by Nancy Bauer
There is no reason, on the other hand, Beauvoir claims, for adults to direct little girls to invest their genitalia with any particular meaning or significance. (That some adults in this day and age go out of their way to do so would, I imagine, be interpreted by Beauvoir as a response to their sense of the penis’s being overvalued and thus would not constitute a fundamental change in the way we raise our children.) Still, according to Beauvoir, girls do not experience the absence of a “significant” genital as a lack. In taking this position, Beauvoir sets herself against Freud (mentioned at this juncture of The Second Sex in a footnote), whose explanation of sexual difference in his notorious undelivered lecture “Femininity” turns on the claim that women universally experience what he famously calls “penis envy” as a natural response to the sight of the male organ. For Beauvoir, to the contrary, if envy of the little boy or even of his penis develops it is because the little girl “finds herself situated in the world differently from the boy”; and it is “a constellation of factors” that “can transform this difference, in her eyes, into an inferiority” (272). While the girl may envy the fact that the little boy can, for example, urinate standing up and direct the stream of urine more precisely than can she, this difference in and of itself “is something too secondary to engender directly a feeling of inferiority” (276, TM; LDS 2:25). What makes it the case that the absence of a penis “will certainly play a great role in her destiny” is not some direct disadvantage for her but, rather, the existential advantage the boy can gain from the fact that he has an organ “that can be seen and grasped” (278).
This advantage, to be explicit, is that the boy can “at least partially alienate himself” in his penis (278, TM; LDS 2:2712). The idea here, as I understand it, is that as the boy comes to recognize the unreliability of the approbation of adults, in which he hopes to find a stable reflection of himself (as “in-itself”), he finds a substitute for this mode of alienation in his relationship with his penis. The most important thing about this relationship, Beauvoir seems to think, is that the penis is itself part of the little boy, albeit a part whose existence may well appear to the boy to be in danger of being taken away (as Beauvoir, now following Freud, recognizes). And because the penis seems to the boy to be a particularly powerful and, in a manner of speaking, independent part of his body, because of, for example, its length, urinary force, and erections, for him to alienate himself in his penis is for him to adopt a picture of himself as active and strong. To the extent that the boy is his penis, in other words, he is able to perform the neat trick of figuring himself simultaneously as “in-itself” and as powerful and independent (see TSS 278).
The little girl, on the other hand, lacks not only a penis but also, Beauvoir implies, the incentive to try to alienate herself in something other than the gaze of others. The girl, to repeat, is ceaselessly encouraged to seduce others. If she is given a doll to play with, Beauvoir suggests, the little girl may use it as a penis-substitute—that is, may seek to alienate herself in it. But
on the one hand, the doll represents the whole body, and, on the other, it is a passive object. Therefore the little girl will be encouraged to alienate herself in her entire person and to consider this as an inert given. While the boy seeks himself in the penis in the capacity of [en tant que] autonomous subject, the little girl coddles her doll and dresses her up as she dreams to be coddled and dressed up; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll. (278–279, TM; LDS 2:27–28)
So while the boy’s alienation in his penis represents a step away from the stage at which he is attempting to seduce adults, a step toward what Beauvoir calls “autonomy” (278), the girl’s alienation in the doll takes place only because the doll represents to her the epitome of the seductive object she has sought to be since infancy. To alienate herself in it is to identify herself completely with something that, unlike the penis, is “passive” and “inert.” Thus a little girl’s alienation of herself in a doll, according to Beauvoir, perpetuates what she calls the “narcissism” of infancy, that is, I take it, the attempt to figure oneself exclusively as a seductive object.
