کتابی تقریبا خوب از یک نویسنده افتضاح. که حتما قبل از خواندن کتاب باید این ها رو بدونید.
نویسنده این کتاب «سیمون دو بووار »دوجنس‌گرا بودن. معلم و به دلیل تجاوز به دانش آموز های دخترش از کار اخراج شد . متجاوز و پدوفیل بود و سعی کرد پدوفیلیا رو قانونی کنه . به عنوان مادر فمینیسم شناخته میشن و به تک همسری اعتقادی نداشت .
کتاب جنس دوم تحلیل ستمی که در طول تاریخ به جنس زن شده‌ می پردازه. اگر شخصیت نویسنده رو کنار بگذارم، کتاب بدی نیست و به خیلی از واقعیت های تلخ و مشکلات زنان می پردازه .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nvc2...
انها ماساة ان تكوني امراة لكن الماساة الكبرى ان لا تعرفي بذلك
الجزء الاول

ان الاضطهاد الاجتماعي للمراة ناتج عن اضطهادها الاقتصادي. ان المستفيد الوحيد من ابقاء المراة في المنزل هم الرجال هذا ادى الى ظهور الملكية الفردية والابوية وانتساب الابناء الى الاب ومع مرور الزمن زادت الهوة بين الجنسين حيث اصبح عمل الرجل معترفا به اما عمل المراة في المنزل شيئا بسيطا وهذا اعطى للرجل الحق في ان تكون لديه محظيات وفي التعدد. ان استقلال المراة المادي بدخولها الى المجال الصناعي الحديث كفيل بضمان حقوقها وتحقيق مساواتها مع الرجل ومن اجل ذلك يجب توفير الظروف المناسبة لها

ان هذا العالم كان عالم الذكور على الدوام. عندما توجد زمرتان بشريتان تحاول كل منهما بسط سيطرتها على الاخرى فاذا اصرت الاثنتان على المطلب تنشا بينهما علاقة تبادل وتوتر سواء ضمن الصداقة او العدائية واذا كانت لاحد الفئتين امتيازات تتغلب على الاخرى وتعاملها باضطهاد. اولا الرجل يمتاز بقوة بدنية وهذا جعله في عصر الهراوة والحيوانات المفترسة اكثر قوة كما ان الانجاب بالنسبة للمراة يشكل اعاقة في عالم بدائي وفي عالم بائس التفوق للذي يقتل وليس للذي ينجب وهكذا اصبحت علاقة المراة بالرجل هي علاقة العبد بالسيد واخترع الرجال تقسيما انثويا ذكوريا يحافظ على الامتيازات الذكورية لقد صنع الرجال الالهة والنساء عبدتها

الرجل هو من كان يكتب الشعر ومن يعبر. لقد نشر افكاره هو الكائن الاساس والمراة هدية انها حيوان جميل وهدية جميلة من الطبيعة. وعندما تذكر كلمة جنس يقصد بها اغراء جسد المراة لم ينتبه احد الى ان الرجل من زاوية رؤية المراة هو الشهواني الحيواني لان افكار المراة لم تنشر كما نشرت افكار الرجل. ان اي
تحرر للمراة سيكسر الصورة الجميلة المرسومة من طرف الرجل وسيظهرها كانسان وليس كحلم غامض

ان البشرية ليست نوعا حيوانيا لكنها حقيقة تاريخية ان المجتمع البشري لا يخضع للطبيعة انه يعيد اخذها لحسابه لذا فوضع المراة ليس خاضعا للطبيعة انه خاضع للمجتمع. ان ضعف المراة العضلي هو سبب دونيتها لكن هذه الدونية ستلغى اذا حلت التقنية محل القوة

ان ضعف المراة الجسدي له دور في مكانتها في هذا العالم. لكنه ليس السبب الوحيد ان المجتمع له دور كبير في تحديد مكانتها

ان المراة اضعف من الرجل عضليا ولا يمكن ان تنافسه في المصارعة او تحمل الاثقال ...لكن هذا ليس له اهمية اذا كانت القوة العضلية لا تؤثر على العالم. ان الوضع الاقتصادي والاجتماعي هو من يحدد من هو اقوى

الرجل ينعث المراة بمجرد انثى ولا يخجل من حيوانيته

يجب الشك بكل شيء كتبه الرجال عن المراة فهم خصم وعدو وحكم في نفس الوقت

يعتبر الرجل نفسه الها مخلوعا كان في الجنة وخلعته السماء لكي ينزل الى الارض ويعذب. والمراة هي من تربطه بطين الارض كان يتمنى لو كان روحا كاملة لكنه يجد نفسه سجين جسده

يضطرب المراهق ويحمر اذا صادف امه او اخواته وهو يتنزه مع رفاقه لان هذا يكشف جذوره التي يريد الهروب منها

اذا لم تكن المراة خالقة فهي الملهمة. ان المراة هي الجمهور لا تدخل في الصراع الذي يدور بين الرجال لكن هي المشجعة. ان الامير بحاجة الى ايقاظ الجميلة النائمة واوريديس في الجحيم وطراودة تقاتل من اجل الحسناء. ان ثروة الرجل لن تنفع في شيء اذا لم يعطيها. لو لم تكن هناك المراة على من كانوا سينفقون اموالهم

ان قمع الرجل للمراة يجعلها تلجا الى المكر والخداع وليس هناك افضل من الخيانة لكسر المنظومة التي وضعها الرجال. لذا تجد الرجل في غيرة دائمة. لا يمكن امتلاك انسان فالانسان ولد حرا واي محاولة لامتلاكه هي محاولة فاشلة. ان مكر المراة دائما ينتصر على حذر الرجل. ان المراة كالماء الجاري غير ثابتة في جوهرها ولا احد يستطيع تغيير هذه الحقيقة الطبيعية. وكلما قمعها اكثر ستصبح منافقة اكثر

ان المراة الند للرجل خطرة بامكان الاميرة النائمة ان تستيقظ ولا تبتسم فالمراة حرة تبقى حرة لذا فهي مخيفة وعوض ان تكون نحلة مجتهدة وام حنون تتحول الى حشرة مفترسة سرعوفة راهبة عنكبوت وتتحول من امراة ترضع الرضيع الى حشرة تاكل الذكر وتتحول سندريلا الى غولة

المراة اما مباركة وهي الام المتفانية واما ملعونة وهي العشيقة انها تمثل الخير والشر في ان واحد. ان المراة الصالحة هي التي تضمد قلوب الرجال الذين تم اغواؤهم من طرف النساء الملعونات

