Ep. 232: Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 232 is something like, what is the existential situation of woman? And we read Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex from 1949, specifically the intro, conclusion, woman, situation and character, and selections from lived experience. For more information, visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, really trying not to ever disrespect my wife in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:28 Seth: This is Seth Paskin feeling his virility in Austin, Texas.

0:32 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:35 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Jenny: This is Jenny Hansen striving to find an authentic existence as a female from New York.

0:44 Mark: So Jenny has appeared before on an after show of the last time we attacked Simone de Beauvoir, but this is your first time on the main stage, so welcome.

0:52 Jenny: I'm so excited.

0:54 Unknown speaker: Yay.

0:56 Mark: Have you taught this book? What is your experience with this?

0:59 Jenny: Yes, I have taught this book off and on, maybe like 15 years. It's been a while, and so I had to go back and read it. But I've taught it both in intro to philosophy classes, feminist theory and phenomenology, existentialist courses. It was like the book that got me into philosophy. Before that. I didn't know that women wrote philosophy.

1:20 Wes: So you've taught it for 15 years?

1:22 Jenny: Probably something around that.

1:24 Wes: You've been at St. Lawrence? How long have you been at St. Lawrence? The whole time?

1:29 Jenny: No. So I was at Gettysburg College for the first nine years of my career, and then I've now been at St. Lawrence for 11 years.

1:37 Wes: So you, at some point you were in touch with me, and I ended up coming to teach a course up there.

1:43 Jenny: Right. Like a year and a half ago, I was still the dean of the first year program, and now I just had a very lengthy sabbatical before I go back in the classroom in January.

1:53 Dylan: Nice.

1:54 Jenny: Yes.

1:54 Wes: Did you write a book?

1:56 Jenny: No, that's why I'm on this show. I was supposed to. I got some articles out.

2:03 Wes: Are you supposed to have a book to plug?

2:05 Jenny: Oh, I'm sorry.

2:06 Wes: Do people plug scholarly articles?

2:08 Jenny: Probably not. I mean, I did publish one on the MeToo movement in the John Dewey Studies Journal.

2:13 Dylan: We should link to them when we. On the. When we post the.

2:16 Jenny: Sure. I also did one on leisure and liberal arts education, so I got a couple articles out. But I mostly spent my time in Atlanta, having a good time.

2:26 Wes: Okay, well, good. I think that's the properly spent sabbatical I was.

2:32 Jenny: Decompressing.

2:33 Dylan: Recharging.

2:34 Jenny: Exactly. Finding a love of philosophy and college education again.

2:38 Dylan: It usually needs a little bit of time after a few years of teaching it.

2:42 Jenny: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

2:44 Dylan: So you were saying that this is the book that got you into philosophy in the first place.

2:49 Jenny: So I went to a Jesuit college, and so I took philosophy because it was sort of required, and I liked it. I ended up actually majoring in philosophy, but I didn't take it seriously. You know, I thought, okay, it's going to be like a prerequisite for law school or something. But then I discovered this book in my senior year, and then I thought, oh, my God, Wow, women can do philosophy. When I went to graduate school, because I was so motivated by finding a really impressive thinker, literally, this book.

3:15 Dylan: You read this book and then you decided to change your plans and go to graduate school in philosophy?

3:22 Jenny: Yeah, I did. So again, I mean, maybe because all my professors were male, I can't think of a single female philosopher I read until maybe my last quarter of college. So I just didn't think it was a thing. So this opened up the door for me.

3:37 Mark: Did all 700 pages of it open the door for you?

3:40 Jenny: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, just have to start skimming. Right. I mean, it gets repetitive. And, you know, the introduction is insanely profound. Even rereading it, now that I'm, you know, over 20 years in philosophy, I see how much she influenced all the other female thinkers, feminist thinkers that came after her. It's impressive.

4:00 Mark: Yes. So just to comment on the selections here, I ended up as an audiobook, listening to some pretty large chunks of this at high speed, like to kind of scan for what are the good parts that we need to hit. Everybody agreed that the intro is the thing where she introduces her whole project. So that was a foregone conclusion. Also the conclusion of the book, which actually gives her positive where do we go from here? That seemed an obvious thing to append to that. And then I chose this. Volume two, Chapter ten, Woman's Situation and Character. So that is the end of part two of volume two.

