Beauvoir validates men over women. But of course this is true only if we rigidly associate the risking of life with men and the affirming of it with women—which is precisely what Lundgren-Gothlin believes Beauvoir, in her analysis of the anatomical differences between men and women, does.
In reading Beauvoir this way, Lundgren-Gothlin has in mind passages like this: Woman’s “misfortune,” Beauvoir writes in the “Biology” chapter, “is to have been biologically destined for the repetition of Life, even when in her own eyes Life does not carry within itself its reasons for being and when these reasons seem more important than life itself” (64, TM; LDS 1:114). In the next paragraph Beauvoir claims that “certain passages” of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic are better applied to man-woman relationships, since women do not risk their lives but instead give life. But to say that woman is “biologically destined for the repetition of Life” does not imply that women are beholden to this destiny, that they cannot “risk their lives,” whatever this risking turns out to look like on Beauvoir’s account of it. Indeed, this possibility is explicitly affirmed by Beauvoir in the passage I quoted above on the importance she accords to biology. Furthermore, to insist on the importance of risking one’s life cannot be seen as in and of itself “masculinist,” even if it is true that men are biologically more inclined to do so than women. On Lundgren-Gothlin’s analysis the masculinism of this view appears to stem from its association with Hegel. As I read Lundgren-Gothlin, it is the fact that Hegel was a man, and a man who, at that, took an appallingly dim view of women (as the quotation from his Philosophy of Right that I cite in chapter 1 suggests), that leads him to value risking life over preserving, extending, or creating it. But this is also to suggest that Beauvoir simply adopts certain Hegelian tenets wholesale, that, to look at the matter from a broader perspective, there is nothing fundamentally interesting about Beauvoir’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic—which is, of course, just the reading of Beauvoir I’m attempting to contest.
When Beauvoir says that women are “biologically destined for the repetition of Life,” what she is referring to, of course, is woman’s child-bearing capacity. But this is all she is referring to. She is not arguing that women are psychologically destined to bear children, that they are naturally inclined to crave producing children more than they desire anything else. What she is emphasizing is the degree to which women are constrained, from puberty on, by the fact of their female biology: even if they do not desire to produce children, they are at the mercy of physiological processes connected with their capacity to give birth, such as menstruation and menopause. It’s not that these processes are inevitably crippling for women (to the contrary, I will argue, Beauvoir’s way of appropriating Hegel depends on her taking the view that they are not); it’s that they at best interfere with the goals she sets for herself. To make this point clear, Beauvoir distinguishes in the “Biology” chapter between what she calls the individual’s point of view and that of the species; she also speaks of the “interests” of the individual versus those of the species (see, e.g., 25 and 27). The interests of the individual are expressed in the goals he or she sets for himself or herself, and the interests of the species are expressed in his or her physiology. It is from the point of view of the species that woman’s role is to become impregnated and bear children and that man’s role is to impregnate women.
Now, man’s biological role in reproduction, Beauvoir wants to argue, is such that it does not interfere with his interests as an individual. Indeed, the two interests can coincide exactly. As Beauvoir writes,
From [puberty] on, the male has a sex life that is normally integrated with his individual existence: in desire, in coition, his surpassing [dépassement] toward the species blends with the subjective moment of his transcendence: he is his body. (26, TM; LDS 1:63)
By “surpassing toward the species” Beauvoir is referring to the fact of the man’s fulfilling the interests of the species in the act of heterosexual intercourse.3 Because the man (more or less, I suppose) chooses to engage in this act, his surpassing toward the species, his playing the role of impregnator, is coincident with his goals as an individual (whatever these may be: to impregnate, to feel or provide pleasure, to feel powerful or to inflict powerlessness). On the other hand, Beauvoir claims, “the individuality of the female is opposed by the interest of the species; it is as if she were possessed by foreign powers: alienated” (25, TM; LDS 1:62). Beauvoir even uses the notion of slavery in characterizing the woman’s relation to her female physiology (27). She argues that none of the physiological burdens of having a female body (menstruation; cyclical hormonal changes and the emotional and physical lability they often produce; pregnancy; menopause) are inherently desirable—are things women would choose to bring upon themselves—outside their purpose in making and sustaining babies. Furthermore, even in the most uncomplicated of circumstances the range of possible negative consequences of enjoying or otherwise exercising their sexuality is considerably broader for women than it is for men: until extremely recently a woman’s choice to have sexual intercourse with a man was inevitably a choice to risk becoming pregnant.4 While a man might engage in intercourse in circumstances that entail long-term complications for him (he might, for example, become infected with a venereal disease or provoke a woman to fall in love with him or despise him), the act itself is something from which he can simply walk away. For women, on the other hand, unless the circumstances under which she has intercourse are exactly right (she or the man is sterile, a form of birth control that works is used), she risks becoming pregnant, with all the ramifications (physical and almost always social and psychological) that pregnancy entails.
It will be argued here that the interests of woman as an individual and the interests of the species are not always at odds, that many women choose, for example, to become pregnant. Indeed, it is a frequent criticism of Beauvoir that she fails to appreciate the fact that many women are thrilled to become mothers and even sometimes enjoy the other physiological aspects of womanhood, such as its cyclical nature.5 As I read her, Beauvoir has two responses to this objection. First, no woman chooses to be incapacitated in the way that pregnancy and the postpartum period or menstruation can be incapacitating. Whatever may be thrilling or satisfying about being a woman, it is not (for example) the exhaustion and nausea of the first trimester of pregnancy or the pain of menstrual cramps. Second, Beauvoir is suspicious of celebrations of what she would call, following Sartre, women’s “immanence,” that is, her bodily being, what she is by virtue of being female. On Beauvoir’s view investing in one’s womanly immanence amounts either to a capitulation to the culture’s—that is, to men’s—expectations of women or to a revolt against the culture (as when, e.g., women celebrate their menstrual cycles), in which case it still constitutes capitulation to the culture’s way of figuring woman. But more important for Beauvoir, for a woman to choose immanence is, given her physiology, in effect for her to choose, as she puts it, to alienate herself, to allow herself to be colonized by what she calls “foreign powers.”
Beauvoir paints a vivid picture of this concept of alienation in, for example, the following passage:
It is during her periods that [woman] feels her body most painfully as an opaque, alien thing; it is the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that each month constructs and demolishes [ fait et défait] a cradle within it; each month all things are made ready for a child and then aborted in the crimson flow. Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself. (29, TM; LDS 1:67)
To my ear, Beauvoir here paints a scene of woman’s body as the site of a life-and-death drama (something she at one point calls “the theater of a play that unfolds within her” [27]) in which she might well find herself invested (as when she hopes to become pregnant) but over which she has no control. Of course, all creatures could be described as prey to certain bodily processes over which they have no control (such as indigestion). But Beauvoir’s point is that what distinguishes women from men, what makes their bodily situation describable in general or by type in terms of a particular conception of alienation, is that they are routinely prey to “foreign powers,” routinely become sites of drama, strictly by virtue of being female. And it’s not that a woman could not in principle choose pregnancy, for example, as a project; it’s that this choice inevitably leads to a certain split in the self, between what Beauvoir calls her “individuality” and what she calls “the interests of the species.”6 Understanding women’s inherent tendency toward alienation is a key to understanding the role that biology plays in Beauvoir’s conception of women’s situation, of how women have come to be constrained by the fantasies that govern men’s Looks.7
It’s important to note, however, that the alienation Beauvoir describes is not necessarily psychological or even existential/ phenomenological. Beauvoir is not, in other words, making some empirical claim about how women feel about themselves or specifically their bodies when they menstruate. If she were making such a claim, then the charge that she is a biological determinist might be warranted; for the implication would be that woman is bound to regard herself as alienated (in the sense Beauvoir is trying to articulate here) under any circumstances as long as her body is female. I read her instead as trying to make the point that women’s bodily alienation lends itself to exploitation under certain social circumstances, whereas men’s physiology (in and of itself) does not. Women’s physiology, in other words, makes her prone to suffer oppression. But of course this reading requires an explanation, which will emerge as we explore a second, markedly different use Beauvoir makes of the concept of alienation.
