Montherlant redefined woman as a lack of virility and condemned autonomous women

Evidence

If Montherlant had really deflated the Eternal Feminine myth, he would have to be congratulated: women can be helped to assume themselves as human beings by denying the Woman. But he did not smash the idol, as has been shown: he converted it into a monster. He too believed in this obscure and irreducible essence: femininity; like Aristotle and Saint Thomas, he believed it was defined negatively; woman was woman through a lack of virility; that is the destiny any female individual has to undergo without being able to modify it. Whoever claims to escape it places herself on the lowest rung of the human ladder: she does not manage to become man, she gives up being woman; she is merely a pathetic caricature, a sham; that she might be a body and a consciousness does not provide her with any reality: Platonist when it suited him, Montherlant seems to believe that only the Ideas of femininity and virility possessed being; the individual who partakes of neither has only an appearance of existence. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 461

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the Aristotelian/Thomist negative definition of woman that Beauvoir elsewhere challenges; useful foundation alongside Sartre’s being/essence apparatus. — connects to: Montherlant’s myth of woman equates femininity with immanence and harm to men — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 454; Montherlant’s misogyny stems from refusing risk among peers — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 485; Montherlant’s misogyny stems from measuring the distance between male transcendence and female immanence

Broader Connections

• Montherlant’s misogyny stems from measuring the distance between male transcendence and female immanence #expands (0.88)
• Montherlant’s misogyny stems from refusing risk among peers #qualifies (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 485