Exploring Simone de Beauvoir's Feminist Philosophy

Hello, welcome. This is Understanding Existentialism, and my name is Mark Thorsby. In this video, we're going to be talking a little bit, unfortunately, just a little bit about Simone de Beauvoir's really essential and important text, The Second Sex. And we're going to see that this is an, Simone de Beauvoir was an important existentialist philosopher who wrote on existentialist ethics, but importantly, she also wrote on women's liberation. And we're going to be looking at some of the things she has to say. regarding the situation of women both in her day and I would say in our day and how it relates importantly or to existentialism or maybe I should say how an existentialist understands that situation. So let's jump into it. Let me start off with just a couple brief remarks about her biography. She lived from 1908 to 1986. Some of the three key works of hers if you're interested is going to be The Ethics of Ambiguity, You'll recall from our previous series that Jean-Paul Sartre, at the end of Being and Nothingness, predicted that the next book would be on ethics. He never wrote that, but Simone de Beauvoir did in 1947. And two years later, in 1949, the text we're going to be discussing today, The Second Sex, was published. And then much later, in 1970, she also wrote The Coming of Age, as well as many other texts. And she's a very important and prominent existentialist philosopher from the 20th century. She was born in Paris in 1908, originally raised as Catholic, but eventually became a resolute atheist. She also studied at the Sorbonne, which was a difficult feat at her time as a woman. In 1928, she began studying there. Her thesis in 1929 was on the philosopher Leibniz. Interestingly enough, she was the youngest person, at least up to that point, to have passed the philosophy aggregation, which is a test. that was used to determine whether or not you could teach philosophy at the Sorbonne and elsewhere. She's very famous for having a love affair with Sartre and a lifelong friendship and love affair with Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre, and they were something of the original power couple in existentialism, if you will, but her work stands on its own. She worked closely with both Sartre, of course, I already mentioned that, but also Merleau-Ponty. She helped organize a French resistance group in 1941 against the Nazis. She also helped form, along with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, a journal called Modern Times. At least that's the English title. She also helped them establish a political party in 1948. So she's extremely political, as each of these thinkers were. She actually spent a good amount of time with Sartre in Russia in 1955. And she was also the founder and president of France's League of Women's Rights, which she founded in 1974. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1975. And then she died six years after Sartre, but ended up being buried in the same grave as him in 1986. So those two thinkers really... are, as it were, closely related both in their philosophy, but also privately and personally and politically. So I would put it this way. If we're looking at Sartre's philosophy of being and nothingness, her work in The Ethics of Ambiguity and the Second Sex is essentially the next chapter. So from what we're looking at this year, we're kind of stepping backwards, because we're going to also be linking this with a later video. on Judith Butler and the question of gender. So we're trying to raise and think about some of the issues that are more prominent for people today. So let's jump into it. So, and by the way, I should mention, I'm just using excerpts again. I've been using the same book I've been using throughout, which is the Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy after Kant, the Interpretive Tradition. And so I'm just following along with the excerpts they've given. We're not looking at the entire book, unfortunately. Most of the remarks today will be focused on the introduction. And in fact the very, that's where we're going to start is the introduction. And then we'll talk, we'll get into a little bit of chapter three. So volume one, the first section here is called facts and myths. And this is the introduction. In fact, the second sex opens up with these words. She writes, I hesitated a long time before writing a book on women. The subject is irritating, especially for women. And it's not new. And what is a woman is the... principle question she begins with and i would say in many ways the introduction is a way of kind of slowly working through back and forth in terms of what it means to be a woman and how we should understand that now it's helpful to think in terms of the existentialist background that she's bringing to bear here and think here about Existentialism being the idea that existence precedes essence. So how a woman lives or exists is fundamental for the existentialist in terms of what the essence of a woman is. So to be clear from the very beginning what she's not going to be doing is trying to find some perfect ideal formula for what a woman is. It can't be that way as an existentialist. But let's see where she takes us. She writes, speaking of certain women the experts proclaim they are not women. even though they have a uterus like the others. And she's referring here to the way in which some women are called out as not being womanly enough. In fact, she frequently references citations of passages where people have written, you know, where are the women today? We've lost women. Going back to what she writes, she writes, everyone agrees that there are females in the human species. Today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in jeopardy. We are. urged, be women, stay women, become women. So not every female human being is necessarily a woman. She must take part in the mysterious engine gendered reality known as femininity. So to be clear, she's starting off here with this notion, people are challenging the idea that women are no longer women or women are no longer acting the way women ought to. And we still hear this refrain, particularly, I would say from the let's say from social conserve from a social conservative perspective um and so here the question is what does it mean to be a woman and it's an important question particularly for women but i would say for all of us as well So what is a woman exactly? Well, the description of a woman is vague. She writes, it comes in shimmering terms that are borrowed from a clairvoyance vocabulary. So the description of women is fairly vague. Now, the biological. Psychological and social sciences, she writes, no longer believe there are immutably determined entities that define given characteristics like those of the woman. Science considers the characteristics as secondary reactions to a situation. If there's no such thing, today's femininity is because there never was. So does the word woman have any content? So she references here the notion that it appears that science, the characteristics that we give to women, appear to be a kind of a characteristic of women. to be secondary reactions to situations. And by this, what we mean is when people say that women are more gentle or something like this, or the weaker sex or things like this, we can see here that all of those characteristics are situationally defined. In fact, she even mentions particularly American women. She says American women in particular are inclined to think that woman as such. no longer exist. So it's not only a question of what woman is, but perhaps the very defense of being a woman is under threat. Now, Dubois compares this whole... situation to familiar philosophical trends, such as the platonic ideal. Remember, Plato had this notion that we're all participating in reality, and there's some sort of transcendental ideal that we're all participating in. And this would pertain to both men and women, which means that in one philosophical sense, one approach is to say that a woman is there's some sort of ideal. and all the individual members of the species are participating in the ideal. She also mentions rationalism, but importantly, she really focuses on nominalism. Nominalism is the idea, the nominalism comes from the word in Latin, nomos. which means to name. And nominalism here refers to the idea that things only have existence in their language, in a language or in their names. And she references a person that she doesn't like, who's Dorothy Parker. And she writes, and she's quoting from Dorothy Parker, or there's a quotation. Yeah, there's a quotation from Dorothy Parker, who says, My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever they are, should be considered as human beings. So there's this notion that one approach is to just get rid of the category of women altogether and just focus on human beings. And this would be a view of nominalism, where the idea of what it means to be a woman is purely a name. And I don't think that's where Dubois is going, though, right? She writes, but clearly no woman can. claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex. So right from the beginning, she's using this concept we've seen before that came, or at least is first articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre. That's this notion of bad faith. And so to be in good faith is to recognize that we are in fact sexed. We do have a sex. That is our situation. And as a consequence, we can't just ignore it and say it just means nothing. It's just a word. This is getting into some issues that today, and we'll talk about this in our next video, but today many people are talking about the idea that gender is purely a social construct. Here I think that Simone de Beauvoir is not taking that view. She doesn't want to say that there's a platonic ideal that women have to conform to, but she certainly doesn't want to say that the idea of being a woman is just purely conceptual. To be in good faith is to recognize that there is a situation of sex. sex. And for women in particular, this is a situation that they have to deal with. And I say women in particular because Simone de Beauvoir is going to particularly emphasize that throughout these passages. She writes that women in her day, or we'll say today, are haunted by femininity. Now, why are, she says women are denying their femininity. Why? She writes, I also remember a young Trotskyite standing on a platform during the stormy meeting about to come to blows in spite of her obvious virginity. She was denying her feminine frailty, but it was for the love of a militant man she wanted to be equal with. The defiant position that American women occupy proves they're haunted by the feeling of their own femininity. So she tries to give this example of this woman who's denying her feminine frailty and her femininity, but she's doing it in order to be equal with a militant man. And so you can see here there's a way in which the feminine is both resisted yet always remains present. So women are haunted by femininity in this modern situation. And one of the things she's going to argue for is that it's not really sufficient for women to argue for women, but on the basis of masculinity or some sort of neutrality. She's going to defend the idea that women are feminine. Now, and what that means, though, of course, depends, I think. She writes, if the feminine function is not enough to define women, and if we also reject the explanation of the eternal feminine, but if we accept even temporarily that there are women on the earth, then we have to ask what. is a woman. And this is something, a question she's going to ask again and again throughout this. Now, she notices, though, that this is a question that is not asked by men, in the sense that men are asking what it means to be man, right? So her argument is it's an important question that needs to be asked for women. But the question of what it means to be a man is not a question that gets asked. Why? That looks asymmetrical. Why? She writes, it would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex. That he is a man is obvious, right? So men and women are not in a symmetrical situation, at least not socially, nor historically. Men occupy the positive and the neuter of language, she writes. In other words, she's going to say that... Let's call it the connotation of masculinity or the connotation of being a man is understood as being either positive or neutral, right? Whereas by contrast, quote, woman is the negative. To such a point in any determination is imputed to her as a limitation without reciprocity. So she recognizes here that in our language, there is, as it were, a differential understanding in terms of the connotations of the very language we use. The ideal human type, for instance, is usually conceived as being masculine. The body of a woman, however, is treated as a particular condition that she writes locks her in her subjectivity. So being a woman is being a human with some sort of limitation or condition. You can see here why she's irritated, which is something she says a couple times throughout this introduction. So the negative conception of woman of woman and i'm going to use that term because that's the phrase she uses the negative conception of woman also has its roots or we can see its roots in philosophy and religion for instance the female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities that's a quotation from aristotle aristotle