Autonomy and Femininity in The Second Sex

It has been 70 years since Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published.[1] Today, women continue to wrestle with the same questions she did – in modified language – for instance: why do so many women choose to wear makeup, corsets, and high-heels, or engage in sexual submission despite their ‘intellectual awareness’ and ‘feminist sensibilities’?[2] Or, has the rise of women influencers, whose vocation it is to objectify their stylised bodies, fostered a culture of hyperfeminine narcissism?[3] How might we evaluate the relationship between women’s free choices, and what is popularly called ‘internalised misogyny’?[4] During this span of time, the feminist movement has accomplished transformative progress towards women’s emancipation in legal and political institutions, the market, and popular imaginations. However, oppression endures. In this essay on Beauvoir’s philosophy, I address why women who appear to be likely transcendent subjects because of their political and economic independence continue to experience forms of domination in their sexual and creative enterprises. To do so, I examine the chapter ‘The Independent Woman’ of The Second Sex, reconstructing its defining conflict between women’s autonomy and femininity.

            This question requires three points of clarification. First, for Beauvoir, women have been made to occupy the position of the Other, while men colonise the position of human Subject.[5] The concept of subjectivity arises in her writing in existentialist terms as a navigation of transcendence and immanence. Transcendence refers to active, futurist, inventive, purposive living by a subject, while immanence denotes a passive, retrospective, static, insular, objectified existence. Beauvoir acknowledges “all human existence is transcendence and immanence at the same time; to go beyond itself, it must maintain itself; to thrust itself toward the future, it must integrate the past into itself.”[6] Nonetheless, for Beauvoir, the project of fashioning a meaningful life requires working towards transcendence, particularly for women, whose historical mode of existence has been characterised by immanent objectivity – to which women have become phenomenologically attached.

Second, Beauvoir theorises that not only is the body “a thing of the world” but it is also “a point of view on the world.”[7] As a result, “the body…is a situation,” and this ‘embodied situation’ moulds positions from which sexed bodies enact subjectivity.[8] While sexed differences (genitalia, reproduction, etc.) are neither accidental nor incidental, they remain objective facts which inform but never determine destiny. Her analysis concatenates the specific trajectory of civilisation’s formations to show how structures of patriarchal domination were erected; this masculinist infrastructure, while transhistorical, is not ahistorical. It cannot be accepted as an essential, foregone conclusion. This is reflected in Beauvoir’s formulation, “one is not born, but rather, becomes woman,” wherein biology is only one of the many ways the female body is stylised into the situation of womanhood.[9]

To explore the weltering skeins of women’s condition, she takes up methods of psychoanalysis, Marxism, historical materialism, and literary criticism. This exercise culminates in her vision of the ‘feminine mythology,’ which is storied by politically valent rumours, ruminations, regiments, and rituals that “haunt [female] consciousness without ever having appeared as a fixed object before it.”[10] The feminine myth is large, it contains multitudes, it contradicts itself, it careens through Beauvoir’s writings, assuming itself as neither truth nor lie. Additionally, femininity institutes its myth through custom material imperatives. Corsets choke, shirts stain, and heels hinder; the woman is enfeebled by her mythology’s mandates, and yet compliance with them offers her piecemeal gratification. The feminine myth, in other words, sustains the gender hierarchy by turning itself into a symbolic and material repository of female alterity, to which civilisation’s death and life drives are relegated.[11] ‘Objective’ symbolic myths and tight ascriptions of race, class, and caste, are then mediated by women’s “lived experiences,” that is, their intersubjective interactions and chosen imaginaries. These two dimensions finally constellate in the “individual dramas” of disaggregated, dominated women.[12] Beauvoir’s nuanced formulation of ‘becoming’ a woman avoids slipping into either biological reductionism or postmodernist gobbledygook, where gender is nothing but the discursive imaginations of an aerated culture.

Not Everyone Can Have God as a Lover

Beauvoir offers a typology of three categories of women’s response to their situation of Othering: the narcissist; the woman in love; and the mystic. The narcissistic woman “demands to be valued by a world to which she denies all value.” [13] She is so alienated from herself and the world outside her through her cultural education in objectification, that she is able to encounter herself as an object to be adored. Next, the woman in love, like the mystic, straddles the paradox of sacrificing her subjectivity in order to find her subjectivity. She is willing to relinquish herself at the feet of a man whose transcendent subjectivity appears (and tends to be) stronger than hers. However, expectedly, this self-immolation immanentizes her rather than empowering her.

