Woman’s disadvantaged position yields a more authentic self-knowledge than man’s.

Evidence

The erotic experience is one that most poignantly reveals to human beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as subject. Woman experiences this conflict at its most dramatic because she assumes herself first as object and does not immediately find a confident autonomy in pleasure; she has to reconquer her dignity as transcendent and free subject while assuming her carnal condition: this is a delicate and risky enterprise that often fails. But the very difficulty of her situation protects her from the mystifications by which the male lets himself be duped; he is easily deceived by the fallacious privileges that his aggressive role and satisfied solitude of orgasm imply; he hesitates to recognize himself fully as flesh. Woman has a more authentic experience of herself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1015

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Sartrean dialectic of being-for-itself vs being-for-others, and Beauvoir’s forging of that framework into feminist terms. — connects to: Woman’s otherness lets her serve as the privileged judge of men’s value — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 398; Marginalized position pushes women to seek self-realization in imagination rather than action — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1942; The worker’s alienated self-objectification grants truer knowledge of commodities than bourgeois objectivity. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 379
• DEFINE: Crystallizes the core existentialist-feminist definitions: flesh/spirit, other/subject, transcendent/free subject, carnal condition.

Broader Connections

• Marginalized position pushes women to seek self-realization in imagination rather than action #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1942