Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Each man shapes the myth of woman to reflect his own self-positioning

Properties2
tagsja-picks, connection_points, singleton, xref, category/connection-points
aliases@bakewell_at_2016, loc. 681, @de_beauvoir_second_1949, loc. 655, @de_beauvoir_second_1949, loc. 614

4 min read

Each man shapes the myth of woman to reflect his own self-positioning

Evidence

As she pointed out, woman is indeed ‘other’ for man — but man is not exactly ‘other’ for woman, or not in the same way. Both sexes tend to agree in taking the male as the defining case and the centre of all perspectives. Even language reinforces this, with ‘man’ and ‘he’ being the default terms in French as in English. Women try constantly to picture themselves as they would look to a male gaze. Instead of looking out to the world as it presents itself to them (like the person peering through the keyhole) they maintain a point of view in which they are the objects (like the same person after becoming aware of footsteps in the hall). This, for Beauvoir, is why women spend so much time in front of mirrors. It is also why both men and women implicitly take women to be the more sensual, the more eroticised, the more sexual sex. In theory, for a heterosexual female, men should be the sexy ones, disporting themselves for the benefit of her gaze. Yet she sees herself as the object of attraction, and the man as the person in whose eyes she glows with desirability. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 681 (#expands, via linked claim)

Very often they project the values and institutions to which they adhere onto the myth they adopt. Thus paternalism that calls for woman to stay at home defines her as sentiment, interiority, and immanence; in fact, every existent is simultaneously immanence and transcendence; when he is offered no goal, or is prevented from reaching any goal, or denied the victory of it, his transcendence falls uselessly into the past, that is, it falls into immanence; this is the lot assigned to women in patriarchy; but this is in no way a vocation, any more than slavery is the slave’s vocation. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 655 (#expands, via linked claim)

Love, that is woman, reveals the real ends of existence: beauty, happiness, the freshness of feelings and of the world. It tears man’s soul out and thus gives him possession of it; the lover experiences the same tension, the same risks, as his mistress and feels himself more authentically than during a planned career. When Julien hesitates at the base of the ladder Mathilde has set up, he puts his whole destiny into question: in that very moment, he demonstrates his true worth. It is through women, under their influence, in reaction to their behavior, that Julien, Fabrice, and Lucien learn about the world and themselves. Test, reward, judge, or friend, the woman in Stendhal is really what Hegel was once tempted to make of her: that other consciousness that, in reciprocal recognition, gives to the other subject the same truth it receives from it. The happy couple that recognizes each other in love defies the universe and time; it is sufficient in itself, it realizes the absolute. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 614 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Attitudes toward women’s flesh track how seriously men take their own death and destiny. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 364; Both sexes implicitly center perspective on the male, making woman the object — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 681; Woman’s contradictory image stems from being man’s inessential Other — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 413 (+6 more)

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