The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  In one of her letters to Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield recounts that she has just bought a ravishing mauve corset; she quickly adds: “What a pity there is no one to see it!” Nothing is more discouraging than to feel that one is the flower, the perfume, the treasure that no desire seeks: What good is an asset that does not enrich me and that no one wants as a gift? Love is the revealer that shows up in positive and clear traits the dull negative image as empty as a blank print; the woman’s face, the curves of her body, her childhood memories, her dried tears, her dresses, her habits, her universe, everything she is, everything that belongs to her, escapes contingence and becomes necessary: she is a marvelous gift at the foot of her god’s altar:

  Before his hands were laid gently on her shoulders, before his eyes took their fill of hers, she had been a plain dull woman in a plain dull world. He kissed her, and she stood in the rose-light of immortality.4

  Thus, men endowed with social prestige and good at flattering feminine vanity will arouse passion even if they have no physical charm. Because of their lofty situation, they incarnate Law and Truth: their consciousness discloses an uncontested reality. The woman they praise feels transformed into a priceless treasure. According to Isadora Duncan, D’Annunzio’s success came from this:

  When D’Annunzio loves a woman, he lifts her spirit from this earth to the divine regions where Beatrice moves and shines. In turn he transforms each woman to a part of the divine essence, he carries her aloft until she believes herself really with Beatrice … he flung over each favourite in turn a shining veil. She rose above the heads of ordinary mortals and walked surrounded by a strange radiance. But when the caprice of the poet ended, this veil vanished, the radiance was eclipsed, and the woman turned again to common clay … To hear oneself praised with that magic peculiar to D’Annunzio is, I imagine, something like the experience of Eve when she heard the voice of the serpent in Paradise. D’Annunzio can make any woman feel that she is the centre of the universe.5

  Only in love can woman harmoniously reconcile her eroticism and her narcissism; we have already seen an opposition between these two systems that makes the woman’s adaptation to her sexual destiny very difficult. Making herself carnal object and prey contradicts her self-adoration: it seems to her that lovemaking disfigures and defiles her body or degrades her soul. Some women, therefore, choose frigidity, thinking they can thus preserve the integrity of their ego. Others dissociate animal sensuality and lofty sentiments. A very characteristic case is Mrs. D.S.’s, reported by Stekel and which I have already cited concerning marriage:

  Frigid, and married to a respected man, after his death, there came into her life a young man … he, too, was an artist and a wonderful musician … She became his mistress. Her love was and is to this day so great that she feels happy only in his presence. Her whole life is wrapped in her Lothar. In spite of her great love for him she has remained cool in his arms. Another man, too, crossed her path. He was a forester, a powerful, rough individual who, on finding himself alone with her one day, took possession of her without saying a word. She was so consternated that she didn’t object. In his embrace she experienced the keenest orgasm. “In his arms,” she states, “I have regained my health for the past months. It is like a wild intoxication, but followed by an indescribable disgust when I think of my Lothar. Paul I hate; Lothar I love. Nevertheless, Paul is the one who gratifies me. Everything about Lothar holds me to him; but it seems I must act like a harlot in order to feel. As a lady I can never respond.” [She refuses to marry Paul but continues to sleep with him; in those moments] she becomes like a person transformed and the raw words which escape her lips she would never be guilty of using on any other occasion.

