Whatever else Simone de Beauvoir wants to accomplish in the essay "Woman: Myth and Reality," she supplies a critique of the myth of the eternal feminine that vividly demonstrates how intractable and frustrating women's search for social and economic justice and equality women continues to be. The problem, as she explains it, comes down to the fact that social control resides with men. They benefit from virtually all social goods because their physical strength enables them to position themselves favorably in society and marginalize women's competition for such goods in virtually all areas of social life. Their privileged physical and social position enables them to guarantee the social marginalization of women and assure sexual domination of them.
No less important is that their privileged social position enables men, who enjoy social control, to graft a kind of logic and moral weight onto the whole process, with the result that they become the standards against which women's psychoemotional state, mental capacities, and moral sense may be judged. That takes shape as the construction of the myth of Woman as Mystery--exotic, unknowable, "special," or some such designation. But that myth comes down to an articulation chiefly of one thing: that woman is not-man. That is, Man is what is, and Woman is Other. To say that is to explain clearly to the universe why women are the second sex, though as a matter of pure logic there is no reason not to posit a not-woman designation for man.
But the terms of reference are by no means purely logical. Beauvoir develops that critique by arguing the importance in human experience of symbols and signs as building blocks of reality. Designating women as mythic, in their essence residing somewhere beyond what men see as the "absolute" (824) order and logic and reason that is the natural province of male experience, is a way of reducing all females to a unitary symbol, or label. The complex facts of t...