"What do you believe in ?" "People's sufferings, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, n… - Simone de Beauvoir

As for woman, her inferiority complex manifests itself in a rejection out of shame of her femininity: it is not the absence of a penis that unleashes this complex but the total situation; the girl envies the phallus only as a symbol of the privileges granted to boys; the father’s place in the family, the universal predominance of males, and upbringing all confirm her idea of masculine superiority. Later, in the course of sexual relations, even the coital posture that places the woman underneath the man is an added humiliation. She reacts by a “masculine protest”; she either tries to masculinize herself or uses her feminine wiles to go into battle against man. Through motherhood she can find in her child the equivalent of the penis. But this supposes that she must first accept herself completely as woman, and thus accept her inferiority. She is far more deeply divided against herself than is man.

If I were the earth it would disgust me, all this vermin on my back, I’d shake it off.

The term ‘female’ is derogatory not because it emphasises woman’s animality, but because it imprisons her in her sex; and if this sex seems to man to be contemptible and inimical even in harmless dumb animals, it is evidently because of the uneasy hostility stirred up in him by woman. Nevertheless he wishes to find in biology a justification for this sentiment. The word female brings up in his mind a saraband of imagery – a vast, round ovum engulfs and castrates the agile spermatozoan; the monstrous and swollen termite queen rules over the enslaved males; the female praying mantis and the spider, satiated with love, crush and devour their partners; the bitch in heat runs through the alleys, trailing behind her a wake of depraved odours; the she-monkey presents posterior immodestly and then steals away with hypocritical coquetry; and the most superb wild beasts – the tigress, the lioness, the panther – bed down slavishly under the imperial embrace of the male. Females sluggish, eager, artful, stupid, callous, lustful, ferocious, abased – man projects them all at once upon woman.