Beauvoir recognizes that, of course, a boy might well “cherish a teddy bear, or a puppet into which he projects himself” (280). Her point is that no one factor—biological or social—determines that boys’ and girls’ “situations” will be different from one another. Cultural expectations (that the boy become independent and that the girl become passive) as well as biological chance (the boy’s having an organ that lends itself to his attempt to alienate himself) combine to produce this difference. What’s important is that the boy has the means to put himself in a position in which “his manner of existing for-others encourages him to pose himself as for-himself” (280, TM; LDS 2:29). I read Beauvoir here to be suggesting that little boys have the opportunity to project themselves and to see themselves reflected in the other’s gaze as magnificently paradoxical beings—beings, to be specific, who in-themselves are yet fundamentally for-themselves. Now, this state of being simultaneously in-itself and for-itself is, of course, exactly what Sartre in Being and Nothingness claims that human beings yearn for: “Each human reality,” he argues right before the conclusion of the book, “is at the same time a direct project [or, as he calls it a sentence later, a “passion”] to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself” (784). But this project, he claims, is attempted in vain; in the concluding line of this same final section of the book proper, he notoriously declares that “man is a useless passion.” What Beauvoir seems to be suggesting in The Second Sex is that the little boy seems to have succeeded in fulfilling this passion: “what is very important,” she declares,
is that there is no fundamental opposition between his concern for that objective figure which is his, and his will to affirm himself in concrete projects. It is in doing that he makes himself being, in a single movement. (280, TM; LDS 2:29–30)
Most commentators on The Second Sex take moments such as these as evidence of Beauvoir’s “masculinism,” of what they read as her tendency to exalt men as having obtained the highest human standards and to exhort women to follow suit. But the problem is that one can read these moments in this way only if one ignores the fact that Beauvoir is trying to understand why men oppress women. So far, in her analysis of human development from infancy through early childhood, no light has been shed on this subject. Beauvoir has said nothing at this point to link what she has identified as certain systematic differences between little girls and little boys—differences that, again, she traces to a complex situation constituted by social expectations (which she has yet to explain) and biological chance—with systematic oppression of human females by human males. The simple fact (if it is a fact) that his situation is more conducive to his self-realization as for-itself, if you will, in no way implies that the little boy needs the little girl’s situation to be worse than his. And that is why in identifying this simple fact as what I’ve called a neat trick or magnificent paradox for the boy, Beauvoir is not to be read as glorifying maleness, per se.
Indeed, it turns out that on her analysis the problem with this neat trick is that it is ultimately unstable. This is because the sense of himself as in-itself-for-itself that the boy gets through alienating himself in his penis is entirely dependent on the social value of the way he poses himself. In other words, his achievement must be recognized as such in the eyes of the other in order for it to count as an achievement. And on Beauvoir’s understanding, this recognition cannot be and is not something that the boy (or man, or woman or girl for that matter) can obtain once and for all. The struggle for recognition, as I suggested in chapter 6, is ceaseless. And this is why man needs woman, or, more generally, needs someone to play the role of the absolute Other for him: in order to figure himself as in-himself being (statically) for-itself, he needs to be able to count on the existence of beings who can be relied upon endlessly to supply affirmation of his own subjectivity. He needs, as Beauvoir puts it in the conclusi
on of The Second Sex, to “alienate himself in the other, whom he oppresses to that end” (719, TM; LDS 2:647). And she explains that this means that what a man needs in order to understand himself as being (steadfastly) independent, active, strong, and so forth is “to find himself in his wife, [or] in his mistress, in the form of a stone image” (719). I read Beauvoir to suggest through this move that the sense of stability that little boys are privileged to acquire can be perpetuated only through acts of bad faith, that their apparent achievement of stability as in-itself-for-itself comes at the cost of denying—and denying to themselves that they are denying—the humanity of the Other.
