From its onset, life is trapped. It is trapped by sex, trapped by gender, trapped by the situation of birth. To the sexed world, to forsake this is to destroy the facticity of the self as it is known; you must live according to the Self-Evident Rules of Sex. This is the locus of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a scathing, dense critique of the historical situation of woman in a phenomenological-existentialist perspective. To this aim, as a tome of masterwork, it is flawed; however, despite these flaws, Beauvoir’s text remains an incomparable exploration of the gendered and sexed body in its lived situation.

Beauvoir’s writing, despite its verbosity, is exceedingly concise. Her command of the run-on sentence is apparent in The Second Sex; she can put forth incredible indictments, oscillating between particulars and universals with nothing more than a few semicolons. This loquacious speech creates the feeling of an unceasing beating in the text, and, in her constant beating forward, when she comes to a slower, less run-on pace, she creates a violence of impact in her brake. This style sweeps the reader into her rhetoric by the ferocity of its movement, and Beauvoir effectively extracts as much as can be said about each of her analytical subjects while rarely coming across as an interminable slog.

Where her writing does come across as an interminable slog, it is typically in the more confounding areas of her theory. One of these areas is her extensive pontificating about urinary fetishism (fetishism used as in “object fetishism”). She uses this as the nursery locus of feelings of “female mutilation” or “penis envy,” through analyzing the “activity” of the male urine stream as opposed to the “docility” of the female urine stream. What she attempts, here, is to illustrate the social dimension of urinary fascination, which formulates that “female mutilation” is a learned subjugation, not an inherent psychophysiological conflict. This argument works when Beauvoir considers how these ideas are inherited socially through the sexing of the body (“In order for her state to assume the character of a frustration, it is necessary for the young girl to be already, for some reason, dissatisfied with her situation.”), but it does not work when she reiterates the oppression of sexual differentiation by considering the female body as an innately inferior instrument to the transcendent project: “Every stream of water in the air seems like a miracle, a defiance of gravity: to direct, to govern it, is to win a small victory over the laws of nature; and in any case the small boy finds here a daily amusement that is denied his sisters.” (282, 279).

This is a repetitive sin in Beauvoir’s text. She seems to believe the female body is more animal than the male’s in its necessity for the continuation of the species and in the menstrual cycle, as is explicitly apparent when she remarks, “The two essential traits that characterize woman, biologically speaking, are the following: her grasp upon the world is less extended than the man’s, and she is more closely enslaved to the species” (79). This seems counterintuitive for formulating a rejection of sexual hierarchy when transcendence is placed as the object to aspire towards. It’s an ontological inferiority that makes woman’s situation contingent on tools that forego the body’s limits, which I admittedly struggle with.

Iterating again on her ontological evaluations of sexed bodies, she frequently oscillates between a murky mode of rejecting any ontological hierarchies and contributing to them. This is a textual issue that is difficult to disregard; it seems to confuse her formulation of the “situation of the body” each time it begins approaching clarity. It is best to accept her early remark that, “It is not upon physiology that values can be based; rather, the facts of biology take on the values that the existent bestows upon them,” and make a concerted effort to consider her departures from this abstract as aberrant, as this seems the most conducive interface for an advancing understanding of sex (40).

Another significant tension between me and the text lies in Beauvoir’s evaluation of homosexuality. To do so, she begins with a framework that declares love as the unification of the self with the Other (i.e., “true” love transforms the bodies enacting it into independent subjects who unify with an entity outside themselves through their relations while maintaining the self). As consequence, homosexual love is considered failed in the abstract, as to love the other, to Beauvoir, contains realizing one’s self in the partner’s sexed otherness, not so much to recognize one’s self in the partner:

Under a concrete and carnal form there is mutual recognition of the ego and of the other in the keenest awareness of the other and of the ego. Some women say that they feel the masculine sex organ in them as a part of their own bodies; some men feel that they are the women they penetrate. These are evidently inexact expressions, for the dimension, the relation of the other still exists; but the fact is that alterity has no longer a hostile implication, and indeed this sense of the union of really separate bodies is what gives its emotional character to the sexual act; and it is the more overwhelming as the two beings, who together in passion deny and assert their boundaries, are similar and yet unlike. This unlikeness, which too often isolates them, becomes the source of their enchantment when they do unite. The woman sees in man's virile impetuosity the reverse aspect of the passive fever that burns within her; the man's potency reflects the power she exercises upon him; this life-engorged organ belongs to her as her smile belongs to the man who floods her with pleasure. All the treasures of virility, of femininity, reflect each other, and thus they form an ever shifting and ecstatic unity. What is required for such harmony is not refinement in technique, but rather, on the foundation of the moment's erotic charm, a mutual generosity of body and soul (393).

What this also shows is an ascription of narcissism to a woman’s appreciation of a woman’s body (whether self or other), which… has dangerous implications.

Putting aside my criticisms, the rest of the text is, frankly, incomparable to any other major feminist writing. It is hard to sing the praises of this text without seeming to provide the basal framework of modern feminist and queer theory, which is perhaps a testament to its longevity.

To try, though: One of the most notable (and for me, insightful) features of this text is its formulation of the body-as-situation. Coupled with the oh-so-over-quoted beginning of the second volume, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Beauvoir seems to imagine the body as a lived set of facts, whereupon gender is created and developed through the social extrapolation of the body-as-lived-fact (273). It would be incorrect to say this bifurcates sex into gender and sex; rather, gender, to Beauvoir, is the lived situation of sex, thus making them interdependent constructs.

However, Beauvoir does not so much criticize sex as a political and biosocial entity; rather, she focuses primarily on critiquing gender. I do not deem this disqualifying, as the necessary framework is clearly set and considered in the text, just hardly elaborated upon; it is not necessarily boxes that must be checked, but moreso that you cannot critique gender without first having an understanding of sex, which is achieved.

Further, it’s impossible not to appreciate the entire first volume as a deconstruction of the myth of the Feminine Mystique. Beauvoir understands the Feminine Mystique as a force of actualization: it is the Woman in heaven against which all women must be compared and melded into. This is, of course, the entire foundation of modern gender theory; gender is created through the individual’s relations to the image of the Absolute Man and Absolute Woman. Though not explicitly, this also condemns the myth of Masculinity in Beauvoir’s text, as she frequently considers how “boys” are actualized as “men” through action.

The Second Sex is imperfect and occasionally counterintuitive, but it is impossible to walk away from without understanding its value. As a critique of sex and (predominantly) gender, it is a significant groundwork for understanding the operation of sexed bodies and how gendering the body reduces the human being’s open future to the enactment of a generality. To live the body as the totality of the self, Beauvoir postulates, is to reject sex and myth-brokers: a myth is a dangerous thing; to live a myth is to live a foretold narrative.

I believe Eliot’s poetry is something I am going to have to come back to. At the present moment, I found this unnotable, but still felt a clawing intrigue that I could not quite grasp.
One thing I would like to point out, though, is how consciousness seems to bend and collapse in Eliot’s poems. To this end, of course, is the ending of The Hollow Men, which crumbles into metaphysic and religious mimicry, slowly dissolving:

Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the.