The Opium of the Lasses: Beauvoir’s Revaluation of Love in The Second Sex

Journal article

This paper argues that Beauvoir’s The Second Sex offers a genealogy of the morality of sexual hierarchy in which love plays a central role. In dialogue with Sara Heinämaa’s reading of Beauvoir as a projection theorist, I argue that the economic and moral dimensions of Beauvoir’s revaluation of love are illuminated by reading her in a particular tradition of ‘French Marx’. According to Beauvoir, both religious and secular mystifications of love, like Marx’s ‘opium of the masses’, veil the real relations between human beings. However, rather than merely unmasking individualistic mystifications of love, The Second Sex situates what I call ‘the opium of the lasses’ in an axiological critique of Marx’s projection theory of religion and post-Nietzschean discussions of ‘love’ and its capitalist co-optations. As such, Beauvoir’s revaluation of love concerns not only the weight of patriarchal myths of what makes women ‘lovable’, but an inquiry into the possibility of co-responsible solidarity—of what it means to become love-able, able to love.

Authors: Kirkpatrick, K

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume
• Volume: 99
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 167-188
• Publication date: 2025-07-09
• DOI: 10.1093/arisup/akaf005
• EISSN: 1467-8349
• ISSN: 0309-7013
• Language: English