The Second Sex

n  How could the Cinderella myth not retain its validity? Everything still encourages the girl to expect fortune and happiness from a “Prince Charming” instead of attempting the difficult and uncertain conquest alone.n

I am not a true woman.

Because the majority of man that are featured in this book (and the majority of man in history) describe a true woman as “…frivolous, infantile, irresponsible, the woman subjugated to man.”

Yeah, no.

The book is not only about feminism, is a long essay about woman and its history. My history, my mother’s, my grandmother’s, every woman’s on earth.
In its 800 pages Beauvoir tries to answer the question of how women became subjugated to man, how she is not considered an autonomous being, how women are not equals to man and exactly where the difference between them lay.
She tackles these questions from a biological, mythological and social point of view, amongst others. It was truly interesting to see how through the years this views have change and how only it was in the last century that women have truly began to stand up for themselves and try to end with the crushing patriarchy.

This book is consired the bible of feminists and with good reasons; every woman should read it, and then, men too.

n  “… she harbors no desire for revolution, she would not think of eliminating herself as a sex: she simply asks that certain consequences of sexual differentiation be abolished.”n

It’s one of my greatest wishes –and after eight hundred pages I believe Beauvoir would agree- that one day the meaning of the word woman will sound less like slave, and more like equal.

n  “I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.” - Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.” - Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” - Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sexn

(First two paragraphs are an extract of a revisited journal entry, as of 27/07/23)
As a child I refused to be a woman. I had a keen imagination that made it possible for me to be anyone I wanted, first a poet, then an adventurer from distant lands, and finally a king, but never a "woman." Although I still wore skirts and dresses up to a certain age, during my teenage years and after my first period, the thought of not wanting to be a woman not only grew stronger but altered into a form of body dysmorphism and eating disorder. When I realized that it was not possible for me to become a boy, due to a regressive family and its insistent judgmental attitude, I tried to embrace my femininity as a sort of experiment… only to fail after no more than one year: I had a voice too deep for a woman, too high-pitched for a man, a slender body devoid of shape, but too shapely to wear men's clothes; sometimes I was told I looked too much like my mom, later I became a copy of my father. This being "in the middle" and never one of the two made me the Other.

In primary school, when I was about six years old, I told one of my classmates that if I could be reborn, I would love to be a man. The latter laughed and cackled "Hear that? She wants to be a man!", to tease me in front of the other boys. Unceremoniously, I had to take it all back and my face turned red. My first period was a nightmare and since I had it as soon as I turned nine years old, it was as if I had been inflicted violence by Mother Nature. I felt deprived of my freedom and womanhood, which I contemplated on other girls but not on myself, became a challenge for me. If I am to be a woman, what kind of woman do I want to be? I grew terrified at the thought of pregnancies. In adolescence, I realized that I liked women. During the pandemic, I came out as nonbinary. These certainties, far from reassuring me, frightened me more. Teachers at school called me quiet and "different," shrewd and smart and undoubtedly creative. Creative. If there ever were words to describe me, these were never "feminine" or "masculine," but "creative."

Quite honestly, I don’t know what it means to be a woman. If it’s getting catcalled everywhere I go, then I don’t want it. Two weeks ago I got sexually assaulted in public while exiting from a concert. The same week a depraved man stopped by with his motorcycle as I was walking down the streets and kept following me for a while. Another time some grown men kept staring at me working out outside. Because of these unfortunate events, I’m terrified to leave my home all alone again. Before you say it I know it’s not “all men”, so shut the hell up. It’s more about the feeling of not knowing when occasional sexual harassment like these can become more violent and I slightly know how to defend myself in these occasions. In my journey of discovering ways to accept myself and understanding womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was the closest thing to therapy that I have ever had in my entire life.