But this still does not explain why women, per se, are oppressed—or, to put it another way, why men need alienate themselves in women in order to secure fixed images of themselves. The answer, as I read The Second Sex, is that they need not do so and, indeed, do not always do so. One need only consider the wide variety of systematic forms of oppression that human beings have inflicted on each other to see that this is the case. Men and women frequently oppress other men and women through slavery, racism, caste systems, and other forms of both institutionalized and insidious inequalities. And yet, Beauvoir argues, there is a fundamental difference between these forms of oppression and the oppression of men by women, and this difference turns on the fact that women have good reason to desire their situation. For if human beings indeed respond to the “catastrophe” of finding themselves individuated in infancy with a longing to reestablish a fixed connection with the world, and if little (and big) girls are encouraged through the approbation of others to believe they have done so by alienating themselves (literally or figuratively) in (or into) dolls, then it is no wonder they often happily do so. Compare, for example, the case of African-Americans, whose second-class status in this country—no less and perhaps more appalling now that we are all supposedly “equal” in the eyes of the law—has never in and of itself been advantageous for them, even if fear of the unknown—literally, of freedom—occasionally induced certain antebellum slaves (and their heirs) to rationalize their lot to themselves. Women, on the other hand, have traditionally had good reason to enjoy the benefits of not having to be actors in the world: they have rarely been expected to work for wages, even if economic circumstances sometimes forced them to do so (in which case they are entitled to feel gypped); their narcissism is often rewarded; they are able to endow those of their bodily processes associated with reproduction with a sense of purpose and meaning. With reference to “this great difference” between American Blacks and women, Beauvoir writes,
Blacks submit to their lot in revolt. No privilege compensates for their difficulty, whereas woman is invited to complicity. I have already recalled that side by side with the authentic claim [revendication] of the subject who would desire [se veut] sovereign liberty, there is in the existent an inauthentic desire for resignation [démission] and flight. These are the delights of passivity with which parents and educators, books and myths, women and men lure [ font miroiter] the young girl. In her youngest childhood she is already taught to relish [goüter] them. The temptation becomes more and more insidious, and she gives in to it all the more fatally as the impulse to her transcendence crashes against more severe forms of resistance. (298, TM; LDS 2:53)13
For Beauvoir, to review my interpretation thus far, systematic differences between men and women are to be accounted for with reference to a fundamental human tendency to achieve a stable connection with the world by “alienating” oneself in the Look of the other. A boy is taught to do so by aspiring to establish himself as an independent being. He is to achieve and sustain his independence by forcing a woman, or several women, to devote herself or themselves to being his mirror and reflecting back to him a “stone image” of himself as powerful, creative, and free. A girl, on the other hand, is taught to achieve a stable connection with the world by turning herself into a seductive object (a mirror, let’s say) whose passivity is rewarded by the approbation and assurances of others. Both roles—masculine and feminine—are dependent on an insidious “inauthenticity” or “bad faith”: all people, boys and girls, men and women, must at least implicitly deny the status of women as “for-themselves,” which for the likes of Beauvoir means that they must deny that women are human beings. This requirement provides the incentive for both male and female adults to mold children to conform to sex stereotypes. And neither sex, therefore, is singularly responsible for the fact of women’s oppression; individuals are guilty only insofar as they see the situation for what it is and choose deliberately to perpetuate it.
What allows Beauvoir herself to see the situation for what it is (if indeed this is an accurate description of her achievement) is not, on her reckoning, that she is somehow more perceptive or less feminine than other women—a claim that puts me at odds with a number of her critics, who, as I described them in chapter 2, insist that she is exempting herself from the status of being a woman.14 What she says allows her to see the situation for what it is, again, is that she is particularly well placed to do so. Let us look more closely at how she describes her positionings in the following key passage from the introduction to The Second Sex. Having argued that the “woman question” needs to be reposed, she writes,
