#JESUISBEAUVOIR

Hi buddies!


No... I'm not here to launch a new trend about Simone de Beauvoir (actually, nothing more can happen with her, right now...) but to talk about how I agree with her thesis and how it teaches us about the actual world.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir talks about the myths that are made around the woman. She explains how historic and mythic facts have altered the image of the woman in our societies. She says that the "woman" is a construction, a social construction. She explains that the human beings learn to be men or women as they are socially determined by their sex. In her book, she draws the life of a typical woman as she becomes a young girl whose dream is to being married as the little boy doesn't even expect any woman to have a significant role in his future. Then she experiences her first love affairs, her disappointments, goes through phantasms, erotism and sexuality. Thus she becomes a woman, have children and then feel the decrepitude of her maturity
until he dies. She's always, in Beauvoir's point of view, the result of the man's will. She's a good girl because her mother told her to be so as she has to look right for men's sake. She's having sex because men ask her to. She marries because she accomplishes a little girl's dream and can't consider her life complete without a man. She has babies because the man want her to perpetuate his family. And she keeps making choices according to the man's will.
What is more sad about the woman's situation is that she's not helping for it to be changed. The man can be as authoritarian, misogynist or conversely keen to the feminist's cause as possible, if the woman doesn't make it an effort to overcome man's command, she's destined to remain a slave - if not sexually or physically - psychologically.

Woman is a woman as she's biologically determined to be so. She's the biological function of being a mother and the social one of being a wife, a daughter or a sister. Beauvoir has made a huge work on woman's condition. She points out all the struggles women have to go through in order to remain proud. What I personally think is that we're mistaking the debate. It's not about telling if the woman is inferior to the man or if the man has to be more incisive in his behavior than her ; it's not about telling that they should both overcome all of their differences and become the same. It's about showing that woman is not the same as man and that it doesn't inform us about the fact she's less favored than him. We should not focus on the differences between them both but on how they are additional. It's funny how people think being a man and having a penis is preferable of having a vagina ; while the same people would say that it's an inconvenient for women to have a breast and men not. It's the same debate about the hair, the way both should dress, the way both should be spoken to, etc. Finally, even those who take woman's defense are stuck in the Westerner's trick, considering that every biological aspect of the woman is inferior to the man's. I agree with Beauvoir saying that the social functions given to the women are likely to be degrading but I believe - and this is the limit I point out to her work - that her analysis is a Western lecture. I'm not talking of the women being considered weak and being raped or abused all over the world, but I talk about primitive societies, countries like South Africa or even the religions - even though people think they're all androcentric, that's another debate - who consider the woman in a different way as in our societies.

Beauvoir has a remarkable analysis and made people focus a lot on woman's condition. But in some ways, where she sees differences, I see complementarity.

Hope y all did get my point. And if not - because my mind is a bit messy - don't hesitate asking me questions.