Myth creation requires subject status women have never possessed

Evidence

Not positing themselves as Subject, women have not created the virile myth that would reflect their projects; they have neither religion nor poetry that belongs to them alone: they still dream through men’s dreams. They worship the gods made by males. And males have shaped the great virile figures for their own exaltation: Hercules, Prometheus, Parsifal; in the destiny of these heroes, woman has merely a secondary role. Undoubtedly, there are stylized images of man as he is in his relations with woman: father, seducer, husband, the jealous one, the good son, the bad son; but men are the ones who have established them, and they have not attained the dignity of myth; they are barely more than clichés, while woman is exclusively defined in her relation to man. The asymmetry of the two categories, male and female, can be seen in the unilateral constitution of sexual myths. Woman is sometimes designated as “sex”; it is she who is the flesh, its delights and its dangers. That for woman it is man who is sexed and carnal is a truth that has never been proclaimed because there is no one to proclaim it. The representation of the world as the world itself is the work of men; they describe it from a point of view that is their own and that they confound with the absolute truth. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 321

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly grounds the Subject/Other asymmetry in who gets to produce myth, religion, and world-representation — core analytical apparatus.
• XREF: Mirrors the Sophist/Protagorean ‘man is the measure’ point and anticipates later standpoint-feminist epistemology: those excluded from representation cannot name their own experience. — connects to: Feminine mythmaking requires leisure and distance from material necessity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 666; Incompatible myths of woman coexist because each claims to be the whole truth — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 653; Woman’s infantilization results from never having emerged as a subject before others — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1742 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Feminine mythmaking requires leisure and distance from material necessity #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 666
• Woman’s infantilization results from never having emerged as a subject before others #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1742
• Patriarchal mythology projects its own values onto woman and calls imposed immanence her nature #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 655
• Incompatible myths of woman coexist because each claims to be the whole truth #expands (0.70) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 653