also says we should regard women's nature is suffering from a natural defectiveness again there's this negative conception saint thomas aquinas argues that a woman is incomplete Right? And here, for instance, you can see these are all negative connotations. So it's not just that Simone de Beauvoir is irritated, but it looks like she has solid reasons to argue that we've been seeing women and woman as negative for a very long time, both in philosophy and religion. And she mentions religion and think about the Genesis narrative. If you read the book of Genesis in the Bible. which is the sacred text of, is a sacred text for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, three of the world's great religions. Notice that the story tells the story that where does a woman come from? A woman comes, is created out of a man, right? A rib is taken from the man and a woman is created. So notice there, there's always a way in which a woman is incomplete in the sense that they are not the first creation. So you can see here there is a negative conception, and we can see this negative conception in both philosophical and religious text. So now it's... She mentions this French novelist. Let me read this quote. She says, this is a quote from the French novelist, a man's body has a meeting by itself, disregarding the body of the woman, whereas the woman's body seems to void a meeting without reference to the male. Man thinks himself with a woman. Woman does not think herself without man. And that quote got a little fumble, it looks like, when I typed it up. But here's the idea. She's saying that a when a man thinks about himself, he doesn't think of a woman. But a woman can't think of herself without thinking of man. Even just look at the very terms. You have man and you have woe man, right? So notice here is that even in the language of the word man in English, there is no reference to the feminine. Whereas in the word woman in English, there is a reference to the masculine. And her argument here is not just that it's in the language. But the women themselves don't think of femininity or being a woman without reference to man. So this means that woman is therefore classed as the sex, right? She writes, she is determined and differentiated in relation to man while he is not in relation to her. She is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the subject. He is the absolute. she is the other. So what is Dubois saying? She's saying that for a woman, a woman is always recognized as other. So she occupies this category of otherness. And we've talked about otherness in previous videos, but here otherness needs to be understood in terms of, well, let's say in terms of there being a category of consciousness, the same and the other, right? And this is Levin, she's not referencing Levinas here, I don't think. but levinas is also using the same category so that means that when we're talking about what it means to be a woman we have to recognize that baked into the equation at least from the outset if we're describing our culture it looks like that woman is always understood in a non-reciprocal relationship towards men in which she is the the other so there's a relationship of alterity going on here she writes Right, and of course clearly the category of other is in many different cultures and is worldwide and we can see this alterity throughout. She writes, no group ever defines itself as one without immediately setting the other opposite itself. So there is a way in which the conception of alterity between the same and the other is natural because as soon as there's a group identity, identity is understood in context or in juxtaposition. to that which is not the other. She quotes Levi Strauss here, quote, the passage from the state of nature to the state of culture is defined by man's ability to think biological relations as systems of opposition, duality, alteration, opposition and symmetry, whether occurring a defined or less clear form or not so much phenomena to explain as fundamental and immediate givens of social reality. So one of the things she mentions, though, is that this category of otherness that woman seems to occupy can't be understood just by using Heidegger's conception of mid-side, being with the world, right? Where he has this notion of care, and you're with the world. It's very sort of positive, actually, right? But she says, no, Heidegger is not the right model for thinking about this problem. Instead, it's Hegel, where Hegel always has a conception of hostility baked into the equation between the same. and the other so she's going to in a certain way rely upon or lean more into hegel's opposition and we'll talk a little bit about this in a minute but you can think here about hegel's conception of the master slave dialectic now she writes but the other consciousness has an opposing reciprocal claim traveling a local shock to realize that neighboring counties locals that in neighboring counties locals view him as a foreigner between villages clans nations and classes their wars potlatches agreements treatises and struggles to remove the absolute meaning from the idea of the other and bring out its relativity whether one likes it or not individuals and groups have no choice but to recognize the reciprocity of their relationship so she's what is she talking about there she's talking about that even when you travel and you recognize that there's an other Right? Because people see you as another. They see you as a foreigner, right? Do you recognize that there is a reciprocal relation? It's relative to your position, your perspective, as it were. But this isn't the case with women, she argues. When it comes to the case of women, there is otherness without reciprocity. So why has the reciprocity of the woman as other remain unvoiced? Why is only one term of the relationship, only one term of the relationship between man and woman, positive is essential, right? It looks like... Masculinity is considered essential, but femininity is essential, right? So why don't we recognize this reciprocity in this relationship of perspective? It looks like even women, and this is a big complaint of hers, take on this very notion of otherness within their own conception of themselves. Now, de Beauvoir will distinguish this lack of reciprocity from other struggles against oppression. She particularly mentions her own. her words, American blacks and Jews. But she's really just talking about when we take a look at America, for instance, we see the struggle of African Americans, which has a very long and troubled history, right? And she says, of course, there's a struggle of oppression there. We can go back, we can also look at, for instance, the anti-Semitism and the way that Jews are treated as other. And these are all forms of otherness, right? But she says in those cases, for the oppressed. there was at least a before. They share a past, a tradition of some sort, sometimes a religion or a culture. So part of what's different here, she says, is that there is no before in the case of women. Women have always been, as it were, oppressed in this sense. So it's not as if there was some time in the past where this wasn't the case, though you could imagine such a thing. And the question is why? And so she wants to argue that there's something particular. particularly unique, I think, about the oppression that women have. And it starts off with the recognition that you have otherness without reciprocity. So woman discovers herself as the inessential and never turns into the essential. And it's because she does not bring about this transformation herself. So de Beauvoir will actually reference in some ways, think here about Sartre's notion of responsibility, infinite responsibility. And she wants to place the blame partially with women. Women need to bring about this transformation. So it's a crisis of existential authenticity. Women accepting it in a certain abstract gathering such as conferences don't use the term we. Men say women. And women adopt this word to refer to themselves, but they do not posit themselves authentically as subjects. So as we're talking about existentialism and we're talking about of the case of women, then we have to put at the very forefront the question of authenticity. And to be clear here, what we're not doing is placing blame. There is oppression against women, and we shouldn't blame women for that. But we can say that there is also an existential crisis for women as well, in which, from Dubois'perspective, women need to authentically posit themselves as subjects. They are the ones who can bring about this transformation of not just being inessential, but being essential, as it were. Now, the tie that binds her, she writes, the tie that binds her to our oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. Their opposition took place with an original mid-side, an original being in the world, and she has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unit with two halves. riveted to each other cleavage of society by sex is not possible this is the fundamental characteristic of women she is the other at the heart of the whole whose two components are necessary to each other now there's something really important i put in red here number one the the tie that binds a woman to her presence the relationship without reciprocity here is not doesn't begin as a moment in history it is actually as it were baked into the original condition of the social itself right she says for instance the couple's this fundamental unit but a couple and she's thinking a couple here between a man and a woman which is essential for the reproduction of society right having couples is since it is essential to every society you can't create a division of society based upon it because the cleavage of society by sex is impossible because to do so would be to irrevocably alter the possibility of even having society. So this is why it's a fundamental characteristic. And so she's the other, she's this alterity at the heart of the whole society. So you can see here that de Beauvoir is really emphasizing Let's call it the primary and original relation that a woman or that woman occupies. So let's go through it. Now, she's going to reference something that comes out of Hegel, though she doesn't quite do it directly in this passage. But consider the master-slave relationship, what Hegel calls the master-slave dialectic. And this is the question of how are masters and slaves related. And this is a part of Hegel's history, but she's giving just the example of a master and slave here. De Beauvoir writes, Master and slave are also linked by a reciprocal economic need that does not free the slaves. That is, in the master-slave relation, the master does not posit the need he has for the other. He holds the power to satisfy this and does not mediate it. The slave, on the other hand, out of dependence, hope, or fear, internalizes his need for the master. However, equally compelling the need may be for both. It always plays in favor of the oppressor. Over the oppressed and she says this explains the slow working pace of working-class liberation so we can use the master-slave relationship here and recognize that Masters don't have to take on the consciousness of the slave and that the slave Necessarily takes on the consciousness of the master and then the situation is always in favor of the master And you can see how there is maybe a working forward here in terms of this, but let's compare woman in particular Notice that a woman may not be a slave, she says, not in a literal sense, but is rather something of a vassal. The world is not divided up equally between men and women or divided up equally for men and women. Women in many places have different legal statuses. And a woman's rights are typically recognized abstractly but not concretely. For instance, most people say, yes, women deserve the right to equal pay. And yet that is not necessarily true. made concrete in the world. Now, men and women therefore seem to be like two different cast, occupied two different normative levels of the society. She writes, at the moment that women are beginning to share in the making of the world, this world still belongs to men. Men have no doubt about this and women barely doubt it. Refusing to be the other, refusing complicity with men would mean renouncing all the advantages of the world. an alliance with the superior caste confers on them. So this means that in her view, women, at least let's say not all women, but women in general, right, have a sort of deep complicity in terms of being the other for their men. And that's because of the close relationship here with men, they also get all of the benefits that men may be able to give them. And so basically why break the molds as it were moving on male privilege has been conferred as a universal natural right historically both within religion and within philosophy devoire actually begins with the religious example by signing a jewish morning prayer in which the male will pray pray blessed be the lord our god and the lord of all worlds that And we see here a clear differentiation and an example in which women are understood in a natural way. negative context, whereas men are understood in either a positive or neutral context. This goes back to what she argued at the beginning of the introduction. And she writes, religions that are formed by men reflect this domination. So first off, we see this in the religious context, but we also see it