Ep. 234: Beauvoir on Romance in “The Second Sex” (Part Two)

0:00 Seth: So Jenny, I didn't understand that particular section is referring to narcissistic women specifically. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier in the conversation about just the structure determining the nature of the relationships. It felt to me in reading this that she was basically saying if the woman in love, her role in the love relationship is abandonment or fulfillment through the other participant in the relationship, in this case the man, then all of these Things are necessarily going to follow from it. There will be different psychologies that play out differently in the way that people react to it.

But ultimately, if you're trying to find your worth in another person that you have to deify to do it, and you're inevitably going to find out that they're not deities, right, or that they're not God, you're inevitably going to be disappointed. And if you're under the gaze of the other and your value comes from being under the gaze of the other, then you're going to need to have the other present to you constantly. So my understanding of what she was saying was that it's not one particular psychology or another, it's just this is the structure, this is what it causes.

And then there are different responses that people have to different aspects to it, depending on their circumstance and their situation, which she goes into in more detail later. But I didn't understand that to be specifically about women with a particular personality type. Was I wrong in that?

1:19 Jenny: No, I don't think you are wrong. And I think that a lot of what I'm doing, she does straight out talk about these women as narcissistic. I think what I was trying to do, again, is maybe because I've always read this alongside Freud and so I'm not thinking so much about. Narcissism permeates. That's like, I know you're not on the social media. I mean, everyone's got some kind of meme about a narcissist and an empath. Like, you know, everyone's like recovering from a narcissist. It seems like in our society. I didn't mean to suggest that she was kind of like, you know, access to disorders, DSM thing that she's getting at.

What I see there, though, is in just some like. Like in a structure before it became a diagnosis, a structure of. Of the interior romantic life of a person who cannot achieve an ego ideal, cannot achieve a healthy sense of self and any other means to be aligned and to be regularly reminded of that. And I think that, having said that, we can see that in the more clinical diagnosis that exists in our world. And I think one of the things about narcissists is they constantly need to have people around them reflecting the great things about themselves that they are, but they're not really, but that they want to believe that they are.

So I was just kind of noticing that if you read this contemporarily and then from that vein, I think that there are certainly men who have been abandoned all orientations, all kinds of relationships have been left in a terrible place because you were involved with somebody who. There was actually no inter human relationship. Instead there was a need on the part of one person for the other to completely fill him or her up. If that's not gonna happen, that person will move on to another one that will do that and another one that will do that. So that's one point I was making.

But the other point I was making that, you know, again, maybe trying to look at this in a contemporary vein is the mothers, like, I mean, my mom's a pre boomer, a lot of them grew up in these circumstances without a lot of power and figured out how to get power. And we talked about this in our last episode in a lot of sort of frustrating, irritating ways. And so I wonder sometimes if some of these pathologies that persist in relationships that we may call a relationship with a narcissist or some personality disorder. It doesn't matter if we do or not, but may persist and some very long suffering men may hang in there because they grew up with mothers who sort of use those only available tools.

3:59 Dylan: So the way you just framed this, so what I understood you to be saying earlier was that it was man's understanding of his own mother and need for his mother that kept this kind of guy attached to a narcissistic woman. But now I'm hearing you say that it's actually a lesson that he learned from his mother on how to suffer properly. And in that way, you know, the mother is accommodating her situation and also seeing a virtue in providing that validation for their children, her husband and stuff like that. And that this man learned that from his mother, that he learned how to provide that kind of validation for those sorts of people. But those seem to be two different kinds of things.

4:49 Jenny: Let's go with this a little bit. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that a man, again, this could be a woman and a father too, or girl and father. The way a man was taught what love is, if it was taught within a situation of a mother, not much power, you know, who sort of put demands, but those demands seem like they're also love. Those kinds of things can make a man unable to get that authentic relationship. So to have an authentic relationship is risk, it's recognition of freedom, right? It's recognition that there aren't just a few things you can do and you know that you've been, okay, good, now I got the love way.

5:32 Dylan: I'm understanding you're describing the interaction is one where the person who is accommodating the narcissist is enabling them by validating their narcissism. And maybe there's a question of what are they getting out of that relationship, why are they staying in it, and why are they providing that validation? I thought that's what you're trying to reach for, what that was. I guess I'm trying to reframe the question.

5:57 Jenny: No, it's helpful because part of what she's saying here. And again, we don't have to become attached to narcissist or think of it solely in terms of a personality disorder. But what she's describing in that long passage I read about the curse weighing on the passionate woman, her generosity is immediately converted into demands. Is that passionate woman is making an idol out of the one that she loves. She is wanting to. In other descriptions, right? Like sew up holes in his clothes or darn his socks or write things down, help his life in every way.

There's a kind of way in which she makes herself indispensable, I think is the word that de Beauvoir uses. But she's doing that. This is the weird part, right? Because she needs that man to live, right? She is nothing unless she has ensured that that man is going to stick with her because she says these things like she wants to live. He has to devote himself to making her live. It's a very twisted dynamic because she's full of love and expressing it in multiple ways and upping her game. And, you know, all this stuff about beauty and coquetry and fashion and all that still in here, too.

