The Second Sex

Man finds shining stars and the moody moon, sunlight, and the darkness of caves on woman; wildflowers from hedgerows and the garden’s proud rose are also woman. Nymphs, dryads, mermaids, water sprites, and fairies haunt the countryside, the woods, lakes, seas, and moors. This animism is profoundly anchored in men. For the sailor, the sea is a dangerous woman, perfidious and difficult to conquer but that he cherishes by dint of taming it. Proud, rebellious, virginal, and wicked, the mountain is woman for the mountain climber who wants to take it, even at risk of life. It is often said that these comparisons manifest sexual sublimation; rather, they express an affinity between woman and the elements as primal as sexuality itself. Man expects more from possessing woman than the satisfaction of an instinct; she is the special object through which he subjugates Nature. Other objects can also play this role. Sometimes it is on young boys’ bodies that man seeks the sand of beaches, the velvet of nights, the fragrance of honeysuckle. But sexual penetration is not the only way to realize this carnal appropriation of the earth. In his novel To a God Unknown, Steinbeck shows a man who chooses a mossy rock as mediator between him and nature; in The Cat, Colette describes a young husband who settles his love on his favorite female cat because this gentle wild animal enables him to have a grasp on the sensual universe that his woman companion cannot give. The Other can be embodied in the sea and the mountain just as well as in the woman; they provide man with the same passive and unexpected resistance that allows him to accomplish himself; they are a refusal to conquer, a prey to possess. If the sea and the mountain are woman, it is because woman is also the sea and the mountain for the lover.14

  But not just any woman can play the role of mediator between man and the world; man is not satisfied with finding sexual organs complementary to his own in his partner. She must embody the wondrous blossoming of life while concealing its mysterious disturbances at the same time. First of all, she has to have youth and health, for man cannot be enraptured in his embrace of a living thing unless he forgets that all life is inhabited by death. And he desires still more: that his beloved be beautiful. The ideal of feminine beauty is variable; but some requirements remain constant; one of them is that since woman is destined to be possessed, her body has to provide the inert and passive qualities of an object. Virile beauty is the body’s adaptation to active functions such as strength, agility, flexibility, and the manifestation of a transcendence animating a flesh that must never collapse into itself. The only symmetry to be found in the feminine ideal is in Sparta, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, societies that destined woman for the state and not for the individual and that considered her exclusively as mother, with no place for eroticism. But when woman is delivered to the male as his property, he claims that her flesh be presented in its pure facticity. Her body is grasped not as the emanation of a subjectivity but as a thing weighted in its immanence; this body must not radiate to the rest of the world, it must not promise anything but itself: its desire has to be stopped. The most naive form of this requirement is the Hottentot ideal of the steatopygous Venus, as the buttocks are the part of the body with the fewest nerve endings, where the flesh appears as a given without purpose. The taste of people from the East for fleshy women is similar; they love the absurd luxury of this fatty proliferation that is not enlivened by any project, that has no other meaning than to be there.15 Even in civilizations of a more subtle sensibility, where notions of form and harmony come into play, breasts and buttocks were prized objects because of the gratuitousness and contingency of their development. Customs and fashions were often applied to cut the feminine body from its transcendence: the Chinese woman with bound feet could barely walk, the Hollywood star’s painted nails deprived her of her hands; high heels, corsets, hoops, farthingales, and crinolines were meant less to accentuate the woman’s body’s curves than to increase the body’s powerlessness. Weighted down by fat or on the contrary so diaphanous that any effort is forbidden to it, paralyzed by uncomfortable clothes and rites of propriety, the body thus appeared to man as his thing. Makeup and jewels were also used for this petrification of the body and face. The function of dress and ornaments is highly complex; for some primitives, it had a sacred character; but its most usual role was to complete woman’s metamorphosis into an idol. An equivocal idol: man wanted her erotic, for her beauty to be part of that of flowers and fruits; but she also had to be smooth, hard, eternal like a stone. The role of dress is both to link the body more closely to and to wrest it away from nature, to give a necessarily set artifice to palpitating life. Woman was turned into plant, panther, diamond, or mother-of-pearl by mingling flowers, furs, precious stones, shells, and feathers on her body; she perfumed herself so as to smell of roses and lilies: but feathers, silk, pearls, and perfumes also