Ep. 232: Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: We were just getting a little more into the Hegelian parts of this. I wanted to touch a little on when she's giving this extensive analysis of the situation of woman, situation in character, that a lot of it we've characterized. You know, she's treated as an object. She doesn't get the chance to have projects that are independent of those that society assigns to her. She's always pushing up against concrete resistance from male figures, from Society, as opposed to the sort of open ended sky's the limit thing that men supposedly are dealing with.

She does, I think, you know, if you follow this Hegelian picture of lordship and bondage, though, there actually is an upside to her situation. Some of the characteristics that we would attribute to women or that are thought to embody the feminine essence or something. A lot of these are sort of reactions to a bad situation. But some of them are like, for instance, when we had read about the slave situation in Lordship and Bondage for Hegel, the slave actually gets to deal with concrete things, gets to have dirt on his hands. Or in this case, the woman, you know, she's not making plans for the improvement of the state, but she has like concrete responsibility over an infant.

And that in itself, you know, gives her a groundedness that men who don't have to do that kind of work don't have.

1:21 Seth: So let's talk about the opportunities that women have for objectification, for the purposes of developing subjectivity, because I think that's part of what this is about. So can I go into the developmental 395 to 96? So one of the points that Beauvoir makes is that up to a certain point, the development of the child, regardless of which sex it is, is identical, at least with respect to the development of self and identity. So there's the initial. Both are in the womb. They have the same experience inside of the womb as connection to or participation to the whole. And then they both have the same experience of weaning. So the separation from the mother, at least as far as the mother is, you know, this source of sustenance and comfort. And they also share very similarly the stage, with respect to, for lack of a better word, poop.

2:17 Wes: Anal phase.

2:18 Seth: Yeah, or listen, I live in the world of poop right now. It's like all anybody wants to talk about is poop.

2:24 Mark: Because you live in Texas or because of your father.

2:26 Seth: Every day my parents call me and ask me whether she's pooped. It's just the nature of the beast right now. But what I found interesting, and again, this analysis may exist somewhere else, and she may have been appropriating it, but she talks about how when you transition from thinking about the pleasure associated with experiencing excretion, which is a form of objectifying your body, right? So part of the stages of self development, as you distinguish yourself from your mother through weaning, you start to distinguish your body through excrement, is then thinking about urination.

And this idea that the experience of how Boys, little boys pee, and how little girls pee, and how that's different has a very concrete bearing on your ability to objectify that aspect of your experience and to use it for the purposes of subject building, if you will. And that had never even occurred to me. I found it fascinating, and it struck me as. I don't want to say plausible. It's maybe not the right word, but as meaningful as interesting.

3:32 Wes: This is actually from the childhood section, page 334. Yeah, 334. The particular example is, my father told me that one of his sons at the age of three, was still urinating sitting down, surrounded by sisters and girl cousins. He was a shy and sad child. One day his father took him with him to the toilet and said, I will show you how men do it. From then on, the child proud to be urinating standing up, scorned the girls, quote, who urinated through a hole. His scorn came originally not from the fact that they were lacking an organ, but that they had not, like him, been singled out and initiated by the father.

So a lot of these passages are actually. They're sort of modifications or emendations of more traditional Freudian theory where it's not that the little boy in this instance is seeing the girl as castrated, but that adults are endowing these situations with that sort of significance. It seems to me, from what I've read, that de Beauvoir would claim that the phallus is not in and of itself a representation of power. It doesn't naturally. It's not psychologically naturally a symbol of that until it's endowed as such, and it need not be, but endowed as such by adults for various reasons, no pun intended, with endowed.

4:48 Dylan: The way in which we manifest expectations based upon gender is in this case. I didn't read anything about raising children, but I've read things about training dogs. And this example brings to mind, like, a question that I had read, like, on a blog where this woman, she has a male puppy, and as the puppy grows up, she's concerned that the boy puppy isn't growing up to pee like a male dog by lifting his leg up properly to pee on a tree or whatever, but he squats and pees. And so she describes how she starts taking the leash and trying to lift his leg up to encourage him to pee like a man dog, rather than pee like however he's supposed to be, however he's peeing.

5:35 Wes: I completely sympathize with this.

5:40 Dylan: It's like the correlate of the example given here where the dad says, I'm going to teach you how to pee like a man. And the force that it has there.

5:49 Seth: There's that aspect of it, the parental reinforcement of certain kinds of stereotypes. But there's also the fact of the matter is that her claim is that there's an issue unrelated to parental judgment or what have you. Where for girls, the organs that they use to do this are internal. So there's a sense of unknown and mystery to themselves, but also a sense of a lacking of control where boys can pee in the snow and write their name or shoot distance. Right? And all this, you know, they can have pissing contests. It's more about how the externalized male organ is much easier to objectify.

And the act of peeing becomes something over which you can gain control and which you do from a more dominant position, standing up versus sitting down. All these things together give boys a better opportunity or more opportunity for objectification. And again, this self development, and this starts at a very early age.

6:48 Wes: It sounds to me like you're actually giving a more traditional Freudian take on this to which he is actually objecting. Okay, so the question is how much of this is sort of basic psychosocial stuff that is predicated on human biology and is inevitable. Right? It's inevitable. Oh, I have a phallus and you don't. You have a lack. I penetrate you don't. How much psychology inevitably flows from those sorts of facts about us and how much is accidental and cultural. Right. The stuff that we would want to say is socially constructed is stuff that could be otherwise.

So the way she puts it, for instance, she has a lot of these things where she seems clearly to be trying to modify the Freudian view to say, actually, no, this doesn't really follow from just having a penis or not having a penis. It's really the way it's being interpreted for children by adult. So in this particular case, talking about the peeing case, the pride of his virility is breathed into him. In order to encourage him in this difficult path. This abstract notion takes a concrete form. For him, it is embodied in a penis. Here's the very important caveat.

