The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  I think of you all day, and dreamed of you last night … I was walking with you in the most wonderful garden, and helping you pick roses, and although we gathered with all our might, the basket was never full. And so all day I pray I may walk with you, and gather roses again, and as night draws on, it pleases me, and I count impatiently the hours ’tween me and the darkness, and the dream of you and the roses, and the basket never full …

  In his work on the adolescent girl’s soul, Mendousse cites a great number of similar letters:

  My Dear Suzanne … I would have liked to copy here a few verses from Song of Songs: how beautiful you are, my friend, how beautiful you are! Like the mystical bride, you were like the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley, and like her, you have been for me more than an ordinary girl; you have been a symbol, the symbol of all things beautiful and lofty … and because of this, pure Suzanne, I love you with a pure and unselfish love that hints of the religious.

  Another confesses less lofty emotions in her diary:

  I was there, my waist encircled by this little white hand, my hand resting on her round shoulder, my arm on her bare, warm arm, pressed against the softness of her breast, with her lovely mouth before me, parted on her dainty teeth … I trembled and felt my face burning.5

  In her book The Adolescent Girl, Mme Evard also collected a great number of these intimate effusions:

  To my beloved fairy, my dearest darling. My lovely fairy. Oh! Tell me that you still love me, tell me that for you I am still the devoted friend. I am sad, I love you so, oh my L.… and I cannot speak to you, tell you enough of my affection for you; there are no words to describe my love. Idolize is a poor way to say what I feel; sometimes it seems that my heart will burst. To be loved by you is too beautiful, I cannot believe it. Oh my dear, tell, will you love me longer still?

  It is easy to slip from these exalted affections into guilty juvenile crushes; sometimes one of the two girlfriends dominates and exercises her power sadistically over the other; but often, they are reciprocal loves without humiliation or struggle; the pleasure given and received remains as innocent as it was at the time when each one loved alone, without being doubled in a couple. But this very innocence is bland; when the adolescent girl decides to enter into life and becomes the Other, she hopes to rekindle the magic of the paternal gaze to her advantage; she demands the love and caresses of a divinity. She will turn to a woman less foreign and less fearsome than the male, but one who will possess male prestige: a woman who has a profession, who earns her living, who has a certain social base, will easily be as fascinating as a man: we know how many “flames” are lit in schoolgirls’ hearts for professors and tutors. In Regiment of Women, Clemence Dane uses a chaste style to describe ardently burning passions. Sometimes the girl confides her great passion to her best friend; they even share it, adding spice to their experience. A schoolgirl writes to her best friend:

  I’m in bed with a cold, and can think only of Mlle X.… I never loved a teacher to this point. I already loved her a lot in my first year, but now it is real love. I think that I’m more passionate than you. I imagine kissing her; I half faint and thrill at the idea of seeing her when school begins.6

  More often, she even dares admit her feeling to her idol herself:

  Dear Mademoiselle, I am in an indescribable state over you. When I do not see you, I would give the world to meet you; I think of you every moment. If I spot you, my eyes fill up with tears, I want to hide; I am so small, so ignorant in front of you. When you chat with me, I am embarrassed, moved, I seem to hear the sweet voice of a fairy and the humming of loving things, impossible to translate; I watch your slightest moves; I lose track of the conversation and mumble something stupid: you must admit, dear Mademoiselle, that this is all mixed up. I do see one thing clearly, that I love you from the depths of my soul.7

  The headmistress of a professional school recounts:

  I recall that in my own youth, we fought over one of our young professors’ lunch papers and paid up to twenty pfennigs to have it. Her used metro tickets were also objects of our collectors’ rage.

  Since she must play a masculine role, it is preferable for the loved woman not to be married; marriage does not always discourage the young admirer, but it interferes; she detests the idea that the object of her adoration could be under the control of a spouse or a lover. Her passions often unfold in secret, or at least on a purely platonic level; but the passage to a concrete eroticism is much easier here than if the loved object is masculine; even if she has had difficult experiences with friends her age, the feminine body does not frighten the girl; with her sisters or her mother, she has often experienced an intimacy where tenderness was subtly penetrated with sensuality, and when she is with the loved one she admires, slipping from tenderness to pleasure will take place just as subtly. When Dorothea Wieck kisses Herta Thiele on the lips in Girls in Uniform, this kiss is both maternal and sexual. Between women there is a complicity that disarms modesty; the excitement one arouses in the other is generally without violence; homosexual embraces involve neither defloration nor penetration: they satisfy infantile clitoral eroticism without demanding new and disquieting metamorphoses. The girl can realize her vocation as passive object without feeling deeply alienated. This is what Renée Vivien expresses in her verses, where she describes the relation of “damned women” and their lovers:

  Our bodies to theirs are a kindred mirror …

  Our lunar kisses have a pallid softness,

  Our fingers do not ruffle the down on a cheek,

  And we are able, when the sash becomes untied,

  To be at the same time lovers and sisters8

  And in these verses:

  For we love gracefulness and delicacy,

  And my possession does not bruise your breasts …

  My mouth would not know how to bite your mouth roughly.