in the philosophical. And she's going to reference specifically both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, both who argue in different texts that women are ultimately inferior. inferior to men. And what de Beauvoir is going to say here is that to argue that women are naturally inferior is ultimately to cover up what she calls a will to self-justification, but what I'm going to call a will to power, to link in the notion of Nietzsche's will to power here. And I think it's an undercurrent here in terms of explaining where this domination comes from, right? But it's important to recognize here that this privilege, quote unquote, is being conferred. based upon a condition of nature philosophically. And Montaigne, who is a 15th century Renaissance philosopher, the inventor of the essay, actually writes, of course, it's much easier to accuse one sex than to accuse the other. And Montaigne even goes further in saying, women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world. Inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them. There's a natural plotting and scheming between them and us, writes Montaigne. Now, notice there, Montaigne is a 15th century philosopher. Largely, he's living in a world in which, let's say, male privilege is not even a concept. It's not even being questioned. And he's recognizing this condition. And he's recognizing the way in which the world has been organized by men. And that's the context of privilege here. Now, there is in philosophy a defense of women, historically, and it begins roughly in the 18th century philosophy. Though I guess we could argue Montaigne is maybe in that line of thinking. what de Beauvoir argues, gives the example, she first gives the example of Diderot. If you recall, Diderot is the famous French philosophe who first had the notion of creating the encyclopedia. But Diderot actually tried to prove that a woman, and he argued that a woman is a human being, which seems sort of ludicrous maybe from our perspective, but it does represent a fundamental shift in the thinking philosophically, at least let's say of the Western philosophical thinking, towards a defense of women. And of course, a really solid defense of women comes in the work of John Stuart Mill, who ardently defends women. And she doesn't mention it here, and it's interesting, she doesn't talk about it. We've seen de Beauvoir. attack the notion of the platonic ideals here. But it is also notable here that to consider Plato's own defense of women as being equal to men. So anyway, but moving on, she actually doesn't mention Plato, at least not in these passages. But I think it's worth thinking about here. So even in the ancient world, there's some recognition here of the problem of male privilege in its social context. But putting that aside, what de Beauvoir argues is that this is the exception, though, and not not the rule. The defense of women is not the full story in Western philosophy. It's, as it were, an exception. Now, history, now, let's put it this way. One of the problems, though, is that the debate about the equality of women typically turns into a partisan struggle rooted in economics, or rooted in some sort of social, let's call it social political grand narrative, to use the concept that we... saw Francois Lyotard introduce. So the question of equality disappears when it gets retranslated into a language of economics or partisan struggle. Now, one of the things that's worth recognizing here that Dubois is going to emphasize is an insight that's actually very similar to something that Rousseau argues, but it's the notion that the experience that people are having that women are inferior. Let's say the experience of men and the experience of some women, that women are inferior, is the result of the effect of this male privilege and domination. It's not the cause of it, right? She quotes George Bernard Shaw here, right? Who writes, quote, the white American relegates the black to the rank of the shoeshine boy, and then concludes that blacks are only good for shining shoes. The same vicious circle can be found in all analogous circumstances. When an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior. But the scope of the verb to be must be understood. And I put it in blue here because it's an existential concept here. Bad faith means giving it a substantial value when in fact it has the sense of the Hegelian dynamic. To be is to have become, to have been made as one manifest oneself. self. Yes, women in general are today inferior to men. That is, their situation provides them with fewer possibilities. The question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated. So there's a lot that she's mentioning here, and let's see if we can break it down. First and foremost, the form of bad faith that's being used here to justify or to maintain the idea that women are inferior is a form of bad faith. What does that mean? It means that women Women are given, the notion is women are treated as a substance that has a value, i.e. an inferior value. But what we have to recognize, though, is that what we're talking about is a dynamic thing that's taking place over time. So to be is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. So over time, we are in a process of becoming and manifesting ourselves. Yet the problem is, is that because women... are given less possibilities. appear inferior, and that justifies treating women as substantially less valuable instead of recognizing this is a consequence of that dynamic of privilege itself so so obviously the question here is that this should not be perpetuated uh obviously that's her are going to be her argument but i want us to see here that history the history if we look back in history and say that women were inferior historically etc what we're doing is we're conflating the effect of male privilege with its cause, which I think is a really important thing. Now, but as an existentialist, Simone de Beauvoir thinks that women have to speak, right? So it's not just a matter of changing the rules, but ultimately women need to seize their own agency. She writes, I think certain women are still best suited to elucidate the situation of women. Many women today, fortunate to have had all the privileges of the human being restored to them. can't afford the luxury of impartiality. We even feel the necessity of it, yet we know the feminine world more intimately than men do because our roots are in it. We grasp more immediately what the fact of being female means for a human being, and we can care more about knowing it. Now, there's a couple of things I want to mention here. I think that Simone de Beauvoir is arguing two different things. One, I think she's arguing that women need to speak and they need to seize that agency. They need to, that's sort of, as it were, being an ex- existential good faith, as it were. But the other thing she's also arguing is that women are best suited to tell the story of women. But one thing, but she's not, she's not arguing that only women can speak. This would be a inappropriate or a misreading of hers, I think, because she recognizes that we can't say that, we can't commit the fallacy, which, a fallacy, which is namely that you have to be one to, to argue one, to argue that women are are equal doesn't mean you have to be a woman, right? So she's not saying that. But she does want to emphasize that there's an importance of listening to the feminine voice here. And so women need to speak up because women are living in this condition, not men. But she's not arguing that only women can speak for women. I don't think that's what she's arguing. And she's trying to keep a, I think she's trying to balance a fine line there. Now, one of the things here is that when we're talking about, um, you know, resolving, as it were, the problem between men and women. The question isn't about making everyone happy. It's not about happiness. It's about freedom. So I have two different quotes here I want to refer to. The first she writes is, quote, but it is no doubt impossible to approach any human problems without partiality. So she recognizes from the very outset that whenever we look at any of these problems, we always are looking at it from our own perspective. You can think of Nietzsche's perspective as a... here, right? And that means that we are biased and we do have partiality. She goes on, even the way of asking the questions, of adopting perspectives, presupposes hierarchies of interest, all characteristics comprise values. Every so-called objective description is set against an ethical background. So first and foremost, just to begin to ask questions about human problems, asking questions, all of this presupposed... as it were, value commitments that we have. That's what this ethical background is about. She goes on, instead of trying to conceal these principles that are more or less explicitly implied, we're better off stating them from the start. Then it would not be necessary to specify on each page the meaning that's given to words like superior, inferior, better, worse, progress, regression, and so on. And further, she writes, but neither do do we confuse the idea of private interest with happiness? We cannot really know what the word happiness means and still less what authentic value it covers. There's no way to measure the happiness of others and it's always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy. In particular, we declare happy those content to stagnation under the pretext that happiness is immobility. This is a notion that we will not refer to. The perspective we have have adopted is one of existentialist morality. Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely through projects. It accomplishes its freedom only by perpetually surpassing toward other freedoms. There's no justification for present existence other than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future. So it really is this second passage I want to kind of mention and maybe talk a little bit about. First and foremost, the question isn't about happiness, it's about freedom. So, because some people may argue, for instance, well, what's the problem between the sexes? It looks like most women are happy. For instance, someone might argue that. I don't think that's probably true. But someone might argue that. And she says, well, number one, we don't know what happiness looks like for other people. And the other thing is that it's easy to say that other people are happy when they're actually, when they have no mobility, right? you can use that as a pretext. So she doesn't want to think of it. She wants to think of it in terms of freedom. But we have to be clear here. We're not just talking about the freedom to do this, that, or the other. We're talking about an existentialist freedom, a freedom to concretely posit yourself as a subject in the world through the projects you have in the world. And this notion of projects is essential because that's the way, or that's the, let's call it the point, the crux in which women have been. dominated, right? In the sense that they've been limited in terms of the projects they can pursue and the projects they can be free to put their own existence into. So we have a sort of existentialist conception here that one has to live, that women need the opportunity to effectively exist so that they can articulate and find the meaning of their essence. But that can only happen through the projects that... we use in our existence. If there is no ability for women or woman, as she writes it, to do this, then this is the problem, right? The problem is not happiness, it's freedom rather. Now, in chapter three, and we're getting close to the end here of what we're going to talk about with in terms of de Beauvoir, she does talk about some of the social myths that have been used to solidify oppression. So in this chapter, the question is, okay, So we were just looking at the introduction there, but now the question is, or rather the idea is, there are certain mythologies, certain narratives, certain stories that are used to justify this form of oppression within our society. And one of those is what she calls the static myth, or she calls it a static myth. And first is the myth of the two categories of human beings, right? The very myth that human beings are divided between men and women. and therefore they're different. Now, remember, she's defending the notion of woman, or she wants to articulate that notion, but the myth that there's fundamentally two different categories that are irresolvable, irreducible, right? Ultimately, that is a myth in her view. It's a mythology that we've taken on, a narrative, a story that we've used to understand things. And she specifically mentions the division of the sexes when we treat it as a sort of platonic ideal. Now, as a reminder, by platonic ideal, what does she mean here? In Plato's metaphysics, his view is that all of the things in reality are merely just temporary versions, temporary beings that are participating in the real ideal of a thing. So his argument, for instance, is that you have lots of coffee cups in the world, but all of them participate in the ideal or the idea of coffee cup-ness. So there's a... pure perfect essence for things and then everything else in the world is just participating in it imperfectly. So for instance in Plato's view I'm a man and so that means I'm participating in the ideal form of man-ness. Now I'm obviously not perfect and I'm not the ideal but