This chapter seeks to understand the word ‘female’ – which, from what Toril Moi says, signifies the animal female in French (femelle), in other words a she-animal (Moi 1999, pp. 60-61). It is an examination of the biological justification of male hostility, which means that the behaviour of she-animals is projected on to women.
She begins by introducing two reproductive systems which do not require male and female interaction: elementary organisms which multiply without sexes and hermaphroditic species, and how even these reproductive means have been subsumed into a hierarchy of sexuality, where the sexual reproduction is seen to be fundamental (26).
After complicating the narrative of reproduction and its ‘differentiation of individuals into males and females’, Beauvoir then jumps to philosophy and shows how this sexual differentiation has had an aprioristic status in Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, and Hegel – not entirely sure I grasped the Hegel bit though. Is it that Hegel inadvertently points to what she was arguing earlier about asexual reproduction? From Hegel we move on to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and this bit I found to be somewhat tricky:
Beauvoir claims that men define the sexes and their relations through sexual activity, Beauvoir argues, ‘sexual activity is not necessarily implied in the human being’s nature’ (24). Quoting Merleau-Ponty, who claims that existence is primary, she argues that the body conditions existence (a consciousness without a body is rigorously inconceivable, p. 24), and that sexual differentiation is not necessary for the perpetuation of the species. [Is this what she is saying?]
She moves on to discuss the role of the two sexes in procreation in various settings: matrilineal primitive societies, and patriarchal conceptualisations, such as Aristotle, Hippocrates and a handful of others up to the 17th century [sounds like the time frame in Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex], which argued that the woman merely ‘fattened a living and active, and perfectly constituted, principle’ (25). Aristotle’s ideas were perpetuated by Hegel, who saw man as the active principle and women as passive.
The points made in these paragraphs are
i) Sexual reproduction has been favoured as a more advanced or perfected stage of reproduction. The attempt to view it as such is to universalize ‘life’s specific processes’ and to ‘ascribe meaning to vital phenomena’ (26).
ii) ‘Any living fact indicates transcendence and that a project is in the making in every function’ (26) [???].
An analysis of the fertilisation process, where male and female cooperate, refutes two biases: one, that the female is passive. The spark springs from the meeting of the two, it is not inherent in the sperm. Second, the permanence of the species is guaranteed by the female. The ovum has material for future nourishment: ‘it is constituted to nourish the life that will awaken in it’ (29), which the sperm isn’t. Beauvoir’s point is that the role of the two gametes is identical, they are both necessary in the process of generating new life. However, in the secondary phenomena the male element affects change, while the female element provides the stable environment.
This has been used to argue that women’s place is in the home (Fouillèe) and that there is a direct correlation between the ovum and the female. She then argues at length through multiple examples how it is ‘difficult to give a generally valid description of the notion of female’ and that ‘gametes and gonads are not microcosms of the whole organism (31). She then begins at the bottom of the animal ladder to argue how life becomes more individual. At the bottom, females’ existence is enslaved to the species, she just produces eggs. She gives vivid accounts of termites, ants and bees, and how the queen lays eggs ceaselessly [This somehow reminds me of Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia, has anyone read it?]. Beauvoir is arguing against the idea that the insect female enslaves and devours the male, which has generated the myth of devouring femininity. Instead, she argues, ‘it is the species that devours both of them in different ways’ (33).
I’ll return with the last 15 pages tomorrow.
Happy International Women's day! De te fabula narratur!
References
Moi, Toril. 1999. What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford University Press).
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