01/20/2026
That “false women” you hear within is typically the instructions and preferences of an unbalanced beta male. Which is the root cause of dis-ease. The unease. The split. The confusion and chaos. Programming done successfully. It creates women who are consumers, not whole and healthy. Iykyk
Women learn early how to split themselves in two, long before they have language for it. One part watches, adjusts, learns the rules of the room. Another part waits, quieter, sensing that something vital has been set aside for later. Hélène Cixous was interested in that split, and impatient with how normal it had become.
When she wrote The Laugh of the Medusa in 1975, France was still reverberating from the aftershocks of May 1968. Old authorities had been questioned, but the deeper structures of language and culture remained stubbornly intact. Cixous, born in 1937 in colonial Algeria to a German Jewish mother and a French Algerian father, had grown up with displacement as a fact of life. Her father died when she was young. She knew what it meant to live between systems that did not quite want you. That sensibility shaped her work as much as her training in literature and her proximity to thinkers like Jacques Derrida, with whom she shared an interest in how meaning slips, fractures, and hides inside language.
This line arrives from that place of fracture. It insists that the version of womanhood most women are taught to perform is not only incomplete but actively obstructive. The danger, Cixous suggests, is not just external oppression but the way it settles inside, becoming a second skin. The false figure is not a villain in the room but a script in the head. Polite. Self-editing. Fluent in apology. She knows how to survive but not how to breathe.
Cixous uses violent language because polite language had failed. Feminist writing before her, including Simone de Beauvoir’s meticulous dismantling of woman as the Other, had exposed inequality with philosophical clarity. But Cixous wanted something more unruly. She believed that rational critique alone could not undo the damage done by centuries of symbolic exclusion. The body had been written out of serious thought. Desire had been disciplined. So she wrote in a way that refused containment. Her sentences surge and loop. They disobey hierarchy. She called this écriture féminine, a way of writing that moves with the rhythms of lived experience rather than the straight lines of inherited authority.
This approach drew admiration and criticism in equal measure. Some readers felt liberated by her insistence that women write from the body. Others, including fellow feminists like Luce Irigaray, worried that such language risked turning biology into destiny all over again. Was Cixous celebrating difference or essentializing it? The debate still matters. But it is easy to miss how strategic her provocation was. She was not describing what women are. She was naming what happens when expression has been policed for too long and finally refuses restraint.
Psychologically, the image points to a familiar tension. Many people recognize the feeling of managing themselves into palatability. The inner editor that keeps the voice measured, acceptable, non-threatening. Over time, that editor can become so dominant that the original impulse struggles for air. Anyone who has hesitated before speaking a difficult truth knows the sensation. A tightness in the chest. A pause that lasts a beat too long. The body registers the cost even when the mind rationalizes it.
Culturally, the line still resonates because the pressure to perform a coherent, agreeable self has not disappeared. It has simply become more refined. Professional environments reward confidence without excess. Care without need. Passion without mess. The false figure adapts easily to these demands. The living one does not. She is louder, contradictory, sometimes inconvenient. Letting her speak often means risking misunderstanding or loss. Cixous does not pretend otherwise. Liberation, in her vision, is not gentle.
Literarily, the insistence on metaphorical destruction aligns her with a tradition of writers who understood that language shapes reality. If the available words distort experience, then new forms must be invented. This is where her influence spreads beyond feminist theory into contemporary literature. You can feel traces of her in writers who allow sentences to wander, who trust association, who let thought arrive before it has been fully disciplined. The freedom is not decorative. It is ethical.
Iris Murdoch once wrote about the difficulty of seeing clearly when the self is cluttered with fantasy and fear. Cixous pushes that idea further. The obstacle is not only illusion but obedience. The internalized demand to be legible on someone else’s terms. Killing that demand is not an act of cruelty but of care. It clears space.
What remains compelling about the line is its honesty about conflict. Growth is not additive. It often requires subtraction. Something learned must be unlearned. Something practiced must be laid down. The false figure does not disappear quietly. She resists because she once kept us safe. But safety is not the same as life.
Hélène Cixous asks for courage without pretending it will feel pure. She knew how much was at stake. To breathe fully is to risk being heard. To speak without disguise is to accept consequence. The alternative, she suggests, is a quieter kind of erasure, one that happens from the inside out.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