you recognize me as a man precisely because you recognize that I have some elements of that ideal. Now this is a static notion because it means that the notion of man or the notion of woman are ideal and they're static. And our question is, to what degree can we get close to those? And notice that Platonism is the very opposite of existentialism because Platonism says there's an essence and existence is trying to participate in the essence, whereas existentialism says, no, we have existence and that's what essence is. It comes out of that. So there's a diametrical opposition here between de Beauvoir's, let's call it her epistemological, and ethical commitments versus the platonic ideal. So, but in the platonic sense, the division of the sexes is treated as something which is essential and that we're just participating in, right? That's the mythology, right? She writes, each of the myths are built, or each of the myths built around woman tries to summarize her as a whole. So there's a way in which these myths have a tendency to take woman and reduce her to a woman. deuce woman down into this platonic static ideal. Now, what are some of these images of the mythos of woman? One is the saintly mother, right? This notion, this ideal that a woman needs to be something like a saintly mother. But she writes, quote, the saintly mother has its correlation in the cruel stepmother. The angelic young girl has the perverse virgin. So mother will be said sometimes to equal life and sometimes death. And every virgin is either a pure spirit or flesh possessed by the devil, right? So there's a way in which these images, let's call it the myth of the saintly mother, also has its correlate of negativity, right? Going forward, the institutional treatment of women is correlated with the myth that's adopted. So this is important because she's mentioning that when we talk about the situation of woman today, woman is not just treated in a sort of conversational sense as inferior, but is treated inferior in an institutional sense, right? And that institutional sense is rooted in the myth that's organizing that institution. So for instance, let's give an example here, right? We'll use the example of Saudi Arabia, where in Saudi Arabia, clearly women are not given the same equal opportunities. So they're treated institutionally different, right? Courts of law treat women differently there than they treat men. And the same can probably be said here, but this is a more notable example. Women are not allowed to drive, for instance, in Saudi Arabia. Now, why is that the case? And that, I would say, it's because the institution, you know, let's call it the Saudi Arabian government, has its understanding of woman in one that's rooted in the religious, let's call it narratives, that are endorsed by that institution, right, ultimately. So there's a mythology, a story about woman, which is ultimately fueling this institutional prejudice. She writes, thus paternalism that calls for a woman to stay home defines her as sentiment. inferiority and imminence. So she's also against the paternalism of women, that is treating women as if they are children and need a parent to guide them, right? And this comes out in the institutional treatment of women, notably. Now, what are some of the other myths? The other myths include, for instance, the myth of the altruistic woman, the woman who always is self-sacrificing. To identify a woman with altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion. It's to impose on woman a categorical must-be. What is she saying here? Well, if we think of woman as being purely altruistic, that is self-sacrificing, then that, she argues, helps guarantee the idea that, well, if a woman has to be self-sacrificing, then that means that a man has an absolute right to her self-sacrifice. In other words, When we identify a woman as being purely altruistic, we're effectively condemning her to self-sacrifice herself for man or for men or for the opposite sex or whatever. It's to impose on women a sort of categorical, you have to be like this. Sumraval also talks about the myth of assimilating woman with nature. The way in which, and this goes back to the philosophical prejudices we looked at earlier. But this is the case where I'm saying that women have a specific natural condition, and that's the reason, for instance, why they have to be treated differently. She writes, Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling master caste than this one. It justifies all its privileges, even authorized taking advantage of them. Men do not have to care about alleviating the suffering and burdens that are physiologically women's lot, since they are, quote, intended by nature. They take this as a pretext to increase the misery of the woman's condition. For example, by denying women the right to sexual pleasure or making her work like a beast of burden, right? And so here, we're not talking too much about it in this spot, but, and she does talk about this, but thinking about the way in which the description of a woman's body is used to justify oppression. against her, right? For instance, people will say things like women are not as strong as men, so therefore they should be treated differently and so forth. This is another example of assimilating woman with nature. And this is a mythology that, of course, de Beauvoir argues we need to reject and overcome. Now, where do we go from here? Well, remember, de Beauvoir is an existentialist, which means that women need to, women, women. must make herself, right? Quote, for many women, the roads to transcendence are blocked because they do nothing, because they do not make themselves be anything. They wonder indefinitely what they could have become, which leads them to wonder what they are. It's a useless question. If man fails to find that secret essence, it's simply because it does not exist. Kept at the margins of the world, women cannot be defined objectively through this world, and her mystery conceals nothing but emptiness. So this is a very philosophical claim here, or set of claims. But the first claim here, and this is all one quotation, but I've kind of broken them out separately. The first thing here is she's saying that the roads of transcendence are blocked partially because women themselves don't act. Remember, that means, in other words, she's arguing that women are living in bad faith, or many of... Many women are living in bad faith. Remember, Sartre says that we're all living in bad faith, so this isn't a surprise, as it were. But it's the notion that if you do nothing, and you just wonder what you could have been, you can see here that it's useless, right? What you have to do is you have to step forward and act, right? Now, by contrast, she says, there is no secret essence, ultimately, that needs to be discovered here. And she says, if a man can't find it, that is, that doesn't exist. Whereas it looks like women don't find it and they're still searching. So there's a way in which I think that Simone de Beauvoir is trying to puncture the potential bad faith that is contributing to the oppression of women. Partially in an existential sense here, right? But ultimately, at the end of the day, remember this, there is no, for the existential, there is no secret essence that needs to be discovered. Rather, it's made through our doing of things. So in this sense, Simone de Beauvoir is trying to encourage women to step out for themselves and to act. And of course, they did when she wrote this, and they are still today. So it's important to remember this text is written in 1946, I believe, or maybe it was 49, but it's written in the 40s. And so the situation is largely different today, but I think there's a lot of what she's arguing here is still... correct. Now, she writes, the myth is one of those false traps of false objectivity into which the spirit of seriousness falls headlong. It is once again a matter of replacing the lived experience in the free judgments of experience it requires by a static idol. The myth of woman substitutes for an authentic relationship with an autonomous existent, the immobile contemplation of a mirage. What is she saying here? She's saying that these myths about women being the natural condition of woman, the woman is the saintly mother, so on and so forth, these myths or these images that we have in our society, these static images about what the ideal woman is, she says, these are a mirage. These are not real, right? And what we have to do is we have to move beyond those, right? We have to focus on the lived experience and the free judgments. of our experience, not by using a static idol or an image of what the ideal woman is, which is all a mirage. So this is all a false trap in her argument. And you can see this language, for instance, in the discussion of feminism today. When people are discussing what it means to be a man or a woman, in both cases, there's a tendency to articulate what de Beauvoir is calling here a static idol or a myth. And this ultimately is a trap that keeps us in bad faith. Now, there's a duplicitous demand, that means, on the woman. A woman is asked to view herself as other. Du Bois writes, In the eyes of men and of the legions of women who see through these eyes, it is not enough to have a woman's body or to take on the female function as lover and mother to be a real woman. It is possible for the subject to claim autonomy through sexuality or maternity. The real woman is the one who accepts herself as other. The duplicitous attitude of men today creates a painful split for women. They accept for the most part that women be a peer and equal, and yet they continue to oblige her to remain the inessential. For her, these two destinies are not reconcilable. She hesitates between them. Without being exactly suited to either and that is the source of her lack of balance. So here I think Devois is really kind of touching upon. Let's call it the internal paradox of being a woman or to be of woman today, right? Which is namely, you have both the sense that women are equal and yet women have to treat themselves as other or see themselves as other, which means that they're also, as it were, inessential because if they're other, they're not the same, right? And the same is what is essential and so forth. So you can see here that what we have is a painful split that has to be overcome. When we talk about the question of the situation of the sexes, we talk about feminism, we have to recognize that women today are, as it were, bounded in a paradoxical spot. On the one hand, there's these images of these mythological images, which deny her essence, right, and make her inessential. And yet, on the other hand, there is the discussion. that women need to be treated as an equal and as a peer. And these two things are not reconcilable to Beauvoir's arguing. And ultimately, to overcome this problem, as it were, to liberate a woman, this tension has to be overcome. Now, what is certain today, according to Beauvoir, she writes, is that it is very difficult for women to assume both their status of autonomous individual and their feminine destiny. Here is the source of the awkwardness and discomfort that sometimes leads them to be considered a lost sex. And without doubt, it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation. The dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living. In any case, turning back is no more possible than desirable. What must be hoped is that men will assume, without reserve, the situation being created. Only then can women experience it without being torn. So in this passage here, we realize that it's not just a question of women living authentically, but men must also begin to live authentically in order to overcome this dilemma, right? In order to overcome this bifurcation of the sexes in terms of a value where men are treated or seen and recognized as being. either positive or neutral, whereas women, the lot of women, and woman as a concept, is considered negative through all the mythologies. And so there is a key here, right, is that we can't go backwards. We can't go back to what things were. We don't want to do it. It's not even desirable. But what has to be hoped for is that men can also assume the new situation that's being created. So There's a role here for men to, as it were, be feminist. And I think that's an important thing to recognize, is that men have a responsibility as well to recognize these problems. And I think Simone de Beauvoir here really gives us a great summary of helping us understand the way in which the... The quest for women's liberation is a quest that continues on. Because even though certainly there's been lots of progress, even since de Beauvoir wrote this, today the mythology of what an ideal woman is, is still with us. And we still see all of the same things she's talking about widely repeated today within social media and within our society. So I think that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is still an essential text. for us to read and it's really helpful too to understand how existentialism can relate to such an essential pivotal and difficult problem that we have today. Thank you guys very much for watching this video. I hope this was helpful. I apologize midway through I had to change. You can see I made a different thing. I had to stop recording and restart. So hopefully it's still consistent and makes a lot of sense for you. Thank you very much for watching. I'll see you guys online.