This second use, introduced in the chapter on psychoanalysis, which follows the chapter on biology, appears in the form of what Beauvoir calls an “existential fact,” namely, “the tendency of the subject toward alienation” (47). She writes,
The anguish of his liberty leads the subject to search for himself [se rechercher] in things, which is a way of fleeing from himself. This is a tendency so fundamental that immediately after weaning, when he or she is separated from the All, the child strives to seize in mirrors, in the look [le regard] of his parents, his alienated existence. (47, TM; LDS 1:90)
Beauvoir herself glosses this idea at the very beginning of book 2 of The Second Sex, right after the first paragraph, the one that opens with “One is not born a woman”:
The world is at first present to the newborn only in the form of immanent sensations. He is still immersed in the bosom of All [sein de Tout] as in the time he lived in the shadows of a womb. When he is raised to the breast or bottle, he is invested with the heat of maternal flesh. Little by little he learns to perceive objects as distinct from himself: he distinguishes himself from them. At the same time, in a more or less brutal fashion, he is detached from the nourishing body. Sometimes, he reacts to this separation by a violent crisis. In any case, it is toward the moment when it is consummated—toward the age of about six months—that he begins to manifest through acts of mimicry, which subsequently become genuine displays, the desire to seduce others. Certainly, this attitude is not defined by a reflective choice; but there is no need to intend [penser] a situation for it to exist. In an immediate manner the nursling lives the original drama of every existent, which is the drama of his relationship to the Other. It is in anguish that the human being feels his abandonment. Fleeing his liberty, his subjectivity, he would like to lose himself in the bosom of All: here is the origin of his cosmic and pantheistic dreams, of his desire to forget, to dream, to be ecstatic, to die. He never succeeds in abolishing his separate self [moi; also translatable as “ego”]. At the least he wishes to attain the solidity of the in-itself, to be petrified into a thing. It is particularly when he is fixed by the look of others that he appears to himself as a being. It is in this perspective that we must interpret the conduct of the child. In a carnal form, he discovers finitude, solitude, abandonment in a foreign world. He tries to compensate for this catastrophe by alienating his existence in an image whose reality and value others will ground. It appears that he begins to affirm his identity at the moment at which he recognizes his reflection in mirrors—a moment that coincides with that of weaning. [Here Beauvoir inserts a footnote citing a paper by Jacques Lacan.] His ego [moi] blends [se confonder] so well with this reflection that it is formed only in being alienated. Whether the mirror properly speaking plays a role more or less considerable, it is certain that the child begins around six months to mimic his parents and to grasp himself in their look as an object. He is already an autonomous subject who transcends himself toward the world: but it is only in alienated form that he will encounter himself. (268–269, TM; LDS 2:14–15)
Here Beauvoir is claiming that an infant’s coming to perceive himself as individuated inevitably entails a certain resistance, which, she says, takes the form of a desire to become an in-itself, or object. For the baby, individuation is nothing less than a “catastrophe”: through it he “discovers finitude, solitude, abandonment in a foreign world.” This catastrophe is for the baby the meaning of his existential “liberty,” which Beauvoir indicates here is, or is the defining feature of, his subjectivity. In chapter 3 I said that like Hegel and Sartre, Beauvoir links the idea of subjectivity with the idea of freedom by defining a subject as a being who acts, where by definition for all three figures acting is something that goes beyond mere attempts at fulfilling one’s desires as one finds them; I noted that such desires might include those for food, shelter, sexual pleasure, and so forth. But in the long passage above what Beauvoir is emphasizing is something like the cost or condition of this freedom, which is a radical state of independence or separation from the world. Indeed, in this passage the baby’s first experience of freedom, epitomized by the image of being forcibly weaned from the mother’s breast, is marked by a sense not of exhilaration but of what Beauvoir calls “abandonment”—a realization that the world exists independently of you, of your perceptions, your needs, your desires. This interpretation implies that experiencing one’s existential freedom also consists in the recognition of oneself as desirous—as craving guaranteed connections with this independent world. It also provides the means to suggest that when in her earlier philosophical works Beauvoir talks about “assuming” freedom, what she means is keeping this recognition of one’s craving for secure connections with the the world in view, living with and against it, bearing up (whatever this turns out to look like) in the wake of a separation you acknowledge to be catastrophic.
Notice also that Beauvoir suggests in the above passages that it’s perfectly natural, indeed “fundamental,” to attempt to avoid assuming one’s freedom by wishing to transform oneself into a thing, that is, something whose relationship to the world is reliably constant. This natural desire to divest oneself of one’s existential liberty is what she means by this second use of the term “alienation.” And notice that the naturalness of what Beauvoir (like Sartre) calls the “flight” from liberty need not be explained—is not explained by her here—in terms of cowardice, moral or psychological. Instead, she identifies it as a product of the fact that coming to see oneself as separate from the world is coincident with the discovery of oneself as an object in the eyes of others (and, as the case may be, in mirrors). In the last sentence of the long passage cited above, Beauvoir seems to be suggesting that coming to see oneself as individuated is the result or by-product of or perhaps even the form taken by coming to see oneself as (to use Sartre’s term) being-for-others, that is, as an object of other people’s regard. If this is right, then there is something of a paradox or perhaps an ironic coincidence here: one discovers oneself in the other’s Look as the object one desires, only because of this discovery, to be. But Beauvoir appears to be suggesting that this particular desire, the desire to be reified by the other’s Look, is bound to be disappointed whenever the other’s gaze is turned or averted. Thus, the infant, “living the original drama of every existent,” seeks to seduce the other, to recapture herself or himself in the other’s Look. The infant learns to do this, at first, by mimicking his or her parents, who themselves are acting out their own dramas. And later, Beauvoir suggests, the infant may learn to look for himself elsewhere, in “his cosmic and pantheistic dreams, his desire to forget, to dream, to be ecstatic, to die.” Thus Beauvoir is in effect declaring some of the highest of human aspirations to originate in a universal drama of alienation. This is going to turn out to be important in her understanding of both men’s and women’s “situations.” One could say that the difference between the two is a difference in how this drama plays out: while men tend eventually to attempt to alienate themselves in Projects, to dream big dreams and risk dying for them (literally or spiritually), women are inclined never to stop attempting to reify themselves in the gaze of others.
Before I explore Beauvoir’s explanations for this difference, I want to pause at least to acknowledge the resonances between the long passage from the opening of book 2 of The Second Sex cited above and key moments in the writing of the authors whose work Beauvoir is appropriating in this passage, in particular Hegel and Sartre. (Given the preoccupations of this project, I cannot pursue at any length the question of Beauvoir’s indebtedness at this juncture to Lacan. But should anyone doubt that his work figures heavily in Beauvoir’s understanding of alienation, he or she need only consult the (sole) footnote to Beauvoir’s long passage, in which she hails Lacan’s discovery of the so-called “mirror stage” of infancy, declaring it to be “of prime importance.”8) Beauvoir’s picture of the newborn learning to distinguish herself from objects recalls Hegel’s picture of the subjectively self-certain being, who also regards such objects solely in terms of their usefulness with regard to his own desire and their accessibility. For both Beauvoir’s infant and Hegel’s subjectively self-certain being, the discovery of the “other” bodes catastrophe, not the least striking feature of which is a massive change in self-conception (a moment Freud might identify as that at which the conditions sustaining primary narcissism are destroyed). But at this point Beauvoir and Hegel seem to part company. While Hegel portrays the subjectively self-certain being’s response to this catastrophe as an attempt to achieve objective self-certainty through the other’s “recognition” of himself as essentially “for-himself,” Beauvoir suggests that the infant, who, again, she says, is living the drama of every existent, responds to it by attempting to petrify herself in the other’s reflection, “to attain the solidity of the in-itself.”9
Beauvoir’s depiction of the infant here recalls Sartre’s characters in No Exit, in which, I argued in chapter 4, it is the narcissistic wish for the Other to reflect back to you a fixed image you have of yourself that brings on the conditions of hell. But the difference here, as I read it, is that for Beauvoir this wish is the centerpiece of a necessary stage in the history of the human individual. What she seems to be suggesting is that individuation itself is driven by a human being’s demand to find a fixed reflection of himself or herself in another person’s regard, a regard human beings attempt to elicit by what Beauvoir calls seduction. The infant’s ego, she claims, “blends so well with this reflection that it is formed only in being alienated.” By denying that that the infant chooses to be alienated (“this attitude is not defined by a reflective choice”), Beauvoir suggests that the infant’s attempt to seduce the other does not count as a genuine act, a genuine expression, in other words, of the infant’s freedom. You might say that it is the crisis of recognizing oneself to be for-itself, in the Hegelian sense, that provokes the desire to be confirmed by the other to be fundamentally in-itself. This means that I’m arguing that Beauvoir in the passage I’m examining is doing something like turning Hegel—and Sartre—inside out. For both Hegel and Sartre, the presence of the “other”10 induces in a person the catastrophe of experiencing himself as in-itself, as a mere thing in someone else’s world. And a natural response to this crisis, on both their accounts, is the attempt to get the “other” to recognize you as essentially not a mere thing, as fundamentally “for-yourself.” But for Beauvoir, I’m claiming, the presence of the “other” reveals to me the fact of my own individuality, which I experience in the form of a sense of loss, of isolation. This catastrophe is the other face of what Sartre calls freedom. But the natural response to the crisis is not to exploit this freedom but to attempt to divest oneself of it by demanding of the other not that he or she confirm you as “for-itself” but as something with a stable connection to the world—as “in-itself.” This means that for Beauvoir, unlike for Hegel, the encounter with the “other” does not automatically lead to a demand for “recognition,” at least in Hegel’s sense. Rather, it leads to an attempt to seduce others into allowing you to alienate yourself in their gaze.