n  “...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”n

“What is a woman?” asks Beauvoir at the very beginning of her essay. Freud argues that women act the way they do because of their anatomy. Beauvoir doesn’t agree: a woman is a social construct. This phrase alone felt like a hug to me. “The “real woman” is an artificial product that civilization produces the way eunuchs were produced in the past,” writes the activist (book two, part I, ch.4 - The lesbian). In the same volume, she explains that while men are constantly pushed to be independent in puberty, women are protected. Male’s identity is celebrated, whereas women’s is denigrated, leading them to submission. Biology alone isn’t enough to define a woman, so we shall stick to Historical Materialism. “The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some very important truths. Humanity is not an animal species: it is a historical reality. Human society is an anti-physis: it does not passively submit to the presence of nature, but rather appropriates it.” (Book one, part I, ch.3 - The Point of View of Historical Materialism).

In philosophy, women are called the Other. While women are taught to internalize the social construct of womanhood renouncing their individuality, men, “the One”, don't need to justify their position. Women represent immanence - a term applied, in contradistinction to “transcendence,” to the fact or condition of being entirely within something (from Latin immanere, “to dwell in, remain”) ¹ - while men have always been associated with transcendence - of “climbing or going beyond” ². However, men have affirmed their transcendence through women: “No subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential from the outset; it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positioning itself as One.” (Volume I - Introduction). In other words, for Sartre, every human being has the desire to become an individual. Since human beings can imagine, reject or question absolutely anything, they are characterized by freedom. The primary experience of freedom is anguish. Now, for Beauvoir, men have established their freedom through the oppression of women, creating the condition for their own illiberality. ³

Beauvoir believes, unlike Sartre, that the only way to extend one’s transcendence is through the other. To put it simply, men and women must cooperate to recognize themselves as subjects. Existentialism is an invitation to the responsibility of living. Beauvoir’s project is a synthesis of Marxism, Hegelism and Existentialism. Liberalism, in fact, largely depends on private property. From the very first moment The Second Sex was released, in 1949, it became a treatise on feminism and a work of philosophy. I believe that this work is fundamental to learning what it means to be a woman, but it is also a love letter. The Second Sex is not so often discussed nowadays, which is a pity. Feminism has benefited from it incredibly and what is even more surprising it’s the openness with which she talks about female sexuality and homosexuality. Also no, TERFs, this is not for you.

In the final chapters of The Second Sex, Beauvoir talks about how to respond to oppression. In a particular section of this last part, she talks about how certain women yearn for their childhood days, when they were not “gendered”. Narcissism is an objectification of the self: because women were not cared for for many centuries and misunderstood, they tend to focus on themselves a lot. Narcissism is seen as a way to ask for validation. At the same time, women shouldn’t seek validation in love, and not rely on men all the time in a relationship. Through this discourse, Beauvoir addresses not only women’s merits, but also women’s faults. The aim is to be as provocative as possible, creating something that stands completely out of the box and the reason why The Second Sex stayed away from feminism’s history may be also that.

n  “It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.”n

I could talk about The Second Sex for hours, but GR has word limits. There is to say that The Second Sex has been found by many scholars insufficient. It can vary from 800 to 900 pages yet it can still be hit with lots and lots of criticism. Critics bring up Beauvoir’s personal and sexual life, but here I am asking myself if this had been written by a male philosopher, would critics have brought up such skepticism nonetheless? Women are indeed more easily accused of betraying their beliefs than men are and non-fiction is probably the best case in literature to take as an example. That said, this book healed my inner-child forever. Being a woman is an experience and in my experience, it’s totally okay to deviate from the stereotypical concept of femininity.

The problem I have with feminists nowadays is not wanting to accept that feminism is a purely economic problem. It is feminism’s goal to suppress every form of patriarchy, and capitalism or mansplaining to cite another one, are great deals. Feminism is a radical movement, yet it shouldn’t go against men either. Therefore, whatever form of feminism whose aim threats gender equality isn’t feminism, period. Feminism has to be provocative and disturb people, because like every radical movement, it aims to overthrow an old social condition that suppressed not only women, but also the ones who live in poverty. Our society is still a hierarchical society, therefore women who live in wealth - the ones who define themselves “anti-feminists” - could prefer to maintain the same social condition that suppressed women for ages because they benefit from it. They know what feminism is about, that’s why they don’t want to participate in it. So, what can we do?