And when that goes, you try something else. I guess the idea here is that what appears to be love, and you can imagine that this is how a young child experiences love from a parent, that is actually more a demand than love. So what appears like someone is madly in love with you and fawning attention is actually really a demand that you guarantee her value, her existence, you know, and you're not allowed to leave. And if you do, it will go crazy. You'll have the woman in the asylum or you'll have punishments.

7:48 Mark: So I don't want to derail the discussion of these particular kind of relationships, but I have been wondering here about your use of narcissism in the sort of modern sense as an open wound, and whether that's really how she used it. In particular, I was thinking about Kristeva. Our episode on Kristeva overlaps a lot in some of the things we've seen in our reading for today, particularly in the abjection as being something like man's fear of woman as nature. And, you know, so there's a lot of common themes and. Yeah, and she uses narcissism, I thought, in that work, in a positive sense that maybe this is going from Lacan, but that it is the Lacanian self recognition.

In other words, it's finding yourself is narcissism in a sense, right? Because we are a lack, we are an emptiness, we are a nothing. If we can come up with an image. You know, one of the ways that we self transcend toward getting a conception of self is building this self. Like there is a narcissistic component in that necessarily.

8:45 Wes: There's what Freud calls primary narcissism, which is something we all have from the very beginning. Narcissism is an inherent part of identification and sublimation. Because what we're doing is we're transferring libido from outward objects onto our own ego or ego ideal. And then there's pathological or secondary narcissism. And I think that's what we would be talking about here. Narcissism in some pathological sense in which our capacity for actual intimacy is undermined. The idea of relationships are imagined as a sort of one way street in which I receive, as a narcissist, the narcissistic supply, as some psychotherapists put it these days.

Or the admiration or something like that, as a kind of substitute for love. Or is the only way that love can be. We're in the domain of basic psychology, right? The whole recognition relationship in some generic sense, we're all looking for recognition and that's developmentally necessary and all that stuff. But there's a certain point where it goes sideways. And one's capacity for real human relationships is undermined by the focus on the recognition or the desire of others. So maybe one way to put it is this point where one lives completely within the desire of the other to the point where one's own desire is squashed in a certain way.

And this happens in narcissistic men who are just. There can be pathological narcissism in the sense of being status oriented, right? And then the question becomes, are they really that. Yes, they're focused on projects, but are they focused on their own projects? Are they focused on someone else's project that's been implanted in them because they need the admiration or whatever, they need the status. But that in this particular case, I think we're talking about A substitute or status by way of someone. Right. The narcissism would be focused on.

So psychoanalysts call this narcissistic identification. You get it out of your proximity to or your relationship with someone who's important instead of seeking importance for yourself. I think that's the particular pathological case

10:57 Jenny: that we're talking about, that narcissistic identification. That's the type of identification that I think that the woman is making with the man.

11:04 Wes: She says something like, it's the essence of love relations or this type of love relations. And it may be that it's sort of a part of any sort of romantic, passionate love.

11:14 Mark: Can I read a quote here? Yep. So 779. Only in love can woman harmoniously reconcile her eroticism and her narcissism. We've already seen an opposition between these two systems that makes the woman's adaptation to her sexual destiny very difficult. Making herself carnal object and prey contradicts her self adoration. It seems to her that lovemaking disfigures and defiles her body or degrades her soul. So just in saying it that way, it seems like saying something's narcissistic in that sense doesn't necessarily condemn it. It's just. It's like will to power, you know, that we have these drives, we have the erotic drive, we have the power, the recognition drive. And as you're pointing out, Wes, of course, there are ways that, well, both of those drives could go very, very wrong.

11:59 Wes: So in this context, I actually thought she was using narcissism in the pejorative sense and not just in a generic sense.

12:05 Jenny: You know, you did a nice job explaining the different meanings of narcissism and Freud, and I'm talking about that secondary narcissism. He says it's like an open wound. He also makes an analogy to, like, being sick, which three of us are. Right. So when you're sick, you're totally selfish in some ways. Right? Like you shut down, nothing can come in because you're just focusing on getting better, like on an organic level. I think that kind of selfishness is what De Beauvoir thinks is, under patriarchy, a fundamental characteristic of women that maybe they don't have a healthy primary narcissism.

They're just an open wound and they're selfishly looking to feel better, to close that wound through these narcissistic identifications with men. If we have healthy narcissism, which we should all have, it's a lot easier to extend yourself if you don't have that. Then you have to use other devices.

13:00 Wes: In the context of this passage, he's talking about the reconciliation. This is a pathological. The harmonious reconciliation of eroticism and narcissism, which are opposed because, to think about it in very schematic terms, the eroticism, your desire is pointed outwards at objects of desire. And narcissism, it's pointed inward. So they're naturally. There's naturally a tension between them. But in this case, her eroticism is being undermined by her narcissism. And then there are pathological strategies for overcoming that. And one of them, she says, is to dissociate animal sensuality.

Lofty sentiments. And this is actually a very common problem. Right. To not be able to reconcile affection and intimacy with sex and to need to. So she'll say on the next page, quoting Stekel, for many women, the descent into animality is the condition for orgasm. Not being able to associate one's sexuality with a more intimate human relationship. So they see an abasement in physical love impossible to reconcile with feelings of esteem and affection. Freud thought this was very common for men and women, by the way, the inability to reconcile what he called the sensual and affectionate currents of love.

