Woman as place, is a living bodily site. This means that his dependence on woman as his place is articulated through his restriction of women to domestic antisocial spaces, and places, while his life consists of intervals in time, in linear rationality and in intelligibility. Women have no place for themselves. Something not of this world. Where De Beauvoir argues for women's transcendence of nature, Irigaray notices that the success of male endeavors in social spaces is owed to women's position of spatiality.
Man forgets all notion of being bodily through constructing worlds.
He forgets that his constructions began in the body and for the body. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. The Western self is built out of panic towards difference. The male self is aware of his boundaries only through a panicked Othering of women. This othering results from panic in the face of sexual difference.