worked to hide the animal rawness from its flesh and odor. She painted her mouth and her cheeks to acquire a mask’s immobile solidity; her gaze was imprisoned in the thickness of kohl and mascara, it was no longer anything but her eyes’ shimmering ornamentation; braided, curled, or sculpted, her hair lost its troublesome vegetal mystery. In the embellished woman, Nature was present but captive, shaped by a human will in accordance with man’s desire. Woman was even more desirable when nature was shown off to full advantage and more rigorously subjugated: the sophisticated woman has always been the ideal erotic object. And the taste for a more natural beauty is often a specious form of sophistication. Rémy de Gourmont wanted women’s hair to be loose, free as the streams and prairie grass: but it is on Veronica Lake’s hair that the waves of water and wheat could be caressed, not on a mop of hair totally left to nature. The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him. It is also because he fears contingent destiny, because he dreams her immutable and necessary, that man looks for the idea’s exactitude on woman’s face, body, and legs. In primitive people, this idea is the perfection of the popular type: a thick-lipped race with a flat nose forged a thick-lipped Venus with a flat nose; later, the canons of a more complex aesthetics would be applied to women. But in any case, the more the traits and proportions of a woman seemed contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice. She is not only physis but just as much anti-physis; and not only in the civilization of electric permanents, hair waxing, latex girdles, but also in the country of African lip-disk women, in China, and everywhere on earth. Swift denounced this mystification in his famous ode to Celia; he railed against the coquette’s paraphernalia, pointing out with disgust her body’s animal servitudes; he was doubly wrong to become indignant; because man wants woman at the same time to be animal and plant and that she hide behind a fabricated armature; he loves her emerging from the waves and from a high-fashion house, naked and dressed, naked beneath her clothes, exactly as he finds her in the human universe. The city dweller seeks animality in woman; but for the young peasant doing his military service, the brothel embodies the magic of the city. Woman is field and pasture but also Babylonia.

  However, here is the first lie, the first betrayal of woman: of life itself, which, even clothed in the most attractive forms, is still inhabited by the ferments of old age and death. The very use man makes of her destroys her most precious qualities; weighed down by childbirth, she loses her sexual attraction; even sterile, the passage of time is enough to alter her charms. Disabled, ugly, or old, woman repels. She is said to be withered, faded, like a plant. Man’s decrepitude is obviously also frightful; but normal man does not experience other men as flesh; he has only an abstract solidarity with these autonomous and foreign bodies. It is on woman’s body, this body meant for him, that man significantly feels the flesh’s deterioration. It is through the male’s hostile eyes that Villon’s “once beautiful co
urtesan” contemplates her body’s degradation. Old and ugly women not only are objects without assets but also provoke hatred mixed with fear. They embody the disturbing figure of Mother, while the charms of the Wife have faded away.

  But even the Wife was a dangerous prey. Demeter survives in Venus emerging from the waters, fresh foam, the blond harvest; appropriating woman for himself through the pleasure he derives from her, man awakens in her the suspicious powers of fertility; it is the same organ he penetrates that produces the child. This explains why man in all societies is protected against the feminine sex’s threats by so many taboos. There is no reciprocity as woman has nothing to fear from the male; his sex is considered secular, profane. The phallus can be raised to the dignity of a god: there is no element of terror in worshipping it, and in daily life woman does not have to be defended against it mystically; it is simply propitious for her. It also has to be pointed out that in many matriarchies, sexuality is very free; but this is only during woman’s childhood, in her early youth, when coitus is not linked to the idea of generation. Malinowski is surprised that young people who sleep together freely in the “house of the unmarried” show off their love lives so readily; the explanation is that an unmarried daughter is considered unable to bear a child and the sexual act is merely a quiet and ordinary pleasure. On the contrary, once married, her spouse cannot give her any public sign of affection, nor touch her, and any allusion to their intimate relations is sacrilegious; she then has to be part of the formidable essence of mother, and coitus becomes a sacred act. From then on it is surrounded by taboos and precautions. Intercourse is forbidden when cultivating the earth, sowing, and planting: in this case fertilizing forces necessary for the harvests’ prosperity cannot be wasted in inter-individual relations; respect for powers associated with fertility enjoins such relations to be economized. But on most occasions, chastity protects the spouse’s virility; it