1、wordThe Second Sexby Simone de Beauvoir (1949)Book One: Facts and Myths, Part I: DestinyChapter 1, The Data of BiologyWOMAN? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female this word is sufficient to define her. In the mouth of a man the epithet female has
2、the sound of an insult, yet he is not ashamed of his animal nature; on the contrary, he is proud if someone says of him: He is a male! The term female is derogatory not because it emphasises womans animality, but because it imprisons her in her sex; and if this sex seems to man to be contemptible an
3、d inimical even in harmless dumb animals, it is evidently because of the uneasy hostility stirred up in him by woman. Nevertheless he wishes to find in biology a justification for this sentiment. The wordfemalebrings up in his mind a saraband of imagery a vast, round ovum engulfs and castrates the a
4、gile spermatozoan; the monstrous and swollen termite queen rules over the enslaved males; the female praying mantis and the spider, satiated with love, crush and devour their partners; the bitch in heat runs through the alleys, trailing behind her a wake of depraved odours; the she-monkey presents p
5、osterior immodestly and then steals away with hypocritical coquetry; and the most superb wild beasts the tigress, the lioness, the panther bed down slavishly under the imperial embrace of the male. Females sluggish, eager, artful, stupid, callous, lustful, ferocious, abased man projects them all at
6、once upon woman. And the fact is that she is a female. But if we are willing to stop thinking in platitudes, two questions are immediately posed: what does the female denote in the animal kingdom? And what particular kind of female is manifest in woman?Males and females are two types of individuals
7、which are differentiated within a species for the function of reproduction; they can be defined only correlatively. But first it must be noted that even the division of a species into two sexes is not always clear-cut.In nature it is not universally manifested. To speak only of animals, it is well k
8、nown that among the microscopic one-celled forms infusoria, amoebae, sporozoans, and the like multiplication is fundamentally distinct from sexuality. Each cell divides and subdivides by itself. In many-celled animals or metazoans reproduction may take place asexually, either by schizogenesis that i
9、s, by fission or cutting into two or more parts which bee new individuals or by blastogenesis that is, by buds that separate and form new individuals. The phenomena of budding observed in the fresh-water hydra and other coelenterates, in sponges, worms, and tunicates, are well-known examples. In cas
10、es of parthenogenesis the egg of the virgin female develops into an embryo without fertilisation by the male, which thus may play no role at all. In the honey-bee copulation takes place, but the eggs may or may not be fertilised at the time of laying. The unfertilised eggs undergo development and pr
11、oduce the drones (males); in the aphids males are absent during a series of generations in which the eggs are unfertilised and produce females. Parthenogenesis has been induced artificially in the sea urchin, the starfish, the frog, and other species. Among the one-celled animals (Protozoa), however
12、 two cells may fuse, forming what is called a zygote; and in the honey-bee fertilisation is necessary if the eggs are to produce females. In the aphids both males and females appear in the autumn, and the fertilised eggs then produced are adapted for over-wintering.Certain biologists in the past co
13、ncluded from these facts that even in species capable of asexual propagation occasional fertilisation is necessary to renew the vigour of the race to acplish rejuvenation through the mixing of hereditary material from two individuals. On this hypothesis sexuality might well appear to be an indispens
14、able function in the most plex forms of life; only the lower organisms could multiply without sexuality, and even here vitality would after a time bee exhausted. But today this hypothesis is largely abandoned; research has proved that under suitable conditions asexual multiplication can go on indefi
15、nitely without noticeable degeneration, a fact that is especially striking in the bacteria and Protozoa. More and more numerous and daring experiments in parthenogenesis are being performed, and in many species the male appears to be fundamentally unnecessary. Besides, if the value of intercellular
16、exchange were demonstrated, that value would seem to stand as a sheer, unexplained fact. Biology certainly demonstrates the existence of sexual differentiation, but from the point of view of any end to be attained the science could not infer such differentiation from the structure of the cell, nor f
17、rom the laws of cellular multiplication, nor from any basic phenomenon.The production of two types of gametes, the sperm and the egg, does not necessarily imply the existence of two distinct sexes; as a matter of fact, egg and sperm two highly differentiated types of reproductive cells may both be p