  My mouth will not bitterly bite your mouth.9

  Through the poetic impropriety of the words “breasts” and “mouth,” she clearly promises her friend not to brutalize her. And it is in part out of fear of violence and of rape that the adolescent girl often gives her first love to an older girl rather than to a man. The masculine woman reincarnates for her both the father and the mother: from the father she has authority and transcendence, she is the source and standard of values, she rises beyond the given world, she is divine; but she remains woman: whether she was too abruptly weaned from her mother’s caresses or if, on the contrary, her mother pampered her too long, the adolescent girl, like her brothers, dreams of the warmth of the breast; in this flesh similar to hers she loses herself again in that immediate fusion with life that weaning destroyed; and through this foreign enveloping gaze, she overcomes the separation that individualizes her. Of course, all human relationships entail conflicts; all love entails jealousies. But many of the difficulties that arise between the virgin and her first male love are smoothed away here. The homosexual experience can take the shape of a true love; it can bring to the girl so happy a balance that she will want to continue it, repeat it, and will keep a nostalgic memory of it; it can awaken or give rise to a lesbian vocation.10 But most often, it will only represent a stage: its very facility condemns it. In the love that she declares to a woman older than herself, the girl covets her own future: she is identifying with an idol; unless this idol is exceptionally superior, she loses her aura quickly; when she begins to assert herself, the younger one judges and compares: the other, who was chosen precisely because she was close and unintimidating, is not other enough to impose herself for very long; the male gods are more firmly in place because their heaven is more distant. Her curiosity and her sensuality incite the girl to desire more aggressive embraces. Very often, she has envisaged, from the start, a homosexual adventure just as a transition, an initiation, a temporary situation; she acts out jealousy, anger, pride, joy, and pain with the more or less admitted idea that she is imitating, without great risk, the adventures of which she dreams but that she doe
s not yet dare, nor has had the occasion, to live. She is destined for man, she knows it, and she wants a normal and complete woman’s destiny.

  Man dazzles yet frightens her. To reconcile the contradictory feelings she has about him, she will dissociate in him the male that frightens her from the shining divinity whom she piously adores. Abrupt, awkward with her masculine acquaintances, she idolizes distant Prince Charmings: movie actors whose pictures she pastes over her bed, heroes, living or dead but inaccessible, an unknown glimpsed by chance and whom she knows she will never meet again. Such loves raise no problems. Very often she approaches a socially prestigious or intellectual man who is physically unexciting: for example, an old, slightly ridiculous professor; these older men emerge from a world beyond the world where the adolescent girl is enclosed, and she can secretly devote herself to them, consecrate herself to them as one consecrates oneself to God: such a gift is in no way humiliating, it is freely given since the desire is not carnal. The romantic woman in love freely accepts that the chosen one be unassuming, ugly, a little foolish: she then feels all the more secure. She pretends to deplore the obstacles that separate her from him; but in reality she has chosen him precisely because no real rapport between them is possible. Thus she can make of love an abstract and purely subjective experience, unthreatening to her integrity; her heart beats, she feels the pain of absence, the pangs of presence, vexation, hope, bitterness, enthusiasm, but not authentically; no part of her is engaged. It is amusing to observe that the idol chosen is all the more dazzling the more distant it is: it is convenient for the everyday piano teacher to be ridiculous and ugly; but if one falls in love with a stranger who moves in inaccessible spheres, it is preferable that he be handsome and masculine. The important thing is that, in one way or another, the sexual issue not be raised. These make-believe loves prolong and confirm the narcissistic attitude where eroticism appears only in its immanence, without real presence of the Other. Finding a pretext that permits her to elude concrete experiences, the adolescent girl often develops an intense imaginary life. She chooses to confuse her fantasies with reality. Among other examples, Helene Deutsch describes a particularly significant one: a pretty and seductive girl, who could have easily been courted, refused all relations with young people around her; but at the age of thirteen, in her secret heart, she had chosen to idolize a rather ugly seventeen-year-old boy who had never spoken to her.11 She got hold of a picture of him, wrote a dedication to herself on it, and for three years kept a diary recounting her imaginary experiences: they exchanged kisses and passionate embraces; there were sometimes crying scenes where she left with her eyes all red and swollen; then they were reconciled, and she sent herself flowers, and so on. When a move separated her from him, she wrote him letters she never sent him but that she answered herself. This story was most obviously a defense against real experiences that she feared.

