oeuvre
“It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature…He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St. Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolized in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet call ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam. Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being… she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.”
-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Duality lies within the reciprocity of subject and object, derived from the implication that woman is without consciousness or ego.
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