 This attention to what Beauvoir, borrowing from Heidegger, calls a “primordial Mitsein” may be why she does not repeat her earlier argument that violence is sometimes necessary for the pursuit of justice in The Second Sex. Often criticized as one mark of Beauvoir’s heterosexism, this reference to the Mitsein is not made in ignorance of lesbian sexuality and is not a rejection of non-heterosexual sexualities. It is a recognition of the present state of affairs where the heterosexual norm prevails. If patriarchy is to be dismantled we will have to understand how heteronormative sexuality serves it. We will have to denaturalize it. To Beauvoir’s way of thinking, however, the institutional alienations of heterosexuality ought not be confused with the erotics of heterosexual desire. The realities of this desire and the bond of the “primordial Mitsein” that it forges must be taken into account: not only is it used to enforce women’s isolation and to support their inability to identify a common history, it is also responsible for the value and relationship that Beauvoir calls the “bond”, a situation-specific articulation of the appeal found in in The Ethics of Ambiguity.