The Second Sex (31 page)

But man’s revolt against his carnal condition is more general; he considers himself a fallen god: his curse is to have fallen from a luminous and orderly heaven into the chaotic obscurity of the mother’s womb. He desires to see himself in this fire, this active and pure breath, and it is woman who imprisons him in the mud of the earth. He would like himself to be as necessary as pure Idea, as One, All, absolute Spirit; and he finds himself enclosed in a limited body, in a place and time he did not choose, to which he was not called, useless, awkward, absurd. His very being is carnal contingence
to which he is subjected in his isolation, in his unjustifiable gratuitousness. It also dooms him to death. This quivering gelatin that forms in the womb (the womb, secret and sealed like a tomb) is too reminiscent of the soft viscosity of carrion for him not to turn away from it with a shudder. Wherever life is in the process of being made—germination and fermentation—it provokes disgust because it is being made only when it is being unmade; the viscous glandular embryo opens the cycle that ends in the rotting of death. Horrified by death’s gratuitousness, man is horrified at having been engendered; he would like to rescind his animal attachments; because of his birth, murderous Nature has a grip on him. For the primitives, childbirth is surrounded by strict taboos; in particular, the placenta must be carefully burned or thrown into the sea, because whoever might get hold of it would hold the newborn’s fate in his hands; this envelope in which the fetus is formed is the sign of its dependence; in annihilating it, the individual is able to detach himself from the living magma and to realize himself as an autonomous being. The stain of childbirth falls back on the mother. Leviticus and all the ancient codes impose purification rites on the new mother; and often in the countryside the postpartum ceremony maintains that tradition. Everyone knows that young boys and girls and men feel a spontaneous embarrassment, one often camouflaged by sneering, at seeing a pregnant woman’s stomach or the swollen breasts of the wet nurse. In Dupuytren’s museums, the curious contemplate the wax embryos and the preserved fetuses with the morbid interest they would show in a defiled grave. Notwithstanding all the respect that society surrounds it with, the function of gestation inspires spontaneous repulsion. And while the little boy in early childhood remains sensually attached to the mother’s flesh, when he grows up, when he is socialized and becomes aware of his individual existence, this flesh frightens him; he wants to ignore it and to see his mother as institution only; if he wants to think of her as pure and chaste, it is less from amorous jealousy than from the refusal to acknowledge her as a body. An adolescent boy becomes embarrassed, blushes if he meets his mother, sisters, or women in his family when he is out with his friends: their presence recalls the regions of immanence from which he wants to escape; she reveals the roots that he wants to pull himself away from. The boy’s irritation when his mother kisses and caresses him has the same significance; he gives up his family, mother, and mother’s breast. He would like to have emerged, like Athena, into the adult world, armed from head to toe, invulnerable.
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Being conceived and born is
the curse weighing on his destiny, the blemish on his being. And it is the warning of his death. The cult of germination has always been associated with the cult of the dead. Mother Earth engulfs the bones of its children within it. Women—the Parcae and Moirai—weave human destiny; but they also cut the threads. In most folk representations, Death is woman, and women mourn the dead because death is their work.
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Thus, Mother Earth has a face of darkness: she is chaos, where everything comes from and must return to one day; she is Nothingness. The many aspects of the world that the day uncovers commingle in the night: night of spirit locked up in the generality and opacity of matter, night of sleep and nothing. At the heart of the sea, it is night: woman is the
Mare tenebrarum
dreaded by ancient navigators; it is night in the bowels of the earth. Man is threatened with being engulfed in this night, the reverse of fertility, and it horrifies him. He aspires to the sky, to light, to sunny heights, to the pure and crystal clear cold of blue; and underfoot is a moist, hot, and dark gulf ready to swallow him; many legends have the hero falling and forever lost in maternal darkness: a cave, an abyss, hell.

