Beauvoir, The Second Sex – IV

Posted: Tue, Nov 26, 2024

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 (Diotima), …
Teleological: love is a path that leads one to virtue (Phaedrus), a ladder toward the Beautiful itself (Diotima)…
Relational: love is not a good feeling (that’s “timerence”) but an evolving journey that can involve sadness and pain (Jenkins).
- The happiness paradox: pursuing happiness doesn’t make one happy.
- Also, sad/pain isn’t the same as bad (e.g., sad novel, exercise).
- Love can be good even if it’s not “happy ever after.”

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

Society relegates women to the realm of immanence: the worldly, the passive, the objectified, the constricted, 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.

The heterosexual woman loves by making herself the 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 a false path to salvation sold to women.

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.