WOMYN

By: Violeta M. Gloria

It is through her, through what is in her of the best and the worst that man, as a young apprentice, learns of felicity and suffering, of vice virtue, lust, renunciation, devotion and tyranny-that as an apprentice he learns to know himself. Womyn is sport and adventure, but also a test. She is the triumph of victory and the more bitter triumph of frustration survived; she is the vertigo of the ruin, the fascination of damnation of death.

There is a whole world of significance which exists only through womyn. Womyn is the substance of men's acts and sentiments, the incarnation of all the values that call out thier free activity. It is understandable that, were he condemned to the most cruel disappointments, man would not be willing to relinquish a dream within which all his dreams are enfolded.

This then is the reason why womyn has a double and deceptive visage: She is all that man's desire and all that he does not attain. She is that good mediatrix between propitious Nature and man; and she is the temptation of unconquered Nature counter to all goodness. She incarnates all moral values, from good to evil and their opposites. Sheb is the substance of action and whatever is an obstacle to it. She is man's grasp of the world and his frustration: as such she is the source and origin of all man's reflection on his existence and of whatever expression he is able to give to it. And yet she works to divert him from himself, to make him sink down in silence.

She is servant and companion, but he expects her to confirm him his sense of being. But she opposes him with her mockery and laughter. He projects upon her what he desires and what he fears, what he loves and what he hates. And if it is so difficult to say anything specific about her, that is because she is All. She is All, that is on the plane of the inessential; she is all the Other. And, as the other, she is other than herself, other than what is expected of her. Being all, she is everlasting deception, the very deception of that existence which is never successfully attained nor fully reconciled with the totality of existent.

Simonede Beauvoir

Excerpt from THE SECOND SEX

Book review by Violeta Gloria