Beauvoir’s Second Sex reuses Sartre’s slimy imagery to describe feminine sexuality

Evidence

Feminine heat is the soft throbbing of a shell… . Woman lies in wait like the carnivorous plant; she is the bog in which insects and children are swallowed up. She is absorption, suction, humus, she is pitch and glue, an immobile appeal, insinuating and viscous. (DS II, 167; SS, 407) Th ese sections are well known and have oft en been criticized for their misogynous undertones. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 386

Categorization

• SHARE: A striking concrete instance of Beauvoir borrowing Sartre’s slimy/visqueux phenomenological vocabulary for female sexuality.
• XREF: Direct link to the central influence thesis — the passage is the load-bearing textual evidence for the Riddle of Influence. — connects to: Beauvoir synthesized Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, exceeding both, to write the Second Sex — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 63; Beauvoir reframed Sartre’s alienating male Look as a reciprocal female gaze — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 277; Sartre’s writer-reader reciprocity mirrors Beauvoir’s happy couple in The Second Sex. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 281 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre’s writer-reader reciprocity mirrors Beauvoir’s happy couple in The Second Sex. #expands (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 281
• Beauvoir’s transcendence concept is largely non-Sartrean, especially in The Second Sex #qualifies (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 578