Chapter 14 Chapter Eleven Myth and Reality

Chapter Eleven Myth and Reality The myth of women plays an important role in literature.But how important is it in everyday life?To what extent has it influenced people's customs and behaviour?To answer this question, it is necessary to clearly state the relationship between this myth and reality. Myths come in all varieties.This myth, the myth of the woman, sublimates an unchanging aspect of the human condition—the "differentiation" that divides humanity into two stages—and is therefore a static myth.It throws a directly experienced or conceptualized reality into Plato's realm of ideas, and replaces facts with a transcendent idea that is timeless, unalterable, and necessary.The idea of ​​value, meaning, knowledge and rule of thumb, is indisputable because it is beyond the known: it has absolute truth.then.The idea of ​​myth pits a single, unchanging, eternal woman against the scattered, contingent, and diverse existence of real men of letters.If the definition of the concept contradicts the behavior of a woman of flesh and blood, it is the latter that is at fault: we are not told that femininity is a false existence, but that women are not femininity.Contrary empirical facts are powerless in the face of this myth.However, it is in a sense derived from experience.So women are indeed different from men, and this difference can be directly felt in desire, embrace and love.But a real relationship between the sexes is one that has reciprocity, so that it produces drama worthy of the name.With sex, love, and friendship, and the deceit, hatred, and competition that replace them, the relationship is a struggle between conscious people who all want to be masters, a mutual recognition of free people who affirm each other's freedom, is Ambiguous transition from antipathy to engagement.To raise the question of woman is to raise the question of the absolute other, and the absolute other has no reciprocity, and takes a negative attitude towards all the experiences of her as a subject and as a human being of the same kind.

In reality, of course, women have various faces, but every kind of myth formed around the topic of women wants to generalize her and become unique.Thus, there are myths that are inconsistent with each other, and men hesitate in the face of incoherence in the idea of ​​womanhood.Since all women relate to a plurality of these archetypes, each of which presumes to possess a single truth about women, men today are again astonished in the presence of their female companions, just as the old sophists did not understand the human nature. How can the skin color be white and black when I feel surprised.Social phenomena have long indicated a shift towards the absolute: just as intellectually immature people believe that the relations of things are fixed, so class relations, model functions, tend to be fixed.For example, a patriarchal society centered on the maintenance of hereditary property necessarily implies that there are not only people who own and inherit property, but also men and women who take the property of the owner and circulate it.Men such as adventurers, liars, thieves, and speculators are generally cast aside by the group; women, who use sexual simplicity, enable young men and even parents to disperse their hereditary property without the constraints of the law.Some of these women are misappropriating the property of their victims, or using improper means to obtain inheritance.This role was considered evil, and the woman who played it was called a "bad woman".But, quite the opposite, they can actually be patron saints in other situations, such as at home with fathers, brothers, husbands, or with other people.High-class courtesans who "blackmailed" the rich were also often generous patrons of painters and writers.In real life, the ambiguous sexuality and personality of Mrs. Bardu, who is the second-best of Aspen western shoes, can be easily understood.But if women are depicted as praying mantises, mandrakes, and demons, it would be very confusing to discover that they are also muses, the Mother Goddess, and Beatrice.

Since at a level group symbols and social patterns are defined by opposite pairs of wastes, it would appear that contradictions would be inherent in the Eternal Femininity.The divine mother is associated with the cruel stepmother, and the angelic maiden with the wicked virgin: so it is sometimes said that the mother is life, but sometimes the mother is death; sometimes it is said that all virgins are pure spirits, It is also sometimes said that all virgins are bodies dedicated to Juke. Clearly, it is not reality that makes society or individuals choose between two opposing fundamental categories.At all times, and in every situation, society and individuals make choices according to their own needs.Societies and individuals often throw the institutions and values ​​they uphold into chosen myths.So it takes a patriarchy where a woman stays at home to determine that she is emotional, withdrawn, and inner.Virtually all living beings are both immanent and transcendent.When a system offers no goal to the being, or prevents the attainment of any goal, or triumphs unabashedly, its transcendence falls in vain into the past, that is to say, relapses into immanence.This is the destiny assigned to woman by the paternal mechanism, but it is no more a destiny than slavery is the destiny of a slave.The development of this myth can be clearly seen in Auguste Comte.Comparing women with landism is to guarantee the absolute rights of men with her dedication, which is to force women to obey a kind of categorical order.

