Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Posted: Wed, Dec 3, 2025
My interest here:
- The situated & embodied philosopher: Are philosophers located outside of the frame (so to speak), or within it?
- Beauvoir the existentialist ethicist: Womanhood is not so much applied existentialist ethics as a case study that develops existentialist ethics.
“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.”
- Literal translation: “One is not born woman; one becomes it.”
- Popular translation: “Women are made, not born.”
- Borde & Malovany-Chevallier translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”
- Parshley translation: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”
The social constructivist reading: Gender is the social meaning of sex understood as reproductive biology.
- B & M-C: “ ‘Woman’ in English used alone without an article captures woman as an institution, a concept, femininity as determined and defined by society, culture, history.”
- To become a woman is to be socialized into the institution of womanhood.
- Womanhood as an institution exists prior to the self; the self is inducted into it.
- There is no freedom without the abolition of womanhood as an institution.
- [Even if one is sympathetic to the social constructivist reading, does it make sense to say any particular individual becomes woman the social institution?]
The existentialist reading: Gender is an individual’s chosen response to sex as a situation.
- Existence precedes essence: Womanhood is not a given, but an active, situated process of creation, of becoming; it is an individual’s (sometimes-idiosyncratic) response to the (anatomical, relational, social, political etc.) situation in which they find themselves.
- The individual is the subject, not object, of becoming.
- “Becoming” is not a passive, inevitable process that unfolds itself; one could in principle refuse one’s “biological destiny.”
- Sex is a human condition to which we respond, not the raw reproductive biology; for women to pretend not to see this is “bad faith” in the existentialist sense.
- How, on the existentialist reading, does one choose freedom?
Case study: Love—a religion that promises women fake salvation.
- Society relegates women to the realm of immanence, the situation of being stuck in a worldly, passive, objectified, and constricted existence (reproduction, homemaking, …).
- How do women transcend their immanence and become free?
- The heterosexual woman: By devoting herself to man and becoming his love, she hopes to derive her own transcendence from his transcendence.
- Man, as already and paradigmatically human, has access to transcendence.
- The heterosexual woman chooses to use herself as an offering, to serve a man, to completely devote herself to him to the point of “losing herself in him,” and prays that he will free her.
- For the heterosexual woman to love is for her to be loved by man, desired by man, fucked by man, and “when the male is not using this object that she is for him, she is absolutely nothing.”
- But men are interested in other consciousnesses, not things; authentic love requires lovers to see and treat each other as equals.
- Also men are not gods and cannot set women free!
- Disillusioned, the married heterosexual woman realizes that love was falsely sold to her as the path to salvation.
- Responding to inequality by making oneself more unequal does not bring about equality.
- The lesbian relationship is one between equals.
- Being a lesbian isn’t a natural perversion; lesbians are just like “normal” women except that they respond to the situation of woman’s immanence not by worshipping man but rejecting him.
- The lesbian appears “masculine” (e.g., wearing plain pants rather than flowery dresses) because they are actually most human, except that humanity is socially constructed as masculine; that’s not inauthentic.
- Indeed, given “the limitations her sex imposes on her,” the right question to ask “is not why she rejects them: the real problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.”
- The heterosexual woman: By devoting herself to man and becoming his love, she hopes to derive her own transcendence from his transcendence.
- What does this mean?
- More generally, the problem is that freedom/humanity is incompatible with womanhood/the second sex.
- But I am powerless to change the social definition of womanhood. What to do?
- In choosing freedom, I become free; cf. I’m already free, and so my actions are free.
- Monique Wittig’s notorious 1979 talk at the sixth BCRW S&F conference: “What is woman? Panic, general alarm for an active defense. Frankly, it is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective, and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women.”