He does not experience pride spontaneously in his little indolent sex organ, but he feels it through the attitude of those around him. Mothers and wet nurses perpetuate the tradition that assimilates phallus and maleness. She's trying to distinguish herself from traditional psychoanalytic theory in an important way there.

8:17 Dylan: Yeah. At the end of that paragraph, she characterizes him learning by the father, explaining this to him and his distinction from the girls. From then on, he will embody his transcendence and his arrogant sovereignty in his sex.

8:30 Jenny: This passage is bringing forward a couple thoughts. One is just going back to the introduction, something that we haven't mentioned yet, but is kind of the overlay of all these specific examples. But she says early on that the difference between masculine and femininity is. She basically says that they're electric poles, right? Whereas man occupies the positive, but also the neutral. Whatever qualities are associated with masculinity, whether it be the way that men pee standing up or not, that those are like the neutral and the positive. So whatever masculinity is, it's the norm.

And femininity is always the negative. Femininity is always a lack. It's the opposite, and therefore the worse qualities from the masculine qualities. And, you know, that's something that I think was one of the most profound insights she made. I mean, it's where we get this notion of binary oppositions and such, right? But then another point going back to the bathroom example is that I looked this up when I was reading it, but I was wondering when Lacan wrote the agency. I think it's the agency of the letter. Probably one of you knows this better, but it was several years later, and he has this whole discussion of the bathroom as explaining the role of the signifier.

You know, sort of the way in which we start to. The symbolic world is defined not by referring to real things, but by referring to other signifiers. And I think it look, you know, and he's describing these kids in a train seeing the bathroom signs. And look, we're at women or no, we're a gentleman or something like that. And it's this whole discussion of how these kind of signifiers of this sort of symbolic reality. For him, it's completely universal, right? For de Beauvoir, it's absolutely not. It's just the way things have been rendered in this masculine universe.

But nonetheless, the same insight is that whatever the feminine is, it is by virtue of its opposition to the masculine. And so that theme gets played out in all sorts of ways that we raise kids, you know, whether it be that. That conferring different activities on how they go to the bathroom. And then think of all the panic we've had recently with gender neutral bathrooms, right? That sort of mess up these notions of this is where men go, this is where women go. And to mess this up is to create massive disorder.

10:36 Seth: I agree with everything that you just said. I think what I find interesting Is that my reading of her analysis is that that begins with urination. And that blew my fucking mind. What can I tell you? It's like. Like the idea of, you know, like, okay, weaning and pooping is. That's universal. But urination, somehow, it never even occurred. It just never even occurred to me. Like, there's a lot more detail around that particular aspect of it. But the idea that the sex organ on the man is externalized so it's easier to objectify in the sense of. To help the young boy get a sense of self versus the internalized mystery of the female gender, genitalia and being able to stand versus sit.

I found all this stuff fascinating. I mean, whether you find it convincing is another thing. But the idea that developmentally this is a point at which there's divergence. And I get, Wes, what you were saying about attaching an interpretation to all of that versus, I guess, a parental interpretation, more importantly, versus just the experience of it. But she does have numerous things. Examples where she talks about girls being envious of being able to pee like boys without the sense of any kind of parental interpretation on top of it.

11:50 Wes: Yeah. And I'm actually personally, like, inclined to the Freudian point of view. But I wanted to add that caveat that I think, for the most part, you'd have to point me to where she says that. But she's asking us to modify that point of view to say that actually this isn't psychologically basic. It doesn't simply flow from biology, and it's circumstantial, situational. And it's a situation that could be entirely changed so that no little girls would not envy little boys being able to pee standing up if it weren't endowed with various sorts of significance by

12:23 Jenny: adults, like marking their territory. Going back to the dog example. Sorry.

12:29 Mark: So it's interesting, her take on how she uses the ambivalence, which she treats Freudian terminology. And there was a chapter that we didn't read, the psychoanalytic point of view, right toward the beginning of the book, where she says what you said, Jenny, about how the feminine is treated in general. That, you know, her problem with Freud is, for instance, that. And we actually touched on this. I think our Kristeva reading last year is very much influenced by Beauvoir's reading here. That Freud, like most scientists, was treating the male case as sort of the norm.

And then the female case is some aberration that. Well, we didn't really look very closely into it and didn't have a full understanding of it. And ultimately just, you know, thinks that Freud is too focused on sex as being biology, as being the root cause of everything. So she wants to retain some of this talk about stages and about, you know, seeing the penis as an object. And she's dealing with the kind of stuff that Freud was talking about. But I think it's always, always from a kind of contrarian point of view, as Wes was saying, that she is wanting to say, ultimately, no, it's not just the fact that boys have penises and girls don't that creates this difference, but social facts that supervene on that.

That that's what makes the difference. That she, you know, this is why she is a social constructionist, largely, I think.

13:50 Wes: Yep.

13:51 Mark: Women. Women are not born women, they are made.

13:54 Jenny: I mean, I think just to add to the social constructionist, she is one. But. But she, unlike, say, the way Judith Butler goes with this, she does see the restraints that our facticity has on our possibilities. So while a lot of things will intervene in our development to construct us one way or another, that's not the whole picture. I mean, that's. At the very beginning she's making really clear why nominalism, for example, is not a good way to approach what women are. Because there's just a fact of difference. There's just. She's like. You can see it. It's there. What that means, unclear. I mean, that's even in the ethics of ambiguity, too. There's just historical and biological. There's all sorts of constraints on what it is that we can become. There's matter, I guess it's material. That's there for her.

14:41 Wes: Very, very good point. Yep.

14:43 Dylan: But isn't part of that the alterity that she talks about at the beginning that you referred to, Jenny, that this generation of. Of different into other. Right.

14:53 Jenny: That concept is so important in so many fields of philosophy now. She actually takes it from Levinas, but does something completely different with it. And she makes it this way of describing a phenomenon that happens during oppression or during, you know, a kind of situation where total domination is taking place. And. Yeah, you're turned into the other.

15:15 Wes: So this is page 26, I think.

