The Second Sex (60 page)

Throughout her childhood, the little girl was bullied and mutilated; but she nonetheless grasped herself as an autonomous individual; in her relations with her family and friends, in her studies and games, she saw herself in the present as a transcendence: her future passivity was something she only imagined. Once she enters puberty, the future not only moves closer: it settles into her body; it becomes the most concrete reality. It retains the fateful quality it always had; while the adolescent boy is actively routed toward adulthood, the girl looks forward to the opening of this new and unforeseeable period where the plot is already hatched and toward which time is drawing her. As she is already detached from her childhood past, the present is for her only a transition; she sees no valid ends in it, only occupations. In a more or less disguised way, her youth is consumed by waiting. She is waiting for Man.

Surely the adolescent boy also dreams of woman, he desires her; but she will never be more than one element in his life: she does not encapsulate his destiny; from childhood, the little girl, whether wishing to realize herself as woman or overcome the limits of her femininity, has awaited the male for accomplishment and escape; he has the dazzling face of Perseus or Saint George; he is the liberator; he is also rich and powerful, he holds the keys to happiness, he is Prince Charming. She anticipates that in his caress she will feel carried away by the great current of life as when she rested in her mother’s bosom; subjected to his gentle authority, she will find the same security as in her father’s arms: the magic of embraces and gazes will petrify her back into an idol. She has always been convinced of male superiority; this male prestige is not a childish mirage; it has economic and social foundations; men are, without any question, the masters of the world; everything convinces the adolescent girl that it is in her interest to be their vassal; her parents prod her on; the father is proud of his daughter’s success, the mother sees the promise of a prosperous future, friends envy and
admire the one among them who gets the most masculine admiration; in American colleges, the student’s status is based on the number of dates she has. Marriage is not only an honorable and less strenuous career than many others; it alone enables woman to attain her complete social dignity and also to realize herself sexually as lover and mother. This is the role her entourage thus envisages for her future, as she envisages it herself. Everyone unanimously agrees that catching a husband—or a protector in some cases—is for her the most important of undertakings. In her eyes, man embodies the Other, as she does for man; but for her this
Other
appears in the essential mode, and she grasps herself as the inessential opposite him. She will free herself from her parents’ home, from her mother’s hold; she will open up her future not by an active conquest but by passively and docilely delivering herself into the hands of a new master.

It has often been declared that if she resigns herself to this surrender, it is because physically and morally she has become inferior to boys and incapable of competing with them: forsaking hopeless competition, she entrusts the assurance of her happiness to a member of the superior caste. In fact, her humility does not stem from a given inferiority: on the contrary, her humility engenders all her failings; its source is in the adolescent girl’s past, in the society around her, and precisely in this future that is proposed to her.

True, puberty transforms the girl’s body. It is more fragile than before; female organs are vulnerable, their functioning delicate; strange and uncomfortable, breasts are a burden; they remind her of their presence during strenuous exercise, they quiver, they ache. From here on, woman’s muscle force, endurance, and suppleness are inferior to man’s. Hormonal imbalances create nervous and vasomotor instability. Menstrual periods are painful: headaches, stiffness, and abdominal cramps make normal activities painful and even impossible; added to these discomforts are psychic problems; nervous and irritable, the woman frequently undergoes a state of semi-alienation each month; central control of the nervous and sympathetic systems is no longer assured; circulation problems and some autointoxications turn the body into a screen between the woman and the world, a burning fog that weighs on her, stifling her and separating her: experienced through this suffering and passive flesh, the entire universe is a burden too heavy to bear. Oppressed and submerged, she becomes a stranger to herself because she is a stranger to the rest of the world. Syntheses disintegrate, instants are no longer connected, others are recognized but only abstractly; and if reasoning and logic do remain intact, as in melancholic delirium, they are subordinated to passions that surge out of organic disorder.
These facts are extremely important; but the way the woman becomes conscious of them gives them their weight.