Volume two is called Lived Experience. So part one of it is the Formative Years, and it's all about describing the situation of woman. So it's childhood through married life through old age. And this chapter 10, woman situation and Character was at the end of all of that to kind of sum up from childhood to old age. And it's an analysis of. Okay, here's the Personality traits commonly attributed to women. And here's how they relate to her situation as a kept passive being, you know, denied authentic pursuit of her own projects, doomed to a particular role by society.

So that seemed like a good summing up chapter. Then I did come up with some just individual pages from those previous chapters. Childhood, the girl, the married woman, from maturity to old age, social life. Just to kind of give us a flavor of how she gives these descriptions. But. So that was my best take on how can we really concisely get at what her overall argument was here? But of course, there's many, many, many, many pages left out.

5:41 Jenny: Well, and this is an unabridged translation, too, so it's all of the pages.

5:46 Wes: Mark, you were talking about doing another episode, and we should definitely do that.

5:50 Dylan: She's awesome to read. Yeah.

5:52 Jenny: Yeah, I'm so glad to hear that.

5:54 Dylan: I had never read her before until we did The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is a great freaking book. And I was just brought back just how fun she is to read. It does get a little repetitive, but it takes a little while for it to wear off on me, I think.

6:08 Jenny: I read her biography soon after I discovered this book. And there's these images of her sitting in cafes writing. And you just get this sense this is way before computers and edit. And she just kind of went with it. She just wrote things and rewrote them and probably didn't edit out a lot.

6:24 Dylan: Yeah, sure, yeah.

6:26 Mark: Fourteen months I read is what in the intro there. This was spread over a couple years, but about 14 months of work total.

6:32 Jenny: I mean, she did a lot of research for this. So I was thinking about that this time. How many things did she have stacked next to her on one of the cafe tables as she thumbing through and writing this?

6:40 Dylan: So in 1949, also reading through it, the fact that 1949 is on the leading edge, right? Of what? The second wave.

6:49 Jenny: Yeah, I mean, she's considered probably the individual who founded the Second Wave. Speaking of that 1949 date, I was reading the first paragraph to a friend of mine as I was looking at this again, and, you know, and it's sort of like, yeah, everyone's sick of this question, right? Like, we're done. Like, no one wants to hear it anymore. And I'm reading this and my friend's like, shaking her head going, yeah. And I go, actually, that was written in 1949. She's like, what?

7:14 Wes: I read the introduction to a friend as well, actually, just the first few lines because I thought it was hilarious. It is the subject is irritating, especially for women. And it is not new.

7:23 Jenny: Well, and you can tell as a person who was an intellectual who had succeeded in ways that men didn't even succeed. I think she even passed the exam before Sartre, but then they gave it to him or something like that. Not to embarrass him. I can't remember if they postponed her, but I think she probably was irritated about it because she just didn't want deal with it. She just wanted to be a philosopher. So I think a lot of her personality is coming through that.

7:44 Dylan: There's, to me, fun sections where she makes her point in such an articulate but sarcastic manner. I had to read those aloud as well.

7:52 Jenny: And I think her thinking evolved too, after writing this. I don't think she would have considered herself a feminist when she was writing this. She just was sort of something she had to get out of the way. You know, all right, let me just write this and then I can go back to doing philosophy. But, you know, it started something pretty huge.

8:06 Dylan: That's the way she sets it up in the introduction. Right. Is essentially the way you said it, is that I just have to deal with this and move on 800 page later.

8:15 Jenny: Hopefully I'll be over it and we can all just settle this question and go forward.

8:19 Mark: So what is the question?

8:21 Jenny: I mean, I think that even though the majority of the book is really a kind of analysis or a genealogy, let's say, of how women have found themselves in the situation they are, that it was all propaedeutic for her to write that conclusion, which is, I think, where she wanted to be in her life. To get to a place where women and men entered into relationships that weren't sort of fraught with all of these problems, double standards and irritations with each other because of the situation that they both found themselves in because of patriarchy. And so that if they could just sort of undo that, which would be more than simply understanding it or simply affording abstract equality or formal equality, then we could really see what the world would be like. I mean, it's really not about what will women be like, but what will human beings be like if we undo this?

9:10 Dylan: Yeah. Affording every human being the ability to a short version be flourished. She might not appreciate the sort of Aristotelian virtue ethics part of that explicitly

9:21 Wes: rejects happiness as a criterion.

9:23 Dylan: Yeah. That's why I picked Flourish. Right. You know, sort of.