There's a very good paper on it. But, yeah, in this case, I think that's what she's talking about in respect to women.

14:18 Jenny: If we're still in a situation with a lot of women internalizing these roles that patriarchy have handed out to them, then it makes heterosexual and even homosexual relationships very difficult.

14:34 Wes: Yeah, there's kind of an inherent contradiction built into them.

14:37 Jenny: We don't have to stay in that sad spot. I mean, I hope there's clues in there, and I think she wants to. She certainly, in her own life, tried to forge a different way of relating that was more authentic. But you can't read this chapter and think that it's a glorification of being in love.

14:54 Wes: I think we only read the conclusion of Part four, last one. Right. The Toward Liberation. So we got a little bit of that positive picture. We skipped the independent woman. Naturally,

15:06 Mark: I listened to that and thought it was. There was a lot of filler in there that I thought was. I know I was just unnecessary for our overall consumption of this stuff. Like, can women actually be great writers, given that they're living under patriarchy and are mutilated people? And having her go through various writers that she thinks could have been better, you know, I don't know. It was a little too particular to her. Circumstance. It seems like it was more dated, perhaps, than other sections. So part of what also goes out in this chapter is, like, in our discussion last time of the stereotypes of women and how, you know, just like when Sartre is talking about anti Semitism, he kind of says, yeah, there actually is something to the stereotypes of Jewish people.

They are driven because of that situation. And we talked last time about how a lot of things about women were the same. Here. She gets more specific about that. Because woman is trapped in this situation where she doesn't have any power, then kind of the will to power is going to exert itself wherever it can. And so she's going to be very likely to be unfaithful. She's going to be the example given last time, I think, was being late. Like, that's one of the few things she has power over is taking a long time to get ready and meeting you up for the date.

She has to go on the date, but she can slack off in the same way that a scene slave might. And so, likewise, we get a lot of things here. Just the way you're describing, Jenny, the narcissism that they're all these concomitant negative traits that women, they're being clingy, they're being demandy, but they're also being bitchy to. You use that horrible word here, which I think she would probably be okay with, because it is a statement that if you have these stereotypes, you got to look to the situation, you got to kind of pathologize them. You got to figure out what the source is, how they're actually a sensible reaction to being trapped, to being in this horrible situation.

17:00 Seth: It's retaliation for humiliation. When you come to the recognition of the humiliating nature of her circumstance and the fact that the disappointment that we discussed in the previous part of this episode.

17:13 Wes: Yeah, it's page 781, that it's natural.

17:16 Seth: This kind of brings in, I think you mentioned it earlier, Jenny, that ressentiment, you know, it's. If you find yourself in this situation, the realization of it and the powerlessness to do anything to alter your situation would naturally, I think, lead in many cases to a lashing out or, you know, a resentful retaliation.

17:34 Wes: At 781, she says this is the masochistic phase. But she wants to make a distinction between the stage of abasing oneself in order to identify with the God, with the beloved master. That's not masochism for her. And then the desire to punish oneself and to punish the other through that so she says, it has sometimes been claimed that this desire for effacement leads to masochism. But one can only speak of masochism if I try to cause myself to be fascinated by my objectivity for others. That is, if the consciousness of the subject turns back to the ego to grasp it in its humiliated situation.

But the woman in love is not only a narcissist. Alienated in herself, she also experiences a passionate desire to go beyond her limits and become infinite. Thanks to the intervention of another who has access to infinite reality. She abandons herself first to love, to save herself, and so on. The masochism is predicated on the stage where that fails, where there's disappointment, and then one gets revenge. So one thinks of oneself as humiliated. One punishes oneself, but then one also retaliates. And out of resentment.

18:45 Jenny: There's a great line in Freud's Mourning and Melancholia. And of course, all of the patients he's describing are women. He says, her plaints are complaints. Right. And that kind of fits this idea of masochism as a kind of internalized hatred of the man, the humiliation. And so you might try to make some joy out of it by becoming a masochist.

19:07 Wes: In punishing oneself, you punish the object that you have incorporated or identified with.

19:12 Jenny: Yeah.

19:12 Wes: So it might manifest itself as, you know, why do I suck so much? It might not even be consciously, why does he suck so much? And punishing yourself, you're covertly punishing him for being the one who sucks.

19:24 Mark: This is kind of related. I remember as a child watching Kramer vs Kramer because it had just won awards at the time. And as a child, you have no sympathy for the mother at all. I think I saw it later as an adult, I'm like, okay, I get this. But she just abandons her family and she has this like, oh, I just couldn't. I didn't know who I was. I just felt like, misses Something. But, like, reading this, like, oh, you totally see that completely. That is talking about the emergence from patriarchy. So this new marriage story that was. It's a very similar dynamic that the woman just feels like, you know, he's so amazing, has all these creative projects.

He runs a theater troupe, and she's a member of the theater troupe. And. And she's always like, you know, going where he goes. She wants to be in California, he's in New York. And so he. That becomes like, the big conflict of where, after they divorce, they're gonna live. Yeah. So it was very much that, you know, she could only come into her own after emerging from his shadow. And, you know, despite anything, you know, it seems like he was trying to be as sensitive as possible about this, but just was too mixed up in his own stuff to make her a project in the way that she needed.