كل الرجال متشابهون ومن السهل فهمهم لكن كل امراة مميزة لذا يصعب فهم النساء. ان الغموض الانثوي لا يخلق الاحلام ان الاحلام هي من تخلق الغموض الانثوي

This was surprisingly old-fashioned. It was published in 1949 but it just seems so out-dated and often - dare I say it? - wrong and irrelevant.

de Beauvoir's mission is to define woman and find out why the male is the "default" or "normal" sex, while the female sex is the other, the one who deviates from the norm. She does this by looking at biology, psychoanalysis, the history of women from the stone ages to today (or well, 1949) in France, USA, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, the Middle East...She looks at how women have been represented in literature, religion and myths, and she looks at the different stages of a woman's life, from childhood through puberty to middle age. She leaves no stone unturned, and yet it just seems... out-dated. But what is worse, de Beauvoir comes across as a bitter old hag who blames men that their lives are so easy, while women's are oh, so hard.

For instance, puberty is apparently easy for boys, while it leads to neurosis and mental break-downs in girls. Men love conquering the world and see women as silly, stupid puppets, while women hate their lot in life, hate their off-spring, hate their husbands and are filled with Freudian complexes. When de Beauvoir started analysing why some women become lesbians I had to laugh out loud (this is one of the places where the out-datedness shines through).

The introduction was great and thought-provoking, the first chapter boring, the next handful of chapters OK, and from there on I started skipping pages here and there because of all the repetitions. de Beauvoir's central message can be boiled down to this: Men achieve transcendence, women are doomed to immanence (and I cannot tell you how many times she wrote that during the 740 pages. Every third page had de B. blaming men their transcendence and regretting women their immanence from whence everything bad comes. Oh, the repetitions!) And also, much as I love literature, I hardly think quoting passages from D.H.Lawrence, Tolstoy or even my beloved Virginia Woolf constitutes hardcore truth or facts that can be used in scientific study, which is what Simone de B. does here.

Finally, it is hard to take someone seriously who claims that a) marriages are never founded on love but is merely a social institution meant to keep women in place, and b) "Women's fellow feeling rarely rises to genuine friendship" because women must fight individually to gain a place in the masculine world and so they are hostile towards other women.

Seriously.

Simone de Beauvoir has not aged well.

So after mulling over the book for a few days, I came to the realization that de Beauvoir tends to harp on the negative in this text. How lack of purpose makes women neurotic and affects their relationships with people, or the various ways men are/were outrageously mysogyinistic, etc, etc. But given the time period, a little bit of firebrand preaching is acceptable.

She does lend some words for more commonplace issues, but then the text is subdued and explanatory so that a reader's eyes will dialate at the shocking parts. Pretty clever.

Just to have my share on the argument: I think the text exaggerates a bit on the neuroses. Women who don't know better or who don't expect to hope for better, will take as much comfort as they can in their daily life. If they're not happy, they'll look for it in something, somewhere, anywhere. We're creative, we'll think of something. Not everyone ends up a crackpot. If this book proves anything, it proves that women are survivors who have endured nearly 4 thousand years of patriarchal exploitation and abuse.

But all said, I think this is a very valuable book for everyone to read. It's unique. It gives perspective on the half of society which is so often neglected in historical books. But it also has relevance today, particularly in regards to radical religions.

1949 người ta viết đấu tranh cho nữ quyền giải phóng phụ nữ để giới nữ đạt được tự do và trạng thái hướng thượng, 2024 mấy con quễ vì vài lượt like share mà lên content ao ước lấy chồng giàu để khỏi phải đi làm mà ăn sung mặc sướng. Haiz.

Second wave feminism bị chỉ trích vì chỉ tập trung vào white priviledged women và cuốn này cũng không ngoại lệ, một phần chắc do được viết từ góc nhìn khá chủ quan từ một phụ nữ có background chắc chắn, học đại học đàng hoàng. Sau cuốn này vẫn nên đọc thêm black feminism để xem tại sao Sojourner Truth phải cay đắng hỏi thế tao không phải phụ nữ hỏ?

Nhìn chung phân tích thú vị, góc nhìn khá mới mẻ. Phần 1 hay hơn phần Lived Experience, không có thời gian thì đọc phần 1 thôi cũng được imo.

4 stars that occasionally slipped to 3.5.

Overall, I found this to be a fascinating read.

I preferred volume I over volume II.

In volume II Simone de Beauvoir shared her views of what it means to be a woman from childhood to old age. There was a lot in this part that left me much to chew on but it also asserted a bleak picture of a woman trapped by her gender. Simone de Beauvoir gave many examples of this but I couldn’t always agree with how some seemed to be presented to stress this view; one was how women writers and artists could never make the same impression as their male counterparts because of how their gender imprisons them. But what about Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Browning, Jane Austen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Sonia Delaunay, Mary Cassatt, along with a lot of other women who have made their mark and are still known today ?? Not to mention all these women were living in a way more patriarch society than many of us and also had less to no access to education. What these women achieved is truly amazing.

I do not fault Simone de Beauvoir for this, as I imagine the society she lived in was not easy, and although this read does not paint always a rounded view it still hones in on the fact that women still can’t always freely choose what is right for them, and the equality that should exist between men and women is still lacking. This was published in 1949 but we have still not resolved the glass ceiling.

To seem, rather than to see, to appear, rather than to be: this, in a nutshell, has been woman's existential project thus far, according to de Beauvoir. Woman's historic destiny has prohibited her from developing into a self, understood as an autonomous ontic unit and agent. Instead, hers has been a merely instrumental existence defined entirely by her social roles. Never a maker of meaning, her success in life was defined to the extent that she was a suitable canvas for receiving others' meanings. This philosophical document is first of all, whatever else it might be, a sustained exploration of what it means to know, to be, to make, and ultimately to become a self. De Beauvoir starts from the perplexing situation in which she encounters her selfhood as somehow incomplete, and deeply problematic to herself. From this starting point, she can ask the million-dollar question of philosophy anew (and for our benefit): and namely, What does it really take to know a self, our self?