And we're going to see that this is an, Simone de Beauvoir was an important existentialist philosopher who wrote on existentialist ethics, but importantly, she also wrote on women's liberation. And we're going to be looking at some of the things she has to say. regarding the situation of women both in her day and I would say in our day and how it relates importantly or to existentialism or maybe I should say how an existentialist understands that situation.

So let's jump into it. Let me start off with just a couple brief remarks about her biography. She lived from 1908 to 1986. Some of the three key works of hers if you're interested is going to be The Ethics of Ambiguity, You'll recall from our previous series that Jean-Paul Sartre, at the end of Being and Nothingness, predicted that the next book would be on ethics.

He never wrote that, but Simone de Beauvoir did in 1947. And two years later, in 1949, the text we're going to be discussing today, The Second Sex, was published. And then much later, in 1970, she also wrote The Coming of Age, as well as many other texts. And she's a very important and prominent existentialist philosopher from the 20th century.

She was born in Paris in 1908, originally raised as Catholic, but eventually became a resolute atheist. She also studied at the Sorbonne, which was a difficult feat at her time as a woman. In 1928, she began studying there.

Her thesis in 1929 was on the philosopher Leibniz. Interestingly enough, she was the youngest person, at least up to that point, to have passed the philosophy aggregation, which is a test. that was used to determine whether or not you could teach philosophy at the Sorbonne and elsewhere.

She's very famous for having a love affair with Sartre and a lifelong friendship and love affair with Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre, and they were something of the original power couple in existentialism, if you will, but her work stands on its own. She worked closely with both Sartre, of course, I already mentioned that, but also Merleau-Ponty. She helped organize a French resistance group in 1941 against the Nazis. She also helped form, along with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, a journal called Modern Times. At least that's the English title.

She also helped them establish a political party in 1948. So she's extremely political, as each of these thinkers were. She actually spent a good amount of time with Sartre in Russia in 1955. And she was also the founder and president of France's League of Women's Rights, which she founded in 1974. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1975. And then she died six years after Sartre, but ended up being buried in the same grave as him in 1986. So those two thinkers really... are, as it were, closely related both in their philosophy, but also privately and personally and politically.

So I would put it this way. If we're looking at Sartre's philosophy of being and nothingness, her work in The Ethics of Ambiguity and the Second Sex is essentially the next chapter. So from what we're looking at this year, we're kind of stepping backwards, because we're going to also be linking this with a later video.

on Judith Butler and the question of gender. So we're trying to raise and think about some of the issues that are more prominent for people today. So let's jump into it.

So, and by the way, I should mention, I'm just using excerpts again. I've been using the same book I've been using throughout, which is the Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy after Kant, the Interpretive Tradition. And so I'm just following along with the excerpts they've given.

We're not looking at the entire book, unfortunately. Most of the remarks today will be focused on the introduction. And in fact the very, that's where we're going to start is the introduction.

And then we'll talk, we'll get into a little bit of chapter three. So volume one, the first section here is called facts and myths. And this is the introduction.

In fact, the second sex opens up with these words. She writes, I hesitated a long time before writing a book on women. The subject is irritating, especially for women. And it's not new. And what is a woman is the...

principle question she begins with and i would say in many ways the introduction is a way of kind of slowly working through back and forth in terms of what it means to be a woman and how we should understand that now it's helpful to think in terms of the existentialist background that she's bringing to bear here and think here about Existentialism being the idea that existence precedes essence. So how a woman lives or exists is fundamental for the existentialist in terms of what the essence of a woman is. So to be clear from the very beginning what she's not going to be doing is trying to find some perfect ideal formula for what a woman is.

It can't be that way as an existentialist. But let's see where she takes us. She writes, speaking of certain women the experts proclaim they are not women.

even though they have a uterus like the others. And she's referring here to the way in which some women are called out as not being womanly enough. In fact, she frequently references citations of passages where people have written, you know, where are the women today? We've lost women.

Going back to what she writes, she writes, everyone agrees that there are females in the human species. Today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in jeopardy.

We are. urged, be women, stay women, become women. So not every female human being is necessarily a woman.

She must take part in the mysterious engine gendered reality known as femininity. So to be clear, she's starting off here with this notion, people are challenging the idea that women are no longer women or women are no longer acting the way women ought to. And we still hear this refrain, particularly, I would say from the let's say from social conserve from a social conservative perspective um and so here the question is what does it mean to be a woman and it's an important question particularly for women but i would say for all of us as well So what is a woman exactly? Well, the description of a woman is vague.

She writes, it comes in shimmering terms that are borrowed from a clairvoyance vocabulary. So the description of women is fairly vague. Now, the biological. Psychological and social sciences, she writes, no longer believe there are immutably determined entities that define given characteristics like those of the woman. Science considers the characteristics as secondary reactions to a situation.

If there's no such thing, today's femininity is because there never was. So does the word woman have any content? So she references here the notion that it appears that science, the characteristics that we give to women, appear to be a kind of a characteristic of women. to be secondary reactions to situations. And by this, what we mean is when people say that women are more gentle or something like this, or the weaker sex or things like this, we can see here that all of those characteristics are situationally defined.

In fact, she even mentions particularly American women. She says American women in particular are inclined to think that woman as such. no longer exist.

So it's not only a question of what woman is, but perhaps the very defense of being a woman is under threat. Now, Dubois compares this whole... situation to familiar philosophical trends, such as the platonic ideal. Remember, Plato had this notion that we're all participating in reality, and there's some sort of transcendental ideal that we're all participating in.

And this would pertain to both men and women, which means that in one philosophical sense, one approach is to say that a woman is there's some sort of ideal. and all the individual members of the species are participating in the ideal. She also mentions rationalism, but importantly, she really focuses on nominalism. Nominalism is the idea, the nominalism comes from the word in Latin, nomos.

which means to name. And nominalism here refers to the idea that things only have existence in their language, in a language or in their names. And she references a person that she doesn't like, who's Dorothy Parker.

And she writes, and she's quoting from Dorothy Parker, or there's a quotation. Yeah, there's a quotation from Dorothy Parker, who says, My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever they are, should be considered as human beings. So there's this notion that one approach is to just get rid of the category of women altogether and just focus on human beings.

And this would be a view of nominalism, where the idea of what it means to be a woman is purely a name. And I don't think that's where Dubois is going, though, right? She writes, but clearly no woman can. claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex. So right from the beginning, she's using this concept we've seen before that came, or at least is first articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre.

That's this notion of bad faith. And so to be in good faith is to recognize that we are in fact sexed. We do have a sex. That is our situation. And as a consequence, we can't just ignore it and say it just means nothing.

It's just a word. This is getting into some issues that today, and we'll talk about this in our next video, but today many people are talking about the idea that gender is purely a social construct. Here I think that Simone de Beauvoir is not taking that view. She doesn't want to say that there's a platonic ideal that women have to conform to, but she certainly doesn't want to say that the idea of being a woman is just purely conceptual.

To be in good faith is to recognize that there is a situation of sex. sex. And for women in particular, this is a situation that they have to deal with.

And I say women in particular because Simone de Beauvoir is going to particularly emphasize that throughout these passages. She writes that women in her day, or we'll say today, are haunted by femininity. Now, why are, she says women are denying their femininity.

Why? She writes, I also remember a young Trotskyite standing on a platform during the stormy meeting about to come to blows in spite of her obvious virginity. She was denying her feminine frailty, but it was for the love of a militant man she wanted to be equal with. The defiant position that American women occupy proves they're haunted by the feeling of their own femininity. So she tries to give this example of this woman who's denying her feminine frailty and her femininity, but she's doing it in order to be equal with a militant man.

And so you can see here there's a way in which the feminine is both resisted yet always remains present. So women are haunted by femininity in this modern situation. And one of the things she's going to argue for is that it's not really sufficient for women to argue for women, but on the basis of masculinity or some sort of neutrality.

She's going to defend the idea that women are feminine. Now, and what that means, though, of course, depends, I think. She writes, if the feminine function is not enough to define women, and if we also reject the explanation of the eternal feminine, but if we accept even temporarily that there are women on the earth, then we have to ask what. is a woman. And this is something, a question she's going to ask again and again throughout this.

Now, she notices, though, that this is a question that is not asked by men, in the sense that men are asking what it means to be man, right? So her argument is it's an important question that needs to be asked for women. But the question of what it means to be a man is not a question that gets asked.

Why? That looks asymmetrical. Why?

She writes, it would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex. That he is a man is obvious, right? So men and women are not in a symmetrical situation, at least not socially, nor historically. Men occupy the positive and the neuter of language, she writes.

In other words, she's going to say that... Let's call it the connotation of masculinity or the connotation of being a man is understood as being either positive or neutral, right? Whereas by contrast, quote, woman is the negative.

To such a point in any determination is imputed to her as a limitation without reciprocity. So she recognizes here that in our language, there is, as it were, a differential understanding in terms of the connotations of the very language we use. The ideal human type, for instance, is usually conceived as being masculine. The body of a woman, however, is treated as a particular condition that she writes locks her in her subjectivity. So being a woman is being a human with some sort of limitation or condition.

You can see here why she's irritated, which is something she says a couple times throughout this introduction. So the negative conception of woman of woman and i'm going to use that term because that's the phrase she uses the negative conception of woman also has its roots or we can see its roots in philosophy and religion for instance the female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities that's a quotation from aristotle aristotle also says we should regard women's nature is suffering from a natural defectiveness again there's this negative conception saint thomas aquinas argues that a woman is incomplete Right? And here, for instance, you can see these are all negative connotations.