But once again ambivalence is at work here: while germination is always associated with death, death is also associated with fertility. Detested death is like a new birth, and so it is blessed. The dead hero like Osiris is resurrected every springtime, and he is regenerated by a new birth. Man’s supreme hope, says Jung, “is that the dark waters of death become the waters of life, that death and its cold embrace are the mother’s lap, just as the sea, while engulfing the sun, re-births in the depths.”
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The theme of the burial of the sun god within the sea and its dazzling reemergence is common to many mythologies. And man wants to live, but he also hopes for rest, sleep, for nothingness. He does not wish for immortality for himself, and thus he can learn to love death. “Inorganic matter is the mother’s breast,” Nietzsche wrote. “Being delivered from life means becoming real again, completing oneself. Anyone who understands that would consider returning to unfeeling dust as a holiday.” Chaucer puts this prayer into the mouth of an old man who cannot die:

Man wants to assert his individual existence and proudly rest on his “essential difference,” but he also wants to break the barriers of the self and commingle with water, earth, night, Nothingness, with the Whole. Woman who condemns man to finitude also enables him to surpass his own limits: that is where the equivocal magic surrounding her comes from.

In all civilizations and still today, she inspires horror in man: the horror of his own carnal contingence that he projects on her. The girl who has not yet gone through puberty does not pose a threat; she is not the object of any taboo and has no sacred characteristics. In many primitive societies her sex even seems innocent: erotic games between boys and girls are allowed in childhood. Woman becomes impure the day she might be able to procreate. In primitive societies the strict taboos concerning girls on the day of their first period have often been described; even in Egypt, where the woman is treated with particular respect, she remains confined during her whole menstrual period.
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She is often put on a rooftop or relegated to a shack on the outskirts of the town; she can be neither seen nor touched: what’s more, she must not even touch herself with her own hand; for peoples that practice daily flea removal, she is given a stick with which she is able to scratch herself; she must not touch food with her fingers; sometimes she is strictly forbidden to eat; in other cases, her mother and sister are permitted to feed her with an instrument; but all objects that come in contact with her during this period must be burned. After this first test, the menstrual taboos are a little less strict, but they remain harsh. In particular, in Leviticus: “And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean. And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.” This text is perfectly symmetrical
with one concerning gonorrhea-provoked impurity in man. And the purifying sacrifice is identical in the two cases. Seven days after she has been purified of her flow, two turtledoves or two young pigeons have to be brought to the sacrificer, who offers them to the Eternal. Even in matriarchal societies, the virtues connected to menstruation are ambivalent. On the one hand, it brings social activities to a halt, destroys the vital force, withers flowers, causes fruit to fall; but it also has beneficial effects: menses are used in love philters, in remedies, and in particular in healing cuts and bruises. Still today, when some Indians go off to fight spectral monsters haunting their rivers, they place a fiber wad filled with menstrual blood on the bow of their boat: its emanations are harmful to their supernatural enemies. In some Greek cities, young girls pay homage to the temple of Astarte by wearing linens stained by their first menstrual blood. But since patriarchy, only harmful powers have been attributed to the bizarre liquor flowing from the feminine sex. Pliny in his
Natural History
says: “The menstruating woman spoils harvests, devastates gardens, kills seeds, makes fruit fall, kills bees; if she touches the wine, it turns to vinegar; milk sours …”

An old English poet expresses the same thought:

