Woman faces life rather than matter, so tools and technology fail her

Evidence

That means she has not learned the technology that would enable her to dominate matter; as for her, she is not fighting with matter but with life, and life cannot be mastered by tools: one can only submit to its secret laws. The world does not appear to the woman as a “set of tools” halfway between her will and her goals, as Heidegger defines it: on the contrary, it is a stubborn, indomitable resistance; it is dominated by fate and run through with mysterious caprices. No mathematics can make an equation out of this mystery of a spot of blood that changes into a human being in the mother’s womb, no machine can rush it or slow it down; she experiences the resistance of a duration that the most ingenious machines fail to divide or multiply; she experiences it in her flesh that is subjected to the rhythm of the moon, and that the years first ripen and then corrode. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1742

Categorization

• XREF: Deploys Heidegger’s ‘set of tools’ (Zeug) concept against itself — Beauvoir repurposes the analytic apparatus of Being and Time for feminist ends. — connects to: Tools disappear from awareness during successful use but surface when they fail. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 233; A woman’s tech career was dismissed despite evident professional success — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 706
• DEFINE: Contrasts woman’s relation to durational biological life against man’s mastery of inert matter, grounding her immanence.

Broader Connections

• Tools disappear from awareness during successful use but surface when they fail. #complicates (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 233