So it's not just that Simone de Beauvoir is irritated, but it looks like she has solid reasons to argue that we've been seeing women and woman as negative for a very long time, both in philosophy and religion. And she mentions religion and think about the Genesis narrative. If you read the book of Genesis in the Bible.

which is the sacred text of, is a sacred text for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, three of the world's great religions. Notice that the story tells the story that where does a woman come from? A woman comes, is created out of a man, right? A rib is taken from the man and a woman is created. So notice there, there's always a way in which a woman is incomplete in the sense that they are not the first creation.

So you can see here there is a negative conception, and we can see this negative conception in both philosophical and religious text. So now it's... She mentions this French novelist. Let me read this quote. She says, this is a quote from the French novelist, a man's body has a meeting by itself, disregarding the body of the woman, whereas the woman's body seems to void a meeting without reference to the male.

Man thinks himself with a woman. Woman does not think herself without man. And that quote got a little fumble, it looks like, when I typed it up.

But here's the idea. She's saying that a when a man thinks about himself, he doesn't think of a woman. But a woman can't think of herself without thinking of man.

Even just look at the very terms. You have man and you have woe man, right? So notice here is that even in the language of the word man in English, there is no reference to the feminine.

Whereas in the word woman in English, there is a reference to the masculine. And her argument here is not just that it's in the language. But the women themselves don't think of femininity or being a woman without reference to man. So this means that woman is therefore classed as the sex, right? She writes, she is determined and differentiated in relation to man while he is not in relation to her.

She is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the subject. He is the absolute.

she is the other. So what is Dubois saying? She's saying that for a woman, a woman is always recognized as other.

So she occupies this category of otherness. And we've talked about otherness in previous videos, but here otherness needs to be understood in terms of, well, let's say in terms of there being a category of consciousness, the same and the other, right? And this is Levin, she's not referencing Levinas here, I don't think. but levinas is also using the same category so that means that when we're talking about what it means to be a woman we have to recognize that baked into the equation at least from the outset if we're describing our culture it looks like that woman is always understood in a non-reciprocal relationship towards men in which she is the the other so there's a relationship of alterity going on here she writes Right, and of course clearly the category of other is in many different cultures and is worldwide and we can see this alterity throughout. She writes, no group ever defines itself as one without immediately setting the other opposite itself.

So there is a way in which the conception of alterity between the same and the other is natural because as soon as there's a group identity, identity is understood in context or in juxtaposition. to that which is not the other. She quotes Levi Strauss here, quote, the passage from the state of nature to the state of culture is defined by man's ability to think biological relations as systems of opposition, duality, alteration, opposition and symmetry, whether occurring a defined or less clear form or not so much phenomena to explain as fundamental and immediate givens of social reality. So one of the things she mentions, though, is that this category of otherness that woman seems to occupy can't be understood just by using Heidegger's conception of mid-side, being with the world, right?

Where he has this notion of care, and you're with the world. It's very sort of positive, actually, right? But she says, no, Heidegger is not the right model for thinking about this problem.

Instead, it's Hegel, where Hegel always has a conception of hostility baked into the equation between the same. and the other so she's going to in a certain way rely upon or lean more into hegel's opposition and we'll talk a little bit about this in a minute but you can think here about hegel's conception of the master slave dialectic now she writes but the other consciousness has an opposing reciprocal claim traveling a local shock to realize that neighboring counties locals that in neighboring counties locals view him as a foreigner between villages clans nations and classes their wars potlatches agreements treatises and struggles to remove the absolute meaning from the idea of the other and bring out its relativity whether one likes it or not individuals and groups have no choice but to recognize the reciprocity of their relationship so she's what is she talking about there she's talking about that even when you travel and you recognize that there's an other Right? Because people see you as another. They see you as a foreigner, right? Do you recognize that there is a reciprocal relation?

It's relative to your position, your perspective, as it were. But this isn't the case with women, she argues. When it comes to the case of women, there is otherness without reciprocity.

So why has the reciprocity of the woman as other remain unvoiced? Why is only one term of the relationship, only one term of the relationship between man and woman, positive is essential, right? It looks like...

Masculinity is considered essential, but femininity is essential, right? So why don't we recognize this reciprocity in this relationship of perspective? It looks like even women, and this is a big complaint of hers, take on this very notion of otherness within their own conception of themselves. Now, de Beauvoir will distinguish this lack of reciprocity from other struggles against oppression.

She particularly mentions her own. her words, American blacks and Jews. But she's really just talking about when we take a look at America, for instance, we see the struggle of African Americans, which has a very long and troubled history, right? And she says, of course, there's a struggle of oppression there. We can go back, we can also look at, for instance, the anti-Semitism and the way that Jews are treated as other.

And these are all forms of otherness, right? But she says in those cases, for the oppressed. there was at least a before.

They share a past, a tradition of some sort, sometimes a religion or a culture. So part of what's different here, she says, is that there is no before in the case of women. Women have always been, as it were, oppressed in this sense.

So it's not as if there was some time in the past where this wasn't the case, though you could imagine such a thing. And the question is why? And so she wants to argue that there's something particular. particularly unique, I think, about the oppression that women have. And it starts off with the recognition that you have otherness without reciprocity.

So woman discovers herself as the inessential and never turns into the essential. And it's because she does not bring about this transformation herself. So de Beauvoir will actually reference in some ways, think here about Sartre's notion of responsibility, infinite responsibility.

And she wants to place the blame partially with women. Women need to bring about this transformation. So it's a crisis of existential authenticity.

Women accepting it in a certain abstract gathering such as conferences don't use the term we. Men say women. And women adopt this word to refer to themselves, but they do not posit themselves authentically as subjects.

So as we're talking about existentialism and we're talking about of the case of women, then we have to put at the very forefront the question of authenticity. And to be clear here, what we're not doing is placing blame. There is oppression against women, and we shouldn't blame women for that.

But we can say that there is also an existential crisis for women as well, in which, from Dubois'perspective, women need to authentically posit themselves as subjects. They are the ones who can bring about this transformation of not just being inessential, but being essential, as it were. Now, the tie that binds her, she writes, the tie that binds her to our oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history.

Their opposition took place with an original mid-side, an original being in the world, and she has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unit with two halves. riveted to each other cleavage of society by sex is not possible this is the fundamental characteristic of women she is the other at the heart of the whole whose two components are necessary to each other now there's something really important i put in red here number one the the tie that binds a woman to her presence the relationship without reciprocity here is not doesn't begin as a moment in history it is actually as it were baked into the original condition of the social itself right she says for instance the couple's this fundamental unit but a couple and she's thinking a couple here between a man and a woman which is essential for the reproduction of society right having couples is since it is essential to every society you can't create a division of society based upon it because the cleavage of society by sex is impossible because to do so would be to irrevocably alter the possibility of even having society.

So this is why it's a fundamental characteristic. And so she's the other, she's this alterity at the heart of the whole society. So you can see here that de Beauvoir is really emphasizing Let's call it the primary and original relation that a woman or that woman occupies.

So let's go through it. Now, she's going to reference something that comes out of Hegel, though she doesn't quite do it directly in this passage. But consider the master-slave relationship, what Hegel calls the master-slave dialectic. And this is the question of how are masters and slaves related.

And this is a part of Hegel's history, but she's giving just the example of a master and slave here. De Beauvoir writes, Master and slave are also linked by a reciprocal economic need that does not free the slaves. That is, in the master-slave relation, the master does not posit the need he has for the other. He holds the power to satisfy this and does not mediate it. The slave, on the other hand, out of dependence, hope, or fear, internalizes his need for the master.

However, equally compelling the need may be for both. It always plays in favor of the oppressor. Over the oppressed and she says this explains the slow working pace of working-class liberation so we can use the master-slave relationship here and recognize that Masters don't have to take on the consciousness of the slave and that the slave Necessarily takes on the consciousness of the master and then the situation is always in favor of the master And you can see how there is maybe a working forward here in terms of this, but let's compare woman in particular Notice that a woman may not be a slave, she says, not in a literal sense, but is rather something of a vassal.

The world is not divided up equally between men and women or divided up equally for men and women. Women in many places have different legal statuses. And a woman's rights are typically recognized abstractly but not concretely. For instance, most people say, yes, women deserve the right to equal pay. And yet that is not necessarily true.

made concrete in the world. Now, men and women therefore seem to be like two different cast, occupied two different normative levels of the society. She writes, at the moment that women are beginning to share in the making of the world, this world still belongs to men.

Men have no doubt about this and women barely doubt it. Refusing to be the other, refusing complicity with men would mean renouncing all the advantages of the world. an alliance with the superior caste confers on them. So this means that in her view, women, at least let's say not all women, but women in general, right, have a sort of deep complicity in terms of being the other for their men. And that's because of the close relationship here with men, they also get all of the benefits that men may be able to give them.

And so basically why break the molds as it were moving on male privilege has been conferred as a universal natural right historically both within religion and within philosophy devoire actually begins with the religious example by signing a jewish morning prayer in which the male will pray pray blessed be the lord our god and the lord of all worlds that And we see here a clear differentiation and an example in which women are understood in a natural way. negative context, whereas men are understood in either a positive or neutral context. This goes back to what she argued at the beginning of the introduction. And she writes, religions that are formed by men reflect this domination. So first off, we see this in the religious context, but we also see it in the philosophical.

And she's going to reference specifically both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, both who argue in different texts that women are ultimately inferior. inferior to men. And what de Beauvoir is going to say here is that to argue that women are naturally inferior is ultimately to cover up what she calls a will to self-justification, but what I'm going to call a will to power, to link in the notion of Nietzsche's will to power here.

And I think it's an undercurrent here in terms of explaining where this domination comes from, right? But it's important to recognize here that this privilege, quote unquote, is being conferred. based upon a condition of nature philosophically.