There is no need to confuse mythology with acknowledging meaning.Meaning is immanent in the object and revealed to the spirit through vivid experience.And myth is a transcendent idea, completely unknown to the spirit.Michelle Leary narrates his views on female organs in "The Age of Man", telling us something meaningful, not a well-crafted myth.The wonder of the female body and the disgust of menstrual blood all come from the submersion of a concrete reality.There is nothing mysterious about the experience that reveals the erotic nature of the female body; even if one wanted to describe this quality by comparing it with flower-like crystals, there is nothing deeply mysterious about the human condition, and this mystery, in Women take on extremely disturbing forms.

But what is usually considered mysterious is neither the subjective solitude of the conscious self nor the mysterious organic life.The true meaning of the word mystical is expressed in terms of communication: it does not refer to a state of complete silence, darkness, and non-existence, but rather suggests an intermittent existence that ambiguously evokes itself .To say that a woman is mysterious does not mean that she is silent, but that her language is incomprehensible to people.She is there, but behind a veil; she exists outside of these vagaries.Who is she?Is it an angel, or a devil?Is it an inspired person, or an actor?One might think that these questions are impossible to find an answer to, or rather that no one answer is suitable, since it is a fundamentally ambiguous character of womanhood.Perhaps in her mind she was extremely indeterminate even to herself: she was a sphinx.

In fact, she had a hard time figuring out what kind of membership she was.But not because this hidden reality is too vague to discern, but because there is no reality at all in this realm.A survivor is nothing but the role he plays.Possibility does not transcend reality, essence does not precede existence: in pure subjectivity man is nothing, he is to be evaluated on the basis of his actions.When we talk about a peasant woman, we can say that she is a good worker or a bad worker; when we talk about an actress, we can say that she has talent or she has no talent.But if we examine a woman in terms of her inner being, her inner self, we can say absolutely nothing about her, she has no qualifications.Therefore, in love or marriage relationships, in all relationships in which the woman is the vassal, the other, she is to be treated according to her immanence.It is worth noting that there is nothing mysterious about lesbians, female colleagues, and girlfriends.If, on the other hand, the subject is a male, if an older or wealthier man or woman perceives a young lad as playing a secondary object role, then the lad has mystique.This reveals to us the basis of the feminine mystique, the basis of which is in fact immortalized the relationship which, in Kiergegaard's view, is preferable to active possession.In the company of a living, mysterious being, man remains alone—he is alone with his dreams, his hopes, his fears, his loves, and his vanities.This subjective pursuit, which can go from vice all the way to mysterious ecstasy, is, for many, a more seductive experience than a real relationship with a human being.So what is the basis for the existence of this lucrative illusion?

In a sense, woman is indeed mysterious, "as mysterious as the whole world," according to Maeterlinck.Everyone is a subject only to himself; everyone can know inwardly only himself, alone: ​​according to this view, the Other is always mysterious.From the man's point of view, the self-poursoi he knows has an opacity that is greater in the other as female.It is impossible for men to see through any empathy to her peculiar experiences: they are ignorant of, and punished for, the nature of a woman's sexual pleasure, the discomfort of menstruation, and the pains of childbirth.In fact, both sides are mysterious: as the other of men, each man also has an existence, an inner self that is difficult for women to see through; she is also ignorant of men's sexual feelings.But, according to what I have called general laws, the categories in which men think the world are established from their point of view; as absolutes; here, as everywhere, they misunderstand reciprocity.Because woman is a mystery to man, she is considered essentially mysterious.