is demanded when man goes off fishing or hunting and above all when he is preparing for war; in the union with woman, the male principle weakens, and he has to avoid intercourse whenever he needs the totality of his forces. It has been wondered if the horror man feels for woman comes from that inspired by sexuality in general, or vice versa. We have seen that in Leviticus, in particular, wet dreams are considered a stain even though woman has nothing to do with them. And in our modern societies, masturbation is considered a danger and a sin; many children and young boys who indulge in it suffer terrible anxieties because of it. Society and parents above all make solitary pleasure a vice; but more than one young boy has been spontaneously frightened by his first ejaculations: blood or sperm, any flow of one’s own substance seems worrying; it is one’s life, one’s mana, that is running out. However, even if subjectively man can go through erotic experiences where woman is not present, she is objectively involved in his sexuality: as Plato said in the myth of the androgynes, the male organism presupposes the woman’s. He discovers woman in discovering his own sex, even if she is not given to him in flesh and blood, nor in image; and inversely, woman is fearsome inasmuch as she embodies sexuality. The immanent and transcendent aspects of living experience can never be separated: what I fear or desire is always an avatar of my own existence, but nothing comes to me except through what is not my self. The nonself is involved in wet dreams, in erection, and if not in the precise figure of woman, at least in Nature and Life: the individual feels possessed by a foreign magic. Likewise, his ambivalence toward women is seen in his attitude toward his own sex organ; he is proud, he laughs about it, he is embarrassed by it. The little boy defiantly compares his penis with his friends’; his first erection fills him with pride and frightens him at the same time. The adult man looks upon his sex organ as a symbol of transcendence and power; he is as proud of it as a muscle and at the same time as a magical grace: it is a freedom rich with the whole contingence of the given, a given freely desired; this is the contradictory aspect that enchants him; but he suspects the trap in it; this sex organ by which he claims to assert himself does not obey him; full of unassuaged desires, arising unexpectedly, sometimes relieving itself in dreams, it manifests a suspicious and capricious vitality. Man claims to make Spirit triumph over Life, activity over passivity; his consciousness keeps nature at a distance, his will shapes it, but in the figure of his sex organ he rediscovers life, nature, and passivity in himself. “The sexual parts are the real center of the will and the opposite pole is the brain,” wrote Schopenhauer. What he called will is attachment to life, which is suffering and death, while the brain is thought that separates itself from life while representing it: sexual shame according to him is what we feel about our stupid carnal stubbornness. Even if the pessimism of his theories is rejected, he is right to see the expression of man’s duality in the sex-brain opposition. As a subject he posits the world, and, remaining outside the universe he posits, he makes himself the lord of it; if he grasps himself as flesh, as sex, he is no longer autonomous consciousness, transparent freedom: he is engaged in the world, a limited and perishable object; and it is undoubtedly true that the generative act goes beyond the body’s limits: but he constitutes them at the very same instant. The penis, father of generations, is symmetrical to the maternal womb; grown from a fattened germ in woman’s womb, man is the bearer of germs himself, and by this seed that gives life, it is also his own life that is disavowed. “The birth of children is the death of parents,” said Hegel. Ejaculation is the promise of death, it affirms the species over the individual; the existence of the sex organ and its activity negate the subject’s proud singularity. The sex organ is a focus of scandal because of this contestation of spirit over life. Man exalts the phallus in that he grasps it as transcendence and activity, as a means of appropriation of the other; but he is ashamed when he sees in it only passive flesh through which he is the plaything of Life’s obscure forces. This shame is often disguised as irony. The sex organ of others draws laughter easily; but because the erection looks like a planned movement and yet is undergone, it often looks ridiculous; and the simple mention of genital organs provokes glee. Malinowski says that for the wild people among whom he lived, just mentioning the word for these “shameful parts” made them laugh uncontrollably; many crude or saucy jokes are not much more than rudimentary puns on these words. For some primitive peoples, during the days devoted to weeding out gardens, women had the right to brutally rape any stranger that dared to come into the village; attacking him all together, they often left him half-dead: the tribesmen laughed at this exploit; by this rape, the victim was constituted as passive and dependent flesh; he was possessed by the women and through them by their husbands, while in normal coitus man wants to affirm himself as possessor.