15:18 Jenny: Yeah. I mean, the other is. It's not a complementarity. It is a deficiency.

15:24 Seth: Yeah.

15:25 Wes: So she says the category of other is as original as consciousness itself. It can be found in primitive societies just coming forward here. And it did not always fall into the category, the division of the sexes. She quotes Lévi-Strauss. So after studying diverse forms of primitive society in depth, Lévi-Strauss could conclude the passage from the state of nature to the state of culture is defined by man's ability to think. Biological relations as systems of oppositions. Duality, alternation, opposition and symmetry, whether occurring in defined or less clear form, are not so much phenomena to explain as fundamental and immediate givens of social reality.

So this is stuff that influenced Saussure and ultimately Lacan. And then this is also the point where she makes the point going into page 27, Jenny, that you. You referred to before, which is that, following Hegel, a fundamental hostility to any other consciousness is found in consciousness itself. The subject posits itself only in opposition. It asserts itself as the essential and sets up the other as inessential as the object. So, Dylan, you were drawing on this point, I think.

16:32 Dylan: Well, the distinction between opposition and alterity, right. Or maybe just difference. So you have this opposition that is part of consciousness itself. The subject posits itself only in opposition as everything else. Is that compared to me? So you get what we were talking about before, where the male or the masculine gets set up as the norm, as the reference point, the default, and everything else is other. And that's, I think, the avenue where the social construction part comes in. For her. It's not that there isn't this natural characteristic of consciousness, of understanding the subject in opposition to the object, but that then there becomes this sort of socially constructed and reinforced generation of other subjects and other objects based upon, as she points out, in terms of essences.

We haven't talked about that part of it, but that, I think, for her, a lot of the foundation of this dichotomy comes down to essence thinking as well, which reinforces this notion of oppositions.

17:35 Wes: Dylan, you were using the term alterity. So. Yeah, in the next paragraph. The difference here is the lack of reciprocity and the positing of femininity and the woman as pure alterity, as the other, but not simply relative, but as absolute, as essential, as essentially other.

17:55 Jenny: The Lévi-Strauss point enables her to. Yeah, I mean, I think it fits well in describing how she understands social construction, because instead of saying oppositions, you could use sort of Aristotle's notion of categories, that we make categories of things. You know, they aren't necessarily cutting nature at its joint, but we have ways in which we relate things to each other. They could be reciprocal, they could be symmetrical. They can be. I think she used the word alternation, duality. But the specific way that we have categorized essentially femininity, masculinity is alterity.

And therefore the way that femininity has been constructed and lived in women's lives is as not only different, but deficient. And that again, that's the whole point of binary oppositions. It's not a simple difference. It's a hierarchy. She mentions things like the Pythagoreans, I believe. And, you know, this is something that you can trace in a lot of Western thoughts. The way that it's not a simple distinction, hierarchical distinction. Yeah. One of the ways that I have taught this chapter, and it still works. I hate to say it, but you have to kind of get them past their political correctness.

But you can get students to start yelling out the kinds of characteristics or qualities they associate with masculine and femininity. You have to kind of lay the groundwork. Look, I'm not saying what are men like? What are women like? But what is a masculine way of being in the world? What's a feminine way of being in the world? And you can get them to see, spontaneously generate those lists. And then you can ask them to evaluate the relationship of the qualities to each other. So you'll have linear pops up eventually for masculinity. And then you'll have emotionality.

That'll pop up, you know, or logical versus emotionality. All the things she ends up discussing in that chapter at the end of book two. But it's still there. It's pervasive.

19:35 Seth: Your point about alterity is. It's not just that alterity is the definition of the relationship between male and female. She says it's the fundamental character of human thought to create. And what's more important is that she mentions it with respect to consciousness. She says consciousness has a fundamental hostility to other consciousness.

19:57 Jenny: The subject is posed and being opposed.

19:59 Seth: Yeah. What she's saying is we are programmed to think in terms of alterity. And alterity in itself has a form of violence, as she says. It's not Mitsein, which is a reference to Heidegger.

20:10 Jenny: She calls it solidarity, though I thought that was interesting.

20:14 Seth: If you think of opposition, if you're programmed to think in terms of you and other me and other me and somebody else, you could naturally characterize that as reciprocity. So there's me, there's somebody else like me. And we have to reciprocate. We have to have some kind of reciprocal relation. But the fundamental nature of alterity when it comes to consciousness is not reciprocity of equals. It's subjectivity and objectivity.

20:43 Jenny: So on this point, because this is really important, so she says on page 27, whether one likes it or not, Individuals and groups have no choice but to recognize the reciprocity of their relation. And what she's trying to say there is that, yes, it's a fundamental category of thought that we make groups that are foreign or, you know, whatnot that we have cast as different than usual, the other. But the difference between the way that functions in general and with women is that for the woman or for femininity, it's a kind of complete domination. Right.

It's not that women then in turn make men to be the other. Women accept men as the absolute or as the essential or as the norm. But in, in other cases, you know, she makes the point of traveling or whatever. You can feel superior as the colonist, but you could also imagine feeling completely other to a community where you don't feel like there's more of you or that the culture is yours or, you know, all of us can lose that sense of being the one and them being the other. But for women, no matter what society, culture, time, they're always the other and there's not that reciprocity.

So it's frustrating.

21:51 Mark: Should we go more into those characteristics of femininity alleged in chapter 10 there?

21:57 Wes: Mm.

21:58 Jenny: I just want to point out that the one part that eluded me that I hope you all talk about and help me understand is her whole riff on religion. I just started skipping through that and getting back to like her stuff on logic and reasoning, but the whole sort of women and religion and I don't know if you want to talk about that, I'll be super interested, but if you don't want to, I get it.

