Beauvoir, The Second Sex – I

Posted: Wed, Feb 5, 2025

In-Class Activity

What does it mean for a man to be in love? And what does it mean for a woman to be in love?
Do men and women love women the same way? Do women love men and women the same way?
If love requires equality and reciprocity but women and men are not equal in our society, can there truly be love?

Prior accounts of love we have considered:

Psychological: love is an intense longing to become whole (Aristophanes), a desire for the beautiful and the good (Socrates’ Diotima), or limerence.
Teleological: love is a path that leads one to virtue (Phaedrus) or a ladder toward the Beautiful itself (Socrates’ Diotima).
Relational: love is an evolving journey that can involve sadness and pain (Jenkins).

Beauvoir: love is a patriarchal institution—indeed, a religion that promises women fake salvation.

Society relegates women to the realm of immanence—the situation of being stuck in a worldly, passive, objectified, and constricted existence (reproduction, homemaking, …).
How do women transcend their immanence and become free?
- They devote themselves to men, become their love, and thereby participate in their transcendence -> the heterosexual woman.
- They radically reject men and their world -> the lesbian.

Caveat #1: Beauvoir is describing the world in order to critique it; she is not endorsing the status quo.

Caveat #2: Beauvoir would reject a rigid dichotomy between choice and born-this-way.

Existence precedes essence: our nature (the kind of person we are) is not already set by nature; rather, we create an authentic self by making our own choices within the situation given to us.
Authenticity: an authentic being is true to themself, not to the dominant social world.

The heterosexual woman loves by making herself into a desirable object to be loved by men.

Salvation: men have access to transcendence, and so the heterosexual woman chooses to use herself as an offering, to serve a man, and hope that he will free her.
Object: for the heterosexual woman to love is for her to be desired by men, to be loved by men, to be fucked by men, …
- And “when the male is not using this object that she is for him, she is absolutely nothing” (701)—“boredom.”
Devotion: the heterosexual woman loves by devoting “everything she is, everything she has, every second of her life” to her lover, by “losing herself in him” (691).
Impossibility: men are interested in other consciousnesses, not things; also men are not gods and cannot set women free (“You shouldn’t believe in Prince Charming. Men are just poor things.”).
Disillusion: love is sold to women as a path to salvation, but it’s a false one.

If authentic love requires lovers to see and treat each other as equals, is this even possible in our society?

The lesbian relationship is one between equals.
Being a lesbian isn’t a natural perversion; lesbians are just like “normal” women except that they respond to the situation/circumstances of women’s immanence not by worshipping men but rejecting them.
Indeed, given “the limitations her sex imposes on her,” the right question to ask “is not why she rejects them: the real problem is rather to understand why she accepts them” (422).
The lesbian appears “masculine” (e.g., wearing plain pants rather than flowery dresses) because they are actually most human, except that humanity is socially constructed as masculine.