The first thing one should note about this book is that it was not originally intended as a political treatise; it wasn't made with the intention of shouting shrill slogans over a megaphone. Its aim is philosophical understanding of the human condition, not political expediency. As such, it eschews neat and tidy ideological divisions in its essence, and prefers to obliquely cast a searching light on the rich ambiguity of this queer dual nature we experience as sexual beings, and the implications this has for our sense of identity and our experience of meaning. De Beauvoir's work finds insight not in ideological formulations, but in the poignant and possibly unanswerable questions brought up by the tensions and dualities that seem intrinsic to the human condition, and that, perhaps, the ideologue in his/her search for the perfectly defined political dogma will always and of necessity gloss over. Her highest strength as a thinker attempting to venture in this gender minefield is that she guides herself therein less by a pursuit of ideological neatness, and more by an effort to attain a philosophical consciousness that can comprehend a perhaps intractable ambiguity.

The impulse to “Know thyself” is shown here to cut across all artificial barriers of specialization: de Beauvoir comes to herself through biological and historical research (hormones and hearth, glands and cosmetics), literary and mythological critique, with all of this capped by philosophical reflection. She shows how, in the effort to know our condition, philosophy can contain, inform and direct all partial disciplinary inquiries and perspectives (a modern and biographical take on the more traditional ideal of philosophy as a “queen of the sciences”).

When most people think of self-knowledge, they tend to conceive this process in purely subjectivist terms, in short, in terms of looking into material accessible only to the individual consciousness. Somewhere in the swarmy mess of impulses, affects, personal memories, belief commitments and gut feelings, you are told, you shall find Your Self. In contrast, I suspect she would sympathize with Mann's insight in The Magic Mountain: “A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.” As such, the work goes far beyond our culture's subjectivist approach to self-knowledge, in order to illuminate us to ourselves in our guise as participants in the unfolding of larger historical patterns.

Our lives are shaped by the accreted sediment of decisions made by past generations; within the domain circumscribed by those decisions, we exist. And some of the most fundamental decisions we make and inherit are decisions regarding meaning, or about how to shape our human experience. The semantic tools available for the shaping of self are our most critical inheritance from the past. Self-knowledge thus implies far more than insight into personal experience; it necessitates developing a historical consciousness of the inherited patterns of meaning-making that we have available for shaping our individual consciousness of self as it emerges at this given moment in time. So, to understand the female self as it has been historically constrained to develop, she targets her philosophical analysis to the representational tools - and their limits - that she has had available for her self-construction.

The problem of incompletely formulated selfhood that she starts from, de Beauvoir takes great pains to suggest, is not merely a piece of her idiosyncratic subjective biographical trajectory, but is, in a sense, our problem as well, to the extent that we are inheritors of a cultural heritage that does not afford us with the semantic tools that we need in order to lay claim to our experience through its shaping. It is in this effort of shaping that autonomy is slowly consolidated and that we become a genuine acting unity, or a full-fledged individual. A guiding thematic thread in her work is the exploration of how various cultural myths restrict woman to the contrary of autonomy, which she calls a state of “immanence.” This state of immanence is, for her, a stultifying state for a human existent to occupy, whose inward striving relentlessly impels her to a “transcendence” through autonomy.

The inherited semantic tools, far from helping woman shape her experience so as to converge on an autonomous perspective, instead restrict her to an "immanent" identity wholly defined by her contingent web of relations. She must ever define herself as daughter, as mother, as wife, as friend, as helper, as nurturer, as muse, as treacherous slut. The one position that is off-limits is her own, that is, her knowing of herself as irreducible existent and autonomous center of meaning. Her knowing of the one thing that no one can give to her, nor take away from her, is unavailable to her as so long as she operates through the inherited, self-alienating semantic paradigm. This centrifugal, purely contingent existence, de Beauvoir persuasively argues, is a humanly incomplete mode of being. As long as we only know to look outside ourselves for our psychological substance, we are lost to ourselves. We never fully come to be, as a self.

The trouble is that, for a woman coming to consciousness, the collective heritage she finds is invariably an inheritance of scars, caricatures, and symbolic deformations. A young woman, growing to consciousness of self, must find herself in relation to an inheritance of meanings predominantly shaped by her male Other, for whom she can only figure as an object that exists solely in relation to his aspirations and needs. Her fulfilment as an existent – as well as her fitness in the world - are both defined in instrumental terms, in relation to her capacity to fulfil his need for meaning. The pressing existential issue becomes, for her, to mould herself so as to become meaningful to him, whatever meaning he might need for her to embody.

It is a queer sort of destiny, to exist only insofar as one is an object for the perception and appreciation of another. De Beauvoir lingers on this strange self-alienation, say, in a woman's use of self-ornamentation, in which she reflexively comes to see herself from the outside in. The reductive mirror image becomes internalized, creating a profound sense of dissociation from herself. “The lived body,” as Merleau-Ponty calls it, becomes merely an object to contour just-so, for another's gaze. She can seldom ever just be; she must ever seem, through some kind of relentless necessity, even as in so doing she merely starves herself of her true sustenance. Such can only be provided by a richer relationship with her world, established intrinsically, through the taproot of her autonomy.

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages,” Woolf aptly put it, and de Beauvoir concurs: others' gazes determine to a very profound extent the shape of our destinies as women. There are so many painfully surgical descriptions here of the growing woman's developmental history as she finds herself sliced up, bit by bit, by others' glances, and hedged into what becomes “her place”: “The young girl feels that her body is getting away from her. (...) On the street men follow her with their eyes and comment on her anatomy. She would like to be invisible; it frightens her to become flesh and to show flesh.” Thus, a growing woman learns that she, as an embodied being, is not just a locus for meaning-making, but, even more urgently for her survival and flourishing in the world, is an object-for-others. She must continually extrude herself from Herself, and shape herself as an object of perception and evaluation for the Other.

The goal of life is for her not learning to see, but managing how others see her; it is not coming to realization, but being instrumental to others'. As she matures, woman is progressively constrained to inhabit her subject-stance only partially, to the extent that meanings gleaned from the Other's, often alienating perspective afford her indirect access to her self. She must ever seek herself through his eyes. As such, she is doomed to encounter herself only as image. In phenomenological parlance, her stance is self-objectifying, never fully subjective.

De Beauvoir's extensive analysis here of how background mythical constructs of Nature regulate the alternative ways women are perceived is brilliant. Through the identification of woman as an instrument of nature, she acquires the characteristics – positive or negative – ascribed to Nature itself. This makes some psychological sense. Aside from our own bodies, nature comes closest to our minds in our confrontation with the other sex. The other sex is nature to us, nature come terrifyingly/ecstatically close... and yet, nature that remains ungraspably other and alien to our consciousness. The problem here, is of course, that it is only the male that is the center of perspective; the female is the “absolute other,” and is thus -identified- with pure (inhuman) nature. She is either the nurturant mother “nature,” the all-encompassing nurturant principle of sympathy, or else, nature as the beast that ensnares merely to devour.

