The mirror assimilates to the self only for woman, whose beauty is passive immanence

Evidence

Male beauty is a sign of transcendence, that of woman has the passivity of immanence: the latter alone is made to arrest man’s gaze and can thus be caught in the immobile trap of the mirror’s silvering; man who feels and wants himself to be activity and subjectivity does not recognize himself in his immobile image; it does not appeal to him, since the man’s body does not appear to him as an object of desire; while the woman, knowing she is and making herself object, really believes she is seeing herself in the mirror: passive and given, the reflection is a thing like herself; and as she covets feminine flesh, her flesh, she enlivens the inert qualities she sees with her admiration and desire. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1787

Categorization

• DEFINE: Grounds immanence/transcendence in concrete bodily self-gaze: male beauty as transcendence, female beauty as arrested passivity.
• XREF: Mirror-double relation via Otto Rank connects to Lacan’s mirror stage and existentialist accounts of self-objectification. — connects to: Being constantly mirrored makes the lesbian unable to live unreflectively.; Mirror ecstasy comes from feeling oneself a singular subject rather than generic flesh — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1795; Lack of beauty frees a woman from self-objectifying and toward pure intellectual life. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Females uniquely experience their own bodies as alienated otherness #corroborates (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 110
• Lack of beauty frees a woman from self-objectifying and toward pure intellectual life. #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950
• Narcissistic women use audiences rather than mirrors to confirm their self-image #complicates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1813
• Even self-directed feminine adornment requires an external gaze #qualifies (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1574
• The mirror stage explains why images grant and destabilize selfhood #expands (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 84