20:32 Jenny: I'd love to explore what that looks like because, okay, so the parts of it that I watched, that I found touching but haunting was early on when they're saying what is so beautiful and wonderful about the other. I mean, they admire and love each other, but they're going to get divorced and they don't want to do it in a particularly hostile or painful way. I can relate to that. I did get divorced, but without any hostility or any. There was no need to do anything to make it worse. And we liked each other. So that part I really related to, maybe that's why I thought it was haunting.

What I like what you just said, Mark, was he needed to figure out, I don't know, her project. I can't remember how you put it, but I think that gets us to this question of what would an authentic relationship look like? What would one look like where you have two freedoms? You eliminate either the man seeking the woman as a kind of rest from the ceaseless striving and project producing, or the woman is seen, you know, the woman's really just becoming a parasite on the man to gain all the things that she's not allowed to gain through activity. So if we could imagine an authentic relationship where there are two subjectivities that are engaged in projects, that's interesting, like what people do fuck that up even when they're smart and totally committed to it.

So what's the obstacles, right? Like when you know, you want your partner to succeed, but people still. I don't know if it's that fundamental egoism that we have or what, but you know, I'd love to explore that more.

22:10 Dylan: Isn't there a lot of circumstances that conspire to makes that kind of thing difficult or enable it to be successful? I mean, one of them has to do with the specific circumstances of each individual freedom, finding their validation, right? So if each of you, if that path involves you being 4,000 miles apart, right, with kids, that circumstance is going to make it a lot harder. I mean, I know of at least a couple of couples, they don't have any kids and they live 2,000 miles apart and they're married because they're both academics. Their ability to find that resolution involved them.

They're under the constraint of the circumstance of, you Just can't live in the same place necessarily. You're damn lucky if you can. I have a cousin, he and his wife both got jobs at the same university, but that doesn't happen all the time. Then you have the case to me where you have a kind of oscillation, a back and forth, like who's going to be the one? Who is the two people in this relationship are working together to get like, you know, someone's going to school, right? And if you got kids, probably both of you going to school, like both of you going to law school and both of you having kids, that's going to be hard.

I did graduate school and medical school and kids at the same time, right? Meaning that my wife was in medical school and then in residency and I was in graduate school. And I would say the only way it got accommodated was that I was the one with the time. I, you know, as a graduate student and a postdoc and stuff like that, I just had more flexible time, way more than a resident does, you know. And then when I wanted to be a professor, she found a job where I was wanted to be a professor. That was the choice in my own personal case. A little time is.

It was. It's an oscillation.

24:04 Wes: So I think the movie nicely complicates some of these questions because it's not clear, right? For instance, who's the successful one, the more successful one, right? She had early success and then that her appearing in his acting troupe is what made that successful. And then he became a well known director. But then she got this great acting opportunity which in a way superseded that. And I think that's part of what makes the movie interesting is it tries to complicate all of those questions and not simply. And tries to make it in a way as symmetrical as possible.

And including their peccadillo's. You know, you kind of wonder, you know, at her insensitivity and hiring this attack dog lawyer for the divorce. But then you begin to see his stubbornness and intransigence and you begin to understand why that might be necessary, all that stuff, sort of stuff. And the other complication is they do seem to have been friends. You know, we might bring up all sorts of cliches in response to well, what does it take? Or maybe they're not cliches, but they're commonplaces. You know, what does it take to sustain a relationship?

Is it friendship? Maybe it's sublimation. Maybe it's something that they can work on together. A third thing, outside of the relationship. Well, they kind of had that because he was directing and she was acting in a play. I think the movie kind of pushes this stuff to the limit, and then it becomes much harder to explain. It's not like it doesn't seem like it's a logistical issue, really, because their relationship problems predate her going to Los Angeles. It's something deeper that I don't know, that I could describe offhand.

25:32 Dylan: Well, there's a movie, right? There's a movie version.

25:37 Mark: What I was saying in making someone a project is really just saying you got to work on your relationship. You got to make that a priority. You can't take the person for granted. And at least the way it's presented in the film, like, at the very beginning, they're in couples therapy. But she's kind of already past the point where that would be helpful, where she's already kind of decided, no, we need to get divorced. I'm not going to really participate in this. So in that sense, like, if you want something to work, you just got to keep on talking.

It's two people that ideally are trying to treat each other as equal and autonomous individuals. And the problem, though, is that even if two people agree to something, you know, they're consenting adults. You don't really know what kind of conventions and psychological hangups and things might make somebody agree, might work on the dynamic so that one person is actually dominating the other. And typically, in the way Beauvoir is describing it, of course it's the man dominating. But it really could be. I've been witness to relationships where it's the other way around.

So it seems like maybe everybody should have mandatory couples therapy, you know, to force them to talk to each other and to kind of unearth these. You know, is that really fair that you're demanding this? You know, but I just get so upset when. When, you know. So, like, getting upset is a way of demanding in itself. Even if you're not being aggressive, you could be passive aggressive. You could just be one person is just more touchy than the other. And therefore, to keep the peace, that person ends up exerting way more power in the relationship.