She thus finds herself in a rather impossible position, internalizing a tradition of self-alienating representations made of her, which supposedly exhaust her nature, while nonetheless being radically alien to this tradition in the innermost truth of her experience, for which she has inherited few clear words that she can make entirely her own, few artistically embodied meanings, and almost no usable philosophical formulations. What self can she scrounge up out of such scattered fragments?

This dissociation from lived experience and personal meaning-making is a big price to pay for social survival. And if Mary Pipher is correct in Reviving Ophelia, this same fate of premature developmental arrest due to internalizing a self-alienating perspective still awaits young girls today. The choice is grim: a girl must choose between love and belonging, on the one hand, and full self-development, on the other. The situation's rigged such that she often cannot have both. As Pipher ruefully notes, when questioned, people define “feminine development” and full “adult development” in antithetical terms. Thus, to be a properly “feminine” woman, as per our cultural norms, is to be a psychologically disabled adult, incapable of agency or of self-directed logical judgment. In short, she must choose between the demands of her relational self and those of her autonomous self, between alienation and amputation.

The tension created by attempting to inhabit a subject stance only through self-alienating representational tools is only part of the conflict de Beauvoir finds in a woman's coming-to-consciousness. A further tension is added by the very duality of human, sexual nature, which introduces an additional, and deeply ambiguous constraint through the relational mutuality of the sexes.

De Beauvoir finds, “with a kind of surprise” - and it seems to me also (understandable) dismay - that she is first and foremost a woman. Yet am I first a woman when I close my eyes and think? Is our sexuality really the primal reality of our conscious experience?

When I sit down and reflect, and there's nobody in the room, I seem to myself to be just a good ole thinking... thing... A light flickering in the darkness. I seem to myself indivisible, the center of my phenomenal experience, a sort of singularity. Wittgenstein seems to have got it better than de Beauvoir: “The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.” I become a aware of my sexuality only when confronted by another, and shoved back into being just a partial being, one item of the duality of human nature – a woman. Does Simone de Beauvoir really mean to say that walking in the forest, alone, with only the trees for her companions, she really feels the word “woman” has any meaning when applied to her conscious experience?

Well, no, as she describes those rare moments in nature when one fully inhabits oneself as a center of meaning-making consciousness, uncircumscribed by any Other's gaze. From her text I glean that sexuality is a kind of polarization we undergo when mingled with others; it is the form of our being-in-relation. We get pushed into one pole to complement the encountered other and to balance out the interaction. There is the same sort of difference here as between the dark expansiveness that Woolf's Mrs Ramsay (“To the Lighthouse”) encounters in herself when she rests contained in her unreachable solitude, on the one hand, and her gushy all-nurturing effusiveness when circumscribed within her role as mother/wife/society pillar, on the other.

This implies a strange double meaning for her foundational self-recognition as a woman: she is, simultaneously, one part of the sexually dual form human nature manifests, and an autonomous, irreducible unity in her own right. She is fundamentally free, yet also fundamentally a self emerging and constructing itself in relation to an other. This brings me to the central difficulty I have with her argument. The former is in keeping with her Existentialist commitments: absolutely autonomous, free choice is the stuff of human life.The latter suggests a teleological ordering of the sexes into a structure of essential relatedness and interdependence. The former divides the world into sovereign individuals, each initiating contractual relations through the sheer force of personal choice unmotivated by any natural impulse to relate; the latter makes of us community animals, as both sexes are partial beings, each requiring union with the other for its completion.

The whole drama of this conflict comes out in sharp relief in her description of the queer metamorphosis of selfhood that is motherhood. "Pregnancy is above all a drama that is acted out within the woman herself. She feels it as at once an enrichment and an injury; the fetus is 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. (...) 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." Motherhood is just such a time when one's usual notion of autonomous, individual selfhood is terrifyingly overthrown. At such a time, a woman becomes swamped by immanence, she feels herself to be a mere "passive instrument" of life. She is completely absorbed into the relational function of her subjectivity.

Here, in motherhood, de Beauvoir comes in headlong collision with the critical problematic of female identity, and its seemingly intractable struggle to preserve a sense of independent self that survives the pressures of impinging relationships, for motherhood is the ultimate of all impingements. Your sense of self before and after cannot remain the same. The birth of my two children, at least, was experienced as a crisis moment in which I myself was tasked to a rebirth, a movement from independent to interdependent selfhood.

How DO you reconcile these two? Well, she doesn't. It seems to me that she gives perfect expression to the whole problem of our dual nature (both uncompromisingly autonomous and intrinsically relational), without truly recognizing it as a problem, never mind venturing a solution. Learning to simultaneously honour the self in its autonomy and in its full capacity for self-giving relationship, or to reconcile, in short, the seemingly conflicting demands of self-actualization and relational self-transcendence, would bring greater harmony to a society deeply divided between these two currently conflicting trajectories.

A lot of the meaning of "woman" and "man," she says, was written over and distorted by a great deal of symbolic mechanisms gone wrong and taking on a life of their own, thereby blocking the spontaneous expression of our true sexual nature. "When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form." Just so, the full realization of one element of the duality empowers the other to find his true form, in a relation that now manifests its true form for the first time.

What if we have never really spoken truly about ourselves, about our experience, and about the true nature of our relations? This thought haunts much of her work, and I respect that. Thus, she very profoundly partakes of the modern project to re-define the fundamentals of the human condition, or, at least, to re-explore, once more, what seemed to be a foreclosed issue. Her philosophical work is a clearing ground for accreted symbolic clutter that lives on only by a kind of inertia and distorts all that is seen and felt, thereby blocking out deeper reserves of meaning.

It is for us to ponder the means to a larger perspective that can contain the intractable ambiguities that she has so faithfully recorded for us here. Her work provides a map that lays out what it takes to genuinely know – and fully become - our own selves. Her unique historico-philosophical approach to self-knowledge encourages us to know our lives by placing our most intimate personal experience in the context of the broadest perspective attainable at our historic moment. Like all great thinkers who had anything of value to teach about self-knowledge, de Beauvoir holds before us the image of a great tree. In order to understand our particular twig, we must recover a map of the larger tree that holds us in place. The meanings that shape us and limit us can be seen truly only in this perspective of historical depth. This map is the surest ground on which we can lay out our personal stories.

