One is not born women, but becomes so

What I found interesting in reading excerpts of Beauvoir’s Second Sex was the argument she made on immanence and transcendence, within the context of the relationship between man and women.

“(…) man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.” (The Second Sex)

First of all, her main idea is that the woman is always “the other” and has always been “othered”; in fact, in the preface, she follows Hegel’s dialectics to show how man and woman fit in his dialectical scheme. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.” Man establishes the Other – woman – in defining himself as a man, rendering her an object of submission. As we said in class, when talking about how men and women are brought up in a different way, Beauvoir states that “Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself”.

So her idea is that woman is the other of the man and, because of this, men define themselves as men through their opposition to women, through this rejection. Therefore, women’s existence is a sort of “negative” existence, if we follow the dialectical process. This idea of woman has always prevailed, as a being which “is less” than a man; as Aristotle said “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities”.

The important distinction she makes is that women belong to immanence, while only men can become transcendent. Being able to become transcendent entails freedom. Thus women are inherently dependent and prevented from freedom; this condition of dependence is what allows men to be free and to be transcendent. However, this dependence is mutual, because without women, men cannot accede to transcendence or define themselves, because of the dialectical relationship among men and women, where women constitute the negation.

Ultimately there’s a dead-end situation, since we need both immanence and transcendence and thus if women were to have also transcendence, then no one would cover their position.

Therefore, the only solution seems to be the deconstruction of the distinction between men and women and the repartition of immanence and transcendence between them.