There seems to be no good solution other than, you know, a therapist would be nice or, you know, bringing in a third party. But, like, the third party can take sides. Like, there's no real objectivity, and there's no real point of objectivity because even the third party wouldn't really know the minds of the individuals.

27:18 Wes: And it's often more complicated than saying who has the power in the relationship. Right. It's more like patterns of submission and dominance within personalities, within different parts of the relationship. And I think that's what makes it equalization, let's say, an enormously complex issue. I mean, and de Beauvoir is even getting at that, Right. When she describes woman's submission as a kind of demand. The power dynamics are not simple. And you could take, I venture to guess that there are hundreds or thousands of different dimensions within a relationship in which there are different power dynamics happening. And so reciprocity is not a simple question at all.

27:58 Jenny: Let me throw out, like, three things with no real insight but just that have come up. And I'd love to see us talk a little about. I mean, one is, what, if any, role does intimacy play in an existentialist authentic relationship? Does intimacy have any place in, again, the authentic existentialist relationship? And then I think, Mark, from things you've said, I'm starting to see that. I suppose if you wanted to approach building an authentic relationship as an existentialist, then the project is the relationship. The relationship is a project that both subjectivities are engaged in.

Right. It's very bare outlines. And what that looks like, I don't know. And then the third thought is, it doesn't seem to me that marriage is of any interest to an existentialist. You know, that it's. There's no real point. And that might also get back to something maybe Seth said earlier. I mean, the fact that we have gay marriage. We still have a lot of problems with marriage as an institution, Right. So I don't know. These are three things that. And they all intersect too. Like, can you have intimacy without marriage? I don't know. That kind of stuff.

29:09 Wes: Yeah.

29:09 Mark: What do you think of marriage as a. For an existentialist? There's something inauthentic about thinking you can make a choice that's going to stick forever. But at the same time, like, to be not merely an adventurer, in Beauvoir's terms, in the ethics of ambiguity, is to take commitments seriously. So actually, that seems like, you know, as long as you in marriage are not saying, well, now we're getting God involved, and God will strike you down if you then violate these vows and decide not. But if you just say, as our project, we both decided freely, hopefully, that we're gonna work on this as much as possible.

And it seems like on the existentialist picture, no matter how bad the facticity gets, like, you could choose to just keep working on it. And, like, that's what marriage is is just a commitment of a sort that I think an existentialist would have, I want to say, no problem with. I'm sure they have a problem with anything, but would be admissible in terms of, you know, I'm just trying to make official my project, my commitment. That is one of the things that's going to give life meaning. It's not that we own each other, but that we're going to work at this as a co project.

30:21 Wes: Sounds like fun.

30:23 Jenny: Sorry.

30:25 Seth: I mentioned earlier that marriage is still very much an institution that's present in our society, but we've redefined the terms which. The way we think of marriage, I guess, is the way to say it. I think the idea that Mark described of using the institution of marriage as a way of articulating commitment from the perspective of an existentialist personality is nice. I don't think that that's how it works in reality. And I can't imagine that anybody who was truly committed to the existentialist project would feel the need to have their commitment ordained and sanctified by a third party authority. I think it gets into more complicated issues of the state and religion and God.

31:11 Dylan: Do you think that getting married is more than having it sanctified by a third party authority, but that the activity of. Of the public declaration itself is a decidedly important part of the marriage that you have said to one another and to other people that you're committed in this way and that changes the character of the relationship more than the fact that you got a piece of paper from the state.

31:35 Seth: What you're describing is you're saying that the vows are ultimately what's important in the ceremony. But I think psychologically, yes, it communicates more and it's much more. It has more force to do something publicly and have witnesses than to do something individually. I'm not sure though that existentialism, that being truly an existentialist would require that of you. I don't know that that makes sense

32:02 Dylan: necessarily being at that point we're having a discussion about what it means to have a demonstration, be actualizing your life for an existentialist. And that would apply whether it be marriage or any other kind of commitment you have in your life, that you said, I'm going to have a commitment in my life that is giving meaning to that life for an existentialist, whatever that means.

32:23 Unknown speaker: Right.

32:25 Seth: Having said all that, I'm married and I'm happily married. I don't know that. I guess maybe I'm not an existentialist. Or something. But I think I am, or at least I think I strongly influenced. But the experience of being married and of getting married was not so much about the commitment, although that was certainly part of it. Instead, it was the bonding experience with my wife that brought in our broader social network. So it's almost like it almost became a social validation of our commitment. Not necessarily like in legal or sanctification terms, but it strengthened, validated existing relationships that we had with other people in our lives and was a union of the two parts of the family. So it served a different purpose as a ceremony and as an institution.

33:13 Jenny: I think it's interesting what you just described, noting that it seems important if one marries to have a public dimension to it, that it's a kind of pledge with witnesses. And maybe more than that, maybe you're also drawing upon a community to help sustain the project when you do that publicly. I also, in the comments that all of you have made, I've been thinking, so Dewey's my guy. I'm obsessed with John Dewey. And what we need is a reconstruction of marriage in existentialist terms, as it is now and as it was at the time of her orsart writing.