It is true that a woman, because of her situation, is liable to this opinion too.Her physiology was so complex that she endured it as if she were enduring some external frivolity.For her, her body was not a clear expression of herself, she felt herself a stranger inside.Indeed, that bond which in every human being unites the physical and the psychic life, or rather the relation which exists between the accident of the individual and the free spirit which expresses this accident, is hidden. Ham would dabble in mythology.But to say that woman is the body, that the body is night and death, or that it is the light of the universe, is tantamount to abandoning the truth of the earth and flying to the sky of nothingness.Because a man is also a body to a woman, and a woman is not only the object of lust, her body also has a special meaning for everyone and in every experience.It is true that woman, like man, is a being rooted in nature.She is more enslaved to the species than the male, and her animality is more pronounced.But in her, as in man, these established traits are expressed by the fact that she exists, and she too belongs to the human kingdom.Comparing her to nature is purely prejudice.

Few myths are more favorable to the ruling caste than the myth of the woman: it justifies all privileges and even sanctions their evils.There is no need for a man to trouble himself to alleviate the pain and burden that has become a woman's biological destiny, because this is "intentionally arranged by nature".Men use them as an excuse to further deepen the mystery of women's destiny, for example, by denying woman the right to sexual pleasure and making her work like a draft animal. Of all these myths, none is more firmly established in the minds of men than the myth of the "mystery" of women.The benefits it brings are too numerous to list.First of all, it makes it easy to explain all the incomprehensions. The man who "does not understand" women is happy when he replaces the poverty of subjective spirit with objective resistance.Instead of admitting his ignorance, he discovers that there is a "mystery" outside of him: it is indeed an excuse for laziness and vanity.A heart tormented by love, thus avoiding many disappointments: if his lover is capricious and what she says is foolish, the mystery helps to forgive it all.Finally, thanks to this mystery, that passive practicality.

One can think of emotion as nothing. "In the realm of emotion," Gide writes, "the distinction between reality and imagination is blurred. If it is enough to think that a person is in love, then to tell him that he is in love when he is in love is An imagination of himself is enough to make him love less at once." Only by action can the distinction be made between imagination and reality.Now that a man has a privileged position in the world, he is able to actively profess his love.Often he patronizes the woman he loves, or at least often helps her.On marrying her, he gave her social status and presented her with gifts.His independent economic and social status made it possible for him to take the initiative and invent: M. de Nopois had just parted with Mrs. de Villeparisi, and he traveled day and night to see her.Men tend to be busy, women tend to be lazy: he gives her time, spends it with her, and she accepts it: is it for pleasure, for affection, or just for fun?Did she accept these benefits out of love, or out of selfishness?Is she loving her husband, or is she loving her marriage?Of course, even the men's evidence was ambiguous: Was the gift of such and such out of love or out of pity?But although a woman normally derives many benefits from a relationship with a man, a relationship with a woman is profitable for a man as long as he loves her.From the whole description of his attitude, therefore, one can almost conclude the extent of his emotional development.