الجنس الآخر ـ سيمون دي بوفوار


من خلال ما سطرت الكاتبة أستطيع أن أجزم أنها عانت في طفولتها بل في جميع مراحل حياتها من اضطهاد الرجل لها، لذلك سعت إلى نشر الحركة النسوية ضدّ الرجال.

فلو خُلقت الكاتبة في بيئة غير البيئة التي نشأت فيها لَرُبَّمَا أحبّت الرجل ـ ذاك الذي هاجمتهُ الكاتبة بشدّة في كتابها وأنزلت عليه كلّ المآسي التي تواجهها المرأة في جميع مراحل حياتها منذ ولادتها حتى مماتها. وكأنّ الرجل هو من خلقها وكوّنها بهذه الصورة وهذه النشأة. وكأن الرجل هو المسؤول الأوحد في كلّ ما تمر به الأنثى من تغيرات فيزيولوجية وبيولوجية ونفسية معقدة خلال مراحل وسنين حياتها.

تقول الكاتبة: “إن المرأة العادية ذات الميول الحيوانية لا تشعر بالإهانة من جراء الجماع، على عكس المرأة المثقفة المفكرة التي تحتج عليه، لأنها واثقة من نفسها وذات طبع نضالي”.

هل أصبح الجماع بين الرجل والمرأة شيء مُهين للمرأة وحيواني، بينما السِّحَاق الذي تؤيده الكاتبة بشدّة في الكتاب تعتبره شيء طبيعي؟! حيثُ تقول الكاتبة “إن الرجل يعيش في عالم مليء بالنعومة والرقة في عالم المرأة، بينما تتيه المرأة على غير هدى في عالم الذكور الخشن القاسي. إن يديها لتحنّ إلى ضم الجسد الناعم واللحم الغض”.!

برأي ما هو شاذ وخارج عن الفطرة هو انجذاب المرأة نحو المرأة وكذلك انجذاب الرجل نحو الرجل فهذا ما يدعو للتفكر وما يدعو للغوص في معرفة سبب هذا الانجذاب الغير فطري!

إذا لم تُقنّن الحُرية تحت ضوابط وقوانين وشرع لأصبح بني البشر مثل الحيوانات، لا؛ بل الحيوان يقترف أن يمارس التزاوج مع بني جنسهِ أي الذكر مع الذكر والأنثى مع الأنثى مع عدا القردة.!

أناصر بشدّة ما رمت إليه الكاتبة في توعية المرأة وتعليمها، وبأنّ عليها أن تتحرّر من تبعية الرجل وتسلّطه، وهذا لن يحصل إلا إذا ارتقت بالعلم والفكر ونفت عنها الجهل. بل أضيف أن المرأة لو اكتفت بحظّها المادي من الحياة، لكانت أسعد مخلوقة. ولكن بما أنها تسعى دائمًا وراء من يلبي رغباتها ويُشبع نزواتها ماديًا، فهي ستظل أَمَة لِشَرّ نفسها ثم لِشَرّ من يموّلها بالمادة.

أؤيد بعض ما جاء في الكتاب ولا أؤيد أشياء أخرى وردت فيه، مثل استشهادها بقول مارو: “إن الفرق بين النساء اللواتي يبعن أنفسهن عن طريق الدعارة والبغاء، وبين اللواتي يبعن أنفسهن بواسطة الزواج، ينحصر في ثمن ومدة عقد البيع”.! مقارنة عقيمة وفي غير محلها إذ هناك فرق كبير بين الزواج الشرعي وبين البغاء.

من ناحية المساواة في الأجور، فقد أصابت الكاتبة، فالمرأة إلى يومنا هذا لم تنال حقّها الوافي من الأجر مقارنةً بالرجل. فحقّها مهضوم من قبل من شرّع القوانين وسنّها. فالتمييز مازال موجوداً بحكم هيمنة من بيده الأمر والنهي الرجل. ولكن الرجل قد سلب المساواة أيضًا من أخيه الرجل عندما عندما احتلّ وسجن وعذّب وقتل وشرّد كل مناوئ له. عندما أشعل الفتن والحروب وعندما جيّش الجيوش للقتال واحتلال دول أخرى فأهلك الحرث والنسل. وعندما حقّر العامل البسيط وسلبهُ قوت يومهِ وعندما لم ينصف ذوي المهارات والعقول في منحهم فرص للنبوغ والتميّز غيرةً وحسدًا.


تقول الكاتبة:” إن ضعف المرأة لا يعود إلى أسباب فطرية في طبيعتها، وإنما إلى حالتها العامة التي يفرضها عليها المجتمع منذ حداثتها حتى أواخر أيامها”.

كلنا يعلم بأن المرأة تستطيع أن تتحمل أعباء الحياة أكثر من الرجل، فباستطاعتها أن تنجب، وأن تعول أسرة دون رجل، وأن تهتم بدراسة أولادها وترعى شؤون بيتها المنزلية في آنٍ واحد. ولكنها لا تستطيع أن تمارس بعض الأعمال الشاقة كالرجال، مثل حمل الأشياء الثقيلة، ممارسة البناء ونقل الأحجار، ممارسة اَلنِّجَارَة وَالسِّبَاكَة، التعلق على الدرج لفترة طويلة لممارسة النقش والدهان في البيوت والعمارات، تصفية الزجاج في العمارات الشاهقة، قيادة المركبات الثقيلة مثل نقل البضائع والمواد الخام من دولة لأخرى إلخ إلخ.. وهناك أعمال لا يستطيع الرجل ممارستها مثل الحمل والإنجاب والإرضاع، خلاصة القول إن كُلّ مُيسّر لما خُلق، فلدى الرجل قدرات لا تستطيع الأنثى أن توازيه، وكذلك للأنثى قدرات لا يستطيع الرجل أن يباريها فيه.

إن قلب معادلة الخالق في خلقهِ والقول بأنّ الرجل يريد المرأة فقط للمتعة والإنجاب ليس صحيحًا. فالمرأة تُخلق وفي كيانها أنثى رقيقة تتوق للحُب والأمومة. وما انجذابها نحو الرجل إلّا شيء فطري وليس بسبب التربية. كما هو أيضًا بالنسبة للرجل ما انجذابه نحو الأنثى إلّا بالفطرة وليس بسبب التربية.