At about thirteen, boys serve a veritable apprenticeship in violence, developing their aggressiveness, their will for power, and their taste for competition; it is exactly at this moment that the little girl renounces rough games. Some sports remain accessible to her, but sport that is specialization, submission to artificial rules, does not offer the equivalent of a spontaneous and habitual recourse to force; it is marginal to life; it does not teach about the world and about one’s self as intimately as does an unruly fight or an impulsive rock climb. The sportswoman never feels the conqueror’s pride of the boy who pins down his comrade. In fact, in many countries, most girls have no athletic training; like fights, climbing is forbidden to them, they only submit to their bodies passively; far more clearly than in their early years, they must forgo
emerging
beyond the given world, affirming themselves
above
the rest of humanity: they are banned from exploring, daring, pushing back the limits of the possible. In particular, the attitude of defiance, so important for boys, is unknown to them; true, women compare themselves with each other, but defiance is something other than these passive confrontations: two freedoms confront each other as having a hold on the world whose limits they intend to push; climbing higher than a friend or getting the better in arm wrestling is affirming one’s sovereignty over the world. These conquering actions are not permitted to the girl, and violence in particular is not permitted to her. Undoubtedly, in the adult world brute force plays no great role in normal times; but it nonetheless haunts the world; much of masculine behavior arises in a setting of potential violence: on every street corner skirmishes are waiting to happen; in most cases they are aborted; but it is enough for the man to feel in his fists his will for self-affirmation for him to feel confirmed in his sovereignty. The male has recourse to his fists and fighting when he encounters any affront or attempt to reduce him to an object: he does not let himself be transcended by others; he finds himself again in the heart of his subjectivity. Violence is the authentic test of every person’s attachment to himself, his passions, and his own will; to radically reject it is to reject all objective truth, it is to isolate one’s self in an abstract subjectivity; an anger or a revolt that does not exert itself in muscles remains imaginary. It is a terrible frustration not to be able to imprint the movements of one’s heart on the face of the earth. In the South of the United States, it is strictly impossible for a black person to use violence against whites; this rule is the key to the mysterious “black soul”; the way the black experiences himself in the white world, his behavior in adjusting to it, the compensations he
seeks, his whole way of feeling and acting, are explained on the basis of the passivity to which he is condemned. During the Occupation, the French who had decided not to let themselves resort to violent gestures against the occupants even in cases of provocation (whether out of egotistical prudence or because they had overriding duties) felt their situation in the world profoundly overturned: depending upon the whims of others, they could be changed into objects, their subjectivity no longer had the means to express itself concretely, it was merely a secondary phenomenon. In the same way, for the adolescent boy who is allowed to manifest himself imperiously, the universe has a totally different face from what it has for the adolescent girl whose feelings are deprived of immediate effectiveness; the former ceaselessly calls the world into question, he can at every instance revolt against the given and thus has the impression of actively confirming it when he accepts it; the latter only submits to it; the world is defined without her, and its face is immutable. This lack of physical power expresses itself as a more general timidity: she does not believe in a force she has not felt in her body, she does not dare to be enterprising, to revolt, to invent; doomed to docility, to resignation, she can only accept a place that society has already made for her. She accepts the order of things as a given. A woman told me that all through her youth, she denied her physical weakness with fierce bad faith; to accept it would have been to lose her taste and courage to undertake anything, even in intellectual or political fields. I knew a girl, brought up as a tomboy and exceptionally vigorous, who thought she was as strong as a man; though she was very pretty, though she had painful periods every month, she was completely unconscious of her femininity; she had a boy’s toughness, exuberance of life, and initiative; she had a boy’s boldness: on the street she would not hesitate to jump into a fistfight if she saw a child or a woman harassed. One or two bad experiences revealed to her that brute force is on the male’s side. When she became aware of her weakness, a great part of her assurance crumbled; this was the beginning of an evolution that led her to feminize herself, to realize herself as passivity, to accept dependence. To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in one’s self. One needs only to see the importance that young men give to their muscles to understand that every subject grasps his body as his objective expression.

The young man’s erotic drives only go to confirm the pride that he obtains from his body: he discovers in it the sign of transcendence and its power. The girl can succeed in accepting her desires: but most often they retain a shameful nature. Her whole body is experienced as embarrassment. The defiance she felt as a child regarding her “insides” contributes to
giving the menstrual crisis the dubious nature that renders it loathsome. The psychic attitude evoked by menstrual servitude constitutes a heavy handicap. The threat that weighs on the girl during certain periods can seem so intolerable for her that she will give up expeditions and pleasures out of fear of her disgrace becoming known. The horror that this inspires has repercussions on her organism and increases her disorders and pains. It has been seen that one of the characteristics of female physiology is the tight link between endocrinal secretions and the nervous system: there is reciprocal action; a woman’s body—and specifically the girl’s—is a “hysterical” body in the sense that there is, so to speak, no distance between psychic life and its physiological realization. The turmoil brought about by the girl’s discovery of the problems of puberty exacerbates them. Because her body is suspect to her, she scrutinizes it with anxiety and sees it as sick: it is sick. It has been seen that indeed this body is fragile and real organic disorders arise; but gynecologists concur that nine-tenths of their patients have imaginary illnesses; that is, either their illnesses have no physiological reality, or the organic disorder itself stems from a psychic attitude. To a great extent, the anguish of being a woman eats away at the female body.

It is clear that if woman’s biological situation constitutes a handicap for her, it is because of the perspective from which it is grasped. Nervous frailty and vasomotor instability, when they do not become pathological, do not keep her from any profession: among males themselves, there is a great diversity of temperament. A one- or two-day indisposition per month, even painful, is not an obstacle either; in fact, many women accommodate themselves to it, particularly women for whom the monthly “curse” could be most bothersome: athletes, travelers, and women who do strenuous work. Most professions demand no more energy than women can provide. And in sports, the goal is not to succeed independently of physical aptitudes: it is the accomplishment of perfection proper to each organism; the lightweight champion is as worthy as the heavyweight; a female ski champion is no less a champion than the male who is more rapid than she: they belong to two different categories. It is precisely athletes who, positively concerned with their own accomplishments, feel the least handicapped in comparison to men. But nonetheless her physical weakness does not allow the woman to learn the lessons of violence: if it were possible to assert herself in her body and be part of the world in some other way, this deficiency would be easily compensated. If she could swim, scale rocks, pilot a plane, battle the elements, take risks, and venture out, she would not feel the timidity toward the world that I spoke about. It is within the whole context of a situation that leaves her few outlets that these singularities
take on their importance, and not immediately but by confirming the inferiority complex that was developed in her by her childhood.

It is this complex as well that will weigh on her intellectual accomplishments. It has often been noted that from puberty, the girl loses ground in intellectual and artistic fields. There are many reasons for this. One of the most common is that the adolescent girl does not receive the same encouragement accorded to her brothers; on the contrary, she is expected to be a
woman as well
, and she must add to her professional work the duties that femininity implies. The headmistress of a professional school made these comments on the subject: