Being constantly mirrored makes the lesbian unable to live unreflectively.

Evidence

Male beauty is a sign of transcendence, that of woman has the passivity of immanence: the latter alone is made to arrest man’s gaze and can thus be caught in the immobile trap of the mirror’s silvering; man who feels and wants himself to be activity and subjectivity does not recognize himself in his immobile image; it does not appeal to him, since the man’s body does not appear to him as an object of desire; while the woman, knowing she is and making herself object, really believes she is seeing herself in the mirror: passive and given, the reflection is a thing like herself; and as she covets feminine flesh, her flesh, she enlivens the inert qualities she sees with her admiration and desire. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1787 (#expands, via linked claim)

So long as we considered the for-itself in its isolation, we were able to maintain that the unreflective consciousness can not be inhabited by a self; the self was given in the form of an object and only for the reflective consciousness. But here the self comes to haunt the unreflective consciousness. Now the unreflective consciousness is a consciousness of the world. Therefore for the unreflective consciousness the self exists on the level of objects in the world; this role which devolved only on the reflective consciousness—the making-present of the self—belongs now to the unreflective consciousness. Only the reflective consciousness has the self directly for an object. The unreflective consciousness does not apprehend the person directly or as its object; the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other. This means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 727 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The mirror assimilates to the self only for woman, whose beauty is passive immanence — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1787; The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 727; Reflection aims impossibly to unify the for-itself with itself into a totality

Broader Connections

• The mirror assimilates to the self only for woman, whose beauty is passive immanence #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1787
• Reflection aims impossibly to unify the for-itself with itself into a totality #expands (0.75)
• The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness #expands (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 727