In the Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir demonstrates the inability of the psychoanalytic paradigm to grapple with the total situation of woman’s oppression. Beauvoir groups psychoanalysis with a collection of overdetermined sciences (biology, historical materialism and history) which dictate the “destiny” of woman. However, further reading of Beauvoir’s text reveals a deep indebtedness to Freudian analysis throughout the text. Below I will analyze particularly revealing moments Freudian dependency during Beauvoir’s account of the formation of the pubescent girl. In doing so I aim to reveal the primacy of the body in Beauvoir’s (and Freud’s) account of what makes a woman. This focus on the body will reveal the problematic Cartesian foundation of Beauvoir’s feminism.
To to be sure, Beauvoir does not reduce woman to the outcome of her tortuous lebidinal developments as does the vulgar psychoanalyst. By her constructivist account, becoming a woman is a matter bring her life in accord with the platonic ideal of femininity projected over her, and thereby repressing her will-to-freedom and the possibility of becoming a transcendent existent. Still, however much the truth of femininity is produced by societal myth making, Beauvoir is clear that these myths gain their grip through the inherent immanence of the factic female body. For Beauvoir, it is this corporeal reality that will explain both the genesis of patriarchy as well as account for the inertia sustaining its historical development.
In the second book of the Second Sex, Beauvoir produces a phenomenological account as to how one “becomes a woman” (301). In the first section on childhood, Beauvoir follows Freud in making clear the primacy of the phallus in child development. The penis will provide boys with an innate advantage in their march towards transcendence. Unlike any anatomy possessed by girls, the penis exists in relation to the boy as “a small person who is at once himself and other than himself: they make of it, according to an expression already cited, an ‘alter ego’ usually more sly, more intelligent, and more clever than the individual” (306). Thus, the boy, from the get-go, has the advantage of an object both interior to him—in the sense that it is mine—and exterior to him in the sense of a quasi-subjectivity with which he can establish a proto-recognative relationship.
Thus, there are definite advantages derived from sexual difference. Beauvoir is clear that “Because he has an alter ego in whom he sees himself, the little boy can boldly assume an attitude of subjectivity; the very object into which he projects himself becomes a symbol of autonomy, of transcendence, of power…” Meanwhile, what are girls left with for the parallel development of their will-to-power? A doll. Beauvoir parrots Freud’s contention that “a baby takes the place of the penis” and provides “the meaning of her playing with dolls” (Freud, 1920). Unlike the penis for which serves as substitute, Beauvoir explains that the influence of this “passive object” will lead her “to identify her whole person and to regard this [whole person] as an inert given object” (314). The little girl makes do with her wholly external, dead plaything; she is never afforded the opportunity to “incarnate herself in any part of herself,” the facts of her body lack the recognative and objectifying potential afforded by the male’s phallus.
Unlike a girl for whom it can be said that “in a sense she has no sex organ” (306), the boy’s protuberance produces “opportunity for action”:
To the boys the urinary function seems like a free game, with the charm of all games that offer liberty of action; the penis can be manipulated, it gives opportunity for action…the stream can be directed at will and to a considerable distance, which gives boys the feeling of omnipotence. (308-309)
Observing the god-like spectacle of the boys’ urinatory will-to-power, Beauvoir recounts the common feminine response: “If I could ask one gift from Providence, it would be to have for once in my life the power of urinating like a man” (309). Furthermore, Beauvoir affirms the truth of the castration complex, whereby “the little girl readily believes that all children are born with a penis but that later the parents cut off some of them to make girls…” (312).
Beauvoir differs from Freud then, not as to the inevitability of penis envy amongst girls, but rather the source of its longevity. Beauvoir follows Adler in locating the phallic privilege associated with masculinity in social valorization and not any anatomical destiny. Rather than any natural kismet, “it is in fact a destiny imposed upon her by her teachers and her society” (315).
To have a penis is no doubt a privilege, but it is one whose value naturally decreases when the child loses interest in its excretory functions and becomes socialized. If its value is retained in the child’s view beyond the age of eight or nine, it is because the penis has become the symbol of manhood, which is socially valued. (315)
The phallic advantage—and indeed all superiority of the male corpus—is then analagous to Beauvoir’s earlier statement in the case of muscular development. In her sections on history and biology, Beauvoir maintains that the inequality of strength accorded to the sexes amounts to mere facts whose importance must be situated within the lived experience of the individual. Once civilization progresses to a certain cultural and technological level, the advantages of superior strength become negligible or are eclipsed entirely; these biological facts cease to confer any relevant advantage. The bodily difference between males and females provides the facts grounding the construction of gender. To the extent to which the body’s limitations on women are socially and technologically enduring, women who wish to realize their human potential as a transcendental existent will face a double hurdle. Such women will not only face the first burden of seeing through the ideological fog of femininity—to be a free existent she must also overcome the ontological fact of her pubescent, maternal and menopausal body.