It's not a project, it's an institution. It's a contract. It's a, you know, it's a one and done kind of thing that has a whole bunch of economic, political, legal rights bound up with it, but it's not a project. And so I think you can be an existentialist and want to be married, but then you're going to have to reconstruct marriage as a project that perhaps requires community to sustain it, because like all projects, they're ceaseless. But I still have this question about intimacy. I mean, for me, it's always been an open question. I don't just mean sort of the intimacy of friendship or the intimacy you have with your children, but if you choose to have intimacy with a partner, you know, that's like the basis of a romantic connection to that person, or that is the reason for the romantic connection.

What does an existentialist say about intimacy?

34:45 Mark: Well, what is she saying here about intimacy?

34:47 Seth: Search on the term.

34:50 Jenny: It's almost like that would be, you know, if you think about Sartre's theory of emotion, it's almost like it doesn't predate you doing it. If you want to be intimate, be intimate. Like you don't feel intimacy, you produce intimacy or something like that, which I think maybe is all the Cartesian problems.

35:08 Mark: She talks about this in the lesbian chapter this is 495. So just characterizing lesbian relationships in general, which she says, look, because there's not the socially normative roles that the man and the woman play, then there actually can be something more prima facie, authentic and free about it. Because they really do have to work out what their relationship is going to be themselves, the two of them. It's not society telling them so. It's kind of more like maybe what relationships are. Now, insofar as you think, you know, that we have less stringent roles within a relationship.

Men and women, even husband and wife, more or less play roles with each other. And woman, on whom the male always imposes some kind of directive, does so even more exemplary virtue, charm, coquetry, childishness, or austerity. Never in the presence of the husband and the lover does she feel fully herself. She does not show off to a woman friend, has nothing to feign. They are too similar not to show themselves as they are. This similarity gives rise to the most complete intimacy. There you go. And in fact says, it might not even be based on eroticism.

It might be just that eroticism plays a small part. And it's this intimacy might be the primary thing in a lesbian relationship.

36:15 Jenny: And so what does intimacy mean in

36:17 Mark: that having your thoughts and your personalities be transparent to each other? Right. It's something before eroticism. I mean, I guess you could ask, does she share Lacan's negative view of eroticism itself, that it's inevitably an attempt at merger that does not work, whereas intimacy is maybe more cleanly, you know, you look into each other's eyes and like I would still think an existentialist would say, that it still fails. You're still not actually merging with another person, but you could still have the feeling, I think, in either case, obviously physically or psychologically, that you could feel intimate with a person.

And that's something that is an obvious need that we have. So how could she deny that? Is she really going to say that we're just fooling ourselves? That, you know, you feel better by opening yourself to this other person, but really they're not seeing the real you, and so you should just resign yourself to being lonely. And in an existentialist hero manner.

37:12 Dylan: She doesn't seem to have that sense of wanting to resign yourself to it. I mean, the only clearest examples of this is the way in which she talks about authentic love, which I interpret her, maybe I'm reading between the lines, but as the closest thing to a version of a positive sounding point and a look to some Genuine need of a realized self. So at the very end of the Woman in Love chapter, authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. Each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other. Neither would abdicate his transcendence. They would not mutilate themselves together. They would both reveal values and ends in the world. For each of them, love would be the revelation of self through the gift of self and the enrichment of the universe.

38:03 Jenny: That's cool. She does that passage describe love as. I don't know. It's weird, the connection I'm going to make. But it reminds me of Bertrand Russell's essay on philosophy. That the study of philosophy is to sort of be in awe of how vast and interesting the world is. And how much curiosity can be put to work with that realization. It's almost like she's saying the same thing. That love in an authentic sense is a kind of never figuring the other thing out. It's never over. It's always an adventure.

38:37 Dylan: I like the analogy you drew with philosophy or anything else. That's an active engagement. Right. The nice thing about the philosophy case is that you would never. I don't think you would say that by itself, philosophy remains a kind of wondrous draw all the time. Without the activity of the person doing the philosophizing. It's. Reciprocal is not the right word, but it involves active engagement. It gives back to yourself and your intellect in ways that are in accord with how much you give to it. And so, you know, in the way we were talking about. The positive conclusion of her thoughts on relationships is in parallel to the sort of existentialist positive about understanding oneself as being an active, engaged life. And the relationship would be actively engaged with the relationship and the other.

39:30 Wes: Right. I think, Dylan, the really interesting thing about the passage you just read is that I don't think is the typical concept of intimacy, right. Which opens up many possibilities for inauthenticity. If you think of it. I think it has a lot to do with wanting to be seen and to be known by others. And the perils. Therefore, inauthenticity is just again, once again, the danger of that being reduced to finding yourself and then another. Or to narcissistic transference or whatever you want to call it in this case, the way she's put it here preserves this concept of activity.

So the word revelation of self through the gift of self, not through simply seeing oneself in the other's eyes, but through something active one is doing. Or reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. Or the idea that you experience yourself as the other in a way where you don't abdicate your own transcendence. So you're not simply living in the recognition of the other. You somehow preserve your own. And then she quotes a passage in which someone says, here's the great secret. The world is other. I myself am other. It's a really interesting variation on the typical concept of intimacy.

