The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  This liberation can be conveyed on the erotic level as well. Woman might find compensation for the feminine inferiority complex in the money and services she extorts from man; money has a purifying role; it abolishes the war of the sexes. If many nonprofessional women insist on extracting checks and gifts from their lovers—making the man pay—and paying him, as we will see further on, it is not out of cupidity alone: it is to change him into an instrument. In that way, the woman defends herself from becoming one herself; perhaps he believes he “has” her, but this sexual possession is illusory; it is she who has him on the far more solid economic ground. Her self-esteem is satisfied. She can abandon herself to her lover’s embraces; she is not yielding to a foreign will; pleasure will not be “inflicted” on her, it will become rather a supplementary benefit; she will not be “taken,” because she is paid.

  Nevertheless, the courtesan has the reputation of being frigid. It is useful for her to know how to govern her heart and her sexual appetite: sentimental or sensual, she risks being under the influence of a man who will exploit or dominate her or make her suffer. Among the sexual acts she accepts, there are many—especially early in her career—that humiliate her; her revolt against male arrogance is expressed by her frigidity. Hetaeras, like matrons, freely confide “tricks” to each other that enable them to “fake” their work. This contempt, this disgust for men clearly shows they are not at all sure they have won the game of exploiter-exploited. And in fact, in the great majority of cases, dependence is still their lot.

  No man is their definitive master. But they have the most urgent need of man. The courtesan loses all her means of existence if he ceases to desire her: the novice knows that her whole future is in his hands; deprived of masculine support, even the movie star sees her prestige fade: abandoned by Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth wandered over Europe like a sickly orphan until she found Aly Khan. The most beautiful woman is never sure of tomorrow, because her weapons are magic, and magic is capricious; she is bound to her protector—husband or lover—nearly as tightly as a “virtuous” wife is bound to her husband. She not only owes him bed service but also is subjected to his presence, conversation, friends, and especially his vanity’s demands. By paying for his steady’s high heels and satin skirts, the pimp makes an investment that will bring a return; by offering his girlfriend pearls and furs, the industrialist or the producer displays his wealth and power through her: whether the woman is a means for earning money or a pretext for spending it, it is the same servitude. The gifts showered on her are chains. And are these clothes and jewels she wears really hers? The man sometimes reclaims them after they break up, as Sacha Guitry once did with elegance. To “keep” her protector without renouncing her pleasures, the woman uses ruses, maneuvers, lies, and hypocrisy that dishonor conjugal life; even if she only feigns servility, this game is itself servile. Beautiful and famous, she can choose another if the master of the moment becomes odious. But beauty is a worry, a fragile treasure; the hetaera is totally dependent on her body, which time pitilessly degrades; the fight against aging is most dramatic for her. If she is endowed with great prestige, she will be able to survive the ruin of her face and figure. But caring for this renown, her surest asset, subjects her to the hardest of tyrannies: that of public opinion. We know that Hollywood stars fall into slavery. Their bodies are no longer their own; the producer decides on their hair color, weight, figure, and type; teeth are pulled out to change the shape of a cheek. Diets, exercise, fittings, and makeup are daily chores. Going out and flirting are part of “personal appearances”; private life is just a moment in their public life. In France there is no written contract, but a careful and clever woman knows what “promotion” demands of her. The star who refuses to give in to these demands will face a brutal or slow but ineluctable decline. The prostitute who only gives her body is perhaps less of a slave than the woman whose occupation it is to entertain. A woman who has “arrived” through a real profession and whose talent is recognized—actress, opera singer, dancer—escapes the hetaera’s condition; she can experience true independence; but most spend their entire lives in danger; they must seduce the public and men over and over without respite.

  Very often the kept woman interiorizes her dependence; subjected to public opinion, she accepts its values; she admires the “fashionable world” and adopts its customs; she wants to be regarded according to bourgeois standards. She is a parasite of the rich bourgeoisie, and she adheres to its ideas; she is “right thinking”; in former times she would readily send her daughters to a convent school, and as she got older, she even went to Mass and openly converted. She is on the conservatives’ side. She is too proud to have made her place in this world to want to change. The struggle she wages to “arrive” does not dispose her to feelings of brotherhood and human solidarity; she paid for her success with too much slavish compliance to sincerely wish for universal freedom. Zola highlights this trait in Nana:

  As for books and plays, Nana had very definite opinions: she wanted tender and noble works, things to make her dream and elevate her soul … she was riled up against the republicans. What on earth did those dirty people who never washed want? Weren’t people happy, didn’t the emperor do everything he could for the people? A pretty bit of filth, the people! She knew them, she could talk about them: No, you see, their republic would be a great misfortune for everyone. Oh, may God preserve the emperor as long as possible!

