Swift’s disgust at feminine artifice missed that men demand both animality and contrivance

Evidence

Swift denounced this mystification in his famous ode to Celia; he railed against the coquette’s paraphernalia, pointing out with disgust her body’s animal servitudes; he was doubly wrong to become indignant; because man wants woman at the same time to be animal and plant and that she hide behind a fabricated armature; he loves her emerging from the waves and from a high-fashion house, naked and dressed, naked beneath her clothes, exactly as he finds her in the human universe. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 351

Categorization

• XREF: Beauvoir’s reading of Swift as doubly wrong prefigures later feminist critiques of the male gaze demanding contradictory ideals. — connects to: Femininity is a negative imprint of masculine domination, not a natural essence — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 110; Femininity is an artificial, inculcated product rather than a natural instinct — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1037

Broader Connections

• Femininity is an artificial, inculcated product rather than a natural instinct #responds-to (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1037
• Femininity is a negative imprint of masculine domination, not a natural essence #expands (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 110