Conscious efforts to appear feminine fail because spontaneity cannot be willed.

Evidence

The more the intellectual woman fears failure, the more zealously she will try; but this conscious zeal remains an activity and falls short of its goal. She makes mistakes like those blamed on menopause: she tries to deny her intelligence as an aging woman tries to deny her age; she dresses like a girl, she overdoes the flowers, the frills, and the loud materials; she carries childish and wide-eyed mimicry too far. She romps, skips, prattles, acts overly casual, scatterbrained, and impulsive. But she looks like those actors who, failing to feel the emotion that would relax certain muscles, purposely contract antagonistic ones instead, lowering their eyelids or the corners of their mouths instead of letting them drop; thus the intelligent woman, wishing to appear uninhibited, stiffens instead. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1922

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the anti-actor metaphor and bad-faith structure from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. — connects to: Autonomous self-awareness structurally blocks feminine submission and spontaneous charm. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1922; Rejecting femininity cannot yield neutrality; every rejection enacts a positive position — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1921

Broader Connections

• Autonomous self-awareness structurally blocks feminine submission and spontaneous charm. #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1922
• Rejecting femininity cannot yield neutrality; every rejection enacts a positive position #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1921