This does not imply that Beauvoir rejects the idea that there is a stage in the drama she’s describing at which the demand for recognition in Hegel’s sense may and often does occur. But Beauvoir does not see the demand for recognition as natural, at least not in the context she’s exploring. Rather, she sees the attempt to alienate one’s freedom as the natural response to the encounter with (what the catastrophe of experiencing one’s separation from the world reveals to the infant, enacting the drama of every existent, to be) the “other.” At one point (shortly after the passage I’ve been looking at) she even claims that “carnal union creates a deeper alienation than any resignation under the gaze of others” (270), which suggests that alienation is not only a temptation that occurs in the wake of the crisis of individuation but is indeed the primary “situation” of each individual. Once again, the distinctiveness of Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel is to be explained, I wish to argue, by the specific project that motivates it: the attempt to explain the singular nature of women’s “situation.” It is this project that provokes Beauvoir to examine the mechanics, if you will, of the “becoming” of women (and of men). The long passage I’ve been focusing on represents the beginning of this project, in which Beauvoir is claiming (a) that the impulse to self-alienation is universal in the early stages of human development; (b) that given the magnitude of the catastrophe of discovering oneself to be an individual, human beings never fully recover to the point of totally divesting themselves of this temptation; and (c) that there is no difference in the way male and female infants experience this crisis.
Beauvoir is quite explicit about this final point. She writes,
There is no difference in the attitudes of girls and boys during the first three or four years. Both try to perpetuate the happy condition that preceded weaning. In both sexes one observes seduction and display [parade]: boys are as desirous as their sisters of pleasing adults, provoking smiles, making themselves admired. (269–270, TM; LDS 2:16)
While both boys and girls succeed in their seduction of adults only intermittently (“In this world, uncertain and unpredictable as the universe of Kafka, one stumbles at every step,” says Beauvoir [270]), girls actually seem to be more privileged than boys are at this early-childhood stage. This, according to Beauvoir, is because of what culture—all cultures—demand of the little boy, namely, that he demonstrate his maleness by becoming independent of adults: “He will please them,” as Beauvoir wryly puts it, “by not appearing to seek to please them.”11 Meanwhile, the little girl is allowed and even encouraged to continue her seductive ploys: “She is dressed up in dresses soft as kisses; her tears and caprices are indulged; her hair is carefully styled; people are amused by her expressions and coquetry. Carnal contacts and obliging looks protect her against the anguish of solitude” (270, TM; LDS 2:17).
However, Beauvoir argues, “if the boy seems at first to be less favored than his sisters, it is because there are grander designs on him” (271, TM; LDS 2:18). Specifically, boys are given to understand at a very early age that their difference from girls, if apparently putting them at a disadvantage as young children, will eventually work to their benefit: the path, it is implied, may be more difficult, but the payoffs will be greater. And the boy is also taught that the symbol or, as Beauvoir goes so far as to put it, the “incarnation” of this advantage is his penis. Beauvoir is again quite explicit here: the boy does not automatically regard his penis as a symbol of either virility or privilege; rather, “he experiences [pride in his penis] through the attitude of the group around him” (271, TM; LDS 2:18). This is true, Beauvoir argues, regardless of the valence, if you will, of this attitude: whether the adults raising the boy are aroused by his maleness or awed by it or “get a sense of revenge in coming upon it in the nursling in a very humble form” (271), they convey to the boy that the penis—something that belongs to no girl—is important. Evidently, according to Beauvoir, the adults who convey this message to the young boy are passing on to him what was taught to them in early childhood and reinforced as they grew into maturity. Here, a partial explanation for this phenomenon, for the singular valuation of the penis, emerges. Beauvoir claims that the penis is anatomically well suited for this purpose: “projecting free of the body, it seems like a little natural plaything, a kind of puppet” (271). And adults teach the boy that he can do things with his penis that little girls cannot do, e.g., urinate standing up. They teach him these things not (necessarily) because they believe that the penis is valuable in and of itself but (primarily) because they wish to salve his disappointment in the wake of what Beauvoir calls the “second weaning,” that is, the culture’s demand that the boy become independent of others.
There is no reason, on the other hand, Beauvoir claims, for adults to direct little girls to invest their genitalia with any particular meaning or significance. (That some adults in this day and age go out of their way to do so would, I imagine, be interpreted by Beauvoir as a response to their sense of the penis’s being overvalued and thus would not constitute a fundamental change in the way we raise our children.) Still, according to Beauvoir, girls do not experience the absence of a “significant” genital as a lack. In taking this position, Beauvoir sets herself against Freud (mentioned at this juncture of The Second Sex in a footnote), whose explanation of sexual difference in his notorious undelivered lecture “Femininity” turns on the claim that women universally experience what he famously calls “penis envy” as a natural response to the sight of the male organ. For Beauvoir, to the contrary, if envy of the little boy or even of his penis develops it is because the little girl “finds herself situated in the world differently from the boy”; and it is “a constellation of factors” that “can transform this difference, in her eyes, into an inferiority” (272). While the girl may envy the fact that the little boy can, for example, urinate standing up and direct the stream of urine more precisely than can she, this difference in and of itself “is something too secondary to engender directly a feeling of inferiority” (276, TM; LDS 2:25). What makes it the case that the absence of a penis “will certainly play a great role in her destiny” is not some direct disadvantage for her but, rather, the existential advantage the boy can gain from the fact that he has an organ “that can be seen and grasped” (278).
This advantage, to be explicit, is that the boy can “at least partially alienate himself” in his penis (278, TM; LDS 2:2712). The idea here, as I understand it, is that as the boy comes to recognize the unreliability of the approbation of adults, in which he hopes to find a stable reflection of himself (as “in-itself”), he finds a substitute for this mode of alienation in his relationship with his penis. The most important thing about this relationship, Beauvoir seems to think, is that the penis is itself part of the little boy, albeit a part whose existence may well appear to the boy to be in danger of being taken away (as Beauvoir, now following Freud, recognizes). And because the penis seems to the boy to be a particularly powerful and, in a manner of speaking, independent part of his body, because of, for example, its length, urinary force, and erections, for him to alienate himself in his penis is for him to adopt a picture of himself as active and strong. To the extent that the boy is his penis, in other words, he is able to perform the neat trick of figuring himself simultaneously as “in-itself” and as powerful and independent (see TSS 278).
The little girl, on the other hand, lacks not only a penis but also, Beauvoir implies, the incentive to try to alienate herself in something other than the gaze of others. The girl, to repeat, is ceaselessly encouraged to seduce others. If she is given a doll to play with, Beauvoir suggests, the little girl may use it as a penis-substitute—that is, may seek to alienate herself in it. But
on the one hand, the doll represents the whole body, and, on the other, it is a passive object. Therefore the little girl will be encouraged to alienate herself in her entire person and to consider this as an inert given. While the boy seeks himself in the penis in the capacity of [en tant que] autonomous subject, the little girl coddles her doll and dresses her up as she dreams to be coddled and dressed up; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll. (278–279, TM; LDS 2:27–28)
So while the boy’s alienation in his penis represents a step away from the stage at which he is attempting to seduce adults, a step toward what Beauvoir calls “autonomy” (278), the girl’s alienation in the doll takes place only because the doll represents to her the epitome of the seductive object she has sought to be since infancy. To alienate herself in it is to identify herself completely with something that, unlike the penis, is “passive” and “inert.” Thus a little girl’s alienation of herself in a doll, according to Beauvoir, perpetuates what she calls the “narcissism” of infancy, that is, I take it, the attempt to figure oneself exclusively as a seductive object.
