Woman’s contradictory image stems from being man’s inessential Other

Evidence

Here, then, is why woman has a double and deceptive image: she is everything he craves and everything he does not attain. She is the wise mediator between auspicious Nature and man; and she is the temptation of Nature, untamed against all reason. She is the carnal embodiment of all moral values and their opposites, from good to bad; she is the stuff of action and its obstacle, man’s grasp on the world and his failure; as such she is the source of all man’s reflection on his existence and all expression he can give of it; however, she works to divert him from himself, to make him sink into silence and death. As his servant and companion, man expects her also to be his public and his judge, to confirm him in his being; but she opposes him with her indifference, even with her mockery and her laughter. He projects onto her what he desires and fears, what he loves and what he hates. And if it is difficult to say anything about her, it is because man seeks himself entirely in her and because she is All. But she is All in that which is inessential: she is wholly the Other. And as other she is also other than herself, other than what is expected of her. Being all, she is never exactly this that she should be; she is everlasting disappointment, the very disappointment of existence that never successfully attains or reconciles itself with the totality of existents. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 413

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the chapter’s core clarification of the ‘Other’ concept: woman is ‘wholly the Other,’ inessential even while absorbing all of man’s projection.
• DEEPTHINKING: The passage that woman is the Other yet ‘other than herself, other than what is expected of her’ — never exactly this that she should be, ‘everlasting disappointment’ — is a paradigm-shifting, dense formulation of how woman’s very being is constituted as a lack that cannot be attained.
• XREF: Connects to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and to Sartre’s account of the gaze and of being-for-others which Beauvoir is transposing onto gender. — connects to: Both sexes implicitly center perspective on the male, making woman the object — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 681; Man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 13; Woman’s defining situation is being forced to assume herself as Other — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 64 (+28 more)

Broader Connections

• Woman’s subordinate situation makes her lovable but not genuinely equal in man’s eyes. #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1930
• Woman’s aging shame stems from being an object for man’s mediation #qualifies (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1709
• Woman embodies Nature, whose ambivalence makes her both ally and enemy to man #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 324