Explore "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The word "love" has not at all the same meaning for both sexes, and this is a source of the grave misunderstandings that separate them. Byron rightly said that love is merely an occupation in the life of the man, while it is life itself for the woman. The same idea is expressed by Nietzsche in The Gay Science. The same word "love," he says, means, in fact, two different things for the man and for the woman:
What woman means by love is clear enough: total devotion (not mere surrender) with soul and body, without any consideration or reserve. In this absence of conditions her love is a faith; woman has no other faith.1 Man, when he loves a woman, wants2 precisely this love from her and is thus himself as far as can be from the presupposition of feminine love. Supposing, however, that there should also be men to whom the desire for total devotion is not alien; well, then they simply are not men.