Beauvoir recognizes that, of course, a boy might well “cherish a teddy bear, or a puppet into which he projects himself” (280). Her point is that no one factor—biological or social—determines that boys’ and girls’ “situations” will be different from one another. Cultural expectations (that the boy become independent and that the girl become passive) as well as biological chance (the boy’s having an organ that lends itself to his attempt to alienate himself) combine to produce this difference. What’s important is that the boy has the means to put himself in a position in which “his manner of existing for-others encourages him to pose himself as for-himself” (280, TM; LDS 2:29). I read Beauvoir here to be suggesting that little boys have the opportunity to project themselves and to see themselves reflected in the other’s gaze as magnificently paradoxical beings—beings, to be specific, who in-themselves are yet fundamentally for-themselves. Now, this state of being simultaneously in-itself and for-itself is, of course, exactly what Sartre in Being and Nothingness claims that human beings yearn for: “Each human reality,” he argues right before the conclusion of the book, “is at the same time a direct project [or, as he calls it a sentence later, a “passion”] to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself” (784). But this project, he claims, is attempted in vain; in the concluding line of this same final section of the book proper, he notoriously declares that “man is a useless passion.” What Beauvoir seems to be suggesting in The Second Sex is that the little boy seems to have succeeded in fulfilling this passion: “what is very important,” she declares,
is that there is no fundamental opposition between his concern for that objective figure which is his, and his will to affirm himself in concrete projects. It is in doing that he makes himself being, in a single movement. (280, TM; LDS 2:29–30)
Most commentators on The Second Sex take moments such as these as evidence of Beauvoir’s “masculinism,” of what they read as her tendency to exalt men as having obtained the highest human standards and to exhort women to follow suit. But the problem is that one can read these moments in this way only if one ignores the fact that Beauvoir is trying to understand why men oppress women. So far, in her analysis of human development from infancy through early childhood, no light has been shed on this subject. Beauvoir has said nothing at this point to link what she has identified as certain systematic differences between little girls and little boys—differences that, again, she traces to a complex situation constituted by social expectations (which she has yet to explain) and biological chance—with systematic oppression of human females by human males. The simple fact (if it is a fact) that his situation is more conducive to his self-realization as for-itself, if you will, in no way implies that the little boy needs the little girl’s situation to be worse than his. And that is why in identifying this simple fact as what I’ve called a neat trick or magnificent paradox for the boy, Beauvoir is not to be read as glorifying maleness, per se.
Indeed, it turns out that on her analysis the problem with this neat trick is that it is ultimately unstable. This is because the sense of himself as in-itself-for-itself that the boy gets through alienating himself in his penis is entirely dependent on the social value of the way he poses himself. In other words, his achievement must be recognized as such in the eyes of the other in order for it to count as an achievement. And on Beauvoir’s understanding, this recognition cannot be and is not something that the boy (or man, or woman or girl for that matter) can obtain once and for all. The struggle for recognition, as I suggested in chapter 6, is ceaseless. And this is why man needs woman, or, more generally, needs someone to play the role of the absolute Other for him: in order to figure himself as in-himself being (statically) for-itself, he needs to be able to count on the existence of beings who can be relied upon endlessly to supply affirmation of his own subjectivity. He needs, as Beauvoir puts it in the conclusion of The Second Sex, to “alienate himself in the other, whom he oppresses to that end” (719, TM; LDS 2:647). And she explains that this means that what a man needs in order to understand himself as being (steadfastly) independent, active, strong, and so forth is “to find himself in his wife, [or] in his mistress, in the form of a stone image” (719). I read Beauvoir to suggest through this move that the sense of stability that little boys are privileged to acquire can be perpetuated only through acts of bad faith, that their apparent achievement of stability as in-itself-for-itself comes at the cost of denying—and denying to themselves that they are denying—the humanity of the Other.
But this still does not explain why women, per se, are oppressed—or, to put it another way, why men need alienate themselves in women in order to secure fixed images of themselves. The answer, as I read The Second Sex, is that they need not do so and, indeed, do not always do so. One need only consider the wide variety of systematic forms of oppression that human beings have inflicted on each other to see that this is the case. Men and women frequently oppress other men and women through slavery, racism, caste systems, and other forms of both institutionalized and insidious inequalities. And yet, Beauvoir argues, there is a fundamental difference between these forms of oppression and the oppression of men by women, and this difference turns on the fact that women have good reason to desire their situation. For if human beings indeed respond to the “catastrophe” of finding themselves individuated in infancy with a longing to reestablish a fixed connection with the world, and if little (and big) girls are encouraged through the approbation of others to believe they have done so by alienating themselves (literally or figuratively) in (or into) dolls, then it is no wonder they often happily do so. Compare, for example, the case of African-Americans, whose second-class status in this country—no less and perhaps more appalling now that we are all supposedly “equal” in the eyes of the law—has never in and of itself been advantageous for them, even if fear of the unknown—literally, of freedom—occasionally induced certain antebellum slaves (and their heirs) to rationalize their lot to themselves. Women, on the other hand, have traditionally had good reason to enjoy the benefits of not having to be actors in the world: they have rarely been expected to work for wages, even if economic circumstances sometimes forced them to do so (in which case they are entitled to feel gypped); their narcissism is often rewarded; they are able to endow those of their bodily processes associated with reproduction with a sense of purpose and meaning. With reference to “this great difference” between American Blacks and women, Beauvoir writes,
Blacks submit to their lot in revolt. No privilege compensates for their difficulty, whereas woman is invited to complicity. I have already recalled that side by side with the authentic claim [revendication] of the subject who would desire [se veut] sovereign liberty, there is in the existent an inauthentic desire for resignation [démission] and flight. These are the delights of passivity with which parents and educators, books and myths, women and men lure [ font miroiter] the young girl. In her youngest childhood she is already taught to relish [goüter] them. The temptation becomes more and more insidious, and she gives in to it all the more fatally as the impulse to her transcendence crashes against more severe forms of resistance. (298, TM; LDS 2:53)13
For Beauvoir, to review my interpretation thus far, systematic differences between men and women are to be accounted for with reference to a fundamental human tendency to achieve a stable connection with the world by “alienating” oneself in the Look of the other. A boy is taught to do so by aspiring to establish himself as an independent being. He is to achieve and sustain his independence by forcing a woman, or several women, to devote herself or themselves to being his mirror and reflecting back to him a “stone image” of himself as powerful, creative, and free. A girl, on the other hand, is taught to achieve a stable connection with the world by turning herself into a seductive object (a mirror, let’s say) whose passivity is rewarded by the approbation and assurances of others. Both roles—masculine and feminine—are dependent on an insidious “inauthenticity” or “bad faith”: all people, boys and girls, men and women, must at least implicitly deny the status of women as “for-themselves,” which for the likes of Beauvoir means that they must deny that women are human beings. This requirement provides the incentive for both male and female adults to mold children to conform to sex stereotypes. And neither sex, therefore, is singularly responsible for the fact of women’s oppression; individuals are guilty only insofar as they see the situation for what it is and choose deliberately to perpetuate it.