  In times of war, no one displays a more aggressive patriotism than high-level prostitutes; they hope to rise to the level of duchess through the noble sentiments they affect. Commonplaces, clichés, prejudices, and conventional feelings form the basis of their public conversations, and they have often lost all sincerity deep in their hearts. Between lies and hyperbole, language is destroyed. The hetaera’s whole life is a show: her words, her gestures, are intended not to express her thoughts but to produce an effect. She plays a comedy of love for her protector: at times she plays it for herself. She plays comedies of respectability and prestige for the public: she ends up believing herself to be a paragon of virtue and a sacred idol. Stubborn bad faith governs her inner life and permits her studied lies to seem true. There are moments of spontaneity in her life: she does experience love; she has “flings” and “infatuations”; sometimes she is even “mad about” someone. But the one who spends too much time on caprices, feelings, or pleasure will soon lose her “position.” Generally, she composes her fantasies with the prudence of an adulterous wife; she hides from her producer and the public; thus, she cannot give too much of herself to her “true loves”; they can only be a distraction, a respite. Besides, she is usually too obsessed with her own success to be able to lose herself in a real love affair. As for other women, it often happens that the hetaera loves them sensually; as an enemy of men who impose their domination on her, she will find sensual relaxation as well as revenge in the arms of a woman friend: so it was with Nana and her dear Satin. Just as she wishes to play an active role in the world to put her freedom to positive use, she likes to possess other beings: very young men whom she enjoys “helping,” or young women she will willingly support and, in any case, for whom she will be a virile personage. Whether she is homosexual or not, she will have the complex relations I have discussed with women in general: she needs them as judges and witnesses, as confidantes and accomplices, to create this “counter-universe” that every woman oppressed by man must have. But feminine rivalry reaches its paroxysm here. The prostitute who trades on her generality has competition; but if there is enough work for everyone, they feel solidarity, even with their disputes. The hetaera who seeks to “distinguish” herself is a priori hostile to the one who, like her, lusts for a privileged place. This is where the well-known theme of feminine “cattiness” proves true.

  The greatest misfortune for the hetaera is that not only is her independence the deceptive reverse side of a thousand dependencies, but this very freedom is negative. An actress like Rachel, a dancer like Isadora Duncan, eve
n if they are aided by men, have occupations that are demanding and justify them; they attain concrete freedom from the work they choose and love. But for the great majority of them, their art, their occupations are only a means; they are not involved in real projects. Cinema in particular, which subjects the star to the director, allows her no invention, no progress, in creative activity. Others exploit what she is; she does not create a new object. Still it is quite rare to become a star. In “amorous adventures,” properly speaking, no road opens onto transcendence. Here again, ennui accompanies the confinement of woman in immanence. Zola shows this with Nana:

  However, in the midst of all this luxury, and surrounded by her courtiers, Nana was bored to tears. She had men for every minute of the night, and money all over the house, even among the brushes and combs in the drawers of her dressing-table. But all this had ceased to satisfy her; and she was conscious of a void in her existence, a gap which made her yawn. Her life dragged on without occupation, each day bringing back the same monotonous hours. The next day did not exist: she lived like a bird, sure of having enough to eat, and ready to perch on the first branch she came to. This certainty of being fed caused her to stretch out in languid ease all day, lulled to sleep in conventional idleness and submission as if she were the prisoner of her own profession. Never going out except in her carriage, she began to lose the use of her legs. She reverted to her childish habits, kissing Bijou from morning to night and killing time with stupid pleasures, as she waited for some man or other.

  American literature abounds with this opaque ennui that stifles Hollywood and chokes the traveler as soon as he arrives there: actors and extras are as bored as the women whose condition they share. Even in France, official events are often burdensome. The protector who rules the starlet’s life is an older man whose friends are his age: their preoccupations are foreign to the young woman, their conversations weary her; there is a chasm far deeper than in bourgeois marriages between the twenty-year-old novice and the forty-five-year-old banker who spend their days and nights side by side.

