The Second Sex (13 page)

Without wholly rejecting the contributions of psychoanalysis, some of which are productive, we will nevertheless not accept its method. First of all, we will not limit ourselves to taking sexuality as a given: that this view falls short is demonstrated by the poverty of the descriptions touching on the feminine libido; I have already said that psychoanalysts have never studied it head-on, but only based on the male libido; they seem to ignore the fundamental ambivalence of the attraction that the male exercises over the female. Freudians and Adlerians explain woman’s anxiety before male genitalia as an inversion of frustrated desire. Stekel rightly saw this as an original reaction; but he accounts for it only superficially: the woman would fear defloration, penetration, pregnancy, and pain, and this fear
would stifle her desire; this explanation is too rational.
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Instead of accepting that desire is disguised as anxiety or is overcome by fear, we should consider this sort of pressing and frightened appeal that is female desire as a basic given; it is characterized by the indissoluble synthesis of attraction and repulsion. It is noteworthy that many female animals flee from coitus at the very moment they solicit it: they are accused of coquetry or hypocrisy; but it is absurd to attempt to explain primitive behaviors by assimilating them to complex ones: they are, on the contrary, at the source of attitudes called coquetry and hypocrisy in women. The idea of a passive libido is disconcerting because the libido has been defined as a drive, as energy based on the male; but one could no more conceive a priori of a light being both yellow and blue: the intuition of green is needed. Reality would be better delineated if, instead of defining the libido in vague terms of “energy,” the significance of sexuality were juxtaposed with that of other human attitudes: taking, catching, eating, doing, undergoing, and so on; for sexuality is one of the singular modes of apprehending an object; the characteristics of the erotic object as it is shown not only in the sexual act but in perception in general would also have to be studied. This examination goes beyond the psychoanalytical framework that posits eroticism as irreducible.

In addition, we will pose the problem of feminine destiny quite differently: we will situate woman in a world of values, and we will lend her behavior a dimension of freedom. We think she has to choose between the affirmation of her transcendence and her alienation as object; she is not the plaything of contradictory drives; she devises solutions that have an ethical hierarchy among them. Replacing value with authority, choice with drives, psychoanalysis proposes an ersatz morality: the idea of normality. This idea is indeed highly useful from a therapeutic point of view; but it has reached a disturbing extent in psychoanalysis in general. The descriptive schema is proposed as a law; and assuredly, a mechanistic psychology could not accept the notion of moral invention; at best it can recognize
less
but never more; at best it acknowledges failures, but never creations. If a subject does not wholly replicate a development considered normal, his development will be seen as being interrupted, and this will be interpreted as a lack and a negation and never a positive decision. That, among other things, is what renders the psychoanalysis of great men so shocking: we are told that this transference or that sublimation was not successfully carried
out in them; it is never supposed that perhaps they could have rejected it, and perhaps for good reasons; it is never considered that their behavior might have been motivated by freely posited aims; the individual is always explained through his link to the past and not with respect to a future toward which he projects himself. Therefore, we are never given more than an inauthentic picture, and in this inauthenticity no criterion other than normality can possibly be found. The description of feminine destiny is, from this point of view, altogether striking. The way psychoanalysts understand it, “to identify” with the mother or the father is to
alienate oneself
in a model, it is to prefer a foreign image to a spontaneous movement of one’s own existence, it is to play at being. We are shown woman solicited by two kinds of alienations; it is very clear that to play at being a man will be a recipe for failure; but to play at being a woman is also a trap: being a woman would mean being an object, the Other; and at the heart of its abdication, the Other remains a subject. The real problem for the woman refusing these evasions is to accomplish herself as transcendence: this means seeing which possibilities are opened to her by what are called virile and feminine attitudes; when a child follows the path indicated by one or another of his parents, it could be because he freely takes on their projects: his behavior could be the result of a choice motivated by ends. Even for Adler, the will to power is only a sort of absurd energy; he calls any project that incarnates transcendence a “masculine protest”; when a girl climbs trees, it is, according to him, to be the equal of boys: he does not imagine that she likes to climb trees; for the mother, the child is anything but a “penis substitute”; painting, writing, and engaging in politics are not only “good sublimations”: they are ends desired in themselves. To deny this is to falsify all of human history. Parallels can be noted between our descriptions and those of psychoanalysts. From man’s point of view—adopted by both male and female psychoanalysts—behavior of alienation is considered feminine, and behavior where the subject posits his transcendence is considered masculine. Donaldson, a historian of woman, observed that the definitions “the man is a male human being, the woman is a female human being” were asymmetrically mutilated;
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psychoanalysts in particular define man as a human being and woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, the woman is said to be imitating the male. The psychoanalyst describes the child and the young girl as required to identify with the father and the mother, torn between “viriloid” and “feminine”
tendencies, whereas we conceive her as hesitating between the role of
object
, of
Other
that is proposed to her and her claim for freedom; thus it is possible to agree on certain points: in particular when we consider the paths of inauthentic flight offered to women. But we do not give them the same Freudian or Adlerian signification. For us woman is defined as a human being in search of values within a world of values, a world where it is indispensable to understand the economic and social structure; we will study her from an existential point of view, taking into account her total situation.