It would be pointless to say that we have to raise awareness and educate ourselves - you already know that. The least I can do right now is to invite you readers to read this book and maybe other essays on feminism. For me, I plan to read The Third Sex by Ines Testoni - which, I believe, hasn’t been translated into English. I found a bunch of articles that helped me to write this review and a summary of The Second Sex if you want to know more but still can’t afford to buy the book. I’ll link them below. Through The Second Sex you’ll learn more about women, but also about existence. This is how powerful this book is. Still, it’s okay to not agree on Beauvoir’s opinions and instead try to make a critique out of it, because it was Beauvoir’s purpose from the very beginning to do so. Feminism is an open discussion, just like philosophy is, and women are beings that need to be contemplated. Their complexity is unique and fascinating. I love women.

5/5

Notes
¹ Source: britannica.com
² Quote from Wikipedia
³ This part is inspired to Renate Siebert’s preface to the Italian Edition

Links
https://www.thecollector.com/simone-d...
https://www.thecollector.com/first-wa...
https://www.thecollector.com/second-w...

Who is Simone de Beauvoir? For a more in-depth-study, here: https://www.thecollector.com/simone-d...

Knocked Up
Preggers
Up the Spout
A Bun in the Oven

* * *

The word “pregnant” is pregnant with connotation. And for women—often viewed in more bodily terms than men—nothing foregrounds a woman's body more than pregnancy. It’s interesting to consider what Simone de Beauvoir, dubbed the "mother" of modern feminism, thought about motherhood itself. Given what she writes in The Second Sex, Beauvoir would probably concur with my friend’s attitude…

...A number of years ago, a friend of mine spoke to me of her desire to have a baby. She felt—being in her early thirties—she should get on with it but would not consider being pregnant while she was still in graduate school. When I asked her why, she responded that pregnancy made you into such a “body,” and in the environment of graduate school, she would feel like “a body among minds.”

Her fear encapsulates a number of assumptions: A mother is a body. A body does not think. Intellectuals—graduate students, faculty, writers—think. Mothers do not think. A woman—as a graduate student or a professor—writes, talks, produces, thinks from the position of a daughter, that is, from the position of a female body still unencumbered enough to think.

Pregnancy or maternity, besides being a position traditionally at odds with intellect (consider the old caveat: “the baby or the book”), also represents loss of control and a resultant discomfort with the body (somatophobia). Marianne Hirsch, in The Mother/Daughter Plot, isolates both lack of control and somatophobia as two areas “of avoidance and discomfort with the maternal” (165) often apparent in feminist rhetoric. In The Women’s Room, one of Marilyn French’s characters sums up pregnancy as a time when a woman loses control of her body (and, by extension, her mind) as well as her identity:

Pregnancy is a long waiting in which you learn what it means completely to lose control over your life. There are no coffee breaks; no days off in which you regain your normal shape and self, and can return refreshed to your labors. You can’t wish away even for an hour the thing that is swelling you up, stretching your stomach until the skin feels as if it will burst, kicking you from the inside until you are black and blue. You can’t even hit back without hurting yourself. The condition and you are identical: you are no longer a person, but a pregnancy. (69)

With pregnancy, you are “no longer a person,” you are no longer “you.” Logically, the next question is, “Will you still be you when you become a mother?”