But then how shall we pose the question? And to begin with, who are we to pose it? Men are judge and party to the case: women too. Where to find an angel? In truth, an angel would be poorly qualified to speak. An angel would ignore all the particulars [données] of the problem. As for the hermaphrodite, that case is quite singular: the hermaphrodite isn’t at one and the same time man and woman but rather neither man nor woman. I believe that to shed light on the situation of woman, there are still certain women who are best placed. It would be a sophism to claim to enclose Epimenides in the concept of Cretan and the Cretans in that of liar [C’est un sophisme que de prétendre enfermer Epiménide dans le concept de Crétois et les Crétois dans celui de menteur]: it’s not a mysterious essence that dictates good or bad faith to men and women; it’s their situation that disposes them more or less to seek the truth. Many women of today, having had the chance to see all the privileges of the human being restored to themselves can offer themselves the luxury of impartiality: we even feel the necessity to do so. (xxxiii, TM; LDS 1:29)
I want to propose that in these sentences Beauvoir is lodging a claim to be especially well placed to attempt to pose the woman question through a simultaneous declaration that she is both a woman and a philosopher. The key sentence here is the rather obscure one that makes reference to Epimenides’ so-called liar’s paradox. “I am a Cretan,” Epimenides notoriously said; “and all Cretans are liars.” Ever since Aristotle, what philosophers have found interesting about Epimenides’ claim is that it is impossible to determine whether or not it is true: as any first-semester logic student can tell you, if Epimenides is telling the truth, then he must be lying; and if he is lying, then he must be telling the truth. But if I read Beauvoir correctly, she is suggesting that what Epimenides says becomes paradoxical only if we subscribe to an overly narrow and rigid conception of what it is to “be” a Cretan or a liar. Epimenides’ paradox goes through only if to be a liar is to lie all the time. But is this what we ordinarily mean by the concept “liar”? Does calling someone a liar imply that he or she never tells the truth or is incapable of telling it? The fact that in ordinary language it does not is important to Beauvoir: we do not ordinarily assume that just because a certain kind of behavior is characteristic of an individual or group that individual or group is doomed to exhibit at all times only that kind of behavior. So to say that Cretans are liars does not imply that every utterance of every Cretan is a lie. Epimenides may well be telling the truth.
Similarly, Beauvoir explicitly asks us to think about what it is to “enclose” (enfermer) Epimenides in the concept of “Cretan.” Unless “Cretan” is just another word for “liar,” then there is a question about exactly what it means for Epimenides to declare himself to “be” a Cret
an. A Cretan is of course a citizen of, or a person from, Crete. But a person’s nationality is his only salient feature only under extraordinary (and ordinarily deeply immoral) circumstances. Indeed, no set of facts about a human being confines that human being to indulging in one or the other sort of behavior, and for the same reason that no statement about what’s characteristic of a type of human being applies in all times and all places to people who “are” that type. So when Epimenides claims that he is a Cretan and that Cretans are liars, he is most naturally read as warning us—in provocation, on a dare, in order to be coy, or in order to achieve some particular speech act—simply that he is a member of a group whose members, insofar as they are members of that group, are prone to lie.
But I do not mean to be implying that Beauvoir is declaring herself in the above passage to be a philosopher solely by asking us to take a second look at Epimenides’ paradox (or, for that matter, by warning that to take it as philosophers have traditionally taken it is to take it as a “sophism”). What’s at least equally important is that she is asking us here, already, to think about what it could mean for her to declare that she “is” a woman or to define what a woman “is.” In what follows her warning about how to read Epimenides’ paradox, Beauvoir claims that to “be” a man or a woman is not to partake of some “mysterious essence” that forces you to behave one way or the other. Rather, it’s to be in a certain “situation.” This situation, while it may encourage or even predispose a person to behave in one manner or another does not confine him or her to any particular way of being in the world. And to “be” in a certain situation implies neither that you are utterly constrained by its parameters nor that it’s the only situation you are in. Beauvoir needs to make this point in part because at the beginning of the passage she has said that both men and women are both “judge and party to the case.” Here Beauvoir is alluding to a remark she’s quoted approvingly earlier in the introduction, one made by a man she identifies as “a little-known feminist of the seventeenth century,” namely, François Poulain de la Barre: “All that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party to the lawsuit.”15 (Beauvoir in fact uses this line as one of two epigraphs to the first book of The Second Sex, both of which are deleted in the English edition of the book.) In claiming that it is not only men but women, too, who are “judge and party to the case,” then, Beauvoir is casting suspicion on the idea that women are, as women, inherently more qualified than men to take on “the woman question.” But via her reference to Epimenides she observes that to “be” party to the case does not necessarily mean that one is incapable of being a good judge, too.