40:43 Jenny: Love that's not aware of a possessive kind of love. And a love that wants the other as an object is that. Well, if we take the existentialist seriously. We aren't objects. We are transcendence. And our transcendence is, in fact, world building. You know, it is the other world. It is the other. And so to love in that set of facts means that who you love now. Is going to be someone that is different later. Or you will never fully know that other person. You will not. You'll never figure that person out. That person won't be summed up or sort of neatly packaged.

Where you get to the point and roll your eyes like, there he goes again. Or, there she goes again, doing that same old annoying thing. Like there's this sense that there should be wonderful at the heart of love. Once you give up these bad notions that people are just utterly predictable objects. That. Okay, I got this one. Gotta figure it out.

41:37 Seth: You know, there's a really nice passage at the beginning of the Myths section that we read that I think kind of sums this up. And gets at a little bit of what all of you are saying. If I may read. It is the existence of other men. That wrests each man from his immanence. And enables him to accomplish the truth of his being, to accomplish himself. As transcendence, as flight toward the object, as a project. But this foreign freedom, which confirms my freedom. Also enters into conflict with it. This is the tragedy of the unhappy consciousness. Each consciousness seeks to posit itself alone as sovereign subject.

Each one tries to accomplish itself. By reducing the other to slavery. But in work and fear, the slave experiences himself as essential. And by a dialectical reversal, the master appears, the inessential one. The conflict can be overcome by the free recognition of each individual and the other. Each one positing both itself and the other. As object and as subject in a reciprocal movement. But friendship and generosity. Which accomplish this recognition of freedoms concretely. Are not easy virtues. They are undoubtedly man's highest accomplishment.

This is where he is in his truth. But this truth is a struggle endlessly begun, endlessly abolished. It demands that man surpass himself at each instant. Put in other words, man attains an authentically moral attitude when he renounces being in order to assume his existence. Through this conversion, he also renounces all possession because possession is a way of searching for being. But the conversion by which he attains true wisdom is never finished. It has to be made ceaselessly. It demands constant effort. How'd you like that for a mandate for your marriage?

43:19 Wes: Put that in the vows.

43:20 Seth: Put that in the vows. I vow to constantly and ceaselessly remake myself every instant, but only if you do.

43:30 Wes: In sickness and in health, in struggle, endlessly begun, endlessly abolished.

43:36 Jenny: No rest. This isn't for weak asses.

43:41 Seth: No.

43:43 Jenny: Which is true.

43:44 Mark: Any last topics that people want to bring up for the sort of home stretch of this or.

43:50 Seth: Well, I'd like to know if menstruating women actually cause cheese to ferment or.

43:58 Mark: Yes, yes. We should just pull out some of the quotes.

44:00 Wes: Everyone knows that you can't salt butter while you're menstruating.

44:05 Jenny: Oh, my God. Those were so. I mean, then, of course, using menstrual blood to ward off some kind of, like, monsters. Oh, my God. All that stuff about the virgin as the most powerful feminine principle. And so all the ways of deflowering the virgin before marriage, that was just fascinating.

44:26 Mark: Funny how these two chapters complement each other so nicely for our purposes. But how different they were when she wrote them. That the myth chapter, you know, for every. Okay, why are men disappointed? As opposed to why women are disappointed? What do they want out? But, like, there's so much extra, you know, this is over 50 pages, 60 pages of detail, a lot of which is anthropological.

44:46 Wes: The amount of research that must have gone into this.

44:50 Dylan: She did it, like, in some absurdly short amount of time. In fact, the way she talks about it at the beginning, it's like she had this book, and she had basically expected never to write it. And then finally, like, I've just got to write this book.

45:03 Wes: Let me take a weekend and pound that out, man.

45:07 Jenny: I need that sauce.

45:10 Seth: Yeah, but the thing about this is it's just relentless in the. The motion of the text is just this, like, march. It's this relentless. But it never, at any point, does it feel like she's straying, like, at least having established the thesis that she does. I felt like this was just constant reinforcement, pounding on that same thesis over and over again. And I was able to. To see in everything that she was saying how it justified the point that she was trying to make. So it was, you know, it's 800 pages, but it doesn't read like 800 pages of Hegel or Kant or anything like that at all. And as broad and diverse as the topics are and all that thematically, it's just tight.

45:51 Jenny: There's a lot of beautiful phrases that I found myself just writing down.

45:56 Wes: Yes. I just underline every sentence of every page and then put asterisks next to the really exceptional things.

46:05 Jenny: Sometimes she buries the lead like her most important point is, like, shoved in a huge paragraph. But, you know, there it is, this gem.

46:12 Seth: She's also not hiding in footnotes. That's another thing that I don't like is heavily footnoted things where the real arguments take place.

46:19 Wes: Oh, by the way, she does have them, but.

46:22 Jenny: Which is so unusual.

46:23 Seth: She has them. Yeah.

46:24 Wes: They don't interfere. It's a literary accomplishment as well as. You know, there's scholarship and there's erudition and lots of philosophy, but it's also a literary accomplishment.

46:37 Jenny: Reading this book with others and talking about it gets at really fundamental human things. I've always felt that it's of interest to everybody. It's really not just a book written for women. Right. It's about our humanity and what we can become. And if you sit down and read this and struggle with. Produces amazing conversations and thoughts.