22:18 Mark: I enjoyed that because it starts chapter 10 starts of you've got a lot of stereotypes about women and she talks about different authors who making fun of the shallow, silly women like that. That's part of the. It's a common trope for humor and it serves to justify, in the eyes of the anti feminists, you know, why they have to be limited and can't have real jobs and real responsibilities because they couldn't handle it. And so she's going through this kind of piece by piece. Like you say women are petty and materialistic. Well, because they can't take on real projects, they can't make actual changes in the world.

So of course, whatever little sphere of power they do have, they're going to latch onto that and try to. So this is sort of a very Nietzsche like critique, you know, that they use the will to power however they can. You know, you say women are spiteful. Well, because again, they're in a fundamentally lower power position. So the best they can do is complain and be vindictive and. And a lot of those negative stereotypes are just come straight out of the

23:20 Dylan: situation and in fact end up becoming some of the paragons of the most conservative forms of reinforcing the current social norms.

23:31 Mark: Yes. And that's where that religion stuff comes in.

23:34 Wes: Yeah. So bottom of 725, going into 726, women's mentality perpetuates that of agricultural civilizations that worship the earth's magical qualities. She believes in magic. Her passive eroticism reveals her desire not as will and aggression, but as an attraction similar to that which makes the dowser's pendulum quiver. The mere presence of her flesh makes the male sex swell and rise. She feels surrounded by waves. She believes in telepathy. I'm just skipping various passages here. She introduces primitive superstitions into religion, candles, ex votos and such.

She embodies ancient spirits of nature and the saints. And this is a stereotype that De Beauvoir is explaining here. But women are stereotypically seen as more superstitious and more devout, more religiously devout ultimately than men are. And in a way, they are meant to be sort of religious ambassadors to live the code that men only hypocritically give lip service to but don't actually concretely embody. Women are made to really live it. And they do that. They do. And they can do it more than men do.

24:46 Seth: Is anybody who's on the call right now religious? Like practicing going to.

24:50 Wes: No, but I am not. I'm not anti religious, though.

24:54 Jenny: Yeah. I mean, I'm fascinated by it, but I'm not religious. Yeah.

24:57 Seth: All right. Well, I think in at least Christianity and Judaism, it's the mother's responsibility to educate the children in the religion. So she makes two. She has a kind of a two pronged approach here where she talks about male figures. The father plays a certain role in the family where he's outside the home going out to work. He's the godlike figure. And that's reinforced in the church by virtue of God, the Father being the. And all of the authority figures in the church being male. So there's kind of a reinforcement of male roles. But it's also the case that the education in religion is ultimately the response, responsibility of the women in the sense that the young girls spend more time with their mothers and the mothers identify manifest a sense of power in powerlessness by attaching themselves to the religious doctrine which says, your virtue here in this world Your powerlessness, your submission, your objectivity in this world will be rewarded in the world after.

And so girls are trained by their mothers to accept this doctrinally, but also in practice. By identifying the male figures of God and the leaders of the church with the male figure of the Father, you

26:19 Jenny: get the sense that the feminine or women are the preservers, the conservers of religion. Without them, they're sort of the most dedicated or the most devoted of religious followers. But I think the reason it strikes me as odd is it doesn't really square with earlier comments and later comments that women sort of see the arbitrariness of the values and the rules and the codes that men construct. So she says at one point that men like religion because it endorses the very codes that they have developed. Right. So why is it that women would then completely.

We submit to those. What a weird conclusion to draw. Maybe not wrong, that women are the ones that are the most devoted, the ones that sort of. She says something like they find they're a sort of mirage of transcendence in religion when in other places she's saying that women. Part of their sort of narcissism or their complaining or all those other sort of difficult traits is because they on some level recognize that this is not a world that they created and they're confined to it.

27:24 Wes: This is why I brought up early on the idea that she's vulnerable to criticism, because she's riffing off of various stereotypes and acknowledging some grain of truth in them and then saying why this is the case. And many of these stereotypes, of course, are not consistent, right? The woman as sort of cynical rebel who sees through what men are doing and uses them with their coquettishness and all that is not consistent with the devout. This woman who sort of falls for the code and is completely devoted to it. I mean, I think you can explain that these sorts of qualities are accentuated.

They're present in different people to different degrees. And maybe some women aren't devout at all, of course. And so to talk in this general way opens her up to these objections. But I think it's best to see these as sort of as ideals and stereotypes that no one ever really fully embodies. But there are different degrees, and some of them are just not even consistent. People go down different paths. Even within all these different stereotypes of femininity, there are all these contradictory manifestations.

28:26 Mark: The whole thing that Wes was saying about her belief in magic. I just want to fill in one little detail of the context here, that it's because again, this is bottom of 737. Women do not have a hold on the world of men because their experience does not teach them to deal with logic and technology. And then a little down, this is 738. It is understood, understandable why women objects to masculine logic. Not only does it have no bearing on her experience, but she also knows that in men's hands, reason becomes an insidious form of violence. Their peremptory affirmations are intended to mystify her.

This is an interesting take on this whole. And looking at what's wrong with the fact that, you know, philosophy is dominated by men. Does that color the way that they see things? So we had in Latour, the idea that objectification, you know, and you end up treating the environment terribly. And there are all sorts of things that, you know, this abstraction creates a capitalistic way of looking at or something like this. To add then to this, you know that under this regime, men, in very practical ways, not just, you know, in theory, but like in controlling their wives according to Beauvoir's analysis here, use it to basically gaslight their.

The women in their lives. Right.

29:38 Jenny: I was gonna continue on this thinking Mark, because it's right around these pages, I think. Well, it's like 7:38. I think that she starts clearly laying out that, you know, she says things like, it's not that women think that they've gotten truth wrong, it's that they don't believe in truth.

29:54 Seth: Right.

29:54 Jenny: Or this is just powerful. So on 738. He wants her to yield to him as yielding to the proof of a theorem. But she knows he himself has chosen the postulates on which his rigorous deductions are hung. Or she refuses to play the game because she knows the dice are loaded. So, I mean, essentially de Beauvoir's presenting logic and reasoning, this ability to abstract, to take instances of things and make general categories, all of that as somehow a kind of game that masculinity has played to construct a world that doesn't make sense to the way women are confined to live in it. And that's, I guess, where I was coming from when I said, you know, she's saying this here, but then she's saying, and I think Wes covered this, but you know, that there's sort of these massive devotees of religion.