And Montaigne, who is a 15th century Renaissance philosopher, the inventor of the essay, actually writes, of course, it's much easier to accuse one sex than to accuse the other. And Montaigne even goes further in saying, women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world. Inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them. There's a natural plotting and scheming between them and us, writes Montaigne. Now, notice there, Montaigne is a 15th century philosopher.

Largely, he's living in a world in which, let's say, male privilege is not even a concept. It's not even being questioned. And he's recognizing this condition. And he's recognizing the way in which the world has been organized by men.

And that's the context of privilege here. Now, there is in philosophy a defense of women, historically, and it begins roughly in the 18th century philosophy. Though I guess we could argue Montaigne is maybe in that line of thinking. what de Beauvoir argues, gives the example, she first gives the example of Diderot.

If you recall, Diderot is the famous French philosophe who first had the notion of creating the encyclopedia. But Diderot actually tried to prove that a woman, and he argued that a woman is a human being, which seems sort of ludicrous maybe from our perspective, but it does represent a fundamental shift in the thinking philosophically, at least let's say of the Western philosophical thinking, towards a defense of women. And of course, a really solid defense of women comes in the work of John Stuart Mill, who ardently defends women. And she doesn't mention it here, and it's interesting, she doesn't talk about it.

We've seen de Beauvoir. attack the notion of the platonic ideals here. But it is also notable here that to consider Plato's own defense of women as being equal to men.

So anyway, but moving on, she actually doesn't mention Plato, at least not in these passages. But I think it's worth thinking about here. So even in the ancient world, there's some recognition here of the problem of male privilege in its social context. But putting that aside, what de Beauvoir argues is that this is the exception, though, and not not the rule. The defense of women is not the full story in Western philosophy.

It's, as it were, an exception. Now, history, now, let's put it this way. One of the problems, though, is that the debate about the equality of women typically turns into a partisan struggle rooted in economics, or rooted in some sort of social, let's call it social political grand narrative, to use the concept that we... saw Francois Lyotard introduce.

So the question of equality disappears when it gets retranslated into a language of economics or partisan struggle. Now, one of the things that's worth recognizing here that Dubois is going to emphasize is an insight that's actually very similar to something that Rousseau argues, but it's the notion that the experience that people are having that women are inferior. Let's say the experience of men and the experience of some women, that women are inferior, is the result of the effect of this male privilege and domination.

It's not the cause of it, right? She quotes George Bernard Shaw here, right? Who writes, quote, the white American relegates the black to the rank of the shoeshine boy, and then concludes that blacks are only good for shining shoes. The same vicious circle can be found in all analogous circumstances. When an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior.

But the scope of the verb to be must be understood. And I put it in blue here because it's an existential concept here. Bad faith means giving it a substantial value when in fact it has the sense of the Hegelian dynamic. To be is to have become, to have been made as one manifest oneself.

self. Yes, women in general are today inferior to men. That is, their situation provides them with fewer possibilities.

The question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated. So there's a lot that she's mentioning here, and let's see if we can break it down. First and foremost, the form of bad faith that's being used here to justify or to maintain the idea that women are inferior is a form of bad faith. What does that mean? It means that women Women are given, the notion is women are treated as a substance that has a value, i.e. an inferior value.

But what we have to recognize, though, is that what we're talking about is a dynamic thing that's taking place over time. So to be is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. So over time, we are in a process of becoming and manifesting ourselves.

Yet the problem is, is that because women... are given less possibilities. appear inferior, and that justifies treating women as substantially less valuable instead of recognizing this is a consequence of that dynamic of privilege itself so so obviously the question here is that this should not be perpetuated uh obviously that's her are going to be her argument but i want us to see here that history the history if we look back in history and say that women were inferior historically etc what we're doing is we're conflating the effect of male privilege with its cause, which I think is a really important thing. Now, but as an existentialist, Simone de Beauvoir thinks that women have to speak, right? So it's not just a matter of changing the rules, but ultimately women need to seize their own agency.

She writes, I think certain women are still best suited to elucidate the situation of women. Many women today, fortunate to have had all the privileges of the human being restored to them. can't afford the luxury of impartiality. We even feel the necessity of it, yet we know the feminine world more intimately than men do because our roots are in it.

We grasp more immediately what the fact of being female means for a human being, and we can care more about knowing it. Now, there's a couple of things I want to mention here. I think that Simone de Beauvoir is arguing two different things.

One, I think she's arguing that women need to speak and they need to seize that agency. They need to, that's sort of, as it were, being an ex- existential good faith, as it were. But the other thing she's also arguing is that women are best suited to tell the story of women.

But one thing, but she's not, she's not arguing that only women can speak. This would be a inappropriate or a misreading of hers, I think, because she recognizes that we can't say that, we can't commit the fallacy, which, a fallacy, which is namely that you have to be one to, to argue one, to argue that women are are equal doesn't mean you have to be a woman, right? So she's not saying that.

But she does want to emphasize that there's an importance of listening to the feminine voice here. And so women need to speak up because women are living in this condition, not men. But she's not arguing that only women can speak for women. I don't think that's what she's arguing. And she's trying to keep a, I think she's trying to balance a fine line there.

Now, one of the things here is that when we're talking about, um, you know, resolving, as it were, the problem between men and women. The question isn't about making everyone happy. It's not about happiness.

It's about freedom. So I have two different quotes here I want to refer to. The first she writes is, quote, but it is no doubt impossible to approach any human problems without partiality.

So she recognizes from the very outset that whenever we look at any of these problems, we always are looking at it from our own perspective. You can think of Nietzsche's perspective as a... here, right? And that means that we are biased and we do have partiality.

She goes on, even the way of asking the questions, of adopting perspectives, presupposes hierarchies of interest, all characteristics comprise values. Every so-called objective description is set against an ethical background. So first and foremost, just to begin to ask questions about human problems, asking questions, all of this presupposed... as it were, value commitments that we have. That's what this ethical background is about.

She goes on, instead of trying to conceal these principles that are more or less explicitly implied, we're better off stating them from the start. Then it would not be necessary to specify on each page the meaning that's given to words like superior, inferior, better, worse, progress, regression, and so on. And further, she writes, but neither do do we confuse the idea of private interest with happiness? We cannot really know what the word happiness means and still less what authentic value it covers. There's no way to measure the happiness of others and it's always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy.

In particular, we declare happy those content to stagnation under the pretext that happiness is immobility. This is a notion that we will not refer to. The perspective we have have adopted is one of existentialist morality.

Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely through projects. It accomplishes its freedom only by perpetually surpassing toward other freedoms. There's no justification for present existence other than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future.

So it really is this second passage I want to kind of mention and maybe talk a little bit about. First and foremost, the question isn't about happiness, it's about freedom. So, because some people may argue, for instance, well, what's the problem between the sexes? It looks like most women are happy.

For instance, someone might argue that. I don't think that's probably true. But someone might argue that.

And she says, well, number one, we don't know what happiness looks like for other people. And the other thing is that it's easy to say that other people are happy when they're actually, when they have no mobility, right? you can use that as a pretext.

So she doesn't want to think of it. She wants to think of it in terms of freedom. But we have to be clear here. We're not just talking about the freedom to do this, that, or the other. We're talking about an existentialist freedom, a freedom to concretely posit yourself as a subject in the world through the projects you have in the world.

And this notion of projects is essential because that's the way, or that's the, let's call it the point, the crux in which women have been. dominated, right? In the sense that they've been limited in terms of the projects they can pursue and the projects they can be free to put their own existence into. So we have a sort of existentialist conception here that one has to live, that women need the opportunity to effectively exist so that they can articulate and find the meaning of their essence. But that can only happen through the projects that...

we use in our existence. If there is no ability for women or woman, as she writes it, to do this, then this is the problem, right? The problem is not happiness, it's freedom rather. Now, in chapter three, and we're getting close to the end here of what we're going to talk about with in terms of de Beauvoir, she does talk about some of the social myths that have been used to solidify oppression. So in this chapter, the question is, okay, So we were just looking at the introduction there, but now the question is, or rather the idea is, there are certain mythologies, certain narratives, certain stories that are used to justify this form of oppression within our society.

And one of those is what she calls the static myth, or she calls it a static myth. And first is the myth of the two categories of human beings, right? The very myth that human beings are divided between men and women.

and therefore they're different. Now, remember, she's defending the notion of woman, or she wants to articulate that notion, but the myth that there's fundamentally two different categories that are irresolvable, irreducible, right? Ultimately, that is a myth in her view.

It's a mythology that we've taken on, a narrative, a story that we've used to understand things. And she specifically mentions the division of the sexes when we treat it as a sort of platonic ideal. Now, as a reminder, by platonic ideal, what does she mean here? In Plato's metaphysics, his view is that all of the things in reality are merely just temporary versions, temporary beings that are participating in the real ideal of a thing.

So his argument, for instance, is that you have lots of coffee cups in the world, but all of them participate in the ideal or the idea of coffee cup-ness. So there's a... pure perfect essence for things and then everything else in the world is just participating in it imperfectly. So for instance in Plato's view I'm a man and so that means I'm participating in the ideal form of man-ness.

Now I'm obviously not perfect and I'm not the ideal but you recognize me as a man precisely because you recognize that I have some elements of that ideal. Now this is a static notion because it means that the notion of man or the notion of woman are ideal and they're static. And our question is, to what degree can we get close to those?

And notice that Platonism is the very opposite of existentialism because Platonism says there's an essence and existence is trying to participate in the essence, whereas existentialism says, no, we have existence and that's what essence is. It comes out of that. So there's a diametrical opposition here between de Beauvoir's, let's call it her epistemological, and ethical commitments versus the platonic ideal.