9:26 Wes: I know I'm just giving you a hard time.

9:28 Jenny: I mean, she does, but I think she has an ambivalent relationship to that kind of Aristotelian thought. I mean, she does like Thomas Aquinas. Right. So that's clear. But she seems to have an appreciation of certain martial virtues that you see articulated in people like Aristotle. Like heroism and revolt and all that kind of stuff.

9:46 Wes: Yeah, so she just. Because I'm looking at the passage where she sort of articulates the questions that she's going to be answering. I thought I would just read from that on page 37 at the bottom. How in the feminine condition can a human being accomplish herself? What paths are open to her? Which ones lead to dead ends? How can she find independence within dependence? What circumstances limit women's freedom, and can she overcome them? These are the fundamental questions we would like to elucidate. And elsewhere. This means that in focusing on the individual's possibilities, we will define these possibilities not in terms of happiness, but in terms of freedom.

And she's gone in a little bit into why she thinks that's necessary. One of them is just that happiness is such a vague concept. And I think she's right. Although Dylan is also right that there's a more sophisticated Aristotelian version of that. Which I think does connect to existentialism in various ways. And she has a little spiel on this criterion, too. A basically sort of summary of her existentialist approach, which we could read as well. It's on the same page. The perspective we have adopted is one of existentialist morality. Every subject posits itself as a transcendence.

Concretely through projects. It accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms. There is no other justification for present existence Than its expansion toward an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degradation of existence into, in itself a freedom, into facticity. This fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it. If this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression. In both cases, it is an absolute evil. So I thought maybe we should say a little bit about that.

Since that is her existentialist criterion. Throughout these readings. And I assume it's throughout the book as well.

11:39 Mark: There seems to be little bits of it. So like the beginning of a chapter. This is why I kind of. In that lived experience I picked out. Let's just read the first couple pages of each of these chapters. Because that's where she kind of gives her existentialist analysis of this stage of infancy or of gaining sexual maturity or something. And then it goes into great detail that's not so so you could, I think, shave the existentialism off of this. And I think that's what was wrong supposedly with the first English translation of this, which it was done by a man who had no philosophical training, who thought this was more of a psych book. And apparently that's why it was abridged because he was like taking out all the hard looking philosophy and leaving the observations.

12:25 Jenny: I just want to add the statement she makes that where she's sort of suggesting that her method is this existentialist morality, because right before that, and this goes back to the brief discussion we had about her concern with making happiness the goal. Maybe it's on the same page she lays out. What we're doing here is value laden. Right. We're all going to come at this from our own lived experience, our own point of views. She's a phenomenologist. Right. So I think that her problem with happiness is, and she says it in connection with concepts like the public good or the public interest is that they end up becoming ways that certain people that have more power can enforce on others their conception of the good. And she wants to maintain this plurality.

13:07 Wes: Well, she says there is no public good other than one that assures the citizen's private good.

13:12 Jenny: Right, Right.

13:13 Wes: We judge institutions from the point of view of the concrete opportunities they give

13:17 Jenny: to individuals and to impose on others. Right. Those ideas. So I think freedom for her doesn't have content, happiness does. And then happiness is the content of whoever, what individual, however, that individual has casted out and then it becomes something imposed. Whereas freedom, I think for her. And existentialism is more about projects that don't have any specific content in that way.

13:40 Dylan: That's, I guess, one of the reasons why I think of the term flourishing, which is also the reason why you wouldn't want to use it, because in that Aristotelian context, it has the notion of flourishing towards a particular end, whereas in her case it would be the openness of that part of it. But without the prescription of a particular

14:00 Wes: end, we set our own ends instead of the ends coming from our human nature.

14:04 Dylan: Yeah. In that paragraph that you just. After what you read, Wes, what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, is an autonomous freedom. She discovers and chooses herself. In a world where men force her to assume herself as other, an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will forever be transcended by another essential and sovereign conscious. And then at the end, in focusing on these questions, in fact, the questions I think, that we said earlier, we'll be focusing on individuals, possibilities. We will define these possibilities not in terms of happiness, but in terms of freedom. That's just what we've been saying.

14:42 Wes: So this idea, shall we say, talk about transcendence and immanence and projects and what all these things mean.

14:49 Mark: Well, it follows from her that the general existential vocabulary, which, again, I gotta say, is sprinkled a little bit in here, but you could almost. This is not like being in nothingness.

