The Second Sex (106 page)

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:

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, even 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:

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.

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.