محاولة الكاتبة الإجابة على السؤال:” لماذا تكون المرأة الجنس الآخر؟” هل استطاعت الكاتبة أن تفنّد الجواب بشكل حيادي وعقلاني ومنطقي؟

Most people consider The Second Sex to be the Feminist 'Bible'. While Beauvoir's text is certainly a seminal text in feminism — both in terms of feminist theory and the larger movement for emancipation — it has some of the same flaws as its theological counterpart(s).

Beauvoir starts her nearly-800-pages-long existential project for the woman's condition with a hugely impressive Introduction highlighting some of the principal arguments of the feminist movement and why it exists. Going forth, she divides The Second Sex into two books, the first of which, entitled 'Facts and Myths', undertakes meticulous research in looking at and seeking to counter male arguments about women through biology; psychology; historical materialism; history; mythology; and literature. Book II, 'Woman's Life Today', traces the various phases and conditions of women throughout their development, debunking the myth of the "eternal feminine" and arguing about the development of this feminine through various factors in lived reality and conditioning that thwart women into alterity instead of transcendence. She looks at the various roles the adult bourgeois woman performs, studies some ways in which they reinforce their own dependency, and looks at the barriers to real equality the independent woman in the 1940s continues to face.

Much of Beauvoir's arguments hold currency today in that they deal with issues that are as yet prevalent. Her ideas about education/upbringing and feminine narcissism as well as those regarding birth control and marriage are those that we still discuss in terms of feminist perspective today. Particularly striking are her statements about some fundamentals of women's oppression — that as victims of class and other male institutions they are unable to form a coherent group of their very own and representing their own interests, despite comprising roughly half of all human population.

However, just like many revered theological texts such as the Bible, a good chunk of The Second Sex emerges through the test of time as horribly dated; some of it may even be considered sexist when looked at from the lens of our times. One obvious limitation lies in the sources available for the author to refer to and infer from: in the fields of biology and psychology; and especially psychoanalysis; most of the studies Beauvoir interacts with in writing this book have since then been disproven and discarded, and moreover also suffer from the subjective biases of the men who conducted and recorded them. Moreover, while Beauvoir often refutes and counters the affirmations of these studies, she also bases some of her own suppositions on them. Thus, many of her arguments — particularly those about women's pain and 'imagined' diseases and women's behaviours in marriage and old age — end up perpetuating the same masculinist assumptions and attitudes they collectively seek to fight against. Similarly, while she lays ground for the performativity of gender that Judith Butler later explores in her own work on queer theory; Beauvoir takes a rather ambiguous stance on homosexuality, asserting lesbianism as a matter of choice but not quite, a confused and confusing conundrum.

In fact, many errenous assertions in The Second Sex, such as its stance on lesbianism, result from the restrictions of her theoretical framework (namely that of Existentialism). Beauvoir is also guilty, as many women of her time, of overlooking intersectionality: her work is modelled on women of her own kind, and yet she generalises these specific behaviours onto all of womankind. While she does include examples from the Orient, she only does so to fit her own thesis and does not situate them in a proper context. Thus, perspectives from women belonging to the working class and women of colour are absent in her work, and the actualities and values of the women she constructs throughout the text difficult to ascribe. It is also true that Beauvoir's writing here is prone to taking to the inaccessible flourishes of the ivory towers of academese, and one often finds her work difficult to engage with and to sustain interest in. I found myself skimming over at least some of her ideas — perhaps only because my position in time means that I know better, but also out of the sheer tedium of reading through some things. I guess that as a woman writing at her time, Beauvoir had to really justify her assertions, but at some points she seems to have done it at the cost of lucidity.

Nevertheless, The Second Sex raises some of the most important and undeniably cogent points regarding the subjection and emancipation of women, as well as about human nature itself. The book lays essential groundwork for what we learn and build on as feminists today, and even its mistakes allow us the space for greater assertion and amendment. It remains, despite its flaws, an essential read.

As a feminist, it's been recommended to me for years that I read Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book, The Second Sex. As a regular person, though, I have always felt like it "wasn't the right time" to read it.

What does that even mean?

As someone living as "the second sex" myself, there is no excuse for this. I was lazy, bottom line. It's a big book, and while big books do not normally frighten me, I was worried I wouldn't be smart enough for Simone de Beauvoir. She was, from what I understand, a highly intelligent and talented existentialist writer, and here I am practically picking my nose while I decide what kind of cereal I want to eat for dinner tonight. I mean, I'm not the dimmest light in the pack, but I'm also not the brightest. I'm just regular.

But as I am pushing 40, it's been on my mind that I should really read this book. There's probably never the right time, maybe the time is right now. We read this as a group here on GR, and I'm afraid to say I sort of disappeared during any discussion of it because life got in my way, but I persevered anyway because I was finally ready to commit to Simone.

And what a commitment it was.

I read Betty Friedan's classic The Feminine Mystique a few years back and what was surprising to me about that book was that it read so easily and smoothly. I think for that reason alone Friedan may have reached more of her audience than Beauvoir did, though this does not automatically mean we should be ignoring Beauvoir. Quite the opposite, really.

The book is large, yes. And it is dense, yes. Beauvoir insists her readers give a bit of themselves in order to read this book, I think. She covers a lot of ground in this book, more than Friedan, though the comparison is unfair since they achieved different things with their writing and came at it from slightly different angles.

Beauvoir's approach covers biology, philosophy, religion, history, you name it. There's very few stones that Beauvoir did not turn in the process of writing this book. She begins with the science of gender and sexuality, and then she walks the reader through the entirety of a woman's life, from her young days to maturity to old age. Beauvoir was 41 when this book was published. Just how long did it take her to write this? Because I'm 38 and she was probably writing this at that age (based on the size and the amount of research she did), and this makes me feel like a colossal failure.

The information here may seem dated to a reader today. There's also so much information that it's easy to glaze over at times. Beauvoir was a French writer, and her lack of love for the Americans is evident in several places in sometimes subtle (other times not so subtle) ways. It's amusing to look back at it now, but the point is she wasn't even wrong. She may have written things in a condescending manner, but she still hit the nail on the head.

Much of her information is still relevant today. There was a section I especially recall in which she talks about abortion, a topic discussed openly way less often back in 1949, and she writes about it in a very matter-of-fact manner. The part that I especially love is that she pointed out how so many people want to prevent abortions, and they encourage many to keep their child. And then, once the woman carries the baby for the greater part of a year, and gives birth to this thing, those same people who encouraged her to keep the baby are suddenly nowhere to be found to help ensure that she and the baby receive all the financial and other support that they need. This is a still a topic of debate today, how conservatives want to tell women what to do with their bodies with lots of promises to "help", and then when the time comes they shrug and say "Not my problem."