In contrast to these categories, the independent woman is financially independent through productive work, and has political rights. For man, emancipated transcendence lies a priori in his undivided masculinity that allows professional, and romantic accomplishments to confer and confirm his prestige and worth. Conversely, femininity inheres to passivity and objectivity; if the woman is to realise her femininity, she must abdicate her sovereignty. Due to her economic and political position of relative progressiveness, she recognises – in some form or the other – the tyranny incorporated in the feminine myth, for her male counterparts do not suffer the same psychological and moral predicaments as her. However, Beauvoir posits that denying herself femininity would amount to the partial loss of her humanity, not to mention social and sexual depreciation in her worth. Women cannot opt-out of the cultivation of their femininity, nor, by virtue of the myth’s design, would they want to – women “want to feel like a real woman for her own personal satisfaction.”[14] Her conflict is thus: “[s]he refuses to confine herself to her role as female because she does not want to mutilate herself; but it would also be a mutilation to repudiate her sex.”[15] In the independent woman’s stabs at autonomy, the feminine myth exposes its inescapability, and its incompatibility with holistic liberation.

The Man Who Picks Her Like A Fruit

There are three effects to bear in mind about the intelligent woman who knows she is intelligent, and tries to repudiate this fact like “an aging woman tries to deny her age.”[16] First, her economic responsibilities mean she has less time to devote to feminine upkeep, which inspires in her feelings of inadequacy. Secondly, her independence incapacitates her grace; the bliss of ignorance eludes her, and when she play-acts at socio-political insouciance it manifests as hyperfeminine contortions of doe-eyes, florid giggles, and nubile affectations. However, femininity exists as an aesthetic of innocence – her intentionality flattens the performance into awkwardness. Third, the result of ‘failing’ at femininity forces her to rhetorically attribute this to her being smarter, freer, and more enlightened than her slavish, siren sisters.

As framed by the myth of essential femininity, sex is preconfigured as man (subject) taking woman (object). Women – intelligent or otherwise – wantto be ‘taken’ because the male subject, if “chosen,…feel[s] exploited.” [17] Thus, if a woman wants to engage in sexual gratification, she must accordingly acquiesce to the patriarchal logic that organises sex; “the woman can take only when she is prey” [italics added].[18] However, femininity cannot accommodate the display of agency involved in edulcorating herself into prey. If the independent woman deploys her curated wiles in the pursuit of sex, both success and failure condemn her to sufferance. If the man rejects her advances or sees through the miasma of her deliberate objectification, her embarrassment at being unable to seamlessly achieve ‘femininity’ is gutting. If she succeeds, she has willingly made “herself flesh,” through choosing sexual passivity and immanence, “she could win only by losing: she remains lost.”[19]

 Furthermore, this process of self-objectification for sexual gratification is psychologically difficult to command. Being a working woman in the real world, men do not populate her imaginary as godlike superiors, and therefore, sexually submitting to them in order to feel the pleasure of genuine domination falters at once erotically and ontologically. A man in bed may “feel he is most fiercely male,” but to the intelligent woman’s “knowing eyes,” he is transparent as overcompensating, anxious, or otherwise insipid for harbouring the delusions of masculine supremacy – delusions which she has dispensed of through her critical faculties.[20]

All the World Is Not A Stage

Beauvoir asserts that “work alone can guarantee [the woman’s] concrete freedom,” and that it is only through work that women have, to some extent, mitigated their oppression.[21] Nevertheless, for working women, two new forms of domination mottle the path to liberation: first, the alienating nature of all labour under capitalism; and second, the basic incongruence of autonomous work with feminine immanence. The exception to this is the performer. The actress, dancer, and singer have historically been the sole category of women who have not only enjoyed economic independence, but also engaged in work that is compatible with their femininity. The professional sphere of performance is a space where women have the freedom to assert themselves as humans, producing meaning through their artistic projects, which, in turn, empowers them to assert themselves as women whose lives have true meaning outside their status of Other. Like the man subject, whose masculinity is bolstered by vocational excellence and not impeded by it, the woman performer’s rubric for achieving artistic worth dovetails with her rubric for actualising femininity. Her vain and narcissistic proclivities towards make-up, artifice, fashion, and drama if well-executed, award her monetary benefits. Furthermore, “[a] great actress will…really be an artist…who gives meaning to her life by lending meaning to the world.”[22]