  This case is almost pathological. But it illustrates a normal process by magnifying it. Marie Bashkirtseff gives a gripping example of an imaginary sentimental existence. The Duke of H., with whom she claims to be in love, is someone to whom she has never spoken. What she really desires is to exalt herself; but being a woman, and especially in the period and class she belongs to, she had no chance of achieving success through an independent existence. At eighteen years of age, she lucidly notes: “I write to C. that I would like to be a man. I know that I could be someone; but where can one go in skirts? Marriage is women’s only career; men have thirty-six chances, women have but one, zero, like in the bank.” She thus needs a man’s love; but to be able to confer a sovereign value on her, he must himself be a sovereign consciousness. “Never will a man beneath my position be able to please me,” she writes. “A rich and independent man carries pride and a certain comfortable air with him. Self-assurance has a certain triumphant aura. I love H.’s capricious air, conceited and cruel: something of Nero in him.” And further: “This annihilation of the woman before the superiority of the loved man must be the greatest thrill of self-love that the superior woman can experience.” Thus narcissism leads to masochism: this liaison has already been seen in the child who dreams of Bluebeard, of Griselda, of the martyred saints. The self is constituted as for others, by others: the more powerful others are, the more riches and power the self has; captivating its master, it envelops in itself the virtues possessed by him; loved by Nero, Marie Bashkirtseff would be Nero; to annihilate oneself before others is to realize others at once in oneself and for oneself; in reality this dream of nothingness is an arrogant will to be. In fact, Bashkirtseff never met a man superb enough to alienate herself through him. It is one thing to kneel before a far-off god shaped by one’s self and another thing to give one’s self over to a flesh-and-blood man. Many girls long persist in stubbornly following their dream throughout the real world: they seek a male who seems superior to all others in his position, his merits, his intelligence; they want him to be older than themselves, already having carved out a place for himself in the world, enjoying authority and prestige; fortune and fame fascinate them: the chosen one appears as the absolute Subject who by his love will convey to them his splendor and his indispensability. His superiority idealizes the love that the girl brings to him: it is not only because he is a male that she wants to give herself to him, it is because he is this elite being. “I would like giants and all I find is men,” a friend once said to me. In the name of these high standards, the girl disdains too-ordinary suitors and eludes the problem of sexuality. In her dreams and without risk, she cherishes an image of herself that enchants her as an image, though she has no intention of conforming to it. Thus, Maria Le Hardouin explains that she gets pleasure from seeing herself as a victim, ever devoted to a man, when she is really authoritarian:

  Out of a kind of modesty, I could never in reality express my nature’s hidden tendencies that I lived so deeply in my dreams. As I learned to know myself, I am in fact authoritarian, violent, and deeply incapable of flexibility.

  Always obeying a need to suppress myself, I sometimes imagined that I was an admirable woman, living only by duty, madly in love with a man whose every wish I endeavored to anticipate. We struggled within an ugly world of needs. He killed himself working and came home at night pale and undone. I lost my sight mending his clothes next to a lightless window. In a narrow smoky kitchen, I cooked some miserable meals. Sickness ceaselessly threatened our only child with death. Yet a sweet, crucified smile was always on my lips, and my eyes always showed that unbearable expression of silent courage that in reality I could never stand without disgust.12

  Beyond these narcissistic gratifications, some girls do concretely find the need for a guide, a master. From the time they escape their parents’ hold, they find themselves encumbered by an autonomy that they are not used to; they only know how to make negative use of it; they fall into caprice and extravagance; they want to give up their freedom. The story of the young and capricious girl, rebellious and spoiled, who is tamed by the love of a sensible man is a standard of cheap literature and cinema: it is a cliché that flatters both men and women. It is the story, among others, told by Mme de Ségur in Quel amour d’enfant! (Such an Adorable Child!). As a child, Gisèle, disappointed by her overly indulgent father, becomes attached to a severe old aunt; as a girl, she comes under the influence of an irritable young man, Julien, who judges her harshly, humiliates her, and tries to reform her; she marries a rich, characterless duke with whom she is extremely unhappy, and when, as a widow, she accepts the demanding love of her mentor, she finally finds joy and wisdom. In Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives, independent Jo begins to fall in love with her future husband because he seriously reproaches her for an imprudent act; he also scolds her, and she rushes to excuse herself and submit to him. In spite of the edgy pride of American women, Hollywood films have hundreds of times presented enfants terribles tamed by the healthy brutality of a lover or husband: a couple of slaps, even a good spanking, seem to be a good means of seduction. But in reality, the passage
from ideal love to sexual love is not so simple. Many women carefully avoid approaching the object of their passion through more or less admitted fear of disappointment. If the hero, the giant, or the demigod responds to the love he inspires and transforms it into a real-life experience, the girl panics; her idol becomes a male she shies away from, disgusted. There are flirtatious adolescents who do everything in their power to seduce a seemingly “interesting” or “fascinating” man, but paradoxically they recoil if he manifests too vivid an emotion in return; he was attractive because he seemed inaccessible: in love, he becomes commonplace. “He’s just a man like the others.” The young woman blames him for her disgrace; she uses this pretext to refuse physical contacts that shock her virgin sensibilities. If the girl gives in to her “Ideal one,” she remains unmoved in his arms and “it happens,” says Stekel, “that obsessed girls commit suicide after such scenes where the whole construction of amorous imagination collapses because the Ideal one is seen in the form of a ‘brutal animal.’ ”13 The taste for the impossible often leads the girl to fall in love with a man when he begins to court one of her friends, and very often she chooses a married man. She is readily fascinated by a Don Juan; she dreams of submitting and attaching herself to this seducer that no woman has ever held on to, and she kindles the hope of reforming him: but in fact, she knows she will fail in her undertaking, and this is the reason for her choice. Some girls end up forever incapable of knowing real and complete love. They will search all their lives for an ideal impossible to reach.