30:40 Dylan: I found this part that you're pointing to, Jenny. You know, she says, the woman does not positively think that the truth is other than what men claim. Rather, she holds that there is no truth. That felt consistent. In this chapter from the beginning, at the middle of the third paragraph, she's not learned the technology that would enable her to dominate matter. She's not fighting with matter, but with life. And life cannot be mastered by tools. One can only submit to its secret laws. The rule does not appear to the woman as a set of tools halfway between her will and her goals, as Heidegger defines it.

On the contrary, it is a stubborn, indomitable resistance. It is dominated by fate and run through with mysterious caprices. And so that frame of the world being a stubborn resistance and dominated by fate and caprices would completely engender you to thinking that there is no truth. Right. Because there isn't. Because it isn't full of logic. It isn't full of. Because of one plus one equals two. You regularly have the experience that something that is perfectly logical is just supervened by some kind of caprice. In this case, the caprice of some man or some circumstances in life.

The only way I find the point she makes about religion to be consistent is as a kind of reaction of being in that role of being the ones who are being the subjects and being the ones who are making the law.

32:12 Jenny: So it's kind of way to gain a little bit of power, maybe.

32:15 Dylan: Yes.

32:16 Jenny: Straight up asserting their power in their crappy situation.

32:20 Dylan: Yeah. So that's why the white slaveholding women would be often much, much more cruel than even the white male slave owners.

32:28 Jenny: All of this gets me back to this kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. Her description of these characteristics of women, like the fact that they cry so easily, or that they are narcissistic, or that they're whiny. Yeah. You read this and you're like, this is, I think, why it's devastating to me, because it's not like I haven't heard or any woman hasn't heard these descriptions of herself or other women. Right. But what I find hard is on the one hand, she gives a very charitable read of why they have ressentiment. If you want to put in those terms, like why, for example, the narcissist is a narcissist, or why the woman cries.

But I want to be able to read this and like more people that I find irritating because they are passive aggressive or narcissistic. You know, I want to say, wow, she's given me a tool here. But one of the things she said that I thought was so interesting and it was on her discussion of narcissism, and I'm like flipping through to find in my Notes. But she talks about how they. Women aren't sort of allowed to have genuine conversation or communication. Maybe that's what it is. Communication's not open to them. Which, you know, of course genealogically would explain why they would use more passive aggressive and pathological ways of getting their way because they can't sort of assert themselves.

But it's still, it's interesting, you know, I mean, I think it speaks to a lot of women's experience and I shouldn't say that because that's making me sound like I'm an essentialist, but that women find themselves wanting to voice certain frustrations or critiques of behavior but they're not heard or they're not really allowed or it's not really like a discussion where people think there's a productive debate that's going to happen that's going to open their eyes, but instead it's just construed from the get go as like, oh God, here we go again.

So that mode of dealing with what they think is a sort of powerless or unfair situation ends up making them take up different strategies which drive us all nuts. I mean, I definitely have relatives who are female that have used those strategies and they drive me crazy. But you know, she kind of gives a reason for why this happens so often.

34:30 Mark: So the two specific places I found in here, it's on 738 and 739 where Wes groaned when I said gaslighting. But that I know that's a trendy term. So the first one was this, you know, in talking about the masculine logic, they want to confine her in a dilemma. Either you agree or you don't. She has to agree in the name of the whole system of accepted principles. In refusing to agree, she rejects the whole system. But she cannot allow herself such a dramatic move. She does not have the means to create another society. In other words, if you were just to say, look, I want to be treated with more humanity, then that is taken as, oh, you're just going to say screw the world.

Like that's the false choice that they're. According to this analysis being given, that is a woman who's not a woman now necessarily, but a woman who's raised in an utterly dependent state where she's not allowed to actually produce anything substantial in the world. And if she objects to that, then and she is objecting to the whole patriarchy, the whole world has been created by men. The logic, the laws, the truth itself is presented according to this as a male construction is something that is Used to box her in. So of course she's then gonna be irrational and buy into magic and become super religious.

So that's one of the lies. What do you think of that?

35:44 Jenny: Yes, on the one hand, I wanna completely affirm what you said, but I just found a passage going back to this idea of concrete communication. And I think it's a part of her explanation of develop all these very irritating and frustrating and bizarre characteristics. But she says, I think this is on page 731. All possibility of concrete communication with others is removed from her. In her experience, she does not recognize either the appeal or the advantages of solidarity. There's just this deep sense that, yes, there's this sort of system, this male universe that she's imprisoned in.

She has no space within that universe to create a counter universe, which would require collectivity. And from her point of view too, it would be an effort that women would have to form a solidarity with each other to create this counter universe. But their experience is such that having those kinds of real conversations that get at real things hasn't served. It's been of no use. I mean, she doesn't say this, but I guess in my mind I'm thinking because they're not taken seriously from the get go, they have nothing to say. So any attempt to say something, to communicate, to sort of of share the world with others and form a community is a waste of time.

36:55 Mark: So she does say that the women try, you know, they immediately started gossiping as soon as they're by themselves. So that is their way of trying to communicate, to have a counter universe. But it's always defined within a masculine universe, right? As sort of a rejection. And they can complain about their husbands to each other, but that's not real communication. That's not getting at their existential situation.

37:14 Jenny: I think it's because they don't feel like. She says this often. They can't build things. This goes back to technology, right? So if they fall into gossip or anecdotes they hear in the line or whatever she says it's because she said something like those have more force. They seem more real to them than some scientific theory, right? To buy into that way of functioning in the world, you have to sort of believe that you're going to be at the table getting to kind of carve things out and make sense of things and propose hypotheses, that you're in common with the rest, that you have solidarity with the rest and that you have this basis to think.

