Such change does not concern womens happiness. Happiness may be chosen or accepted in exchange for the deprivations of freedom. Recalling the argument of The Ethics of Ambiguity we know why. As Others, women are returned to the metaphysically privileged world of the child. They experience the happiness brought about by bad faitha happiness of not being responsible for themselves, of not having to make consequential choices. From this existential perspective women may be said to be complicit in their subjugation. But this is not the whole story. If women are happy as the Other, it may be because, given the material and ideological realities of their situation, this is the only avenue of happiness open to them. Beauvoirs existential charge of bad faith must be understood within her Marxist analysis of the social, economic and cultural structures that frame womens lives. Though Beauvoir does not argue that these structures deprive women of their freedom, neither does she ignore the situat

For Beauvoir, the work of liberation will not be easy. It is work that will cause conict because it requires refusing and ultimately sacricing norms and customs of femininity and masculinity, the very ones that are, for many, sources of happiness and self-justication. Liberation is also not a matter of appealing to men to give women freedom; it is a matter of women discovering their solidarity, rejecting the bad faith temptations of happiness and discovering the pleasures of freedom. While Beauvoir alerts us to the tensions and conicts that this will create between men and women, she does not envision a permanent state of hostility. Here her Hegelian-Marxist optimism prevails. Men will (ultimately) recognize women as free subjects, but only when both commit to sacricing patriarchal myths. Speaking in reference to sexual difference, Beauvoir notes that dismantling patriarchal mythology is not a recipe for androgynous subjects. Given the realities of embodiment, there will be sexual

Unlike today, however, these differences will appear differently. They will not be used to justify the difference between a Subject and his Inessential Other. Ultimately, according to her, the goal of liberation is our mutual recognition of each other as free and as other. Despite the heterosexist structure of the myth of the eternal feminine, Beauvoir describes one situation in which mutual recognition sometimes exists: the intimate heterosexual erotic encounter. Speaking of this intimacy, she writes, the dimension of the other remains; but the fact is that alterity no longer has a hostile character (SS: 2010, 415, cf. 1949, 189). Why? Because authentic lovers experience themselves and each other ambiguously, that is, as both subjects and objects of erotic desire rather than as delineated according to institutionalized positions of man and woman. In Beauvoirs words,

The erotic experience is one that most poignantly reveals to human beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as esh and as spirit, as the other and as subject (SS: 2010, 416, cf. SS: 1949, 190). The concept of ambiguity, developed abstractly in The Ethics of Ambiguity, is erotically embodied in The Second Sex and is identied as a crucial piece of the prescription for transcending the oppressions of patriarchy. This description of the liberating possibilities of the erotic encounter is also one of those places where Beauvoir reworks MerleauPontys phenomenology of embodiment. By drawing on MerleauPontys descriptions of the ways that we are world-making and worldembedded subject-objects, she reveals the ways that it is as subjectobjects for the world, to the world, and in the world that we are passionately drawn to each other.