What allows Beauvoir herself to see the situation for what it is (if indeed this is an accurate description of her achievement) is not, on her reckoning, that she is somehow more perceptive or less feminine than other women—a claim that puts me at odds with a number of her critics, who, as I described them in chapter 2, insist that she is exempting herself from the status of being a woman.14 What she says allows her to see the situation for what it is, again, is that she is particularly well placed to do so. Let us look more closely at how she describes her positionings in the following key passage from the introduction to The Second Sex. Having argued that the “woman question” needs to be reposed, she writes,
But then how shall we pose the question? And to begin with, who are we to pose it? Men are judge and party to the case: women too. Where to find an angel? In truth, an angel would be poorly qualified to speak. An angel would ignore all the particulars [données] of the problem. As for the hermaphrodite, that case is quite singular: the hermaphrodite isn’t at one and the same time man and woman but rather neither man nor woman. I believe that to shed light on the situation of woman, there are still certain women who are best placed. It would be a sophism to claim to enclose Epimenides in the concept of Cretan and the Cretans in that of liar [C’est un sophisme que de prétendre enfermer Epiménide dans le concept de Crétois et les Crétois dans celui de menteur]: it’s not a mysterious essence that dictates good or bad faith to men and women; it’s their situation that disposes them more or less to seek the truth. Many women of today, having had the chance to see all the privileges of the human being restored to themselves can offer themselves the luxury of impartiality: we even feel the necessity to do so. (xxxiii, TM; LDS 1:29)
I want to propose that in these sentences Beauvoir is lodging a claim to be especially well placed to attempt to pose the woman question through a simultaneous declaration that she is both a woman and a philosopher. The key sentence here is the rather obscure one that makes reference to Epimenides’ so-called liar’s paradox. “I am a Cretan,” Epimenides notoriously said; “and all Cretans are liars.” Ever since Aristotle, what philosophers have found interesting about Epimenides’ claim is that it is impossible to determine whether or not it is true: as any first-semester logic student can tell you, if Epimenides is telling the truth, then he must be lying; and if he is lying, then he must be telling the truth. But if I read Beauvoir correctly, she is suggesting that what Epimenides says becomes paradoxical only if we subscribe to an overly narrow and rigid conception of what it is to “be” a Cretan or a liar. Epimenides’ paradox goes through only if to be a liar is to lie all the time. But is this what we ordinarily mean by the concept “liar”? Does calling someone a liar imply that he or she never tells the truth or is incapable of telling it? The fact that in ordinary language it does not is important to Beauvoir: we do not ordinarily assume that just because a certain kind of behavior is characteristic of an individual or group that individual or group is doomed to exhibit at all times only that kind of behavior. So to say that Cretans are liars does not imply that every utterance of every Cretan is a lie. Epimenides may well be telling the truth.
Similarly, Beauvoir explicitly asks us to think about what it is to “enclose” (enfermer) Epimenides in the concept of “Cretan.” Unless “Cretan” is just another word for “liar,” then there is a question about exactly what it means for Epimenides to declare himself to “be” a Cretan. A Cretan is of course a citizen of, or a person from, Crete. But a person’s nationality is his only salient feature only under extraordinary (and ordinarily deeply immoral) circumstances. Indeed, no set of facts about a human being confines that human being to indulging in one or the other sort of behavior, and for the same reason that no statement about what’s characteristic of a type of human being applies in all times and all places to people who “are” that type. So when Epimenides claims that he is a Cretan and that Cretans are liars, he is most naturally read as warning us—in provocation, on a dare, in order to be coy, or in order to achieve some particular speech act—simply that he is a member of a group whose members, insofar as they are members of that group, are prone to lie.
But I do not mean to be implying that Beauvoir is declaring herself in the above passage to be a philosopher solely by asking us to take a second look at Epimenides’ paradox (or, for that matter, by warning that to take it as philosophers have traditionally taken it is to take it as a “sophism”). What’s at least equally important is that she is asking us here, already, to think about what it could mean for her to declare that she “is” a woman or to define what a woman “is.” In what follows her warning about how to read Epimenides’ paradox, Beauvoir claims that to “be” a man or a woman is not to partake of some “mysterious essence” that forces you to behave one way or the other. Rather, it’s to be in a certain “situation.” This situation, while it may encourage or even predispose a person to behave in one manner or another does not confine him or her to any particular way of being in the world. And to “be” in a certain situation implies neither that you are utterly constrained by its parameters nor that it’s the only situation you are in. Beauvoir needs to make this point in part because at the beginning of the passage she has said that both men and women are both “judge and party to the case.” Here Beauvoir is alluding to a remark she’s quoted approvingly earlier in the introduction, one made by a man she identifies as “a little-known feminist of the seventeenth century,” namely, François Poulain de la Barre: “All that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party to the lawsuit.”15 (Beauvoir in fact uses this line as one of two epigraphs to the first book of The Second Sex, both of which are deleted in the English edition of the book.) In claiming that it is not only men but women, too, who are “judge and party to the case,” then, Beauvoir is casting suspicion on the idea that women are, as women, inherently more qualified than men to take on “the woman question.” But via her reference to Epimenides she observes that to “be” party to the case does not necessarily mean that one is incapable of being a good judge, too.
Now, what is required of a good judge is what Beauvoir calls “impartiality,” something that she identifies as a luxury. This is her way of identifying philosophy itself—which, at least since Descartes, has prided itself on its impartiality—as something that is, for women, at any rate, a luxury. Some fortunate women, she is saying, are in an overall position, an overall situation, to be impartial—to do philosophy; and when she adds that “we even feel the necessity to do so” she is suggesting that women in such a situation actually feel something like called to philosophy—that is, they feel that their philosophizing, given their situations, is called for. In Beauvoir’s case, it is her philosophical training—or, more specifically, the material conditions afforded her in part because of and through this training—that distinguishes her particular situation from that of women who are less favorably placed to write a book like The Second Sex. As an agrégée in Philosophy (that is, someone with the highest possible certification, equivalent to that required for a doctorate, in the subject), Beauvoir was guaranteed a position in the French secondary-school system for the rest of her life, which meant that unlike the vast majority of women in her day she could count on lifelong financial independence.16 But more than this: Beauvoir’s achievement allowed her to belong, as something like a peer, and to be recognized as belonging to a circle of similarly achieving men—I mean not only the author of the hugely influential Being and Nothingness and his cohort but also the historical circle of men preoccupied with philosophical problems.17 But of course this admission did not erase the fact of Beauvoir’s being a woman. Despite her being in a position to indulge the luxury of her “detachment,” she writes, she and others like her “know the feminine world more intimately that men because we have our roots there. We grasp more immediately what the fact of being female means for a human being, and we are more concerned to know it” (xxxiii–xxxiv, TM; LDS 1:29–30).
I am suggesting, in effect, that Beauvoir is declaring herself to be well placed to pose the questions she is posing in The Second Sex because her situation comprises that of “being” a woman and that of “being” a philosopher, where this is to be understood as a declaration of a certain sense of being split—or, if you like, ambiguous. And on her analysis of what it is to “be” a woman, in which one’s being an individual is at odds with one’s biological destiny, the implication is that her existence as a woman philosopher is, as it were, doubly ambiguous. That this situation has its advantages, its own economy of fertility, is attested to by the very existence of The Second Sex. (That it has its disadvantages is, I would argue, what accounts for that existence.) If Beauvoir accuses both men and women of attempting to avoid recognizing that women, like men, are fundamentally “for-themselves,” she is able to articulate this claim only from within her own sense of being split, of being, specifically, a woman philosopher. She needs, to put it another way, the resources of both her philosophical powers and her experience as a woman to understand why human beings oppress one another and allow themselves to be oppressed on the basis of their sex. This is not to say that a man (or a differently placed woman, for that matter) could not have arrived at something like Beauvoir’s picture of the situation between men and women. It is to suggest how Beauvoir herself came to require a reconceptualization of the line between the ordinary and the philosophical that most people are inclined not to question.
In The Second Sex Beauvoir comes to be able to articulate Hegel’s achievement in the master-slave dialectic—an achievement the full implications of which, she at least implicitly suggests, it was not open to Hegel himself to recognize—as one of showing the human being’s sense of herself in the world to be a function of her “being-for-others.” That human beings, on Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel, harbor a “fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness” is not some brute fact about how people are hard-wired; rather, the experience of freedom, when it takes the form of a sense of the loss of the world, inclines people to attempt to objectify themselves in the eyes of others, to try to attain steadfast connections with the world by asking others to affirm that one “is,” for all times and places, whatever it is one fancies oneself to be. (This would mean that the “fundamental hostility” that Beauvoir says we all bear against each other need not take an overt, frankly hostile form.) In certain situations—notably, that of men vis-à-vis women—the attempt to get the other to objectify you is driven by a desire to affirm that you are essentially a free being, that is, the desire that drives the beings in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. In other situations—notably, that of women vis-à-vis men—the attempt to get the other to objectify you is driven by a desire to affirm that you are essentially not a free being.