In addition to the phallocentric account of the lives of children, Beauvoir inherits Freud’s narrative of the transition of young girls to womanhood. In doing so she adopts the Freudian developmental scheme without caveat. Successful development will depend on the girl’s progression from “oral, anal, and genital phases to adulthood” (414). In his 1920 lecture on femininity, Freud explains the mystery of women by revealing the double wave of repression experienced by women during their genital phase as opposed to the experience of men:
Furthermore, a comparison with what happens with boys tells us that the development of a little girl into a normal woman is more difficult and more complicated, since it includes two extra tasks, to which there is nothing corresponding in the development of a man…In the course of time, therefore, a girl has to change her erotogenic zone and her object both of which a boy retains. (Freud 1920)
Beauvoir’s account follows with absolute parity. The challenge for the young girl will play out through the “the opposition of the two organs: the clitoris and the vagina” (415). In her clitoral or phallic stage, the young girl will be exhibit masculine aggressivity. The girl’s primary erogenous zone is clitoral with pleasure deriving from the active stimulation of her atrophied penis. With regard to object-lebido, she retains her mother as the object of her desire. Thus, this clitoral or phallic stage is the proper ending for male development, but represents only an intermediary stage for females. In order to leave this transitional period of boyish adolescence, the young girl must shift her erogenous orientation to center on the passive, receptive pleasure of the vagina, as well as change the direction of her libidinal energy to her father.
Affirming Freud’s conclusions regarding the biological destiny of women, Beauvoir asserts the dead futures available to woman: “in woman there is a choice of two systems, one of which perpetuates juvenile independence while the other consigns woman to man and childbearing” (417). However, even this paltry freedom of choice turns out to be false freedom. If the young girl clings to her phallic stage then she will become a lesbian and achieve only a junvenile illusion of independence.[1] By completing her development through the vaginal phase and achieving adulthood, the woman can now resign herself to a life of dependence, passivity and immanence.
Among the many curiosities of Beauvoir’s account of the sexual development of women is her choice to forgo the emancipatory route followed by the likes of Wittig and other future French feminists in locating lesbianism as the site of feminine liberation and autonomy. Indeed, given the bleakness afforded by marriage and heterosexuality she goes on to describe, it is even more odd that Beauvoir follows Freud in regarding lesbian independence as an infantile flight.
Beauvoir fails to conceive of a lesbian vocation as a legitimate developmental alternative due to her initial conceptulationzation and assumptions regarding the nature of sexuality. Like Freud, Beauvoir assumes the male as prototype or norm from which the feminine will suffer deviation. In her chapter on sexual initiation, Beauvoir first recounts male sexuality:
For a man, the transition from childish sexuality to maturity is relatively simple…a man reaches out toward his partner, but he himself remains at the center of this activity, being, on the whole, the subject as opposed to objects that he perceives and instruments that he manipulates; he projects himself toward the other without losing his independence; the feminine flesh is for him a prey…(414-415)
Beauvoir then goes on to define “the act of love” as a heterosexual, penetrative act perpetrated by the male subject’s penetration into the female’s passive object:
The act of love is completed is completed in the [male] orgasm. Coition has a definite physiological end and aim; in ejaculation the male rids himself of certain discomforting secretions; he obtains a complete relief, following upon sex excitement, which is unfailingly accompanied with pleasure…In any case, a definite act has been consummated, and the man’s body retains its integrity: his service to the species is combined with his personal enjoyment. (415)
Since coitus or “the act of love” is defined exclusively as heterosexual penetration, it is now clear why same-sex sexuality fails to qualify as an authentic erotic and loving relationship. Since there is no possibility of penetration, all lesbian interactions are by definition pre-sexual acts.[2] According to Beauvoir, “homosexual caresses imply neither defloration nor penetration: they [merely] satisfy the clitoral eroticism of childhood without demanding new and disquieting changes” (387). Rather than conceive same-sex couplings as legitimate relationships in which both authentic love and a real sex-act could possibly occur, Beauvoir regards such couplings as a flight from the embrace of real, that is to say heternomative, sexuality.
