What is a Woman? ebook

What is a Woman? First we must ask: what is a woman? 'The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities'. 'This is copulation'. And she is simply what man decree; thus she is called 'the sex', by 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.' A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. 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. It is often said that she thinks with her glands.