14:58 Wes: I don't agree. I mean, maybe you could convince me as it goes on. That wasn't my impression of the readings anyway.

15:03 Mark: To exist, to be an existent is to have this openness is to be not a thing. So to be an in itself is to be something that has a determinate nature, just an object. And so it is forever is the curse of the truly existent, right? The one who's pursuing existentialism. All of us, by the definition of the type of being that we are, that we are doomed to freedom. It's very tempting for us to try to become static objects, to define ourselves. I am nothing but a waiter, you know, in Sartre's example, or I'm a French citizen, I am but a woman. And that's always going to be really immoral.

15:45 Wes: Part of what we discussed in the ethics of ambiguity, the ambiguity is the two ways in which we can take ourselves. One, as physical, material objects in the universe subject to deterministic laws, objects like any other objects. And so that point of view militates against the idea of our freedom and therefore of our responsibility. In the case of a waiter who inhabits that role, or anyone who thinks, well, that's just my character, or that's just this or that about me. I have some sort of essence that determines my behavior. That's a way of falling back on that deterministic point of view.

And the other way of viewing ourselves is as subjectivities, which not obviously material objects within the world that can be pointed to and handled. They're transcendent in that sense. And then if we're transcendent in the sense that we can also be free, it's not the case that there isn't such a thing as a facticity. By the way, it's circumstances, situations, these deterministic forces which confine us. And she and Sartre and other existentialists, I don't think deny those. That doesn't mean that we aren't also capable of freedom and capable of taking responsibility and so that's going to be the paradigm through which the subjection of women is explained.

Because women are, as she points out even here, are treated as if they are mere immanences or mere objects where man is the one subject and woman is simply the object within his gaze and formed by that gaze.

17:15 Mark: And then she, at least in many cases, is enticed to go along with this. Right, because it's her tendency, just like everybody's tendency toward bad faith, toward making herself an object, that women sort of by default, they accept this oppression.

17:30 Dylan: Well, they're raised into it. It's cultivated.

17:32 Wes: They internalize the gaze of the other, the cultural concept of woman as their self concept.

17:37 Jenny: Yeah, well, and then there's also the economic and political restraints that they have to face. So, yeah, part of it is that they internalize certain images of femininity, but they also know that they're completely dependent for the most part. And these are where some criticisms come in of her work, but we can get back to that later. But they're completely dependent on the man to have a house, to have a roof.

17:59 Dylan: The economic and political circumstances are very powerful levers and bludgeons of the objectness, of maintaining their objectness, of forcing their

18:10 Jenny: circumstance on this notion of ambiguity, too. And this is kind of where I think about the ethics of ambiguity. And because she wrote that before this, that part of it is just the relativity of the values that constitute the masculine universe, as she calls it. I think that somehow there's a sort of unique perspective that women adopt, that because they are made objects in this world, because the men aren't even following these rules and they're wanting women not to follow these rules, right, or these laws or these values. And so they begin to see that whatever kind of world of values that gets posited and then try to impose on other people is just completely arbitrary on some level.

18:48 Wes: I wanted to mention, since you talked about criticisms of her work, the writing is incredible and it's just chock full of insights, one insight after the other. And one of the natural byproducts of that is just that it's open to tons of criticisms because she's generaliz, she's contradicting herself. You could say that some of the things she says about women aren't entirely true in her time. She's speaking of a sort of ideal or paradigm. And I think she would acknowledge all these things. And of course, she adds her own qualifications in various places. And I'm sure she does more in the 700 pages we didn't read. Regardless of whether one can nitpick at various little things, I think, and regardless of whether one agrees, it's just the insights are. It's amazing how dense this reading was with those insights.

19:34 Mark: I think people today are going to say, okay, this is 1949. Is it really the case that women are kept now?

19:42 Unknown speaker: Right.

19:42 Mark: Is it really the case that woman's destiny is marriage and that nothing else remains to her? So even at the time she was writing this, she's saying, look, marriage is becoming more and more a meeting of equals. The professions are opening up more and more to women. This is no longer. But still we can acknowledge that even now, a lot of people in a lot of parts of the world, this describes pretty damn exactly. And to the extent that the problems she's outlining have been addressed, she says, look, we're still living in the cultural remnants of a time when this was just universally the situation of women.