Still curious is why Beauvoir insists that all sex, or moreover all acts of love, must entail participation in the possibility of perpetuation of the species in order to qualify as authentic love-acts. Perhaps this Catholic conception of sex is based on some notion that love qua self-transcendence requires one’s projection of oneself into future progeny? If so, Beauvoir fails to imagine a different situation in which a heteronormative nuclear family is not a prerequisite for the rearing of children, nor does she foresee a possibility in which the facticity of social and technological life allow for reproduction without the heterosexual sex act.
In the foregoing I have argued that Beauvoir’s phenomenology of women rests on the centrality of the famale body as the essential and constitutive feature of what makes a woman. Once all the cultural and ideological clouds have lifted, the flesh is all that remains to account for the genesis and maintenance of inequality between the sexes. In her imaginative anthropology Beauvoir sets up her dialectic of recognition as follows:
I have already stated that when two human categories are together, each aspires to impose its sovereignty upon the other…If one of the two is in some way privileged, has some advantage, this one prevails over the other and undertakes to keep it in subjection. It is therefore understandable that man would wish to dominate woman: but what advantage has enabled him to carry out his will? (69, my emphasis)
It is to be expected then that all human relationships will be defined—if not forever, then at least at the beginning and in their maturation—by subjection. The only question is what advantage prefigured the outcome of this battle for men and women across diverse situations? In the next page after the question’s formulation we get our answer:
In any case, however strong the women were, the bondage of reproduction was a terrible handicap in the struggle against a hostile world. Pregnancy, childbirth and menstruation reduced their capacity for work and made then at times wholly dependent upon the men for protection and food (70).
To be clear, the problem is not that men and women both desire transcendence and the facts of biology pose specific limitations on each of them due to their sex. Rather, the problem is that women are bodies, while men can be said to merely have them. Men are only acknowledged as having bodies to the extent are built to perfectly enable exercise of their own freedom; the bodies of men never frustrate transcendence. Thus, to the extent that the body represents a fact that traps the subject in an immanent spiral, men exist, and have in fact always existed, effectively without bodies.
Beauvoir follows Freud in assuming the bodies of men as a clean runaway allowing for the smooth take off towards transcendence. Women, on the other hand, are measured against men, and it is determined that their flesh is laden with fetters, barriers and hurdles which frustrate any clean takeoff towards freedom. Instead, woman finds herself grounded, trapped within her body, a mere “plaything of obscure forces” (71).
There are two key conclusions that need to be drawn given Beauvoir’s thesis of repressive embodiment. The first relates the continuity Beauvoir’s existentialist feminism shares with the antecedent paradigm of liberal feminism. Like for the liberal feminist John Stuart Mill, for example, the problem of female freedom is the problem of the fetter that restricts the normal [male] development towards freedom and becoming free, independent [male] subjects. The solution for Mill is the liberalization of the juridical and cultural restricitons that inhibit women from realizing their potential, thereby enabling them to realize freedom the way men do. To the extent that the transcendence of women is repressed by the facts of her body and the myths that stand above her, the solution lies in in the same liberalization prescription of that of Mill. Sexism can be expected to whither away once the repressive force of social myths have been lifted, and technology (e.g. contraception) as well as cultural valorizations have evolved so as to liberate woman from the despotism of her body.
The second necessary conclusion is to recognize that Beauvoir’s departure is a Cartesian one. All requirements for transcendence are contained within the cogito, while the body exists entirely outside the subject (res extensa). By situating the body as a repressive alien force, Beauvoir’s Cartesian dualism implies a “before”—some prior reality where women existed as pure geist prior to any corporeal attribution. The normative content of Beauvoir’s philosophy lies in women’s return to this pre-sexed, pre-embodied life in which transcendence was unburdened by the facts of the body.
In the first paragraph of the introduction to her work, Beauvoir provocatively asks “Are there women, really?” (xv). If the essence of woman is her capacity as a transcendent existent, she must exist essentially as a mind that subsequently undergoes embodiment. But, can a woman really be without a body? What would it mean to be a preembodied woman? Alternatively, a more likely definition of what makes a woman is precisely her state as an existent trapped within a body. An existent becomes a woman to the extent that her self becomes inexorably enmeshed by alien flesh and the consequent immanence it implies. In this view, Beauvoir’s advocacy of the rejection of the repressive body and its concomitant sentence of immanence would result in the overcoming of woman itself.
For Beauvoir, the problem of woman is the problem of the body.
[1]“If the prehensile, possessive tendency remains especially strong in a woman, she, like Renee Vivien, will be oriented in the homosexual direction” (421)
[2] Presumably penetrative sex-acts aided by auxiliary means or with non-phallus body parts would not constitute authentic penetration for Beauvoir.