For Simone de Beauvoir the answer would be “No”: pregnancy and motherhood rob a woman of her identity and her intellect. Over and over again, in her interviews and in her books, Beauvoir refers to mothers as slaves reduced to bodies and cut off from intellectual pursuits. Beauvoir’s description of pregnancy, from her influential book, The Second Sex (1949), sounds very much like the description quoted above from The Women’s Room. While French’s character emphasizes how much pregnancy overtakes a woman’s identity, Beauvoir goes further and depicts pregnancy more like a disease that ultimately annihilates awoman:

[the fetus is:] an enrichment and an injury; the fetus is a part of her body, and it is a parasite that feeds on it; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it; it represents the future and, carrying it, she feels herself vast as the world; but this very opulence annihilates her, she feels that she herself is no longer anything. (emphasis added, 495)

In this theorization, a woman not only loses her former identity in the process of pregnancy, but actually loses her mind, as Beauvoir illustrates when she describes the pregnant woman in less than human terms:

. . . but in the mother-to-be the antithesis of subject and object ceases to exist; she and the child with which she is swollen make up together an equivocal pair overwhelmed by life. Ensnared by nature, the pregnant woman is plant and animal, a stock-pile of colloids, an incubator, an egg; she scares children proud of their young, straight bodies and makes young people titter contemptuously because she is a human being, a conscious and free individual who has become life’s passive instrument. (495)

Beauvoir’s perspective in the above quotation attracts comment. Though The Second Sex ostensibly is presented as an objective critique there is no attempt at objectivity here. In what often amounts to an emotional tirade, Beauvoir relentlessly focuses on the pregnant woman’s body, equating it with an “animal” or a “stockpile of colloids” and then—rather gratuitously—states that a pregnant woman “scares children” and makes them “titter contemptuously.” Beauvoir’s descriptions of pregnancy illustrate her attitudes about the pregnant body and the resultant disintegration of the mind and identity she sees occurring with maternity.

Beauvoir’s attack on motherhood is surprising unless you've read Beauvoir’s autobiographical works. There, you can see how Beauvoir systematically rejects the body—particularly a woman’s body—in favor of the life of the “mind.” And Beauvoir’s research on motherhood proves less than scientific. While she presents her findings in The Second Sex as though they are objective and backed by evidence from broad samplings, her viewpoints on motherhood rest largely on her observations of a few friends, quotes from novels, and her own personal life. Beauvoir, for instance, posits that the nausea women suffer in pregnancy demonstrates that pregnancy is not a natural state for human women given that nausea is “unknown for other mammals” (498). In evidence for this conclusion, Beauvoir preemptively cites herself, referring the reader to an earlier point in her own text!

Whatever groundbreaking work Beauvoir accomplishes in The Second Sex needs to be balanced against Beauvoir’s privileging of the mind over the body as well as her evident distaste for women’s bodily processes and pregnancy in particular. Furthermore, Beauvoir’s desire to erase the body doesn’t work. Ironically, as Jane Flax points out, the search for truth in the world of pure mind ultimately leads right back to the body:

The self, which is constituted by thought and created by an act of thought, by the separation of mind and body, is driven to master nature, because the self cannot ultimately deny its material character or dependence on nature. Despite Descartes’ claim, the body reasserts itself, at least at the moment of death. (28)

And, can one really separate the mind from the body? Jean-François Lyotard provocatively explores this question in his essay, “Can Thought Go On without a Body?” Lyotard considers whether technology could create machines “to make thinking materially possible” after our bodies are destroyed (77). Lyotard concludes that not only is thought impossibly entwined with the body but that the body actually creates thought: “Thinking and suffering overlap” (82). Thought, Lyotard posits, attempts to create endings, to once and for all silence the discomfort of the unthought:

The unthought hurts. It’s uncomfortable because we’re comfortable in what’s already thought. And thinking, which is accepting this discomfort, is also, to put it bluntly, an attempt to have done with it. That’s the hope sustaining all writing (painting, etc.): that at the end, things will be better. As there is no end, this hope is illusory. (84)

The impasse of artificial intelligence thus hinges on desire: thought without body has no impetus. Indeed, Lyotard questions why machines designed to mimic human minds would ever start thinking without the discomfort of the unthought making “their memory suffer” (85). We need, he continues, “machines that suffer from the burden of their memory” (85), i.e., machines with bodies.