  Stekel adds that “for many women, the descent into animality is the condition for orgasm.” They see an abasement in physical love impossible to reconcile with feelings of esteem and affection. For others, by contrast, it is by the man’s esteem, tenderness, and admiration that this abasement can be abolished. They only consent to give themselves to a man if they believe they are deeply loved by him; a woman has to be very cynical, indifferent, or proud to consider physical relations as an exchange of pleasures in which each partner equally gets something out of it. The man revolts as much as—and perhaps more than—the woman against anyone who wants to exploit him sexually;6 but she is the one who generally has the impression that her partner is using her as an instrument. Only exalted admiration can make up for the humiliation of an act she considers a defeat. We have seen that the love act requires a woman’s profound alienation; she is awash in the indolence of passivity; eyes closed, anonymous, lost, she feels transported by waves, caught up in torment, buried in the night: night of flesh, of the womb, of the tomb; reduced to nothing, she reaches the Whole, her self effaced. But when the man separates himself from her, she finds herself thrown back to earth, on a bed, in the light; she has a name and a face again: she is a conquered person, a prey, an object. This is when love becomes necessary to her. Just as after being weaned the child seeks the reassuring gaze of his parents, it is in the eyes of the lover who contemplates her that the woman whose flesh has been painfully detached has to feel reunited with the Whole. She is rarely completely satisfied; even if she experienced the relief of pleasure, she is not entirely freed from the carnal spell, her arousal becomes feeling; in providing her with sensuality, the man attaches her to him and does not liberate her. He, though, no longer feels desire for her: she only forgives him for this momentary indifference if he has vowed timeless and absolute feeling to her. Then the immanence of the instant is transcended; the burning memories are no longer a regret but a treasure; as it dies down, the sensuality becomes hope and promise; sexual pleasure is justified; the woman can gloriously assume her sexuality because she transcends it; arousal, pleasure, and desire are no longer a state but a gift; her body is no longer an object: it is a song, a flame. Thus she can abandon herself passionately to the magic of eroticism; night becomes light; the woman in love can open her eyes, look at the man who loves her and whose gaze glorifies her; through him nothingness becomes plenitude of being, and being is transfigured into value; she no longer sinks into a sea of darkness, she is transported on wings, exalted to the sky. Abandon becomes holy ecstasy. When she receives the loved man, the woman is inhabited, visited like the Virgin by the Holy Spirit, like the believer by the wafer; this explains the obscene analogy between holy hymns and ribald songs: it is not that mystical love always has a sexual side; but the sexuality of the woman in love takes on a mystical tone. “My God, my beloved, my master”: the same words spill from the lips of the kneeling saint and the woman in love lying on the bed; the saint offers her flesh to Christ’s arrows, she holds out her hands to receive the stigmata, she implores the burning of divine Love; the woman in love also offers and waits: darts, stinger, and arrows are embodied in the male sex. In both of them there is the same dream, the infantile, mystical, love dream: to exist sovereignly by effacing oneself within the other.

  It has sometimes been claimed that this desire for effacement leads to masochism.7 But as I have noted concerning eroticism, one can only speak of masochism if I try “to cause myself to be fascinated by my objectivity-for-others,”8 that is, if the consciousness of the subject turns back to the ego to grasp it in its humiliated situation. But the woman in love is not only a narcissist alienated in her self: she also experiences a passionate desire to go beyond her own limits and become infinite, thanks to the intervention of another who has access to infinite reality. She abandons herself first to love to save herself; but the paradox of idolatrous love is that in order to save herself, she ends up totally disavowing herself. Her feeling takes on a mystical dimension; she no longer asks God to admire her or approve her; she wants to melt into him, forget herself in his arms. “I would have liked to be a love saint,” writes Mme d’Agoult. “I envied the martyr in such moments of exaltation and ascetic furor.” What comes through in these words is the desire for a radical destructi
on of the self, abolishing the frontiers that separate her from her beloved: it is not masochism but a dream of ecstatic union. The same dream inspires these words of Georgette Leblanc: “At that time, had I been asked what I most wanted in the world, without any hesitation I would have said: to be food and flame for his spirit.”

  To achieve this union, the woman first wants to serve; she will feel necessary in responding to her lover’s demands; she will be integrated into his existence, she will be a part of his value, she will be justified; even mystics like to believe, according to Angelus Silesius, that God needs man, otherwise the gift they make of themselves would be in vain. The more demands the man makes, the more fulfilled the woman feels. Although the seclusion Hugo imposed on Juliette Drouet weighed on the young woman, one feels she is happy to obey him: staying seated close to the fire is doing something for the master’s happiness. She passionately tries to be positively useful to him. She prepares special dishes for him, creates a home for him: your little “nest for two,” she said sweetly; she takes care of his clothes.

  She writes to him: “I want you to stain and tear all your clothes as much as possible and that I alone should mend and clean them and nobody else.”