So, but in the platonic sense, the division of the sexes is treated as something which is essential and that we're just participating in, right? That's the mythology, right? She writes, each of the myths are built, or each of the myths built around woman tries to summarize her as a whole. So there's a way in which these myths have a tendency to take woman and reduce her to a woman.

deuce woman down into this platonic static ideal. Now, what are some of these images of the mythos of woman? One is the saintly mother, right? This notion, this ideal that a woman needs to be something like a saintly mother.

But she writes, quote, the saintly mother has its correlation in the cruel stepmother. The angelic young girl has the perverse virgin. So mother will be said sometimes to equal life and sometimes death. And every virgin is either a pure spirit or flesh possessed by the devil, right?

So there's a way in which these images, let's call it the myth of the saintly mother, also has its correlate of negativity, right? Going forward, the institutional treatment of women is correlated with the myth that's adopted. So this is important because she's mentioning that when we talk about the situation of woman today, woman is not just treated in a sort of conversational sense as inferior, but is treated inferior in an institutional sense, right?

And that institutional sense is rooted in the myth that's organizing that institution. So for instance, let's give an example here, right? We'll use the example of Saudi Arabia, where in Saudi Arabia, clearly women are not given the same equal opportunities.

So they're treated institutionally different, right? Courts of law treat women differently there than they treat men. And the same can probably be said here, but this is a more notable example.

Women are not allowed to drive, for instance, in Saudi Arabia. Now, why is that the case? And that, I would say, it's because the institution, you know, let's call it the Saudi Arabian government, has its understanding of woman in one that's rooted in the religious, let's call it narratives, that are endorsed by that institution, right, ultimately. So there's a mythology, a story about woman, which is ultimately fueling this institutional prejudice.

She writes, thus paternalism that calls for a woman to stay home defines her as sentiment. inferiority and imminence. So she's also against the paternalism of women, that is treating women as if they are children and need a parent to guide them, right? And this comes out in the institutional treatment of women, notably. Now, what are some of the other myths?

The other myths include, for instance, the myth of the altruistic woman, the woman who always is self-sacrificing. To identify a woman with altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion. It's to impose on woman a categorical must-be. What is she saying here? Well, if we think of woman as being purely altruistic, that is self-sacrificing, then that, she argues, helps guarantee the idea that, well, if a woman has to be self-sacrificing, then that means that a man has an absolute right to her self-sacrifice.

In other words, When we identify a woman as being purely altruistic, we're effectively condemning her to self-sacrifice herself for man or for men or for the opposite sex or whatever. It's to impose on women a sort of categorical, you have to be like this. Sumraval also talks about the myth of assimilating woman with nature. The way in which, and this goes back to the philosophical prejudices we looked at earlier. But this is the case where I'm saying that women have a specific natural condition, and that's the reason, for instance, why they have to be treated differently.

She writes, Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling master caste than this one. It justifies all its privileges, even authorized taking advantage of them. Men do not have to care about alleviating the suffering and burdens that are physiologically women's lot, since they are, quote, intended by nature.

They take this as a pretext to increase the misery of the woman's condition. For example, by denying women the right to sexual pleasure or making her work like a beast of burden, right? And so here, we're not talking too much about it in this spot, but, and she does talk about this, but thinking about the way in which the description of a woman's body is used to justify oppression.

against her, right? For instance, people will say things like women are not as strong as men, so therefore they should be treated differently and so forth. This is another example of assimilating woman with nature.

And this is a mythology that, of course, de Beauvoir argues we need to reject and overcome. Now, where do we go from here? Well, remember, de Beauvoir is an existentialist, which means that women need to, women, women.

must make herself, right? Quote, for many women, the roads to transcendence are blocked because they do nothing, because they do not make themselves be anything. They wonder indefinitely what they could have become, which leads them to wonder what they are. It's a useless question.

If man fails to find that secret essence, it's simply because it does not exist. Kept at the margins of the world, women cannot be defined objectively through this world, and her mystery conceals nothing but emptiness. So this is a very philosophical claim here, or set of claims. But the first claim here, and this is all one quotation, but I've kind of broken them out separately. The first thing here is she's saying that the roads of transcendence are blocked partially because women themselves don't act.

Remember, that means, in other words, she's arguing that women are living in bad faith, or many of... Many women are living in bad faith. Remember, Sartre says that we're all living in bad faith, so this isn't a surprise, as it were.

But it's the notion that if you do nothing, and you just wonder what you could have been, you can see here that it's useless, right? What you have to do is you have to step forward and act, right? Now, by contrast, she says, there is no secret essence, ultimately, that needs to be discovered here. And she says, if a man can't find it, that is, that doesn't exist.

Whereas it looks like women don't find it and they're still searching. So there's a way in which I think that Simone de Beauvoir is trying to puncture the potential bad faith that is contributing to the oppression of women. Partially in an existential sense here, right?

But ultimately, at the end of the day, remember this, there is no, for the existential, there is no secret essence that needs to be discovered. Rather, it's made through our doing of things. So in this sense, Simone de Beauvoir is trying to encourage women to step out for themselves and to act. And of course, they did when she wrote this, and they are still today. So it's important to remember this text is written in 1946, I believe, or maybe it was 49, but it's written in the 40s.

And so the situation is largely different today, but I think there's a lot of what she's arguing here is still... correct. Now, she writes, the myth is one of those false traps of false objectivity into which the spirit of seriousness falls headlong. It is once again a matter of replacing the lived experience in the free judgments of experience it requires by a static idol. The myth of woman substitutes for an authentic relationship with an autonomous existent, the immobile contemplation of a mirage.

What is she saying here? She's saying that these myths about women being the natural condition of woman, the woman is the saintly mother, so on and so forth, these myths or these images that we have in our society, these static images about what the ideal woman is, she says, these are a mirage. These are not real, right?

And what we have to do is we have to move beyond those, right? We have to focus on the lived experience and the free judgments. of our experience, not by using a static idol or an image of what the ideal woman is, which is all a mirage. So this is all a false trap in her argument.

And you can see this language, for instance, in the discussion of feminism today. When people are discussing what it means to be a man or a woman, in both cases, there's a tendency to articulate what de Beauvoir is calling here a static idol or a myth. And this ultimately is a trap that keeps us in bad faith. Now, there's a duplicitous demand, that means, on the woman.

A woman is asked to view herself as other. Du Bois writes, In the eyes of men and of the legions of women who see through these eyes, it is not enough to have a woman's body or to take on the female function as lover and mother to be a real woman. It is possible for the subject to claim autonomy through sexuality or maternity.

The real woman is the one who accepts herself as other. The duplicitous attitude of men today creates a painful split for women. They accept for the most part that women be a peer and equal, and yet they continue to oblige her to remain the inessential. For her, these two destinies are not reconcilable. She hesitates between them.

Without being exactly suited to either and that is the source of her lack of balance. So here I think Devois is really kind of touching upon. Let's call it the internal paradox of being a woman or to be of woman today, right? Which is namely, you have both the sense that women are equal and yet women have to treat themselves as other or see themselves as other, which means that they're also, as it were, inessential because if they're other, they're not the same, right?

And the same is what is essential and so forth. So you can see here that what we have is a painful split that has to be overcome. When we talk about the question of the situation of the sexes, we talk about feminism, we have to recognize that women today are, as it were, bounded in a paradoxical spot.

On the one hand, there's these images of these mythological images, which deny her essence, right, and make her inessential. And yet, on the other hand, there is the discussion. that women need to be treated as an equal and as a peer. And these two things are not reconcilable to Beauvoir's arguing.

And ultimately, to overcome this problem, as it were, to liberate a woman, this tension has to be overcome. Now, what is certain today, according to Beauvoir, she writes, is that it is very difficult for women to assume both their status of autonomous individual and their feminine destiny. Here is the source of the awkwardness and discomfort that sometimes leads them to be considered a lost sex. And without doubt, it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation. The dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

In any case, turning back is no more possible than desirable. What must be hoped is that men will assume, without reserve, the situation being created. Only then can women experience it without being torn.

So in this passage here, we realize that it's not just a question of women living authentically, but men must also begin to live authentically in order to overcome this dilemma, right? In order to overcome this bifurcation of the sexes in terms of a value where men are treated or seen and recognized as being. either positive or neutral, whereas women, the lot of women, and woman as a concept, is considered negative through all the mythologies. And so there is a key here, right, is that we can't go backwards. We can't go back to what things were.

We don't want to do it. It's not even desirable. But what has to be hoped for is that men can also assume the new situation that's being created. So There's a role here for men to, as it were, be feminist.

And I think that's an important thing to recognize, is that men have a responsibility as well to recognize these problems. And I think Simone de Beauvoir here really gives us a great summary of helping us understand the way in which the... The quest for women's liberation is a quest that continues on. Because even though certainly there's been lots of progress, even since de Beauvoir wrote this, today the mythology of what an ideal woman is, is still with us.

And we still see all of the same things she's talking about widely repeated today within social media and within our society. So I think that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is still an essential text. for us to read and it's really helpful too to understand how existentialism can relate to such an essential pivotal and difficult problem that we have today.

Thank you guys very much for watching this video. I hope this was helpful. I apologize midway through I had to change. You can see I made a different thing.

I had to stop recording and restart. So hopefully it's still consistent and makes a lot of sense for you. Thank you very much for watching.

I'll see you guys online.

Transcript for:Exploring Simone de Beauvoir's Feminist Philosophy

Transcript for:
Exploring Simone de Beauvoir's Feminist Philosophy