Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

TOPIC: ROMANTIC LOVE
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Woman’s way of loving
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, and political activist, and was one of the first women to study at the Sorbonne. During her studies she met Jean-Paul Sartre, and the two became life-long friends, intellectual companions, as well as lovers who maintained an open erotic relationship, sometimes in trio with a third woman. She wrote many novels and essays, and was also involved in the French women’s liberation movement. She died of pneumonia at the age of 78, and was buried next to Sartre in Paris.

The following text is adapted from de Beauvoir’s famous book The Second Sex (1949). In this book she argues that woman has always been regarded as an Other: Man is viewed as the “norm,” the default human being, while woman is defined relative to him, as “different,” as a deviation from man.
According to the existential philosophy of De Beauvoir and Sartre, an individual is a subject who is free to “transcend” himself or herself, in other words to go beyond the facts (biological or other) and determine goals, values, self-understandings, meanings. Woman, no less than man, is a free subject capable of self-determination, or transcendence, but society pressures her to enter the role of an object without transcendence of her own. Society tells her, already from childhood, that she is inferior to man, it denies from her equal economic freedom, it subjects her to maternal slavery, etc. She is therefore raised not as a self-determining subject, but as an addendum to man, who needs man for her salvation.
As a result, de Beauvoir argues, woman’s way of loving is also different.

FROM CHAPTER 23: THE WOMAN IN LOVE

The word “love” does not have the same meaning for both sexes, and this is one reason for the serious misunderstanding that divides them.
[…]
Men, in their most violent ecstasies, never abandon themselves completely. Even on their knees before their mistress, they still want to possess her. In the very passion of their lives they remain autonomous subjects; the beloved woman is, for them, only one value among others. They wish to integrate her into their existence, and not to spend their existence entirely on her. For woman, on the contrary, to love is to give up everything for the benefit of a master. […]

This difference between men’s and women’s love has nothing to do with laws of nature. It is the difference in their situation that is reflected in their different conceptions of love. The individual who is a subject, who is himself, if he has the courageous inclination towards transcendence, tries to deal with the world; he is ambitious, he acts. But an inessential creature cannot sense the absolute at the heart of her subjectivity; a being doomed to immanence cannot find self-realization in actions. She is shut up in the sphere of the relative, destined from childhood to belong to the male, accustomed to seeing the man as a superior being whom she cannot possibly equal. And if she has not repressed her claim to be human, she will dream of transcending herself toward one of these superior beings, of uniting herself with the autonomous subject. There is no other way for her than to loose herself, body and soul, in the person who represented for her the absolute, the essential. Since she is anyway doomed to dependence, she will prefer to serve a god rather than obey tyrants – parents, husband or protector. She chooses to enslave herself so eagerly, that it will seem to her the expression of her liberty. […] She will humble herself to nothingness before him. Love becomes for her a religion.

[…]
The supreme happiness of the woman in love is to be recognized by the loved man as a part of himself. When he says “we,” she is associated and identified with him, she shares his prestige and reigns with him over the rest of the world. […] She feels elevated to a place at the right side of God. It doesn’t matter that she is only in the second place, as long as she has HER place, forever, in a wonderfully ordered world. As long as she loves and is loved by him, and is necessary to him, she feels that she is fully justified: she knows peace and happiness.
[…]
A fallen god is not a man; he is a fraud. The lover has no other alternative than to prove that he really is this adored king – or to confess that he is a fake. If he is no longer adored, he must be trampled on. Because of the glory with which she has given to her beloved, the woman in love forbids him any weakness. She is disappointed and annoyed if he does not match the image which she has put on him. If he gets tired or careless, if he gets hungry or thirsty at the wrong time, if he makes a mistake or contradicts himself, she asserts that he is “not himself” and she complains about it.
[…]
Authentic love should be based on the mutual recognition of two free beings. The lovers would then experience themselves both as a self and as other. Neither of them would give up transcendence, neither would be mutilated. Together they would determine values and aims in the world.
[…]
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to lower herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, like for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents the curse that lies heavily on the woman who is confined to the feminine universe, a woman mutilated, insufficient to herself.

Topic: Sex

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Male and female sexualities shaped by society
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, and political activist. During her studies she met Jean-Paul Sartre and the two became life-long friends, intellectual companions, as well as lovers who maintained an open erotic relationship. She wrote many novels and essays, and was also involved in the French women’s liberation movement. She died of pneumonia at the age of 78, and was buried next to Sartre in Paris.

