February 10, 2023
The Second Sex
Very good. I don't know why I expected this to be like an easy layman-approachable book. I'll definitely want to reread it once I've learned more. In particular I struggled with
existentialism. Of course the idea of self-realization only through transcendental projects is familiar to men through our masculine ideal of action. In an inversion of the existentialist viewpoint I've even seen men complain about what they see as being valued only for what they do. But I wanted more background information, or maybe subsequent information about absurdism.
My most serious (but maybe easily addressed) objection was to the early part of the book where Beauvoir attempts to explain why relatively small biological differences between the sexes grew into an enduring system of gender domination. As technology improved, surplus production was achieved, which made primitive accumulation possible. The existentialists say that the reason men instead of women used technology for this new purpose was that they were already accustomed to transcendental projects (hunting and stuff) while a large part of women's energy was diverted to childbearing, a sort of enslavement by the species rather than an act of a subject. To me this seems rather arbitrary - isn't this what The Myth of Sisyphus is about, meaning and change from an act not chosen?The parts that were closest to my experience (men under patriarchy, straight relationships) and previous reading (sex-class analysis) were lucid and enlightening. I think my biggest takeaway was a deeper understanding of why, even though male domination makes it "easier" for men to do what they want to women, it (a) promises only unfulfiling surface-level relations (b) can't even keep those promises. The pitch for men is that feminism will get you more, not less. We do well to tell young men not to put women on a pedestal, but we may not make it explicit enough that that's specifically the reason boomers all hate their wives:
Of all these myths, none is more anchored in masculine hearts than the feminine "mystery". It has numerous advantages. And first it allows an easy explanation for anything that is inexplicable; the man who does not "understand" a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting his ignorance, he recognizes the presence of a mystery external to himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the same time. An infatuated heart thus avoids many disappointments: if the loved one's behavior is capricious, her remarks stupid, the mystery serves an excuse.
...
Surely, in a way, woman is mysterious, "mysterious like everyone," according to Maeterlinck. Each one is subject only for himself; each one can grasp only his own self in his immanence; from this point of view, the other is always mystery. In men's view, the opacity of the for-itself is more flagrant in the feminine other; they are unable to penetrate her unique experience by any effect of sympathy; they are condemned to ignorance about the quality of woman's sexual pleasure, the discomforts of menstruation, and the pains of childbirth. The truth is that mystery is reciprocal: as another, and as a masculine other, there is also a presence closed on itself and impenetrable to woman in the heart of every man; she is without knowledge of male eroticism. But according to a universal rule already mentioned, the categories in which men think the world are constituted from their point of view as absolutes: they fail to understand reciprocity here as everywhere. As she is mystery for man, woman is regarded as mystery herself.
... [from an existentialist perspective, what you "are" is what you do, and if women aren't given the chance to do anything that means what they "are" remains mysterious even to themselves. "There is no discriminating between the imaginary and the real except through behavior."]
...
Furthermore, like all oppressed people, woman deliberately dissimulated her objective image; slave, servant, indigent, all those who depend on a master's whims have learned to present him with an immutable smile or an enigmatic impassivity; they carefully hide their real sentiments and behavior. Woman is also taught from adolescence to lie to men, to outsmart, to sidestep them. She approaches them with artificial expressions; she is prudent, hypocritical, playacting.
But feminine Mystery as recognized by mythical thinking is a more profound reality. In fact, it is immediately implied in the mythology of the absolute Other. If one grants that the inessential consciousness is also a transparent subjectivity, capable of carrying out the cogito, one grants that it is truly sovereign and reverts to the essential; for all reciprocity to seem impossible, it is necessary that the Other be another for itself, that its very subjectivity be affected by alterity; this consciousness, which would be alienated as consciousness, in its pure immanent presence, would obviously be a Mystery; it would be a Mystery in itself because it would be it for itself; it would be absolute Mystery. It is thus that, beyond the secrecy their dissimulation creates, there is the mystery of the Black, of the Yellow, insofar as they are considered absolutely as the inessential Other. It must be noted that the American citizen who deeply confounds the average European is nonetheless not considered "mysterious": one more modestly claims not to understand him; likewise, woman does not always "understand" man, but there is no masculine mystery; the fact is that the rich America and the male are on the side of the Master, and Mystery belongs to the slave.
Men date or marry a woman because she embodies this ideal for him. After a while he gets to know her as a person/subject, which is obviously incompatible with being a gossamer feminine mystery. So the "magic" fades.
One thing that I didn't really get out of this reading is a good understanding of how women's liberation will work. Women's entrance into the workforce gave them some degree of economic freedom, which might allow their abstract freedoms to be actually exercised, but their entry into the workforce was because it was convenient to capital, not because women demanded it. And, not being the product of a feminist movement, this comes with severe tradeoffs: "either she finds work but is enslaved, or she is enfranchised but can do nothing else with herself". Per Dworkin, many women find too little realized freedom to justify the new oppression of proletarianization! If we're doing sex-class analysis, women should be the motors of women's liberation; although some men may realize that they'd be better off without patriarchy, lots of men are satisfied with their hollow relations and cannot be mobilized en masse. But,
Feminism itself has never been an autonomous movement: it was partially an instrument in the hands of politicians and partially an epiphenomenon reflecting a deeper social drama. Never did women form a separate caste: and in reality they never sought to play a role in history as a sex.
A faction of men can advocate for the demands of the women's movement, and the reproductive/economic conditions that so far have been necessary for that to develop (contraception and abortion, equal wages, etc), but they obviously can't lead the movement or do gender solidarity for women. I suppose there is analogy in the American Civil War. There were freedman battalions and slave rebellions, but the slaves were primarily freed by the North, which was spurred by abolitionists but also had reasons to fight besides slavery. Many of the freed slaves had no way to exercise their new freedoms and became sharecroppers on the same plantations; their situation has slowly improved over time but not to the level of equality. Likewise, "accidental" economic liberation of women is much better than nothing, but we can't expect it to fulfill the promise of radical feminism.