Gender conflict persists because each sex is its own enemy’s accomplice in bad faith.
Evidence
The conflict will last as long as men and women do not recognize each other as peers, that is, as long as femininity is perpetuated as such; which of them is the most determined to maintain it? The woman who frees herself from it nevertheless wants to conserve its prerogatives; and the man then demands that she assume its limitations. “It is easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other,” says Montaigne. Meting out blame and approbation is useless. In fact, the vicious circle is so difficult to break here because each sex is victim both of the other and of itself; between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure freedom, an agreement could easily be found, especially as this war does not benefit anyone; but the complexity of this whole business comes from the fact that each camp is its enemy’s accomplice; the woman pursues a dream of resignation, the man a dream of alienation; inauthenticity does not pay: each one blames the other for the unhappiness brought on himself by taking the easy way out; what the man and the woman hate in each other is the striking failure of their own bad faith or their own cowardice. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1970
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The culminating diagnosis of the vicious circle — each camp is the enemy’s accomplice, hating in the other its own bad faith — is among the most concentrated statements of Beauvoir’s gendered-existentialist thesis.
- DEFINE: Latches the existentialist category ‘bad faith’ onto the feminist analysis of gender relations, a key definitional move for the reader’s Continental foundations.
- XREF: Resonates with Sartre’s account of bad faith in Being and Nothingness, and with the recursive ‘each forgives the other’s fault’ dynamic in Naqvi or other fiction of mutual accusation. — connects to: Erotic combat between the sexes is really each person fighting their own repudiated self — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1978; Goodwill on both sides intensifies rather than resolves gendered conflict — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1974; Bad faith’s possibility constrains what kind of being man must be. (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Goodwill on both sides intensifies rather than resolves gendered conflict
#expands(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1974 - Erotic combat between the sexes is really each person fighting their own repudiated self
#corroborates(0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1978 - Being-for-others generates perpetual conflict as each self objectifies the other
#corroborates(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1462 - Bad faith requires the for-itself to both be and not be what it is
#corroborates(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 313 - Bad faith emerges when one acknowledges facts but refuses their imposed conclusion.
#corroborates(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 307 - Bad faith’s possibility constrains what kind of being man must be.
#expands(0.75)