18、roduced by the same individual. This occurs in normally hermaphroditic species, which are mon among plants and are also to be found among the lower animals, such as annelid worms and molluscs. In them reproduction may be acplished through self-fertilisation or, more monly, cross-fertilisation. Here
19、again certain biologists have attempted to account for the existing state of affairs. Some hold that the separation of the gonads (ovaries and testes) in two distinct individuals represents an evolutionary advance over hermaphroditism; others on the contrary regard the separate condition as primitiv
20、e, and believe that hermaphroditism represents a degenerate state. These notions regarding the superiority of one system or the other imply the most debatable evolutionary theorising. All that we can say for sure is that these two modes of reproduction coexist in nature, that they both succeed in ac
21、plishing the survival of the species concerned, and that the differentiation of the gametes, like that of the organisms producing them, appears to be accidental. It would seem, then, that the division of a species into male and female individuals is simply an irreducible fact of observation.In most
22、philosophies this fact has been taken for granted without pretence of explanation. According to the Platonic myth, there were at the beginning men, women, and hermaphrodites. Each individual had two faces, four arms, four legs, and two conjoined bodies. At a certain time they were split in two, and
23、ever since each half seeks to rejoin its corresponding half. Later the gods decreed that new human beings should be created through the coupling of dissimilar halves. But it is only love that this story is intended to explain; division into sexes is assumed at the outset. Nor does Aristotle explain
24、this division, for if matter and form must cooperate in all action, there is no necessity for the active and passive principles to he separated in two different categories of individuals. Thus St Thomas proclaims woman an incidental being, which is a way of suggesting from the male point of view the
25、 accidental or contingent nature of sexuality. Hegel, however, would have been untrue to his passion for rationalism had he failed to attempt a logical explanation. Sexuality in his view represents the medium through which the subject attains a concrete sense of belonging to a particular kind (genre
26、). The sense of kind is produced in the subject as an effect which offsets this disproportionate sense of his individual reality, as a desire to find the sense of himself in another individual of his species through union with this other, to plete himself and thus to incorporate the kind (genre) wit
27、hin his own nature and bring it into existence. This is copulation (Philosophy of Nature, Part 3, Section 369). And a little farther on. The process consists in this, namely: that which they are in themselves, that is to say a single kind, one and the same subjective life, they also establish it as
28、such. And Hegel states later that for the uniting process to be acplished, there must first be sexual differentiation. But his exposition is not convincing: one feels in it all too distinctly the predetermination to find in every operation the three terms of the syllogism.The projection or transcend
29、ence of the individual towards the species, in which both individual and species are fulfilled, could be acplished without the intervention of a third element in the simple relation of progenitor to offspring; that is to say, reproduction could be asexual. Or, if there were to be two progenitors, th
30、ey could be similar (as happens in hermaphroditic species) and differentiated only as particular individuals of a single type. Hegels discussion reveals a most important significance of sexuality, but his mistake is always to argue from significance to necessity, to equate significance with necessit
31、y. Man gives significance to the sexes and their relations through sexual activity, just as he gives sense and value to all the functions that he exercises; but sexual activity is not necessarily implied in the nature of the human being. Merleau-Ponty notes in thePhnomnologiede la perceptionthat hum
32、an existence requires us to revise our ideas of necessity and contingence. Existence, he says, has no casual, fortuitous qualities, no content that does not contribute to the formation of its aspect; it does not admit the notion of sheer fact, for it is only through existence that the facts are mani
33、fested. True enough. But it is also true that there are conditions without which the very fact of existence itself would seem to be impossible. To be present in the world implies strictly that there exists a body which is at once a material thing in the world and a point of view towards this world;