The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some very important truths. Humanity is not an animal species: it is a historical reality. Human society is an anti-physis: it does not passively submit to the presence of nature, but rather appropriates it. This appropriation is not an interior, subjective operation: it is carried out objectively in praxis. Thus woman cannot simply be considered a sexed organism: among biological data, only those with concrete value in action have any importance; woman’s consciousness of herself is not defined by her sexuality alone: it reflects a situation that depends on society’s economic structure, a structure that indicates the degree of technical evolution humanity has attained. We have seen that two essential traits characterize woman biologically: her grasp on the world is narrower than man’s; and she is more closely subjugated to the species. But these facts have a totally different value depending on the economic and social context. Throughout human history, grasp on the world is not defined by the naked body: the hand, with its prehensile thumb, moves beyond itself toward instruments that increase its power; from prehistory’s earliest documents, man is always seen as armed. In the past, when it was a question of carrying heavy clubs and of keeping wild beasts at bay, woman’s physical weakness constituted a flagrant inferiority: if the instrument requires slightly more strength than the woman can muster, it is enough to make her seem radically powerless. But on the other hand, technical developments can cancel out the muscular inequality separating man and woman: abundance only creates superiority relative to a need; having too much is not better than having enough. Thus operating many modern machines requires only a part of masculine resources; if the necessary minimum is not superior to woman’s capacities, she becomes man’s work equal. Today enormous deployments of energy can be commanded at the touch of a switch. The burdens that come with maternity vary greatly depending on customs: they are overwhelming if numerous
pregnancies are imposed on the woman and if she must feed and raise her children without help; if she procreates as she wishes and if society helps her during her pregnancies and provides child care, maternal duties are lighter and can be easily compensated for in the realm of work.

Engels retraces woman’s history from this point of view in
The Origin of the Family;
to him, this history depends essentially on the history of technology. In the Stone Age, when the land belonged to all members of the clan, the rudimentary nature of the primitive spade and hoe limited agricultural possibilities: feminine strength was at the level of work needed for gardening. In this primitive division of labor, the two sexes already constitute two classes in a way; there is equality between these classes; while the man hunts and fishes, the woman stays at home; but the domestic tasks include productive work: pottery making, weaving, gardening; and in this way, she has an important role in economic life. With the discovery of copper, tin, bronze, and iron, and with the advent of the plow, agriculture expands its reach: intensive labor is necessary to clear the forests and cultivate the fields. So man has recourse to the service of other men, reducing them to slavery. Private property appears: master of slaves and land, man also becomes the proprietor of the woman. This is the “great historical defeat of the female sex.” It is explained by the disruption of the division of labor brought about by the invention of new tools. “The same cause that had assured woman her previous authority in the home, her restriction to housework, this same cause now assured the domination of the man; domestic work thence faded in importance next to man’s productive work; the latter was everything, the former an insignificant addition.” So paternal right replaces maternal right: transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed. Man reigning sovereign permits himself, among other things, his sexual whims: he sleeps with slaves or courtesans, he is polygamous. As soon as customs make reciprocity possible, woman takes revenge through infidelity: adultery becomes a natural part of marriage. This is the only defense woman has against the domestic slavery she is bound to: her social oppression is the consequence of her economic oppression. Equality can only be reestablished when both sexes have equal legal rights; but this enfranchisement demands that the whole of the feminine sex enter public industry. “Woman cannot be emancipated unless she takes part in production on a large social scale and is only incidentally bound to domestic work. And this has become possible only within a large modern industry that not only accepts women’s work on a grand scale but formally requires it.”

Thus woman’s fate is intimately bound to the fate of socialism as seen also in Bebel’s vast work on women. “Women and the proletariat,” he writes, “are both oppressed.” And both must be set free by the same economic development resulting from the upheaval caused by the invention of machines. The problem of woman can be reduced to that of her capacity for work. Powerful when technology matched her possibilities, dethroned when she became incapable of benefiting from them, she finds again equality with man in the modern world. Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day this resistance is broken down. It already has broken down in the U.S.S.R., Soviet propaganda affirms. And when socialist society is realized throughout the whole world, there will no longer be men or women, but only workers, equal among themselves.