These beliefs have been vigorously perpetuated right up to today. In 1878, a member of the British Medical Association wrote in the
British Medical Journal:
“It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women.” He said that he personally knew of two cases of hams spoiling in such circumstances. In the refineries of the North at the beginning of this century, women were prohibited by law from going into the factory when they were afflicted by what the Anglo-Saxons call the “curse” because the sugar turned black. And in Saigon, women are not employed in opium factories: because of their periods, the opium goes bad and becomes bitter. These beliefs survive in many areas of the French countryside. Any cook knows how impossible it is to make mayonnaise if she is indisposed or simply in the presence of another woman who is indisposed. In Anjou, recently, an old gardener who had stocked that year’s cider harvest in the cellar wrote to the master of the house: “Don’t let the young women of the household and their female guests go through the cellar on certain days of the month: they would prevent the cider from fermenting.” When the cook heard about this letter, she shrugged her shoulders. “
That
never prevented cider from fermenting,” she said, “it is
only bad for bacon fat: it cannot be salted in the presence of an indisposed woman; it would rot.”
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Putting this repulsion in the same category as that provoked by blood is most inadequate: more imbued with the mysterious mana that is both life and death than anything else, blood, of course, is in itself a sacred element. But menstrual blood’s baleful powers are more particular. Menstrual blood embodies the essence of femininity, which is why its flow endangers woman herself, whose mana is thus materialized. During the Chaga’s initiation rites, girls are urged to carefully conceal their menstrual blood. “Do not show it to your mother, for she would die! Do not show it to your age-mates, for there may be a wicked one among them, who will take away the cloth with which you have cleaned yourself, and you will be barren in your marriage. Do not show it to a bad woman, who will take the cloth to place it in the top of her hut … with the result that you cannot bear children. Do not throw the cloth on the path or in the bush. A wicked person might do evil things with it. Bury it in the ground. Protect the blood from the gaze of your father, brothers and sisters. It is a sin to let them see it.”
¹⁰

For the Aleuts, if the father sees his daughter during her first menstruation, she could go blind or deaf. It is thought that during this period woman is possessed by a spirit and invested with a dangerous power. Some primitives believe that the flow is provoked by snakebite, as woman has suspicious affinities with snakes and lizards; it is supposed to be similar to crawling animals’ venom. Leviticus compares it to gonorrhea; the bleeding feminine sex is not only a wound but a suspicious sore. And Vigny associates the notion of soiling with illness: “Woman, sick child, and impure twelve times.” The result of interior alchemic troubles, the periodic hemorrhage woman suffers from is bizarrely aligned with the moon’s cycle: the moon also has dangerous whims.
¹¹
Woman is part of the formidable workings
that order the course of planets and the sun; she is prey to the cosmic forces that determine the destiny of stars and tides, while men are subjected to their worrisome radiation. But it is especially striking that menstrual blood’s effects are linked to the ideas of cream going sour, mayonnaise that does not take, fermentation, and decomposition; it is also claimed that it is apt to cause fragile objects to break; to spring violin and harp strings; but above all it influences organic substances that are midway between matter and life; this is less because it is blood than because it emanates from genital organs; even without knowing its exact function, people understood it to be linked to the germination of life: ignorant of the existence of the ovary, the ancients saw in menstruation the complement of the sperm. In fact, it is not this blood that makes woman impure, but rather, this blood is a manifestation of her impurity; it appears when the woman can be fertile; when it disappears, she becomes sterile again; it pours forth from this womb where the fetus is made. The horror of feminine fertility that man experiences is expressed through it.

The strictest taboo of all concerning woman in her impure state is the prohibition of sexual intercourse with her. Leviticus condemns man to seven days of impurity if he transgresses this rule. The Laws of Manu are even harsher: “The wisdom, energy, strength, and vitality of a man coming near a woman stained by menstrual excretions perish definitively.” Priests ordered fifty days of penance for men who had sexual relations during menstruation. Since the feminine principle is then considered as reaching its highest power, it is feared that it would triumph over the male principle in intimate contact. Less specifically, man shies away from finding the mother’s feared essence in the woman he possesses; he works at dissociating these two aspects of femininity: that explains why incest is prohibited by exogamy or more modern forms and is a universal law; that explains why man distances himself from woman sexually when she is particularly destined for her reproductive role: during her period, when she is pregnant, or when she is nursing. Not only does the Oedipus complex—whose description, incidentally, has to be revised—not contradict this attitude: on the contrary, it even implies it. Man guards himself against woman to the extent that she is the confused source of the world and disorder become organic.