46:59 Mark: Well, so my original experience of this book. I don't remember when this was many years ago was. I'm looking like, on chapter one, page one, which is actually page 41 of our text, given the introductory material and all that stuff, biological data. I had a quote here. And the most splendid wildcats, the tigress, lioness and panther, lie down slavishly under the man's imperial embrace. Inert, impatient, shrewd, stupid, insensitive, lewd, fierce and humiliated. I just saw that she's right off the bat saying that intercourse itself, even among animals, is inherently humiliating for women. And I just saw that, like, that's the starting point of the book. That's what you're gonna base this. So, like, I just know she's clearly crazy. That was my initial. You know, why, like.

47:48 Seth: And then.

47:49 Mark: Okay, well, I really liked all of the ethics of ambiguity. But still, this is the book where she, you know, expresses the crazy stuff. So. So I reassessed, let's put it that way. But I still find it interesting that I think she does, like, in several of the sections that we read, say, sort of by default, the way that it is practiced now. Intercourse is humiliating for women, right, because they're passive. Whereas in a sexually awake, you know equal relationship. She would know how to express her desires and assert herself pursuing her eroticism as opposed to merely submitting to his.

48:25 Jenny: Yeah, well, we still need a whole lot of work on that. You mentioned this last time we did this, Mark, but one line that we never read officially in our reading of this together is her very famous line, one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman. And I think we should just, like, put that out there, because you can't understand Judith Butler without understanding that statement and what de Beauvoir was after in basically creating this social construction, a genealogy of how we constructed the feminine or woman in patriarchy.

49:04 Dylan: Isn't that going to come with two meanings, though? One is. One is not born a woman. One becomes a woman in that there isn't an essentialism to it, and there is a radical situatedness and contingency to it. But then there's also going to be the parallel of one becomes who one

49:23 Jenny: is in general, the Pindar or Nietzsche. Become what you are.

49:28 Dylan: The reason I'm shrinking back from the become what you are. I guess it's a longer conversation about whether or not that big process of becoming is unearthing a essentialness that you're getting towards that's teleological, or if it's a becoming that is a emergence. Those would be two different ways of understanding a process. Becoming is talking about one's being as being a process. And you can have an understanding of that that is a process of teleological or one that is emergent and constantly evolving. And the way we were talking about love and relationships and putting that in Beauvoir's mouth is the full authentic. Love is one that is not that teleological version, but is of a constant dynamical system that is becoming what it is all the time.

50:25 Wes: Let's discuss that next time.

50:26 Mark: Yes, the good news for people that are enjoying this conversation is that we're going to continue with exactly this group to discuss some portions of Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble. So she in particular has a chapter near the end, it is the last chapter before the conclusion about the performative nature of gender. So I think that is the linchpin to the whole thing. But we'll, you know, we want to get a sense of the book as a whole and root around in it. So we're going to have that discussion. Then there's going to be one more we'll figure out after that.

And then if things go the way they're planning right now, Judith Butler herself is going to join us to discuss her new book, the Force of Nonviolence. So thank you, yes, Jenny, for volunteering yourself. We're kind of at odds with should we get a guest for Gender Trouble? Who should we get? Should we insist on a trans philosopher? I definitely want to leave space. I don't know when this will be published in relation to that, but open to the idea of one of those second opinion episodes. In other words, we have our discussion with the five of us on Gender Trouble, but then, you know, just me or just me and one other person or something talks to three or four trans philosophers or people that run trans related podcasts or something like, you know, people that represent that community and see what they think of our discussion of that and of the text itself.

So if you know anybody that might want to participate in that, it's not too late already. Email us@plparsexaminlife.com we welcome all other points of feedback. Our closing song is Easier Than Leaving by Michaela Anne, whom I interviewed for Nakedly examined music Episode 114. Please look out for that. So go subscribe to Nakedly examined music@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com finally, my daughter Mina is raising funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. If you'd like to support this cause, please Visit partially examined life.com cancer thanks

52:18 Jenny: for letting me come onto your next show too.

52:22 Dylan: Thanks for joining, Jenny.

52:23 Wes: It's great.

52:24 Seth: Good night Rape Bye.

52:25 Wes: Good night Night.

52:32 Unknown speaker: Sitting at the table against the wall Cough you're skin colder as I wait for you to talk We've been having trouble just getting through the day make make sure you won't regret it what you're about to say Cause I can't afford to lose it I can't afford to crack I've given you my heart now can never give it back I can't afford to break down not here upon my knees don't turn me into someone that I can't afford to be. No need for explanation I smell on your skin My imagination is worse than where you been this ain't the first time you've let your colors show I cannot be hurt by what I don't want to know Cause I can't afford to lose it I can to crack I've given you my heart now you can never give it back I can't afford to break down not here upon my knees don't take turn me into someone that I can't afford to be.

Living with the secrets and here in all your lights Easier than leaving all that I love behind Cause I can I can't afford to lose it I can't afford to crack I've given you my heart now you can never give it back I can't afford to break down not here, here upon my knees don't turn me into someone that I can't afford to be.

56:54 Dylan: Sa.