  But this is where he will experience the ambiguity of his carnal condition most obviously. He takes pride in his sexuality only to the extent that it is a means of appropriation of the Other: and this dream of possession only ends in failure. In authentic possession, the other as such is abolished, it is consumed and destroyed: only the sultan of The Thousand and One Nights has the power to cut off his mistresses’ heads when dawn withdraws them from his bed; woman survives man’s embraces, and she is thus able to escape from him; as soon as he opens his arms, his prey once again becomes foreign to him; here she is new, intact, completely ready to be possessed by a new lover in just as ephemeral a way. One of the male’s dreams is to “brand” woman so that she remains his forever; but even the most arrogant male knows only too well that he will never leave her anything more than memories, and the most passionate images are cold compared with real sensation. A whole literature has denounced this failure. It is made objective in the woman, who is called fickle and treacherous because her body destines her to man in general and not to a particular man. Her betrayal is even more perfidious: it is she who turns the lover into a prey. Only a body can touch another body; the male masters the desired flesh only by becoming flesh himself; Eve is given to Adam for him to accomplish his transcendence in her, and she draws him into the night of
immanence; the mother forges the obscure wrapping for her son from which he now wants to escape, while the mistress encloses him in this opaque clay through the vertigo of pleasure. He wanted to possess: but here he is, possessed himself. Odor, damp, fatigue, boredom: a whole literature describes this dreary passion of a consciousness become flesh. Desire often contains an element of disgust and returns to disgust when it is assuaged. “Post coïtum homo animal triste.”*

  “The flesh is sad.” And yet man has not even found definitive reassurance in his lover’s arms. Soon his desire is reborn; and often it is the desire not only for woman in general but for this specific woman. She wields a singularly troubling power. Because in his own body man does not feel the sexual need except as a general one similar to hunger or thirst without a particular object, the bond that links him to this specific feminine body is forged by the Other. The link is mysterious like the foul and fertile womb of his roots, a sort of passive force: it is magic. The hackneyed vocabulary of serialized novels where the woman is described as an enchantress or a mermaid who fascinates man and bewitches him reflects the oldest and most universal of myths. Woman is devoted to magic. Magic, said Alain, is the spirit lurking in things; an action is magic when it emanates from a passivity instead of being produced by an agent; men have always considered woman precisely as the immanence of the given; if she produces harvests and children, it is not because she wills it; she is not subject, transcendence, or creative power, but an object charged with fluids. In societies where man worships such mysteries, woman, because of these qualities, is associated with religion and venerated as a priestess; but when he struggles to make society triumph over nature, reason over life, will over inert fact, woman is regarded as a sorceress. The difference between the priest and the magician is well-known: the former dominates and directs the forces he has mastered in keeping with the gods and laws, for the good of the community, on behalf of all its members, while the magician operates outside society, against the gods and laws, according to his own passions. But woman is not fully integrated into the world of men; as other, she counters them; it is natural for her to use the strengths she possesses, not to spread the hold of transcendence across the community of men and into the future, but, being separate and opposed, to draw males into the solitude of separation, into the darkness of immanence. She is the mermaid whose songs dashed the sailors against the rocks; she is Circe, who turned her lovers into animals, the water sprite that attracted the fisherman to the depths of the pools. The man captivated by her spell loses his will, his project, his future; he is no longer a citizen but flesh, slave to his desires, he is crossed out of the community, enclosed in the instant, thrown passively from torture to pleasure; the perverse magician pits passion against duty, the present against the unity of time, she keeps the traveler far from home, she spreads forgetfulness. In attempting to appropriate the Other, man must remain himself; but with the failure of impossible possession, he tries to become this other with whom he fails to unite; so he alienates himself, he loses himself, he drinks the potion that turns him into a stranger to himself, he falls to the bottom of deadly and roiling waters. The Mother dooms her son to death in giving him life; the woman lover draws her lover into relinquishing life and giving himself up to the supreme sleep. This link between Love and Death was pathetically illuminated in the Tristan legend, but it has a more primary truth. Born of flesh, man accomplishes himself in love as flesh, and flesh is destined to the grave. The alliance between Woman and Death is thus confirmed; the great reaper is the inverted figure of corn-growing fertility. But it is also the frightening wife whose skeleton appears under deceitful and tender flesh.16