I'm totally paraphrasing here. Beauvoir was much too classy to write "Not my problem."

I do recommend this book to, well, anyone who can manage to get through it. It's not the easiest book to read because it just seems too boring. Well, I'm sorry that a woman's life is boring to you. Beauvoir's point was (and should still be) that women are here, we are the other part of the population, and we have a history and a voice of our own.

یکی از مهمترین دلایلی که جامعه‌ای مردسالار رو به مقابله با استقلال و برابری خواهی زنان برمی‌انگیزه، هراسِ از دست رفتن زنانگی، ملاحت و جاذبه جنسی زن هستش. اونها از شبیه شدن زنها و مردها به هم وحشت دارن و در حقیقت برابری خواهی رو معادل شبیه‌شدن قرار میدن. مردها میترسن زنها به استقلال جنسی و مالکیت تن دست پیدا کنن، چون تصور میکنن در این صورت عشرتشون کم و دست‌یابی به لذت دشوار میشه. اونها میترسن در این عرصه از عرش حاکمیت کنترل تن و میل جنسی زنها پایین بیان چون میخوان کنترل همه جانبه رابطه جنسی با خودشون باشه . هرگونه اختیار و آزادی زنها اونها رو به هراس میندازه، بطوریکه اغلب کل این میل و گرایشها رو در زن انکار میکنن.
........
در بحثی که با" ف "درباره روشهای جلوگیری از بارداری داشتیم، صحبت به قرصهای ضد بارداری مردانه و عدم استقبالش از طرف جامعه کشید. و دیدیم حتی توی ویکی پدیا هم درباره مهمترین نگرانی مصرف این قرصها به عوارضی نظیر کم شدن میل جنسی اقایون اشاره شده . در حالیکه انواع قرصها، آمپولها و ابزار خارجی مورد استفاده خانمها قرار میگیره و کمترین نگرانی که درموردش صحبت میشه همین تاثیرش بر روی میزان میل جنسی هستش. تا این حد یعنی ://
.......
درباره کتاب:
باید بگم کتاب جالبیه اما مطلب جدیدی برای من نداشت . با توجه به حجم اطلاعات و سرعت بالا رفتن آگاهی در زمینه مسائل زنان در سالهای اخیر، فکر میکنم متن کتاب قدیمی شده باشه. قطعا در گذشته کتاب بسیار آگاهی بخشی بوده ، بعضی مطالب هنوزم جذابن، ولی بیشتر مطالب رو میدونستم و از طریق پیج های اینستاگرام و صفحات فمنیستی باهاشون اشنا شده بودم .
داستانهای زندگی شخصی افراد و تعریف کردن خاطرات هم برام کسل کننده بودن حقیقتش و دوستشون نداشتم.
چیزی هم که روی اعصابم بود ،استفاده از واژه "همجنسباز" به جای "همجنسگرا" بود.
تصمیم دارم دنبال کتابهای جدیدتر درباره زنان و فمنیسم باشم و اطلاعات به روز بدست بیارم حتمن :)
........
این ریویوو رو دوباره خوندم و حسرت روزهایی رو خوردم که بحثهای خوبی با هم میکردیم و چقدر از هم یادمیگرفتیم

Why I never manage to find the right edition of the book I'm reading on Goodreads baffles me.
Twice I've read Beauvoir in French. Mine is an old treasured edition, which I didn't find listed here. So, I set to read it again in English. It would be quite weird to write the review in English and quote Beauvoir in French...

Alors, on y va!

n  Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis – in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf.n

This review was due for a few weeks because I have a passion and a non-orthodox view of Beauvoir's ideas. (Or maybe I have a full comprehension of her ideas and that still surprises me. I'm always wondering and wool-gathering about philosophical concepts).

Raised in a very traditional Portuguese and Italian family, the first time I claimed I loved Beauvoir's works, there was an uproar in my house. I was astonished: both my grandmothers worked as teachers, my mother was (is) a lawyer and I was already in Law School... So, why was all that commotion about?
Oh! Beauvoir was one of those who threw their bras in the bonfires and was not feminine; had weird relationships, was an atheist, talked about coitus and penis, so on and so forth... Being young then, I just shrugged inward and as a good girl let the oldest and wisest lecture me, but with a strike of defiance already blazing in my veins, I hummed a litany in my mind: Your words are not compatible with your behaviours and for sure I'll not be submissive to anyone.

What I didn't perceive then, and I can see clearer now is that at the time Le Deusième Sexe was written, women, specially those raised in Christianity, were still regarded as appendices of men -

And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
in the Bible

And in the middle the authoritarian Brazilian regimen of the 80's, independent women yet saw themselves as utterly dependable and submissive to their strong, rich (or not), all-so-powerful-male husbands.

I don't particularly like this quote, but as we are not talking about domestic violence here, this is a truth that cannot be denied:

It must be admitted that the males find in woman more complicity than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed.

Even more surprising to me was that all the women in my family truly believed that, to be feminine and agreeable, they had to be submissive to their husbands' whims, even though they had their own professions, jobs, opinions and wealth.
Their existences were strictly linked to their husbands and children, and that was a powerful leash they would not release. Their family came first. Their husbands were the head of the family, the chiefs, the ones who gave the last word. And they, the women, the wives, the mothers, were the keeper of the key to that golden cage, which they secretly entrusted in their souls.

Well, that was in the 80's; but I can fairly say that nowadays there are many that still live in that caveman style. And, to my chagrin, I have been seeing a backward movement, done by a few more people - or by a lot more? - who, by sheer ignorance, are willing to return to the past dominant-submissive paternalist regimen.
I questioned myself: Will this dreadful movement spread?
That is why I choose to re-read 'The Second Sex' a third time (and I'll will probably revisit it in a decade or so).

IMHO, her most famous quote:

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

, highlights she has never denied that women are women from the very beginning, that we are born females, physiological different from males, who when grown will become the stronger, bigger Tarzan stereotypes because girls and boys are taught differently on how to behave;
And in their Tarzan mask or not, men are no less different from their females or males companions because strength is not an issue anymore, but individuality is.
So, I can say myself that: Men are not only born men, but raised as one, confirming themselves as Tarzans.
Also, what she wants to emphasise with the quote above is that us, society, have to learn to see oneself as ONE first, to then appreciate the other ONE, with all their oddities and similarities and therefore choose, or not. Freedom to be.