And if you don't Then you're just going to be driven by what sort of impresses itself upon you, which might be gossip or magical thinking or. I guess that's how I took her to be describing why women are so much more likely to listen to sort of ridiculous gossip.

38:07 Seth: She's making the point that women are not engaging with the world. They're not engaging with other objects as subjects. They're not projecting. There's no sense in which the world as a canvas or other subjectivities as a canvas. They don't treat the world objectively the way that men do. Or I should say feminine women, feminine entities don't treat the way the world that masculine entities do to create the basis of objectivity that's required for developing full subjective experience. And this is really critical because it means that women are not able to become full moral subjects.

It means they're likely to be subject to temptation in the form of faith versus judgment. So to be, you know, fall into these patterns of submission, there's just a number of downstream effects. But ultimately, what we're talking about, about here is there's a pattern or a structure in which women are not able to fully realize themselves as subjects. And, you know, we all can kind of internalize and grasp that and understand it. The bigger question is, is that externally imposed 100%. Is it biological or psychological or somehow inherent? Or is there a balance between the two?

And I think that's where the judgment about Beauvoir's contribution becomes really interesting. I think we all sort of agree that there is some truth to this. But then it becomes, is it strictly situational? Is there some element of biology? And if you admit there's some element of biology, you know, this is why

39:48 Mark: I was trying to be very specific in these particular lies that are being told. So actually, let me just get the second one out there. This is on 739. This is why the whole idea of truth would be undermined in the ideology of the kept women. According to her analysis here is what she says. The man readily uses the pretext of the Hegelian idea that the male citizen acquires his ethical dignity by transcending himself toward the universal. As a singular individual. He has a right to desire and pleasure. His relationships with women thus lie in a contingent region where morality no longer applies, where conduct is inconsequential.

What this actually cashes out to is that men have very strict moral codes. And she even talks about how they prohibit abortion. But they're totally hypocritical that they want, in fact, the whole system requires that women break these. In other words, I'm gonna preach morality, but here, come suck my. Exactly. That's what she's saying. This is the way that men are. Started gaslighting women in this second way that.

40:53 Seth: What is hypocrisy? Sorry, it's the second time I've heard that. What does gaslighting mean?

40:56 Mark: It's from the movie where you're just telling someone something that they know is just false, but you repeat it over and over again and like, you must be insane if you don't believe it. That's what it is.

41:08 Wes: It's so misused in public discourse. You know, every time you disagree with someone. Oh, you're gaslighting me. You're making me feel like I'm insane. No, I just disagreeing with you. That's why I groan when I hear those.

41:21 Mark: Yes, well, but I think she's using. These are exact examples of the kind of. Like, if you disagree with me, then you're disagreeing with all of society. You're disagreeing with logic itself. You are insane. Like, that was the first example. And the second one is just this insistence on, you must be sexually pure, but also you must be a slut.

41:40 Jenny: I want to make two quick points, and one is going back to what you were just reading about. And I think I was looking at this too near where she's discussing abortion and prostitution. She gives the example of the two girls in the bordello and how they're the ones who are punished because they're trying to sully an honest man's name. And this goes back to what I was really trying to say about do we have to give up femininity? Do we have to give up that kind of dimension of the erotic? And I think what I was trying to get at was she's pointing out how men have strict morality, but only with other men.

Right. Like with other subjects, in other words. But women are not subjects. They're animals or they're nature or they're whatever. They're less than that world of subjectivity, that universe. And so they don't have to use their strict morals in the way they interact with women. They don't have to respect them. They don't have to sort of honor their promises. They don't have to actually conduct themselves in a way that would prevent them from burying their children when they don't want to, when women don't want to. Or they can say that they want virtuous women, but they are the ones that produce prostitution.

As a. As an industry. That's kind of all her points. That's where she really gets me. Because you don't have to give up femininity as some sort of. Of future project or some unyet realized erotic style of existing, but you have to give up the femininity that has been constructed and impressed upon or internalized by women in that situation where they're not moral equals to men.

43:05 Dylan: Femininity is a weapon, right?

43:07 Jenny: As long as they are not going to be treated with the same sort of principles that men say that they value, then it's a trap for them, right? Because then they find themselves in these concrete situations of being pregnant and abandoned or not being able to eat if they don't have a man, or, you know, if their parents or family don't provide for them, or being told that they should be virtuous, but yet knowing that all the men are going to the prostitutes. These are impossible situations to make you psyched about embracing femininity, because what.

Whatever short power it gives you. Like the example of being late, you know, I'll be late to meet the guy because it's the one time in our entire relationship that I'm going to have power. After that, he owns me. If there is a biological feature that creates or is the sort of basis of all of this, it's got to be pregnancy, like childbirth. Like, I'd have to really think about this more. But I thought about this a lot when I had a little child, and I was reading a lot of anthropologists that are writing about this across species and stuff. And there's just something about the way in which your body, if you are taking care of this child and breastfeeding and all these things, you become very vulnerable, I think, in a way that makes you dependent on others.

There's something there.

44:20 Wes: If you wanted a psychoanalytic theory, it would have something to do with the significance of the maternal and the way others react to that and the roles that women get put in because of their maternal role. It's expanded to. It's generalized in a way. But I think the other. If you were to look at some of the arguments I see unfortunately on Twitter about this sort of thing, but there's a big debate. If you look at the way academics of different stripes interact with each other, you'll see that, for instance, some evolutionary psychologists would try to point to hierarchical relationships in primates and aggression mediated by testosterone. They give all sorts of. Which de Beauvoir was already aware of all that, and she talks about It.

45:03 Jenny: Those arguments can go either way. They can prove that women are more violent or that they're more nurturing or. Yeah, I mean, they're all over the map, I think.