And when these attempts are made by man and woman vis-à-vis one another, they do not take the form of demands or claims. (I am therefore arguing, contra Lundgren-Gothlin, that neither men nor women “demand” recognition from one another.) This is because women are already poised, for the reasons I’ve discussed above, reasons having to do with their experience as little girls, to reflect back to men what they wish to see of themselves; and men are already poised for the same sorts of reasons to treat women as the mirrors they have good reason to wish them to be. In their relationships with one another, then, neither men nor women risk their lives. “In [woman’s] eyes,” Beauvoir writes, “man incarnates the Other, as she does for the man; but this Other seems to her to be on the plane of the essential, and with reference to him she sees herself as the inessential” (329). For both men and women then, man is a subject, is in-himself for-himself, and woman is an object, pure in-itself. And there is nothing internal to their relationship that has the power to make the bad faith of their conceptions of themselves (insofar as they are men and women) intolerable—no contradiction capable of making the relationship productively dialectical.
But this is not to imply that, even given the way things now stand between Man and Woman, an individual man and an individual woman cannot have a relationship characterized by what Beauvoir has identified as the hallmarks of “reciprocal recognition,” namely, friendship and generosity. In particular, as Debra Bergoffen has stressed, Beauvoir suggests that such a relationship may be achieved in an erotic context.18 At the end of a chapter called “Sexual Initiation,” part of the first section of the second book of The Second Sex, after trying to show that her first heterosexual experience is often a disastrous experience for a young woman, Beauvoir writes that the “normal and happy flowering of feminine eroticism” requires that
woman succeed in surmounting her passivity and in establishing with her partner a relationship of reciprocity. The asymmetry of male and female eroticism creates insoluble problems as long as there is a battle of the sexes. They can easily be solved [se trancher] when the woman feels in the man at the same time desire and respect. If he desires her in her flesh all the while recognizing her liberty, she finds herself [se retrouve] the essential at the moment at which she makes herself an object; she remains free in the submission to which she consents. Thus, the lovers can know, each in his or her manner, a common jouissance. Pleasure is felt by each partner as being his or her own, all the while having its source in the other. The words receive and give exchange their senses: joy is gratitude, pleasure, tenderness. Under a concrete and carnal form reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in the sharpest consciousness of the other and of the self. (401, TM; LDS 2:189)
Bergoffen places the highest importance on this passage because she reads it as evidence that a central achievement of The Second Sex is Beauvoir’s development of a “philosophy of the erotic.” But on my reading what’s most important about this passage is that, for starters, it confirms that Beauvoir in contradistinction to Sartre believes that reciprocal recognition is possible and that it can take the form of (at least) carnal love. More important, this passage reveals that what is required for reciprocal recognition on Beauvoir’s view is the willingness and the wherewithal to make oneself both subject and object in the other’s eyes. This is an absolutely crucial point. If I am right in reading Beauvoir this way, it means that she is not making the point she’s widely believed to make, namely, that men are subjects and women are objects and that women’s “liberation” requires that women become subjects (often read to mean that men are the standard to which women have to rise). Rather, I am arguing, Beauvoir is claiming that both women and men must learn how to be simultaneously both subjects and objects.
But how are we to do this? We have seen already that the way boys and men attempt to become in-itself-for-itself requires a certain persistent self-deception. We have also seen that, on Beauvoir’s analysis, women are tempted by incentives not to desire their own subjectivity. In the passage I’ve just quoted, Beauvoir seems to be suggesting that under the right conditions erotic love can induce both men and women to act toward each other in good faith. These conditions, Beauvoir specifies in what follows this passage, are constituted by the specifics of an individual woman’s situation as well as by “her social and economic situation as a whole” (402). But why erotic love, exactly? Beauvoir’s answer is that “the erotic experience is one of those that discloses to human beings in the most poignant way the ambiguity of their condition. In it they experience themselves as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as subject” (402, TM; LDS 2:190). Bergoffen as I understand her reads Beauvoir here to be declaring that erotic love provides us with the paradigm for the achievement of recognition between men and women. On my reading, Beauvoir’s point is that even under the current circumstances, when men and women are systematically encouraged to shirk their existential freedom, erotic love with a person of the opposite sex can, under the right conditions, encourage them to assume it. This point depends on a claim the status of which, I take it, is itself ambiguous: that in the best instances of erotic love human beings find themselves capable of bearing up under, or even reveling in, the experience of their own ambiguity.19 I claim that the status of this claim is itself ambiguous because it seems to me to be based on an authority that is not properly philosophical (not something that could be, or could obviously be, backed up by an argument) and not properly empirical (not something based on some psychological or sociological study). Rather, it is the product of the authority Beauvoir finds herself able to arrogate to herself as a woman philosophizing.
That certain experiences of heterosexual erotic love provide glimpses of what reciprocal recognition between men and women could look like is further affirmed by Beauvoir’s suggesting in the same context that what is required is that each lover, and particularly the woman, claim his or her “dignity as a transcendent and free subject, all the while assuming his or her carnal condition.” And this, she warns, “is a difficult enterprise, full of risk” (402, TM; LDS 2:190). I read this to be specifying a way for men and women to risk their lives with one another—that is, to undertake what I have argued Beauvoir deems necessary for a dialectic between men and women to inaugurate itself. On this interpretation, to risk one’s life according to Beauvoir is equivalent to assuming one’s freedom. More specifically, it is to do so in the context of accepting one’s own ambiguity, that is, accepting the fact that even as one lacks a stable connection with the world one is bound to find oneself fixed in the eyes of the other. This is something that in Beauvoir’s view both men and women have failed to do, at least vis-à-vis one another. And it is here that women actually can be seen to have an advantage over men, as Hegel’s slave at a certain juncture can be seen to have an advantage over the master. As Beauvoir’s writes,
It is for the woman that this conflict [between flesh and spirit, self and other] takes on the most dramatic character because she grasps herself at first as an object, because she doesn’t immediately find in pleasure a sure autonomy. … But the difficulty of the situation itself protects her against the mystifications to which the male falls prey [se laisser prendre]. He is the ready dupe of the fallacious privileges that are involved in his aggressive role and the satisfied solitude of his orgasm. He hesitates to recognize himself fully as flesh. The woman has a more authentic experience. (402, TM; LDS 2:190–191)
I read Beauvoir here to be suggesting that the man in a heterosexual erotic relationship, like Hegel’s master, has reasons to protect himself from the truth of his situation—from, in this case, his reliance on the woman’s subjectivity for his own sense of himself. The woman, like the slave, on the other hand, has less to risk and more to gain under these circumstances. Like the slave, she is in a better position to see the truth.
Unlike Bergoffen, however, I do not think that Beauvoir believes that women in erotic relationships with men, even under the best circumstances, are likely to see the truth. Indeed, in the closing lines of the chapter on amorousness toward the end of book 2 of The Second Sex, Beauvoir limns a vision of what she calls “authentic love” as though human beings have yet to experience it:
Authentic love would be founded on the reciprocal recognition of two liberties. Each of the lovers would experience himself, then, as himself and as the other. Neither would abdicate his transcendence; neither would mutilate himself. Both would disclose [dévoileraient] together values and ends in the world. For the one and the other, love would be revelation of himself through the gift of self and the enrichment of the world. (667, TM; LDS 2:579)
One way to read this passage is in juxtaposition with one in which we have seen Beauvoir articulating what is required for a person to achieve insight about himself or herself:
The drama [of the master-slave relationship] can be surmounted by the free recognition of each individual in the other [en l’autre], each posing himself and the other at the same time as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement. But friendship and generosity, which concretely realize this recognition of liberties, are not easy virtues. They are assuredly the highest accomplishment of the human being; it’s thus that he or she achieves [se trouve] his or her truth. But this truth is that of a struggle ceaselessly sketched out [ebauchée], ceaselessly abolished. It requires that a human being at each instant master herself [se surmonte]. (140, TM; LDS 1:238)
In this second passage, which, again, is part of the long rendering of Hegel that inaugurates the “Myths” section of book 1 of The Second Sex, Beauvoir claims, first, that mutual recognition requires that each individual pose both himself or herself and the other individual as object and as subject. This “posing” (or, to use the English translation of Fichte’s word, “positing”) of oneself and the other, something that Beauvoir claims provides each person with her or his “truth,” in turn is said to require the virtues of friendship and generosity. And finally the attainment of these virtues according to Beauvoir requires a ceaseless struggle to master oneself. One way of putting what strikes me as problematic about Bergoffen’s reading of Beauvoir is that this idea of a ceaseless struggle seems to have dropped out.
