Mythic thinking declares women wrong when their reality contradicts the myth

Evidence

There are different kinds of myths. This one, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition—that is, the “division” of humanity into two categories of individuals—is a static myth; it projects into a Platonic heaven a reality grasped through experience or conceptualized from experience; for fact, value, significance, notion, and empirical law, it substitutes a transcendent Idea, timeless, immutable, and necessary. This idea escapes all contention because it is situated beyond the given; it is endowed with an absolute truth. Thus, to the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existence of women, mythic thinking opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and fixed; if the definition given is contradicted by the behavior of real flesh-and-blood women, it is women who are wrong: it is said not that Femininity is an entity but that women are not feminine. Experiential denials cannot do anything against myth. Though in a way, its source is in experience. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 652

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘static myth’ of the Eternal Feminine and how it immunizes itself against empirical refutation.
• XREF: The Eternal Feminine as unbeatable-by-evidence ideology parallels later critique of essentialism; connects to Foucauldian idea that discourse constitutes rather than describes. — connects to: Woman as myth is a fluctuating, contradictory object that evades fixed definition — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 322; Montherlant’s myth of woman equates femininity with immanence and harm to men — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 454; Incompatible myths of woman coexist because each claims to be the whole truth — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 653 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Incompatible myths of woman coexist because each claims to be the whole truth #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 653