THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
329
still more. It is only the quantity, the capacity in that sense, in which
the sexes appear to differ. Women, in the language of sociology books,
"fight very hard" to get the amount of sexual satisfaction they want–
and even harder to keep men from forcing a superabundance their way.
It is hard to see how anyone can be sure that it is only man's voracious
appetite for conquest which has created, as its contrary, this reluctant,
passive being who has to be wooed, raped, bribed, begged, threatened,
married, supported. Perhaps she really has to be. After she has been
conquered she has to "pay" the man to restrain his appetite, which
he is so likely to reveal at cocktail parties, and in his pitifully longing
glance at the secretary-she pays with ironed shirts, free meals, the
pleasant living room, a son.
And what about the arts-those womanish activities which are,
In
our day, mostly "done at home." For those who desire this form of
transcendence, the other liberating activities of mankind, the office, the
factory, the world of commerce, public affairs, are horrible pits where
the extraordinary man is basely and casually slain.
Women have excelled in the performance arts: acting, dancing
and singing-for some reason Simone de Beauvoir treats these accom–
plishments as if they were usually an extension of prostitution. Women
have contributed very little to the
art
of painting and they are clearly
weak in the gift for musical composition. (Still whole nations seem
without this latter gift, which may be inherited. Perhaps even nations
inherit it, the male members at least. Like baldness, women may trans–
mit the gift of musical composition but they seldom ever suffer from it.)
Literature is the art in which women have had the greatest suc–
cess. But a woman needs only to think of this activity to feel her bones
rattling with violent distress. Who is to say that
R emembrance of Things
Past
is "better" than the marvelous
Emma? War and Peac.e
better than
Middlemarch? Moby Dick
superior to
La Princesse de Cleves?
But
everybody says so! It is only the whimsical, cantankerous, the eccentric
critic, or those who refuse the occasion for such distinctions, who would
say that any literary work by a woman, marvelous as these may be,
is
on a level with the very greatest accomplishments of men.
Indeed the
best
literature by women is superior to
most
of the work
done by men and anyone who treasures literature at all tends to ap–
proach all excellence with equal tenderness.
The Second Sex
is not whimsical about women's writing, but here
again
I think too much is made of the position in which women have
been "trapped" and not enough of how "natural" and inevitable their