34、but nothing requires that this body have this or that particular structure. Sartre discusses inLtre et le nantHeideggers dictum to the effect that the real nature of man is bound up with death because of mans finite state. He shows that an existence which is finite and yet unlimited in time is conce
35、ivable; but none the less if death were not resident in human life, the relation of man to the world and to himself would be profoundly disarranged so much so that the statement Man is mortal would be seen to have significance quite other than that of a mere fact of observation. Were he immortal, an
36、 existent would no longer be what we call a man. One of the essential features of his career is that the progress of his life through time creates behind him and before him the infinite past and future, and it would seem, then, that the perpetuation of the species is the correlative of his individua
37、l limitation. Thus we can regard the phenomenon of reproduction as founded in the very nature of being. But we must stop there. The perpetuation of the species does not necessitate sexual differentiation. True enough, this differentiation is characteristic of existents to such an extent that it belo
38、ngs in any realistic definition of existence. But it nevertheless remains true that both a mind without a body and an immortal man are strictly inconceivable, whereas we can imagine a parthenogenetic or hermaphroditic society.On the respective functions of the two sexes man has entertained a great v
39、ariety of beliefs. At first they had no scientific basis, simply reflecting social myths. It was long thought and it still is believed in certain primitive matriarchal societies that the father plays no part in conception. Ancestral spirits in the form of living germs are supposed to find their way
40、into the maternal body. With the advent patriarchal institutions, the male laid eager claim to his posterity. It was still necessary to grant the mother a part in procreation, but it was conceded only that she carried and nourished the living seed, created by the father alone. Aristotle fancied that
41、 the foetus arose from the union of sperm and menstrual blood, woman furnishing only passive matter while the male principle contributed force, activity, movement, life. Hippocrates held to a similar doctrine, recognising two kinds of seed, the weak or female and the strong or male. The theory of Ar
42、istotle survived through the Middle Ages and into modern times.At the end of the seventeenth century Harvey killed female dogs shortly after copulation and found in the horns of the uterus small sacs that he thought were eggs but that were really embryos. The Danish anatomist Steno gave the name of
43、ovaries to the female genital glands, previously called feminine testicles, and noted on their surface the small swellings that von Graaf in 1677 erroneously identified with the eggs and that are now called Graafian follicles. The ovary was still regarded as homologous to the male gland. In the same
44、 year, however, the spermatic animalcules were discovered and it was proved that they penetrated into the uterus of the female; but it was supposed that they were simply nourished therein and that the ing individual was preformed in them. In 1694 a Dutchman, Hartsaker, drew a picture of the homuncul
45、us hidden in the spermatozoan, and in 1699, another scientist said that he had seen the spermatozoan cast off a kind of moult under which appeared a little man, which he also drew. Under these imaginative hypotheses, woman was restricted to the nourishment of an active, living principle already pref
46、ormed in perfection. These notions were not universally accepted, and they were argued into the nineteenth century. The use of the microscope enabled von Baer in 1827 to discover the mammalian egg, contained inside the Graaflan follicle. Before long it was possible to study the cleavage of the egg t
47、hat is, the early stage of development through cell division and in 1835 sarcode, later called protoplasm, was discovered and the true nature of the cell began to be realised. In 1879 the penetration of the spermatozoan into the starfish egg was observed, and thereupon the equivalence of the nuclei
48、of the two gametes, egg and sperm, was established. The details of their union within the fertilised egg were first worked out in 1883 by a Belgian zoologist, van Beneden.Aristotles ideas were not wholly discredited, however. Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one active
49、and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one. Thus man, in consequence of that differentiation, is the active principle while woman is the passive principle because she remains undeveloped in her unity.Hegel,Philosophy of NatureAnd even after the egg had been recognised as an active principle, men still tried to make a point of its quiescence as contrasted with the lively movements of the sperm. Today one notes an opposite tendency on the part of some sci
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