Yet as with the sexually consenting intelligent woman, the performer’s femininity runs the risk of suspending her in immanence despite her impulse towards autonomy. The performer “often falls into self-worship or seduction,” where her intervening narcissism inhibits genuine artistic labour because “she deludes herself as to the value of her mere presence to the extent that serious work seems useless to her.”[23] Here, we can presume women are more susceptible to such pseudo-artistry by turning to Beauvoir’s earlier analysis of narcissism. Since women have seen structural entry barriers that restrain their worldly exposure, when they are given privileges of choice and artistic liberty their instinct is to objectify and preserve its immediate rewards. They cannot reach outside themselves, their solipsism is almost evolutionary survival – they can look nowhere except inwards, clinging onto fragments of subjectivity.

When I Think I Have to Get Everything from My Brain!

Beauvoir builds on women’s inability to escape themselves in her instantiation of their (to her eyes, largely disappointing) literary creations. Here, as in sexual acts and the performing arts, the discursive embodiment of femininity is in tension with the transcendent project at hand, for it impedes women’s ability to write radical, sublime literature. Beauvoir opens her analysis by acknowledging that women are basically situated on the peripheries of human culture. Such a culture does not exist for them, it simply imposes on them. Hence, women observe universal abstractions from a specific vantage point that searches for general meaning through emotional and personal frameworks rather than distanced, impartial schematics. Women resist the logic of the real by scavenging for themselves in artistry’s warrens and liminal spaces.

The medium of art, for the independent woman, connotes something different than it does for the man subject. For her, creative arts become a device to “reach her being,” where she has creative control over the expression of her interiority.[24] However, the nature of this expression is spontaneous, diaristic, and confessional to a fault; Beauvoir’s description condemns women as being “used to idleness,” and therefore incapable of the rigorous effort creative work demands.[25] She suggests that whereas the expectations of femininity are exacting as part of the process of women’s situated subjectivity, the kind of work involved in creative labour is incompatible with the labour of the feminine ‘becoming.’ Women’s ‘becoming,’ then, is rendered a discipline of sleight of hand. When she tries to write, “she confuses conjurations and acts, symbolic gestures and effective behaviour,” for these are the only labours she has been permitted to perform in the past.[26] Even as an independent woman, sexual submission demands self-annihilation, and the theatre carries trappings of self-worship – subsequently, just as the labour demanded of her is not phantasmagorical but concrete and crafted, she has little to offer.

 The creative woman conflates forged expression with ready exhibition, “writing or smiling is all one to them,” and the idea of constant edification, reconstitution, and experimentation is foreign to her, for she has only known innate feminine value, not earned subjective transcendence.[27] Beauvoir believes in women’s talent, but mourns its wastage in “babble,” for they cannot articulate their artistry, being so wholly “crushed by the universe… of men.”[28]

Beauvoir’s insistence that women ought not to cordon themselves off as ‘women writers’ speaks to her general distaste for what we would now call identity politics; she believes that the classification of ‘woman’ should not be able to predict the voice and substance of what women write. One might object to this by arguing that women’s historical underrepresentation in the literary canon and the publishing world make ‘women’s writing’ a corrective attempt to proportionately bring women into the creative pantheon. But if in 1949 Beauvoir believed women’s radical reclamation of their agency within their situated context could surmount these creative impediments, certainly in 2022 we can hope to adopt similar good-faith expectations of today’s creative women.