For me, it's exactly in this point where resides the power of Beauvoir's work: existentialism.

TO BE A WOMAN, to become a woman, is to accept and LEARN the full capacity of what a woman has intrinsically in her being, not denying weaknesses, not diminishing strengths, and, especially, not trying to emulate man.
The duality of weakness and strength varies in each and every one of us, human beings, creating a beautiful diversity that allows us to choose, match and collaborate to fulfil whatever another ONE is in need, and as a team, walk together in the path of life.

I am a woman; I don't have the same strength as another man of my size and age has, but I have other capacities that equal or maybe even excel his; And then no man can gestate, give birth or feed an infant, and that doesn't diminishes my rights - or his rights - as a human being - much on the opposite, I have different rights because of my womanly differences. (Thank God!!)
But if I had been born a man, stronger, quicker and taller and could not find a woman that would stand by me, to join forces with me, what would I be? A nothingness, a waste, because One doesn't exist without the Look of another One.

Women were, are and, will always be alike to men, Others too, which populated this world, because

To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality.

In a splendid and easy analysis - sometimes even in an odd hilarious way, as Beauvoir quotes absurdities stated by great philosophers, zoologists and others scientists, concerning ovules, spermatozoids and copulation - she wanders through and plunges deep in biology, physiology, psychoanalysis, history and politics, to question, and question again n  whyn is such the inferior position of women in society.
She doesn't pretend to have all the answers, although she is quite opinionated.
What she wants and does magnificently is to point and destroy so many stereotypes that had been firmly entrusted in the feminine and masculine beliefs and behaviours, showing how far those concepts drove women and men apart, when the road should have united them.

I particularly like this passage:

All these dissertations [about psychophysiological parallelism and existence of a natural hierarchy] which mingle a vague naturalism with a still more vague ethics or aesthetics are pure verbiage. It is only in a human perspective that we can compare the female and the male of the human species. But man is defined as a being who is not fixed, who makes himself what he is. As Merleau-Ponty very justly puts it, man is not a natural species: he is a historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with man; that is to say, her possibilities should be defined.
What gives rise to much of the debate is the tendency to reduce her to what she has been, to what she is today, in raising the question of her capabilities; for the fact is that capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realised – but the fact is also that when we have to do with a being whose nature is transcendent action, we can never close the books.

Furthermore, it's baffling the easiness with which Beauvoir dismantles and pushes away psychoanalysis notions (especially Freud's and Adler's) - not disregarding their scientific contributions and insights - of the penis as a symbol of power and dominance, by simply demonstrating that Freud and Adler were not only males, partial judges not entirely cognisant of the feminine psyche, but also lacking in never having used the feminine libido as a starting point, always having as their initial assumption the masculine libido. Besides, it doesn't escapes her Freud's confessed ignorance of the origin of male supremacy.
In addition, there was an already artificial stablished situation; economical and social structure, that connected individuals of identical conditions of society, therefore setting a predeterminate behaviour, which could only be viewed and understood on its historical circumstances.
Analysing their theories - and others - in reference to their time and, reinforcing that psychoanalysis dealt with the concept of the 'collective unconscious' and that it sees the drama of the individual unfolding within oneself, which thus removes the possibility of freedom, of choice, Beauvoir refutes their concepts as the psycho drama often and only happens because of the relationships, that are only possible when One is in contact with the other Ones around oneself and the world;

In the materialism chapter, or rather on her analysis of government politics, she confronts Engels, Marx, socialism, totalitarian and authoritative regimens, revealing their tricks to revive with force the paternalistic notions and the subaltern position of women in their society.
One by one, she rips away the veils, and unclothed, none are able to explain or justify their means, such is their simplicity of thought.
As she had done with psychoanalysis, she bares all the theses from their false premises, which turned technology and sexuality in reasons to make women the other, the subject.
In her hands, they are just mysterious abstractions, unless they are fully integrated with the individual and Its position in society. No technology, no sexuality are valuable to define or justify the existence of women as an object of subjugation, a slave to men's domination.

The main point here is: women are women and men are men and, as such, they exist as peculiar individuals - or rather, they should;
AND MORE, imho, Beauvoir doesn't make the distinction based on sex or on gender, but in ethics, ideas, and behaviour.
That is what I unconsciously meant when I reviewed a book about gender gap a few months ago.
We are not genders;
We are not religions;
We are not colours.
We are all different human beings, living in the same space and we should respect the One as the other One should respect us.
And to complete the though, if the One doesn't show us Its respect, be One a man or a woman, we don't need to resort to unbounded violence or indignant, criminal behaviours to be heard or seen. Many successful revolutions were made in peace and with calm, well-spoken words.

This and much more make this work of art so special and such a must read. It was brilliantly written by a woman, who succeeded by her own merits, and stood her ground not being a subject, but as One, seeing herself not only as a woman, but as a conscious being, deserving respect of society, her pair, and her peers.

It's a landmark, that states that if we, as society, don't respect ourselves there will never be true respect neither for men, nor for women, because one is the half of the other.

There is no value in the subdued look of a defeated or crushed other;
There is no real complicity between a couple when one is controlled by power, force or fear of the controller.
There is no authenticity in a subjugated behaviour of an oppressed;
And there is no dignity to an unfair conquerer; a liar tyrant or an aggressive dominator.
If we, as society, become more conscious of our differences, we will understand that we are all Ones and at the same time Others.

Her conclusion, which I'll not spoil because it should be read, re-read and read again, it's fabulous and astonishing, because even though this text was written in 1949, it still applies to too many situations women still find themselves in the so-called contemporary and enlightened societies. It goes without saying that in some places of this round world some women have not even reached the first stage of knowledge or freedom of thinking of such subjects. Unfortunately.

As I don't pretend to have or propose answers to such a difficult subject that have been discussed for others much more capable than myself, I end this review bowing to Beauvoir's wiseness - and why not say, dream - hoping it will become true - and soon, and make hers my words:

n  it is not as single individuals that human beings are to be defined in the first place; men and women have never stood opposed to each other in single combat; the couple is an original Mitsein, a basic combination; and as such it always appears as a permanent or temporary element in a large collectivity.n

P.S. - In my rustic German, I would translate Mitsein as communion. If anyone knows a better translation, please correct me.