  The Moloch to whom the hetaera sacrifices pleasure, love, and freedom is her career. The matron’s ideal is static happiness that envelops her relations with her husband and children. Her “career” stretches across time, but it is nonetheless an immanent object that is summed up in a name. The name gets bigger on billboards and on people’s lips as the steps mounted up the social ladder get higher. According to her temperament, the woman administers her enterprise prudently or boldly. One woman will find satisfaction in housekeeping, folding laundry in her closet, the other in the headiness of adventure. Sometimes the woman limits herself to perpetually balancing a perpetually threatened situation that sometimes breaks down; or sometimes she endlessly builds—like a Tower of Babel aiming in vain for the sky—her renown. Some of them, mixing amorous commerce with other activities, are true adventurers: they are spies, like Mata Hari, or secret agents; they generally are not the ones who initiate the projects, they are rather instruments in men’s hands. But overall, the hetaera’s attitude is similar to that of the adventurer; like him, she is often halfway between the serious and the adventure as such; she seeks ready-made values—money and glory—but she attaches as much value to winning them as to possessing them; and finally, the supreme value in her eyes is subjective success. She, too, justifies this individualism by a more or less systematic nihilism, but experienced with all the more conviction as she is hostile to men and sees enemies in other women. If she is intelligent enough to feel the need for moral justification, she will invoke a more or less well assimilated Nietzscheism; she will affirm the right of the elite being over the vulgar. Her person belongs to her like a treasure whose mere existence is a gift: so much so that in being dedicated to herself, she will claim to serve the group. The destiny of the woman devoted to man is haunted by love: she who exploits the male fulfills herself in the cult of self-adoration. If she attaches such a price to her glory, it is not only for economic interest: she seeks there the apotheosis of her narcissism.

  1. Volume I, Part Two.

  * Complete Essays of Montaigne.—TRANS.

  2. Puberty. [A. Marro, “The Psychology of Puberty,” British Journal of Psychiatry (1910). —TRANS.]

  * A. J. B. Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (Prostitution in the City of Paris). Brussels: Société Encyclographique des Sciences Médicales, 1836. Beauvoir’s dates are erroneous. The study was republished in 1857.—TRANS.

  * Léon Bizard, Souvenirs d’un médecin … des prisons de Paris (1925; Memoirs of a Doctor of Paris Prisons)—TRANS.

  3. Cited by Marro, “Puberty.”

  * Parent-Duchâtelet’s study was written in 1836 and republished in 1857.

  4. She had this story published in secret under the pseudonym Marie-Thérèse; I will refer to her by this name.

  * Julot is a pet name for a prostitute’s pimp.—TRANS.

  5. “Les jeunes prostituées vagabondes en prison” (Young Vagabond Prostitutes in Prison)

  * In the French text of these passages there are grammar and spelling errors that we have not reproduced in English.- * In the French text of these passages there are grammar and spelling errors that we have not reproduced in English.—TRANS.

  6. “A tampon to anesthetize the gono was given to prostitutes before the doctor’s visit so that he only found a woman to be sick if the madam wanted to get rid of her.”

  7. Obviously, it is not through negative and hypocritical measures that this situation can be changed. For prostitution to disappear, two conditions are necessary: a decent job must be guaranteed to all women; customs must not place any obstacles to free love. Prostitution will be suppressed only by suppressing the needs to which it responds.

  8. It may happen that she is also an artist, and seeking to please, she invents and creates. She can either combine these two functions or go beyond the amatory level and class herself in the category of actress, opera singer, dancer, and so on, which will be discussed later.

  9. Just as some women use marriage to serve their own ends, others use their lovers as means for attaining a political or economic aim. They go beyond the hetaera’s situation as others go beyond the matron’s.

  | CHAPTER 9 |

  From Maturity to Old Age

  The history of woman—because she is still trapped in her female functions—depends much more than man’s on her physiological destiny; and the arc of this destiny is more erratic, more discontinuous, than the masculine one. Every period of woman’s life is fixed and monotonous: but the passages from one stage to another are dangerously abrupt; they reveal themselves in far more decisive crises than those of the male: puberty, sexual initiation, menopause. While the male grows older continuously, the woman is brusquely stripped of her femininity; still young, she loses sexual attraction and fertility, from which, in society’s and her own eyes, she derives the justification of her existence and her chances of happiness: bereft of all future, she has approximately half of her adult life still to live.

  The “dangerous age” is characterized by certain organic troubles,1 but the symbolic value they embody gives them their importance. The crisis is felt much less acutely by women who have not essentially staked everything on their femininity; those who work hard—in their home or outside—are relieved when their menstrual servitude ends; peasants and workers’ wives who are constantly threatened with new pregnancies are happy when, finally, that risk no longer exists. In this situation as in many others, women’s disorders come less from the body itself than from their anxious consciousness of it. The moral drama usually begins before the onset of the physiological phenomena, and it does not end until long after they have been eliminated.