The following text is adapted from Simon de Beauvoir’s famous book The Second Sex (1949), an influential philosophical work on woman’s condition. A major theme in this book is that woman has been shaped by society to become an Other – defined not by herself but in relation to man, as being the creature who is different from man, as the “second” sex. She has also been forced to give up her subjectivity, her “transcendence” – the human capacity to go beyond the facts and freely give meaning and value to things in life.
All this applies to sexuality too. Differences between man’s sexuality and woman’s sexuality are not the result of biological factors but of complex social processes which shape woman and her sexuality. Of course, biological differences exist, but the crucial question is how society interprets and treats these differences. De Beauvoir analyzes in detail the development of these two sexualities, and the following text contains a few examples of the process. Whether or not we accept her specific analysis, on a more general level she offers a provocative idea: that your sexuality is not simply the result of your personal tastes or urges, but of social factors that shape your identity and sexuality.

From Book 2, Chapter 12: Childhood
One is not born a woman, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the character of the human female in society. Civilization as a whole produces this creature who is between male and eunuch, and who is described as feminine. Only the intervention of somebody else can establish an individual as an Other.
[…]
Anatomically, the boy’s penis is suitable for this role. It projects free from the body and seems like a little natural toy, a kind of puppet. Adults will give value to the boy, then, when they give value to his “double” [his penis with which he identifies]. […] For the little girl, things are very different. Mothers and nurses feel no reverence or tenderness toward her genitals. They do not direct her attention toward that secret organ, invisible except for its covering, that cannot be grasped by hand. In a sense, she has no sex organ. She does not experience this absence as a lack; evidently, her body is quite complete for her. But she finds herself situated in the world differently from the boy, and a constellation of factors can transform this difference, in her eyes, into an inferiority.
[…]
Thus, the passivity that is the characteristic of the “femenine” woman develops in her from the earliest years. But it is wrong to assert that a biological fact is concerned. It is, in fact, a destiny imposed upon her by her teachers and society. The great advantage enjoyed by the boy is that his mode of existence in relation to others leads him to assert his subjective freedom. […] In woman, on the contrary, there is from the beginning a conflict between her autonomous existence and her objective self, her “being-the-Other.” She is taught that to please she must try to please, she must make herself an object. She should therefore renounce her autonomy. She is treated like a live doll and is refused liberty.

From Chapter 14: Sexual initiation
Sexual pleasure in woman, as I have said, is a kind of magic spell. It demands a complete letting go. […] She longs to abolish the separateness that exists between her and her male. She longs to melt with him into one. As we have seen, she longs to remain subject while she is made object. Since she is more profoundly beside herself than man, since her whole body is moved by desire and excitement, she retains her subjectivity only through union with her partner. Giving and receiving must combine in both of them. If the man limits himself to taking without giving, or if he gives pleasure without receiving, the woman feels that she is being maneuvered, used. Once she realizes herself as the Other, she becomes his non-essential Other, and then she has to deny her otherness.
This explains the fact that the moment when the two bodies separate is almost always distressing for the woman. After coition, the man always dis-owns the flesh, regardless of whether he feels happy or depressed, the victim of nature or the conqueror of woman. He becomes once more an honest body. He wants to sleep, take a bath, smoke a cigarette, go out for fresh air. The woman wants to prolong the bodily contact […] “Was it enough? You want more? Was it good?” – the fact that he asks such questions emphasizes the separation, it changes the act of love into a mechanical operation directed by the male. And that is, indeed, why he asks them. He really seeks domination much more than fusion and mutuality.
[…]
The erotic experience dramatically reveals to human beings the ambiguity of their condition. Through it they are aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as the Other and as the subject. The conflict has a more dramatic shape for woman, because at first she feels herself to be object and she does not immediately realize a sure independence in sex enjoyment. She must regain her dignity as a transcendent and free subject, while assuming her bodily condition – this enterprise is full of difficulty and danger, and it often fails. But the difficulty of her position protects her from the traps into which the male easily falls. He is an easy victim of the deceptive privileges given to him by his aggressive role, and by the lonely satisfaction of the orgasm. He hesitates to see himself fully as flesh. Woman lives her love more authentically.