Beauvoir’s ‘Woman in Love’ chapter tacitly endorses Nietzsche’s androcentric view of love

Evidence

It is quite apparent that “Woman in Love” is a tacit acquiescence of the virulent androcentrism found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science (which Beauvoir quotes at length in that chapter): “I will never admit the claim that man and woman have equal rights in love. Th ese do not exist,” Nietzsche writes adamantly. And a little further: “Woman wants to be taken, wants someone who takes, who does not give himself away.” And he goes on to explain that woman wants to abandon herself totally, in love, but that a man who would want to do likewise would simply not be a man. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 122

Categorization

• XREF: Source-hunting into Beauvoir’s reading of Nietzsche; ties to Gay Science as an underexamined influence on Second Sex. — connects to: Beauvoir transformed phenomenological thought by exposing its patriarchal biases — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 85; Sartre’s ethic of generous love reproduced Heidegger’s dominating rather than liberating solicitude — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 144
• SEED: Essay angle: the Nietzschean substrate of Beauvoir’s Second Sex — how her feminism absorbed and qualified Gay Science’s sex essentialism.

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir transformed phenomenological thought by exposing its patriarchal biases #complicates (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 85
• Sartre’s ethic of generous love reproduced Heidegger’s dominating rather than liberating solicitude #qualifies (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 144