45:09 Wes: Right. But there's. Anyway, I just bring that up to say, you know, you could resort to plenty of different sorts of biological theories trying to explain some of this stuff. All of it is social. Right. But then the question is, well, how much of what is social flows from biology and couldn't be any other way or couldn't be significantly different except with cultural interventions? I think for de Beauvoir, it's. That's pretty much all constructed. And that kind of comes out of her existentialism, where maybe I'm overstating that, but I think for her this is largely constructed. Whatever is there biologically is not significant in determining these different gender roles.

45:50 Jenny: I think she thinks that all of the biological changes that happen to women that they don't like compared to the male in his body, the way that the woman's body is just a mess, is because the social meanings that pregnancy and maternity have taken on. And so what they see in their future once they menstruate or once they develop is being imprisoned as mothers and whatever. But what I was thinking about when I said pregnancy or motherhood is that there is substantial changes that happens to the body biologically, hormonally, when you give birth. And I think that it doesn't justify or give any legitimacy to patriarchy or sexism, but it explains why women are vulnerable to it, maybe, I think because of the extreme vulnerability of the female once she has given birth and is responsible in a multitude of ways for this infant.

46:44 Mark: I think she's pretty good about explaining how in that sense, the biology is tied to the social roles, in that the social roles take advantage of biological features and. And mainly, like you just said, pregnancy, the fact that sex is risk free for men in a way that it is not for women.

47:01 Jenny: Right. And that's completely social. Right. It could have been seen that it was much more of a responsibility for them or I don't know. There's lots of ways it could have played out differently. But that vulnerability, maybe of the pregnant woman or the postpartum body or something might be one explanation why patriarchy has persisted in so many cultures and so many times.

47:22 Mark: Yeah, she acknowledges the burdens of motherhood are different in different cultures. Even that have already happened. If you have more of a group caring for the infants kind of mentality, then that's going to be easier on the individual Mother, you don't necessarily have to then just completely give up your life. Maybe if there's already a division of labor, so you're doing something useful, Maybe there's something like childcare.

47:43 Jenny: So it's the nuclear family that's the problem. The nuclear family and, I don't know, the rise of markets and capitalism with

47:52 Mark: no social safety net. Yes. So you could do this in a modern context through childcare and things when

47:57 Jenny: you no longer have a partnership as the home, as the economic unit, but now the person goes out of the home to make money and one person stays in to reproduce the labor inside.

48:06 Seth: I have to say that I feel like there's a unarticulated Marxist thread to Beauvoir in the sense that she characterizes this whole creation of subjectivity. She's bought into the Hegelian conflict, master slave dialectic around consciousness, self consciousness. She's talking about the existentialist conception of self creation through projects, this resistance to the world, this objectification of the world. And there's a sense in which you can legitimately argue, I think, that the framework of capitalism is a framework of competition. At least that's what the free market people would tell you, is that capitalism is about competition.

It's a free market striving and has this sort of Darwinian elements. And to the extent that subjectivity is also framed or is a process that's defined by competition, if you think of this, this relationship between capital and society, capitalism, subjectivity, masculinity, that in a very real sense, women are disenfranchised by virtue of the way that they're raised. And if you buy Beauvoir's analysis, it's not just that they can't participate in subjectivity. And it's not just that economic participation is a subset of that. It's that ultimately the metaphysics of capitalism is the metaphysics of competition that's defined by masculine subjectivity.

And so they're excluded, or there's a way in which they're completely prevented from participating from the outset in the means by which not just we identify ourselves as subjects, but also economic means. There's almost no way for women to meaningfully participate.

49:56 Jenny: Well, she definitely was fighting that cause internationally. Very invested in the overthrow of capitalism, I think, or at least aligned with the international struggle. And I think that her Hegel is read through that. You know, I think I understand it. She got her Hegel from Kojève, and that's how it was sort of rendered. So it's very possible that all of her Metaphysics of subjectivity is also infused with this critique of capitalism.

50:26 Seth: How could it not be right?

50:27 Jenny: But if we took that apart and we just looked at it independently, then there'd be a whole reason for a bunch of criticisms of her. Stark generalizations about. At all times, women have always been oppressed and you know what I mean.

50:40 Mark: Following on that, I guess I want to, as a final thing for me, repeat that, you know, both a warning in how to interpret this text and I think an interesting challenge for me is how to modernize this. That again, she was already acknowledging in her times that things were getting better, that it's not that women are completely cut off from subjectivity. She's writing this book. She was in a very consensual, very interesting relationship herself.

51:05 Wes: Very interesting. As in, yeah, her and Sartre would have threesomes all the time and. Yeah, yeah.

51:13 Mark: I mean, I don't know if she considered it, you know, that she had attained the ideal of an independent woman or that her relationship was entirely, you know, symmetrical and free of the.

51:22 Jenny: I think it was hard for her. I think that her biography that comes out, I think she was trying the experience experiment, but it was very difficult.

51:29 Seth: Yeah, no doubt.

51:31 Jenny: And that's the problem. It's the experiment and it's got a lot more has to change.

51:35 Mark: Like for instance, those two lies that I just had spelled out of just if you rebel at all, you're rebelling against everything, you're rebelling against logic and then the sexual hypocrisy of yes, we're so moral, but I want you to come sleep with me illicitly. Anyway, it seems like versions of those exist now. So I think that second example, like you could give sort of me too interpretations of me too situations with something like that, but it's not, certainly not exactly the same as this paradigmatic, what I keep calling the kept woman that has just no power, no efficacy, who's entirely othered.

That's an extreme case that she's describing. And so I think it is hard, you know, if you just read this as she's giving these generalizations about women and that's not the way even she was like, no, she's kind of describing an archetype, a common thing. And you have to then interpret like to what extent that is actually infesting or, you know, it's the remnants of it historically are infesting your actual situations. So I think that's pretty difficult to do to figure out how exactly to apply this and not be just swept up in a militant I will obtain my full subjectivity.

52:47 Wes: Like, can we make a T shirt?

