Feminine presentation is coerced self-objectification in disguise

Evidence

Modesty, a spontaneous refusal to let oneself be grasped as flesh, comes close to hypocrisy. But above all, the adolescent girl is condemned to the lie of pretending to be object, and a prestigious one, while she experiences herself as an uncertain, dispersed existence, knowing her failings. Makeup, false curls, corsets, padded bras, are lies; the face itself becomes a mask: spontaneous expressions are produced artfully, a wondrous passivity is imitated; there is nothing more surprising than suddenly discovering in the exercise of one’s feminine functions a physiognomy with which one is familiar; its transcendence denies itself and imitates immanence; one’s eyes no longer perceive, they reflect; one’s body no longer lives: it waits; every gesture and smile becomes an appeal; disarmed, available, the girl is nothing but a flower offered, a fruit to be picked. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 900

Categorization

• DEFINE: Beauvoir condenses her core apparatus here: transcendence denies itself and imitates immanence — the girl’s performed passivity is the load-bearing move of the whole book.
• XREF: The eyes-that-reflect-rather-than-perceive recalls Sartre’s look and the objectifying gaze; also prefigures later feminist film theory on women as spectacle. — connects to: Both sexes implicitly center perspective on the male, making woman the object — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 681; Seeing male dominance, not genital difference, alters a girl’s self-consciousness — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 698; Femininity is an artificial, inculcated product rather than a natural instinct — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1037 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• The female body’s shaping inverted from seduction into tactical concealment #expands (0.78) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 210
• Being objectified by another’s look constitutes an inescapable existential guilt #complicates (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 72