A married woman’s coquetry seeks male confirmation rather than attachment.

Evidence

But the god, the master, must not abandon himself to the repose of immanence; it is with a hostile look that the woman contemplates this destroyed transcendence; she detests his animal inertia, this body that no longer exists for her but in itself, abandoned to a contingence whose ransom is her own contingence. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1872 (#expands, via linked claim)

Here, then, is why woman has a double and deceptive image: she is everything he craves and everything he does not attain. She is the wise mediator between auspicious Nature and man; and she is the temptation of Nature, untamed against all reason. She is the carnal embodiment of all moral values and their opposites, from good to bad; she is the stuff of action and its obstacle, man’s grasp on the world and his failure; as such she is the source of all man’s reflection on his existence and all expression he can give of it; however, she works to divert him from himself, to make him sink into silence and death. As his servant and companion, man expects her also to be his public and his judge, to confirm him in his being; but she opposes him with her indifference, even with her mockery and her laughter. He projects onto her what he desires and fears, what he loves and what he hates. And if it is difficult to say anything about her, it is because man seeks himself entirely in her and because she is All. But she is All in that which is inessential: she is wholly the Other. And as other she is also other than herself, other than what is expected of her. Being all, she is never exactly this that she should be; she is everlasting disappointment, the very disappointment of existence that never successfully attains or reconciles itself with the totality of existents. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 413 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A wife denied recognition provokes conflict to force her partner’s continuing attention — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1308; A woman needs her male lover to remain transcendent, not relapse into immanence — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1872; Woman’s contradictory image stems from being man’s inessential Other — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 413

Broader Connections

• A woman needs her male lover to remain transcendent, not relapse into immanence #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1872
• Woman’s contradictory image stems from being man’s inessential Other #expands (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 413