52:51 Jenny: Let me say two things because you just inspired two thoughts in me. One is I hadn't thought explicitly to make the connection of this book to, say, the contemporary MeToo movement, but I thought a lot about both. And I think the reason that I like that particular passage I read to you about concrete communication is I think that's something that women are still having to deal with as not being believed. Right. A kind of epistemic injustice that when they are saying this is happening or even when children are saying things that are happening, they're just not seen as credible and they're not able to affect change.

Except when, I guess some very high profile actresses finally say it. Not when the most vulnerable women among us are saying it, you know. But the other thing is that I would find it hard to imagine that many women reading this book today wouldn't find themselves still caught up in these, these very frustrating situations around the romantic relationship, the heterosexual romantic relationship, like the woman in love and the waiting around. The sort of sense that women, even as they succeed in the workplace and as they have more projects that are fulfilling, still have this odd duality of, you know, she talks about in terms of waiting around for the man to come home.

Right. And I'm not saying that it's as pervasive as when she describes it, but I think there's. There's still a lot of work to be done around the communication between a man and a woman in that romantic relationship that doesn't end up in a mishearing and a begrudging and complaining and crying. That's all counterproductive. I don't know.

54:28 Mark: Wes, did you have any last thoughts here?

54:31 Wes: No, except just to say again that I thought this was great and it's a huge fan of de Beauvoir and I really would like to read that. All 800 and something pages.

54:43 Dylan: I thought it was a great reading and I really enjoyed having Jenny on. It's always awesome to have someone who a book means a lot to, to get on and so it was cool to have you here.

54:56 Mark: Thanks for womansplaining to us.

55:00 Jenny: Oh, I'm so glad that that made it in there. That's hilarious. No, I mean actually that. Thanks for having me and thanks for. I guess I am very passionate about this book, so it does come through. And thanks for tolerating the passion.

55:13 Wes: No, you were. It was great.

55:15 Seth: Yeah, it was great.

55:16 Mark: Folks should tell us what they think. Go to partiallyexaminelife.com, comment on the blog post to this episode, go on the Facebook posts associated with this episode, respond to us on Twitter, email us at pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com, tell us what else you want us to read, what we got wrong, what we got right about this, how we just are missing the point entirely.

55:36 Wes: And don't just tell us that we've become too woke or that we're not woke enough, because those two are the two general criticisms we get when we're doing anything remotely political.

55:48 Jenny: At least they haven't said okay, Boomer to you. Hopefully

55:53 Mark: we're not quite old enough.

55:54 Jenny: I know I'm the same generation as you, but. But all the Gen Z kids are saying, okay, Boomer to me, and I'm like, I'm X. I'm X. I'm the forgotten, forgotten generation.

56:04 Wes: You should just look at them like they're sad. You couldn't come up with your own bespoke insult. You really just have to repeat.

56:13 Seth: I have no idea what you're talking about.

56:18 Wes: How sweet it is to be Seth and insulated from the.

56:21 Mark: I just think of the TV show. Here's Boomer. That was sort of a Benji type thing when we were children. That's what I think of that.

56:28 Jenny: That's funny.

56:29 Wes: How do you defense of it all politics so much?

56:33 Seth: I'm not on social media.

56:35 Jenny: Oh, my God, that's so amazing to do. I can't even imagine, but it's amazing.

56:41 Seth: And when my wife watches CNN or msnbc, I just leave the room.

56:48 Wes: It's great.

56:49 Jenny: Preserve your vessel from all that you must poison.

56:52 Wes: Feel so calm. It's the opposite of the way I feel.

56:57 Seth: Yeah. No, no, no. I'm not saying it's the right solution. It's the one that works for me.

57:03 Mark: You've traded in politics for poop. I understand.

57:08 Seth: It's funny. It's so propitious that I read this now. You know, the young girl and the developmental aspect. And I'm thinking about how to raise my daughter so that I'm not perpetuating these social stereotypes. And, you know, every time I don't tell her she's pretty, I tell her she's strong and smart, you know, and I try to reinforce those things. We need to come up with something to talk about fashion and style, because the way that philosophy degrades and speaks down to fashion, it's the same as rhetoric. We need to have a meaningful and fulfilling conversation around that topic because that's a cool topic. Yes, yes.

57:48 Mark: And there were lots of wonderful quotes from that chapter here that we did

57:51 Seth: not even touch on.

57:52 Mark: That one's a hoot.

57:53 Wes: I think it's great and it's insightful, but we. Yeah, we could do a philosophy of

57:59 Mark: fashion episode someday, but immediately we're going to discuss Plato's dialogue, the protagoras for next episode. Today's closing song is called wrong side of gone. It's by Beth Kille, and I discussed this very song with her in Nakedly examined music, episode 13, including some discussion of domestic violence, which is certainly relevant to this reading. Find it@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Good night, everybody.

58:23 Dylan: Good night.

58:24 Jenny: Good night.

58:24 Seth: Good night.

58:37 Unknown speaker: I feel like that old oak tree? Stuck in the ground? Battered by the wind and rain? Just waiting to fall down? Never hit quite hard enough to make me break? I'm strong enough to stand it? I don't want it this way? Day? I can't make a change? I can make you see? And I know I can't stay? But I can't bear to leave? I've been so deep in denial? I've known it all along? I've been on the wrong side of gone? You love me just enough I didn't feel

59:46 Jenny: no?

59:49 Unknown speaker: You made me think I'd be the one to save your desperate soul? We built a life upon the promise of it all? But how long can a house stand? At least sad and angry ones? I can't make a change? But I can't make you see? But I know I can't stay? But I can't bear to leave? I've been so deep in the use? I've known it all along? I've been on the wrong side of gone? I know how to be a fighter? But I don't know what I'm fighting for? I know how to save a life? I can't stop this bleeding anymore? I can't make you see? I can't make you change? I can't bear to leave? But I know I can't stay? I've been so deep in denial? Cause I've known it all along? Been on the wrong side of gone? On the wrong side of. The wrong side of gone? Sam. Stuck in the ground.