  For him she reads newspapers, cuts out articles, organizes letters and notes, copies manuscripts. She is upset when the poet entrusts part of this work to his daughter Léopoldine. Similar characteristics are found in all women in love. If need be she tyrannizes herself in the lover’s name; everything she is, everything she has, every second of her life, must be devoted to him and thus find their raison d’être; she does not want to possess anything except in him; what would make her unhappy is that he demand nothing of her, and so an attentive lover invents demands. She first sought in love a confirmation of what she was, her past, her personage; but she also commits her future: to justify it, she destines it to the one who possesses all values; she thus gives up her transcendence: she subordinates it to that of the essential other whose vassal and slave she makes herself. It is to find herself, to save herself, that she began by losing herself in him: the fact is that little by little she loses herself; all reality is in the other. Love that was originally defined as a narcissistic apotheosis is accomplished in the bitter joys of a devotion that often leads to self-mutilation. At the outset of a consuming passion, the woman becomes prettier, more elegant than before. “When Adèle does my hair, I look at my forehead because you love it,” writes Mme d’Agoult. This face, this body, this room, this me, she has found a raison d’être for them; she cherishes them through the mediation of this beloved man who loves her. But later, she gives up all coquetry; if the lover so desires, she changes this face that had once been more precious than love itself; she loses interest in it; she makes what she is and what she has the fief of her lord; what he disdains, she disavows; she would like to devote to him each beat of her heart, each drop of blood, the marrow of her bones; this is what a dream of martyrdom expresses: to exaggerate the gift of self to the point of torture, of death, to be the ground the beloved treads on, to be nothing but that which responds to his call. She vigorously eliminates everything the beloved finds useless. If this gift she makes of self is totally accepted, there is no masochism: few traces of it are seen in Juliette Drouet. In her excessive adoration she sometimes knelt before the poet’s portrait and asked him to excuse the mistakes she might have committed; she did not angrily turn against herself. But the slide from generous enthusiasm to masochistic rage is easy. The woman in love who finds herself before her lover in the same situation as the child before his parents also recovers the feeling of guilt she experienced around them; she does not choose to revolt against him as long as she loves him: she revolts against her self. If he loves her less than she desires, if she fails to interest him, to make him happy, to be sufficient to him, all her narcissism turns into disgust, humiliation, and self-hatred that push her to self-punishment. During a longer or shorter crisis, sometimes for a whole life, she will be a willing victim; she will go out of her way to harm this self that has not been able to satisfy the lover. Then her attitude is specifically masochistic. But cases where the woman in love seeks her own suffering so as to get revenge on herself and those where she seeks confirmation of the man’s freedom and power must not be confused. It is a commonplace—and seems to be a reality—that the prostitute is proud to be beaten by her man: but it is not the idea of her battered and enslaved person that exalts her, it is the strength, authority, and sovereignty of the male on whom she depends; she also likes to see him mistreat another male, she often pushes him into dangerous competitions: she wants her master to hold the values recognized in the milieu to which she belongs. The woman who gladly submits to masculine caprices also admires the proof of a sovereign freedom in the tyranny that is wielded over her. One must be careful to note that if for some reason the lover’s prestige is ruined, his blows and demands become odious to her: they are only worth something if they manifest the beloved’s divinity. In that case, it is intoxicatingly joyous to feel oneself the prey of a foreign freedom: for any existent the most surprising adventure is to find oneself sustained by the diverse and imperious will of another; one is tired of inhabiting the same skin all the time; blind obedience is the only chance of radical change that a human being might experience. So here is the woman slave, queen, flower, doe, stained-glass window, doormat, servant, courtesan, muse, companion, mother, sister, or child depending on the lover’s fleeting dreams, the lover’s imperious orders: she complies with delight with these metamorphoses as long as she does not recognize that she still has the same taste of submission on her lips. In love as well as in eroticism, it appears that masochism is one of the paths the unsatisfied woman takes, disappointed by the other and by herself; but this is not the natural slope of a happy resignation. Masochism perpetuates the presence of the self as a hurt, fallen figure; love aims at the forgetting of self in favor of the essential subject.