  Well before the definitive mutilation, woman is haunted by the horror of aging. The mature man is engaged in more important enterprises than those of love; his sexual ardor is less pressing than in his youth; and as he is not expected to have the passive qualities of an object, the alteration of
his face and body does not spoil his possibilities of seduction. By contrast, woman reaches her full sexual blossoming at about thirty-five, having finally overcome all her inhibitions: this is when her desires are the most intense and when she wants to satisfy them the most ardently; she has counted on her sexual attributes far more than man has; to keep her husband, to be assured of protection, and to succeed in most jobs she holds, she has to please; she has not been allowed a hold on the world except through man’s mediation: What will become of her when she no longer has a hold on him? This is what she anxiously wonders while she witnesses, powerless, the degradation of this object of flesh with which she is one; she fights; but dyes, peeling, and plastic surgery can never do more than prolong her dying youth. At least she can play tricks with the mirror. But when the inevitable, irreversible process starts, which is going to destroy in her the whole edifice constructed during puberty, she feels touched by the very inevitability of death.

  One might think that the woman who experiences the greatest distress is the one who has been the most passionately enraptured by her beauty and youth; but no; the narcissist is too attentive to her person not to have envisaged the ineluctable moment and not to have worked out an alternative position; she will certainly suffer from her mutilation: but at least she will not be caught short and will adapt rather quickly. The woman who has forgotten, devoted, and sacrificed herself will be disrupted much more by the sudden revelation. “I had only one life to live; this was my lot, so here I am!” To the surprise of her family and friends, a radical change takes place in her: expelled from her shelter, torn away from her projects, she brusquely finds herself, without resources, face-to-face with herself. Beyond this barrier she has unexpectedly struck, she has the feeling that she will do no more than survive; her body will be without promise; the dreams and desires she has not realized will forever remain unaccomplished; she will look back on the past from this new perspective; the time has come to draw the line, to take stock. And she is horrified by the narrow strictures inflicted on her life. Faced with this, her brief and disappointing story, she behaves like an adolescent girl on the threshold of a still inaccessible future: she denies her finitude; to the poverty of her existence she contrasts the nebulous treasures of her personality. Because as a woman she endured her destiny more or less passively, she feels that her chances were taken from her, that she was duped, that she slid from youth to maturity without being aware of it. She discovers that her husband, her milieu, and her occupations were not worthy of her; she feels misunderstood. She withdraws from the surroundings to which she esteems herself superior; she shuts herself up with the secret she carries in her heart and which is the mysterious key to her unfortunate lot; she tries to see the possibilities she has not exhausted. She begins to keep a diary; if she has understanding confidantes, she pours out her heart in endless conversations; and she ruminates on her regrets, her grievances, all day and all night. Just as the young girl dreams of what her future will be, she recalls what her past could have been; she remembers the missed occasions and constructs beautiful retrospective romances. Helene Deutsch cites the case of a woman who had broken off an unhappy marriage very early and who had then spent long serene years with a second husband: at forty-five, she painfully began to miss her first husband and to sink into melancholy. The cares of childhood and puberty come back to life, the woman constantly mulls over the story of her youth, and forgotten feelings for her parents, brothers and sisters, and childhood friends come alive once again. Sometimes she indulges in dreamy and passive moroseness. But more often she is jolted into saving her wasted existence. She displays, exhibits, and praises the merits of this personality she has just discovered in contrast with the pettiness of her destiny. Matured by experience, she believes she is finally able to prove her worth; she would like to have another chance. And first in a pathetic effort, she tries to stop time. A maternal woman is sure she can still have a child: she passionately seeks to create life once more. A sensual woman strives to conquer a new lover. The coquette is more than ever determined to please. They all declare they have never felt so young. They want to persuade others that the passage of time has not really touched them; they begin to “dress young,” they act childishly. The aging woman well knows that if she has ceased being a sexual object, it is not only because her flesh no longer provides man with fresh treasures: it is also that her past and her experience make a person of her whether she likes it or not; she has fought, loved, wanted, suffered, and taken pleasure for herself: this autonomy is intimidating; she tries to disavow it; she exaggerates her femininity, she adorns herself, wears perfume, she becomes totally charming, gracious, pure immanence; she admires her male interlocutor with a naive eye and childish intonations; she ostentatiously brings up her memories of girlhood; instead of speaking, she chirps, claps her hands, bursts out laughing. She plays this game with a kind of sincerity. This newfound interest in herself and her desire to wrench herself from old routines and start over again give her the impression of a new beginning.