Not Resignation but Combat

“We women are still too preoccupied with seeing clearly to try to penetrate other shadows beyond that clarity,” Beauvoir writes at the close of ‘The Independent Woman.’[29] That we continue to map the indeterminacy of autonomy and femininity implies that ‘seeing’ may be getting more cloudy than clear as civilisation chuffs along than Beauvoir could have forecast. The politics of consent, sexual domination, and sexual violence continue to adapt to changing sociological conditions which normalise and stigmatise certain patterns of behaviour. The nature of artistic performance itself has today been reshaped in light of the creative potential of the internet and its influencer inhabitants. And women’s literary – but also philosophical – firmaments while dynamic, are not self-propelling structures; it is our forms of reading and writing that shape and compromise them. As more obvious political and economic structures of women’s inequality have been torn down through the hard work of the feminist movement, instances of domination and feminine complicity have mutated into trickier relations and subtler situations.

In response, the feminine myth must be theorised as capable of mutation and evolution. Beauvoir’s examples may not speak to contemporary popular culture. However, it does not follow that the feminine myth, too, has decrepitated into irrelevance. ‘The Independent Woman’ was ostensibly liberated, but in fact, experienced particular anxieties and terrors of gendered domination precisely because of the ‘softer’ currents of the feminine myth which could not be stamped out through brute structural deconstruction. Her subjective constitution could not immediately achieve transcendence by virtue of economic or political liberation. In the same sense, Beauvoir calls on women to wield and weld their situated subjectivity as an eternal project whose meaning can only be realised through furious work, fierce contemplation, and combat – not resignation, not immanence, not irony – combat.  

Bibliography

Beauvoir, Simone . The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.

Clein, Emmeline. “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating.” BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed News, 7 Oct. 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmelineclein/dissociation-feminism-women-fleabag-twitter. 

Fisher-Quann, Rayne. “The Cult of the Dissociative Pout.” I, 4 May 2022, https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/y3v8m5/dissociative-pout-selfie-nihilism.

Richards, Arielle. “Bimbofication Is Taking over. What Does That Mean for You?” VICE, 2 Feb. 2022, https://www.vice.com/en/article/4aw4kd/bimbofication-is-taking-over-what-does-that-mean-for-you.

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[1] Beauvoir, The Second Sex.

[2] See, for example, the contemporary phenomenon of ‘bimbofication.’ Women are reclaiming hyperfeminine aesthetics and voluntarily calling themselves ‘bimbos,’ that is, intellectually incompetent (it has also been described as “Weaponised Unintelligence”). Tired of the burden of subjective constitution, bimbofication offers an easier option: immanence. For more information, refer to Vox’s “Bimbofication is Taking Over.” See also Buzzfeed’s “The Smartest Women I Know are All Dissociating,” for further theorisations of this lobotomy-chic approach to feminist ethics.

[3] A relatively recent example of this can be seen in “The cult of the dissociative pout,” (cited below) where nonchalance, narcissism, and irony dominate women’s chosen self-representation.

[4] Note, in particular, the cultural nomenclature of the ‘pick-me girl’ who is defined as a victim of the patriarchy, but also its female functionary. By choosing to differentiate herself from other women, she asserts that she is ‘not like other women,’ who become caricatured, Other, and objectified, whereas she, dying to be ‘picked’ and validated by men, can access human subjectivity.

[5] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 29.

[6] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 548.

[7] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 932; 49.

[8] Ibid, 66.

[9] Ibid, 357.

[10] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 175.

[11] While Beauvoir’s position on psychoanalysis shifts from page to page, there are elements of Lacan’s Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real in her description of subjective constitution. The feminine myth seems to operate on the plane of the symbolic, the woman is later described as resisting the real, and Beauvoir spends a great deal of time theorizing women’s relationship with the imaginary (especially through myth).  

[12] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 562.

[13] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 835.

[14] Ibid, 887; See also Beauvoir’s comment that although “she knows she is a consciousness, a subject; one cannot willfully kill one’s gaze and change one’s eyes into empty pools.”

[15] Ibid, 885.

[16] Ibid, 888.

[17] Ibid, 890.

[18] Ibid, 890.

[19] Ibid, 890.

[20] Ibid, 893; Beauvoir writes: “It is not always out of pride that the mistress refuses to give in to her lover’s caprices: she wants to interact with an adult who is living a real moment of his life, not a little boy fooling himself.”

[21] Ibid, 882.

[22] Ibid, 907.

[23] Ibid, 907.

[24] Ibid, 906.

[25] Ibid, 907.

[26] Ibid, 908.

[27] Ibid, 909.

[28] Ibid, 911.

[29] Ibid, 914.