"Devoid of a gender, this subject is presumed to characterize all genders. On the one hand, this presumption devalues gender as a relevant category in the description of lived bodily experience. On the other hand, inasmuch as the subject described resembles a culturally constructed male subject, it consecrates masculine identity as the model for the human subject, thereby devaluing, not gender, but women.

Merleau-Ponty's explicit avoidance of gender as a relevant concern in the description of lived experience, and his implicit universalization of the male subject, are aided by a methodology that fails to acknowledge the historicity of sexuality and of bodies. For a concrete description of lived experience, it seems crucial to ask whose sexuality and whose bodies are being described, for 'sexuality' and 'bodies' remain abstractions without first being situated in concrete social and cultural contexts. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty's willingness to describe a 'natural sexuality' as a lived experience suggests a lamentable naivete concerning the anthropological diversity of sexual expressions and the linguistic and psychosomatic origins of human sexuality. In the end, his version of 'lived experience' commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, giving life to abstractions, and draining life from existing individuals in concrete contexts."