  The supreme aim of human love, like mystical love, is identification with the loved one. The measure of values and the truth of the world are in his own consciousness; that is why serving him is still not enough. The woman tries to see with his eyes; she reads the books he reads, prefers the paintings and music he prefers, she is only interested in the landscapes she sees with him, in the ideas that come from him; she adopts his friends, his enemies, and his opinions; when she questions herself, she endeavors to hear the answer he gives; she wants the air he has already breathed in her lungs; the fruits and flowers she has not received from his hands have neither fragrance nor taste; even her hodological space is upset: the center of the world is no longer where she is but where the beloved is; all roads leave from and lead to his house. She uses his words, she repeats his gestures, adopts his manias and tics. “I am Heathcliff,” says Catherine in Wuthering Heights; this is the cry of all women in love; she is another incarnation of the beloved, his reflection, his double: she is he. She lets her own world founder in contingence: she lives in his universe.

  The supreme happiness of the woman in love is to be recognized by the beloved as part of him; 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 does not tire of saying—even if it is excessive—this delicious “we.” Necessary to a being who is absolute necessity, who projects himself in the world toward necessary goals, and who reconstitutes the world as necessity, the woman in love experiences in her resignation the magnificent possession of the absolute. It is this certitude that gives her such great joys; she feels exalted at the right hand of the god; what does it matter that she is always in second place as long as it is her place, forever, in a marvelously ordered world? As long as she loves, as she is loved and necessary for the beloved, she feels completely justified: she savors peace and happiness. Such was perhaps Mlle Aïssé’s lot at Knight d’Aydie’s side before religious scruples troubled her soul, of Juliette Drouet’s in Hugo’s shadow.

  But this glorious felic
ity is seldom stable. No man is God. The relations the mystic has with the divine absence depend on his fervor alone: but the deified man—who is not God—is present. That is where the torments of the woman in love stem from. Her most ordinary destiny can be summarized in Julie de Lespinasse’s famous words: “At every instant of my life, my friend, I love you, I suffer, and I await you.” Of course for men too suffering is linked to love; but their heartbreaks either do not last long or are not all consuming; Benjamin Constant wanted to die for Juliette Récamier: in one year, he was cured. Stendhal missed Métilde for years, but it was a regret that enriched his life more than destroying it. In accepting herself as the inessential and as total dependence, the woman creates a hell for herself; all women in love see themselves in Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who, having exchanged her fish tail for a woman’s legs out of love, walked on needles and burning coals. It is not true that the beloved man is unconditionally necessary and that she is not necessary to him; it is not up to him to justify the woman who worships him, and he does not let himself be possessed by her.

  An authentic love should take on the other’s contingence, that is, his lacks, limitations, and originary gratuitousness; it would claim to be not a salvation but an inter-human relation. Idolatrous love confers an absolute value on the loved one: this is the first lie strikingly apparent to all outsiders: “He doesn’t deserve so much love,” people whisper around the woman in love; posterity smiles pityingly when evoking the pale figure of Count Guibert. It is a heartrending disappointment for the woman to discover her idol’s weaknesses and mediocrity. Colette—in The Vagabond and Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeships)—often alludes to this bitter agony; this disillusion is even crueler than the child’s at seeing paternal prestige crumble, because the woman herself chose the one to whom she made a gift of her whole being. Even if the chosen one is worthy of the deepest attachment, his truth is earthbound: it is not he whom the woman kneeling before a supreme being loves; she is duped by that spirit of seriousness which refuses to put values “in parentheses,” not recognizing that they stem from human existence; her bad faith erects barriers between her and the one she worships. She flatters him, she bows down before him, but she is not a friend for him, since she does not realize he is in danger in the world, that his projects and finalities are as fragile as he himself is; considering him the Law and Truth, she misunderstands his freedom, which is hesitation and anguish. This refusal to apply a human measure to the lover explains many feminine paradoxes. The woman demands a favor from the lover, he grants it: he is generous, rich, magnificent, he is royal, he is divine; if he refuses, he is suddenly stingy, mean, and cruel, he is a devilish being or bestial. One might be tempted to counter: If a yes is understood as a superb extravagance, why should one be surprised by a no? If the no manifests such an abject egotism, why admire the yes so much? Between the superhuman and the inhuman is there not room for the human?