However, a woman can hardly hear her own voice.She will observe her own emotions from various points of view according to her state of mind.Because she passively submits to these views, the various interpretations are all about the same.In some extremely rare cases, she has a privileged position economically and socially.At this point, the mystery is reversed, it shows that it does not belong to this sex, but to the other sex, to the situation at the time.For a considerable number of women the avenue of transcendence is closed: because they play no role, they cannot make themselves anything.They wonder vaguely what they might become, but this leads them to ask the question of who they are.It is futile to ask this question.If men cannot discover the mysterious nature of women, it is simply because it does not exist.Woman stands on the edge of the world, through which she cannot objectively determine herself, and her mystique hides nothing but emptiness. And, like all oppressed people, woman deliberately conceals her objective truth.Slaves, servants, and poor people, all who live by the eyes of their masters, know how to treat them with a permanent smile or inscrutable indifference.Their true emotions, their actual behavior, are carefully hidden.Also, from adolescence, women learn to lie to men, to be scheming and scheming.She always had an unnatural look on her face when talking about men.She's discreet, hypocritical, and she's always putting on a show. But the feminine mystique recognized by mythological thought has a deeper meaning.In fact, it is directly implied in the myth of the absolute other.If it is admitted that this secondary conscious being is also manifestly subjective and capable of cogito [cogito], then it is tantamount to admitting that this person is in fact sovereign and capable of becoming the primary again.In order to make all reciprocity absolutely impossible, the other must be made an other to himself, his subjectivity must be affected by his otherness.This consciousness alienated as a consciousness will, in its pure inner being, be manifestly a mystery.In view of the fact that it would also be a mystery to itself, it would be essentially mysterious.It will become an absolute mystery. It is also true that, as long as blacks and yellows are absolutely regarded as secondary others, there is a mystery among them besides the secrecy created by their disguise.It should be noted that the American citizen, although deeply perplexing to the average European, was not considered "mysterious": one would say more modestly that they did not understand him.Women don't always "get" men either, but there's no such thing as a male mystery.The point is that rich America and men are on the side of the master, while the mystery belongs to the slave. Indeed, we can only contemplate the dubious truth of the mystery along the path of deceit.Like a distant phantom, it disappears when one tries to gaze at it intently.Literature always fails when it tries to portray "mysterious" women.As some strange and mysterious characters, they can only appear at the beginning of the novel; at the end, they give up their mystery and become completely transparent characters, unless the story has no ending.For example, the protagonists of Peter Cheney (Peter C. Sambayer) are always amazed by the inscrutable capriciousness of women: no one can always guess how they will act, and they overturn all guesses. In fact, once their motives for action are fully revealed to the reader, they are very simple characters: this woman is a spy, that woman is a thief. No matter how clever the plot of the novel is, it is always A thread runs through it. Even if the author had all the talent and imagination in the world, it couldn't be any other way. The mystery is just an illusion, and when we look at it closely, it disappears. We will now find that, to a large extent, the woman myth is explained in terms of its usefulness to men.The woman myth is a luxury.The woman myth can emerge only when man no longer feels an urgent need for what he wants; the more concrete the relationships are, the less idealized they are.The farmers of ancient Egypt, the Bedouin farmers, the artisans of the Middle Ages, and the workers of today, all had a need to work and overcome poverty in relation to their special male companions.These relations are too definite for them to be adorned with omens, be they auspicious or inauspicious.Those epochs and social classes characterized by the leisure to dream are those epochs and classes which erected images of evil or good women.But along with luxury comes utility, and these dreams are irresistibly governed by profit.Undoubtedly, most myths spring from man's spontaneous attitude to his own existence and to the world around him.But the idea of ​​transcending experience, of facing beyond, is deliberately used by patriarchal societies to justify itself.Through these myths, the patriarchal society imposes its laws and customs on the individual in dramatic and powerful ways.It is in the form of myths that the group command (emp-m ding has been rative) is instilled and penetrated into the hearts of everyone, and through the mediation of religion, tradition, language, fables, songs and movies, these myths even Penetrates into the minds of beings enslaved by the rigors of physical reality.Here, everyone can find a sublimation of his monotonous experience: when he is deceived by the woman he loves, he calls her the womb of madness; when he agonizes over his impotence, he calls her a praying mantis.Still others take pleasure in the company of their wives: behold, she is the land of harmony, peace, and mercy!Most men's penchant for perpetual haggling, for absolute fitness, is gratified by myth.Even the slightest excitement, the slightest annoyance reflects the idea of ​​timelessness.And this concept is an illusion that is very willing