I asked in chapter 6 what this struggle might look like. Beauvoir’s analysis of men and women suggests that it takes the form of battling your desire to shirk your freedom, a desire Beauvoir suggests takes the form of a wish to enslave yourself to a fixed picture of who you are and how you are connected with the world. This is a desire, Beauvoir claims, that culture itself, as it is incarnated in particular men and women, works ceaselessly to cultivate. So perhaps the “ceaseless struggle” to which Beauvoir refers is, after all, to take place at least in part on the sociopolitical battlefield. One can imagine Beauvoir suggesting—as numerous feminists in her wake have done—that what’s necessary for men and women to systematically treat each other in the spirit of friendship and generosity is that we transform our social practices—the way we parent our children, for example, or the way we decide what’s true and false.20 Indeed, in the conclusion to The Second Sex Beauvoir does claim that for women’s situation to change, there must be changes in “laws, institutions, customs, public opinion, and the whole social context” (725). It is especially crucial, she argues, that women’s economic condition, and in particular their opportunities as workers, be improved; until such improvement brings about “the moral, social, cultural, and other consequences that it promises and requires,” Beauvoir says flatly, “the new woman cannot appear” (725). This is at least in part because Beauvoir, again, on my reading, appropriating Hegel, believes that coming to see oneself in all good faith as a subject requires that one do something productive in the world, that one act and create.
One could argue—and many critics of Beauvoir have—that taking care of a home and bearing and raising children constitutes productive work, so that in her implication that genuine work takes place only in the public sphere Beauvoir is once again betraying her “masculinism.” But I submit that Beauvoir’s problem with homemaking is not that it is intrinsically any less or more productive or satisfying than any other kind of work but that given women’s situation as it stands it is not recognized as such. Women do not, for example, receive monetary compensation for housework. While it is true that homemakers are characteristically supported economically by their “providers,” the money the man brings into the household, even if he does give the woman a certain amount of leeway with it, is never directly or explicitly tied to the woman’s labor, per se. When a married couple divorces, it is not a foregone legal or moral conclusion that the male wage-earner ought to continue to compensate the female homemaker for her household labors, now that he is no longer living under the same roof with her. (Alimony, when it is granted, is never identified as compensation for housework, per se.) Economically, as many feminists have observed in the last thirty years, the work women do in the home is invisible. In his articulation of the master-slave dialectic, Hegel claims that because the slave is doing productive work—work, interestingly enough, that, given Hegel’s description of it looks for all the world like what we call housework—and because the slave has experienced the fear of death, he (unlike the master) is in a position to see the truth of himself as for-himself. Beauvoir’s view seems to be that one only comes to be in this position if the sort of work that one does is recognized as genuine work by the culture in which one labors—as that of Hegel’s slave, like that of Beauvoir’s woman, is not. But for “slave’s work” or “women’s work” to be recognized as genuinely creative labor, the slave/woman will have to be recognized as a genuinely creative being—as, that is, a subject. This means, effectively, that for the slave/woman’s productive work to have the power (along with the fear of death) to move the dialectic along, recognition of herself as for-itself must already have taken place. But if this is the case, then it’s hard to see how improvement of women’s economic condition could inaugurate the right kind of change in her situation, since it looks as though this change is itself necessary for the improvement of women’s economic condition.
So then: What is necessary for a change in women’s situation? Beauvoir claims, again in the conclusion to The Second Sex, that oppression itself puts pressure on existing social structures to evolve. In the case of the oppression of women by men, Beauvoir says, this pressure can take either of two forms. The first form is to be found in circumstances in which the oppression of women is crushing. In such circumstances, Beauvoir suggests, individual women at various times will find that they cannot bear their imprisonment in their immanence. A woman in such circumstances will rebel by attempting to bring her jailer, the man, into her immanent space so that the prison “will be confounded with the world and she will suffer no longer from being enclosed in it” (717, TM; LDS 2:644). The man, of course, will resist, thereby creating what Beauvoir calls “a state of war” (717). And because the man is more powerful than the woman, he is likely to win the battle. But there is a second way that oppression puts pressure on social structures to change, a way Beauvoir claims is dominant “today,” when there are chinks in the prison walls and women are able to see the advantages of being actors in the world. Now, “instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavors to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence” (717). Men feel this desire for emancipation as a threat to their sovereignty, Beauvoir says, which forces women to take “an aggressive attitude” (717). Consequently, “two transcendences confront each other [s’affronter]; instead of mutually recognizing one another, each liberty wants to dominate the other” (718, TM; LDS 2:645).
Here, I submit, we find an allusion to the Hegelian “fight to the death” as well as to Sartre’s appropriation of this moment in Hegel—that is, specifically, to Sartre’s identification of the desire to dominate the other as fundamental to all human relationships. But Beauvoir in effect rejects Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel when she claims that the confrontation that oppression under certain circumstances puts into play actually takes place within each person. She writes, toward the end of the conclusion of The Second Sex,
In these combats in which they believe themselves to be confronting each other, it’s against himself that each one battles, projecting into his partner this part of himself that he repudiates. Instead of living the ambiguity of his condition, each tries to force the other to bear the abjection of it and to reserve for himself its honor. If, however, both would assume the ambiguity with a lucid modesty, correlative to an authentic pride, they would meet each other as fellows [semblables] and would live the erotic drama in friendship. (728, TM; LDS 2:658)
So instead of accepting Sartre’s idea that the struggle against the other is both inevitable and interminable, Beauvoir is claiming that men and women can get beyond it if they can come to see, and to accept, that they are “projecting” a part of themselves onto the other. Specifically, in accordance with the reading of Beauvoir I have been laying out in this chapter, I think she is claiming that what a person projects onto the other is his or her own sense of not having a fixed relationship with the world—of, to put the point positively, being free. In the encounter with the other I am tempted to see not myself but the other as free: free, in particular, to turn me into an object. I am further tempted to try to get the other to use this freedom to make of me an object whose fixed relationship with the world is the one I covet for myself, whether that be, paradoxically enough, a relationship of freedom (as in the case of men) or of bondage (as in the case of women). Regarding the other solely in terms of how he or she fixes me in his or her gaze is, of course, a way of understanding what Freud means by narcissism. This means that on Beauvoir’s view what is necessary in order to go beyond Sartre’s picture is the recognition and foregoing of a certain temptation to narcissism.
Beauvoir’s rejection of Sartre’s bleak picture of human relations turns on seeing the encounter with the other not as inevitably condemning one to an interminable struggle with the other but as an opportunity to grasp two important truths: about oneself, namely, that one is fundamentally “ambiguous”; and about the other, specifically, that he or she is not just a mirror. The idea that there is an opportunity here is absent in Sartre, but it plays an important role in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Hegel, you may recall, claims that in the encounter between two subjectively self-certain self-consciousnesses, a being initially does not “see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self” (para. 179). And what a being sees in the other’s eyes, Hegel says, is itself as other, so that the encounter with the other is what in fact reveals to the self (what, as I claimed in chapter 3, both he and Beauvoir call) its ambiguity (as between being for-itself and in-itself). In the master-slave dialectic, this sense of ambiguity is unbearable, and it is what drives the self to struggle against the other for mastery. What is desired on Hegel’s view, again, is that the other recognize you as being essentially “for-yourself.” But on Beauvoir’s view, I am arguing, this is simply one form that the temptation to narcissism can take—and, in the case of men’s relationships with women, characteristically takes. For her, merely getting the other to confirm that you are “for-yourself” does not count as genuine recognition; and she further believes, as I have argued above, that this confirmation is often granted (that is, women grant it to men) in the absence of any “demand” for it, per se. What is required, on Beauvoir’s view, for genuine recognition to occur is that a person “assume” his or her ambiguity, which is at the same time to allow the other his or her otherness. The first step in this process has to be a willingness to see and accept that the struggle with the other is in fact a cover for the struggle within oneself—the struggle, that is, against one’s own sense of being ambiguous, which I have characterized as being fueled by a fear of one’s freedom, understood as entailing a loss of a sense of a secure relationship to the world.