But it is precisely this burden, the burden of memory, the burden of the body, Beauvoir hopes to silence as she fashions her life into a trajectory of pure intellect. Increasingly, Beauvoir identifies herself with the life of the mind she associates with the male sphere while simultaneously excising all that connects her to her female body. Though Beauvoir points out many of women’s inequities in A Second Sex and argues that women have often been viewed as the lesser or “other” sex, ironically, it is a sex that Beauvoir seems to reject as well.



adapted from a prior publication

متن سنگین، سرعت پیشرفت کتاب در حد لاک پشت ولی آدم چکار مهمتری غیر از خوندن و فهمیدن این نویسنده میتونه داشته باشه. این کتاب را سخت میشه یکبار خوند و فهمید.

Ένα βιβλίο που διαμόρφωσε την παγκόσμια σκέψη.Αν και γραμμενο το 1949 διαθέτει επικαιρικότητα που αφοπλίζει.Θεωρώ πως είναι υπεράνω κριτικής.

Thus, man today represents the positive and the neuter —that is, the male and the human being— while woman represents the negative, the female.
Every time she behaves like a human being, she is declared to be identifying with the male. Her sports, her political and intellectual activities, and her desire for other women are interpreted as “masculine protest”; there is a refusal to take into account the values toward which she is transcending, which inevitably leads to the belief that she is making the inauthentic choice of a subjective attitude.
The great misunderstanding upon which this system of interpretation rests is to hold that it is natural for the human female to make a feminine woman of herself: being a heterosexual or even a mother is not enough to realize this ideal; the “real woman” is an artificial product that civilization produces the way eunuchs were produced in the past...

I’m not a fan of most non-fiction it tends to be a bit of a trudge to get through. This one, i’m assuming some of the psychological stuff is probably out of date, its also probably longer than it needs to be and uses too many examples. Especially the literary ones, i actually skimmed quite a lot of those.

Theses are very minor complaints however. The length and depth gives this a very comprehensive feel.
There were only two non-fiction books i feel had a major outlook on my comprehension of the world. The Martyrdom of Man, from which i stole my user name, and one of those Introducing books on Evolutionary PsychologyEvolutionary Psychology.
This work is now the 3rd to be added to that. A lot of the information here feels obvious but in the same way evolution or other ideas often feel obvious once people point them out.
Its also not just about women. Because its impossible to talk about one group without putting them in context of other groups it also reveals a lot about men and other oppressed groups.

Highly recommended. Very clear, very complete, very impactful (, oh! and very depressing).

(aplausos)

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Incredibly interesting and eye-opening essay that describes the oppression of women throughout the years. Beauvoir analyses the historical, biological and socio-economic conditions that have led females to become the second sex and tries to define a path for them to overcome that disadvantages and fulfill their destiny. One of the best passages was the chapter where Beauvoir depicted the circumstances that led woman to be left behind in art:

Men we call great are those who—in one way or another—take the weight of the world on their shoulders; they have done more or less well, they have succeeded in re-creating it or they have failed; but they took on this enormous burden in the first place. This is what no woman has ever done, what no woman has ever been able to do. It takes belonging to the privileged caste to view the universe as one’s own, to consider oneself as guilty of its faults and take pride in its progress; those alone who are at the controls have the opportunity to justify it by changing, thinking, and revealing it; only they can identify with it and try to leave their imprint on it. Until now it has only been possible for Man to be incarnated in the man, not the woman. Moreover, individuals who appear exceptional to us, the ones we honor with the name of genius, are those who tried to work out the fate of all humanity in their particular lives. No woman has thought herself authorized to do that. How could van Gogh have been born woman?

Every woman should read this.