to flatter vanity. The myth of women is a trap set by false objectivity, and men who believe in ready-made evaluations fall headlong into this trap.Here again we are dealing with the experience of reality that substitutes for the ready-made idol, and the free judgment required to substitute for this experience.The myth of the woman substitutes a fixed gaze on phantoms for a real relationship to a self-existing being. "Phantom! Phantom!" Laforgue shouted. "We can't understand them, so we should kill them. Or, better still, let them be educated, let them give up their love of jewelry, let them become our true equal comrades, our close friends, True companions, let them dress differently, let them cut their hair short, tell them everything and everything." On the contrary, a man has nothing to lose if he stops making women a symbol.When dreams become official public affairs, become clichés, they indeed seem dull compared with living reality.To the true dreamer, to the poet, woman is not so much a strangely scruffy woman as a constant spring.The time when love for women was sincerely shown was not the age of feudal chivalry, nor was it the nineteenth century when women were courted, but those times when men regarded women as equals, such as the Fat Century.Women at that time seemed to be genuinely romantic, and A Dangerous Affair, and works like it, are fully expressed in this way.The heroines of Lacroix, Stendhal, and Hemingway have no mystery, but they are still very charming for this reason.To admit that woman is a person is not to make any changes in man's experience: it does not lose its variety, its richness, or its intensity, if it takes place between two subjects.To abandon the myth of woman is not to destroy the dramatic relationship between the sexes, nor to deny the meaning of what female reality does reveal to men, nor to cancel poetry, love, adventure, happiness, and dreams.It's just about acting, feeling and passion based on real people "Women are gone. Where are such women? Women today are not women at all!" We have discovered the meaning of these mysterious slogans.For men, and for many women who see things through men's eyes, it is not enough for a mother or mistress to be a "real woman" simply to have a woman's body or to perform feminine functions.In sexual behavior and motherhood, women, as subjects, can claim autonomy.However, to be a "real woman," she must recognize herself as the Other.Men today display an attitude of duplicity that makes women miserable.On the whole, they are willing to admit that woman is their own kind, an equal, but they still make her secondary.For her, the two fates were incomparable.She hesitates between being this kind of person and that kind of person, and she doesn't know what to do, so she loses her balance.In a man there is no gap between public and private life: the more he proves his mastery of the world in action and work, the more manly he appears.The value of man and the value of life are combined in him.However, a woman's independent success contradicts her femininity, because, to be a "real woman", one must make oneself an object and the other. It is entirely possible that a man's sensibility and sexual drive will change in this regard.Now, a new aesthetic concept has been produced.If flat breasts and narrow hips, the boyish figure, were all in fashion for a while, at least the ideals of overly plumpness of previous centuries are gone forever.Female bodies are required to be sensual, but this requirement is more cautious.It should be slender, not fat; it must be muscular, flexible, and strong, reminiscent of transcendence; it should not be as pale as the flowers and plants in a greenhouse that never sees the sun all day long, but rather as naked. The shoulders of the workers are as tanned as those who work in the sun.A woman's clothes need not be functional without making her look unsexy: on the contrary, short skirts are meant to give her legs a sexiness they never had before.There is no reason to think that labor robs a woman of her sex appeal.The idea that woman is both a social being and an object of sensuality can be unsettling: in a series written recently by Pena (ler) (1948), we find that a young man tore has broken his engagement because he has been seduced by the charming mayor's wife, who is planning to officiate his wedding.It has long been the subject of dirty jokes that women have a certain "manhood" and that men feel desirable.But gradually, the sarcasm has become less sharp, and it seems that a new kind of sex is being created—perhaps it will create new myths. There is no doubt that it is very difficult today for women to recognize both their identity as an autonomous person and their female destiny.This is the root cause of the missteps and unease that sometimes lead to the perception that they are "genderless".It is certainly more comfortable to endure invisible servitude than to work for liberation: in this respect a dead woman is more attuned to the earth than a vigorous woman.No matter how you look at it, returning to the past is impossible and not desirable.It should be hoped that the man will accept, on his part, the situation that is about to arise without reservation.Only then can a woman live in that situation without worry.Then this prayer of La Forgue's will be answered: "Oh, young women, when will you be our brothers, our close and devoted brothers? When will we shake hands in good faith?" At that time, Breton's "Méliusine, will no longer be oppressed by the disasters men brought her, and Meliusine will be liberated..." will find "her place among human beings" again.At that time, she will become a complete human being, and in the words of Rambo's letter, "then, the infinite bondage to woman will come to an abrupt end, and she will live in herself and for herself, and Man, odious as it is hitherto, will set her free."