This insight and acceptance requires, first and foremost, that a person stop warding off the truth of the other’s genuine otherness. For the locus of the struggle to shift from your encounter with the other to your encounter with yourself—for you to see that your most fundamental nemesis, as it were, is not in fact the other but, rather, yourself—you have to come to recognize the other as something more than his or her gaze.21 I am suggesting here, this means, that on Beauvoir’s view my recognition of the other (where this, I am now specifying, is to be understood as my recognizing the genuine otherness of the other) is not only necessary to but is even the first step in my getting the other to recognize me. But what is what I am calling “recognizing the genuine otherness of the other” supposed to look like? Beauvoir does not say much about this, at least not directly. It follows from my analysis of her appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, however, that at least a part of recognizing the otherness of the other would have to consist in foregoing the attempt to manipulate the other person’s judgment of me—foregoing, in other words, the demand that the other recognize me solely as I wish to be recognized. But to forego this demand is to make room for the other’s free judgment of me, so that foregoing the demand can be characterized as inviting this free judgment.
How to do this? I want to suggest that even though Beauvoir doesn’t address this question explicitly, she provides a powerful response to it in the form of The Second Sex itself. This is a book that Beauvoir finds herself having to compose, let us recall, in order to be able to, as she puts it, write about herself. She finds, to her astonishment, that the first thing that she has to say about herself is that she is a woman, and that she does not know what this means—that is, what it means to declare yourself to be a woman as well as what it means to discover that this is the first thing that you have to say about yourself. The Second Sex can therefore be read as a record of this woman’s preparation for recollecting or recounting herself. What’s remarkable is that this preparation does not take place in private. Beauvoir finds that in order to say anything specific about who she is, she must first recount woman to (other) women, and to men. In doing this she is not taking, or even pretending to take, the vantage point of an expert. She’s writing as a woman (even as she is exploring what this could mean). Her authority stands or falls entirely on her authorship, so that to publicize the words that make up The Second Sex is inevitably to stake claims solely on the basis of this authorship, these words.
In effect, I am suggesting, in having everything rest on the reception of her authorship, Beauvoir is staking herself. And it is this staking of herself, through her words, that is to count as an answer to the question of how genuine mutual recognition is to be achieved. Beauvoir offers herself as the object of other people’s judgments in inviting them to take up and evaluate her words. This is to say that not just any old words will do; Beauvoir’s words are “fighting words” in the sense that they are intended to provoke the judgments of her readers. But these words are equally offered as an expression of her subjectivity, which means that in and through them she is making an attempt to constitute herself as “for-herself.” The enterprise of writing, when carried out in good faith, can thus be seen as a certain kind of risk-taking: when you write from the heart, as it were, then you express yourself as a subject (a creator, an actor) precisely by taking the risk of turning yourself into an object of the other’s judgment.
I am suggesting that in her authorship of The Second Sex Beauvoir, far from setting out to petrify the “other” in order to shore up some private sense of herself, as Sartre suggests in Being and Nothingness we inevitably do in our relationships with others, is offering up her writing as an invitation to the other to express himself or herself as a subject, as a judge of her words.22 In turn, this judgment, if again it is put forth publicly and in good faith, will constitute both an expression of the other’s subjectivity (which, à la Sartre, Beauvoir will experience as such to the extent that the critic’s words move her, one way or another) and an object of Beauvoir’s further judgment, of her own (further) criticism. This, then, is a picture of the Hegelian struggle for recognition as taking place at the highest reaches of human conversa-tion.23 Mutual recognition is to be found, it follows, not in some definitive words that the other can pronounce on your behalf but in the very willingness to continue talking. This means that in a sense recognition is never final, never complete. At the very least, it is withdrawn the moment the conversation breaks down.
For Beauvoir the idea of inviting the best kind of human conversation, by subjecting oneself to criticism, is linked with the idea of pleasure, in much the same way that erotic fantasies of give-and-take are so associated. On my reading of Beauvoir, the pleasure imagined or experienced in conversation is not a goal, exactly, of that conversation but, rather, a mark of its success.24 Often, as Beauvoir certainly knew, the pleasures of conversation are to be had at the cost of enormous pain: the pain of misunderstandings, of failure to find the words one needs, of discursive impasses, of vulnerability, of inadequacy, of self-loathing, of anger. Needless to say, it is a feature of human conversation that it can derail at any moment—and in actuality of course does, and all the time. All of a sudden, or slowly, over time, I might find that I don’t know or understand you the way I thought I did, or you me—or each of us ourselves. We can’t pin each other, or sometimes even ourselves, down. This is because the struggle to keep the conversation going is the struggle to come to terms with the fact that what it means to be a human being is that neither my nor the other’s relationship to the world is ever fixed, both because human beings inherently are not simply objects and because we are constantly exposed to the (varying) judgmental eyes of different others. To continue the conversation requires foregoing precisely the sort of narcissism that Sartre depicts so cannily in No Exit, a narcissism that demands that I find mirrored in your judgments of me a static image of myself in which I can take pride. On Sartre’s view, of course, this narcissism is what drives my very encounter with the Other, so that the fight-to-the-death, the struggle, is essentially between my narcissism and yours. But on Beauvoir’s view the essential struggle is with myself: I struggle to let go of a fixed picture of myself, to risk letting the other teach me who I am. To the extent we can allow the other to play such a role, our various failures of conversation are to be seen as moments revealing a certain truth, moments in which we come to grips with the fantasies we customarily construct as a way of avoiding confrontation with the fact of our ambiguity. The idea of exposing our fantasies to ourselves in our struggles with ourselves is a major motif throughout The Second Sex.
This is also a picture, then, of a world in which something other than Sartre’s solipsistic sort of objectivity is possible. Recall that for Sartre, “objectivity” can consist only in the state of feeling oneself trapped, thinglike, in the Other’s Look—a state, I argued in chapter 4, characterized by narcissism and paranoia. On Sartre’s view, in order to be a human being, I must will what the skeptic fears: that you and I be radically separate and that it be impossible for us genuinely to share a world. But on Beauvoir’s view, what marks us as human, as capable of subjectivity, is our risking ourselves (as in-itself, as it were) in order to create a world for ourselves with others. For her, then, to be objective is to undertake this risk. We do so by investing ourselves in language, in employing the signs we share publicly, in taking responsibility for co-authoring the world. As I put it toward the end of chapter 3, this investment demands foregoing another, namely, the investment in one’s privacy (figured as a wish to automatically be transparent to oneself and others), a foregoing Beauvoir regards as demanding an acceptance of oneself as ambiguous and one that she takes to be a prerequisite of any morally productive form of human self-consciousness. In her case it is the very act of writing a book such as The Second Sex that constitutes Beauvoir’s willingness for publicity and specifically for attempting to forge a world in which an ethical form of cohabitation between men and women is possible.
The difference between this world and the world in which we now live, Beauvoir suggests, will be that men and women, males and females, find themselves in situations in which the temptation to privacy, to narcissism and distrust and skepticism, is outweighed by the temptation to what she calls friendship and generosity. Crucially, forging a genuinely new world will probably demand a drastic change in the material circumstances of many people. It’s hard to take an interest in authoring the world if it is simply crushing you.25 But even under conditions of widespread plenty, people will always wish for what Beauvoir calls rest, for an escape from the unceasing demands of self-scrutiny and self-exposure. These demands, she shows in The Second Sex, are the demands of morality. They are demands that we recognize the divisiveness we produce through our obsession with dividing ourselves into categories, such as sex, and that we recognize this divisiveness itself as stemming from our wish to avoid the fact of our fundamental ambiguity, an ambiguity that is both the condition of and the stumbling block to our being able to inhabit a world together. Beauvoir had this concept, or at least this word, ambiguity from early on in her writing career. But it took her being overcome by a sense of her own ambiguity, the contradiction she felt between the sense of herself as a potential author of an autobiography and as what is called a woman, to find her voice with the concept philosophically. Why she found conducting a philosophical investigation of this sense of ambiguity unavoidable is perhaps, in the end, simply a matter of her tastes and passions. Personally, I like to think it was women’s intuition.