Women’s alleged faults arise from their enclosed condition, not innate nature

Evidence

Many of the faults for which they are reproached—mediocrity, meanness, shyness, pettiness, laziness, frivolity, and servility—simply express the fact that the horizon is blocked for them. Woman, it is said, is sensual, she wallows in immanence; but first she was enclosed in it. The slave imprisoned in the harem does not feel any morbid passion for rose jelly and perfumed baths: she has to kill time somehow; inasmuch as the woman is stifling in a dismal gynaeceum—brothel or bourgeois home—she will also take refuge in comfort and well-being; moreover, if she avidly pursues sexual pleasure, it is often because she is frustrated; sexually unsatisfied, destined to male brutality, “condemned to masculine ugliness,” she consoles herself with creamy sauces, heady wines, velvets, the caresses of water, sun, a woman friend, or a young lover. If she appears to man as such a “physical” being, it is because her condition incites her to attach a great deal of importance to her animality. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1745

Categorization

• XREF: Central inverse of the nature-vs-nurture debate, anticipating Judith Butler’s performativity and later critiques of biological essentialism. — connects to: Woman’s apparent naturalness is itself a product of history; Biologizing women’s inferiority is scientifically baseless and ethically vacuous — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 104; Adler explains woman’s inferiority complex through her total situation, not anatomy — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 124 (+9 more)
• SEED: Article angle: how every character critique of women (‘frivolous’, ‘materialistic’, ‘servile’) is really a description of a closed horizon — a template for re-reading moral judgments as social conditions.

Broader Connections

• Girls’ symptoms arise from their situation rather than a mysterious feminine soul #corroborates (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 712
• Historical insignificance caused women’s inferiority, not the reverse. #corroborates (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 289