Levinas’s account of feminine alterity is actually a man’s point-of-view claim

Evidence

I think that the absolutely contrary contrary, whose contrariety is in no way affected by the relationship that can be established between it and its correlative, the contrariety that permits its terms to remain absolutely other, is the feminine. Sex is not some specific difference … Neither is the difference between the sexes a contradiction … Neither is the difference between the sexes the duality of two complementary terms, for two complementary terms presuppose a preexisting whole … [A]lterity is accomplished in the feminine. The term is on the same level as, but in meaning opposed to, consciousness.” I suppose Mr. Levinas is not forgetting that woman also is consciousness for herself. But it is striking that he deliberately adopts a man’s point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of the subject and the object. When he writes that woman is mystery, he assumes that she is mystery for man. So this apparently objective description is in fact an affirmation of masculine privilege. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 68

Categorization

• XREF: Beauvoir turns Levinas’s phenomenological claim back on itself — the same move she makes against Hegel’s master-slave and against Sartre’s account of the Other. — connects to: Man feminizes the ideal Other because woman is the tangible figure of alterity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383; Men’s perspective passes as neutral truth while women’s is read as gendered — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 53; Levinas made the Self-Other relationship philosophy’s central concept — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 625
• DEEPTHINKING: The core insight that a putatively neutral philosophical description can covertly encode masculine privilege, treating woman as mystery-for-man while ignoring woman as consciousness-for-herself.

Broader Connections

• Man feminizes the ideal Other because woman is the tangible figure of alterity #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383
• Men’s perspective passes as neutral truth while women’s is read as gendered #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 53
• Levinas made the Self-Other relationship philosophy’s central concept #qualifies (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 625