Incompatible myths of woman coexist because each claims to be the whole truth

Evidence

In concrete reality, women manifest themselves in many different ways; but each of the myths built around woman tries to summarize her as a whole; each is supposed to be unique; the consequence of this is a multiplicity of incompatible myths, and men are perplexed before the strange inconsistencies of the idea of Femininity; as every woman enters into many of these archetypes, each of which claims to incarnate its Truth alone, men also find the same old confusion before their companions as did the Sophists, who had difficulty understanding how a person could be light and dark at the same time. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 653

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the structural origin of the contradictory archetypes of Femininity: each myth claims totality, so they multiply incompatibly.
• XREF: Connects to Beauvoir’s philosophical apparatus of immanence/transcendence from earlier chapters and to the Other thesis. — connects to: Myth creation requires subject status women have never possessed — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 321; Woman as myth is a fluctuating, contradictory object that evades fixed definition — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 322; Each man shapes the myth of woman to reflect his own self-positioning (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Partial perspectives each capture truth and yet miss the whole #expands (0.88) — , A Year of World Stories, 2242