I want to compare this a lot to the Sartre episodes that we had on Anti-Semite and Jew, published just a couple years before this, where Sartre in that essay was objecting to the liberal who just says, basically we're in a post racial or in this case, post sexist society. And to just abstractly admit that, as was the case in, you know, the intellectual circles that Beauvoir was circulating in, to just say, yes, I recognize that women are just as good, just as capable of men, that it's their situation that's holding them back, that whatever high percentage, 99% of what is attributed as, you know, the feminine character is really a matter of social context.

But even just acknowledging all that stuff in the abstract doesn't change habits and customs that go back millennia.

21:07 Jenny: I find it quite devastating to read this book, even with all of our so called progress. You know, I mean, some of the insights she has about the gist fraught nature of romantic relationships between, you know, heterosexual couples, I guess between men and women. So the insights are still valuable. But then even when she's noticing things about abortion, right, and the sort of men that absolutely reject it, but then secretly want women to get the abortions, you know, I just feel like we still live in a time like that.

21:37 Seth: It doesn't feel dated.

21:38 Jenny: That's a good way to put it. It doesn't feel dated.

21:40 Wes: Well, it certainly isn't dated is, you know, I had the same emotion of feeling sad, but probably for different reasons. And one of them is just, it may be that we have to mourn femininity. It's not clear to me how much that's the case. And that's certainly something that hasn't changed. Right? So the feminine is still a very predominant part of relationships between heterosexual men and women. And it's at least implied, or it seems implied, that to some extent that would have to change. What we think of as femininity would drastically change if women's situation were made better. And then de Beauvoir addresses this explicitly where she gives a really persuasive. Those of us who are attached to it and might not want to give that up, whether we're men or women. She gives a very persuasive argument for why we ought to give it up anyway.

22:31 Seth: So I think you make a good point there, Wes, that the issue isn't that she's challenging gender roles or gender in itself. It's not that she's saying the concept of woman, the concept of man, needs to be questioned. It's the concept of femininity. She mentions frequently the concept of the eternal feminine, which is an oblique reference to the concept that there's an essence. You know, what it means to be a woman is somehow essential, biological or metaphysical. Whatever the case is, the argument of the book is women don't get the same opportunity to transcend by virtue of being a subject and objectifying the world and others in the right way to develop self consciousness that women don't get that opportunity and so they never have the opportunity to become fully subjects.

Your response to that could be we want to give women the opportunity to become full subjects the same way that men are. Or you might also say the whole concept of subjectivity is corrupt. There's a couple different strategies out of this. I'm not sure at the end the criticism of the lack of an eternal femininity, it doesn't get reflected back on some kind of criticism of masculinity or of the masculine self. It's just simply that the mechanism by which men become masculine and women become feminine. She points out the discrepancies between the two, but I don't get a clear sense that she's talking about scrapping the entire system.

24:00 Jenny: I'm not totally sure that that's the case, although it's not completely wrong. But I think that there's a lot of hints. One of the ones that really struck me was the way that men, or the way that sort of, let's call it a bad faith, masculinity can manifest. Right? So that some men, though they're being. They're sort of feeling challenged by other men. Right. They're feeling that they're not holding their own ground. Maybe they're being dominated by other men or by people that, you know, in their areas of expertise, they can at least dominate women to feel that sense of self or that competence that they're not getting.

I mean, let me say something more about that. I mean, that is something that I think a lot of women in philosophy think about, to be honest. And not just philosophy, a lot of fields. But, you know, there's just sort of the sense, you know, when women come in and they want to change things, or there's more women that are getting hired or there's new societies and women want their way in, you know, there's a kind of pushback, a kind of frustration. You know, well, why can't you just do things the way we do things? It's the idea that men would feel like they need to sort of reclaim that space.

I mean, I think she talks about it in terms of like sort of the women taking the positions in medical schools or law schools is because not only do they think they have a right to it, but also they may actually feel like they're not good. She said the ones that feel more, their efficacy, let's say, in a profession or a place, they don't get threatened by women entering into their spheres.

25:30 Seth: Let me qualify what I said. I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying from the perspective of a psychological analysis, but from a phenomenological analysis. If she's making the argument in the basis this is about freedom, not happiness, she's going to define it in terms of freedom. And what we mean here is existential freedom, which is realization through projects it's doing. The argument is women are not given the same opportunity or the circumstances are not created whereby women can do and self realize and explore or manifest this sense of existentialist freedom which is given to men precisely because of their participation in the masculine. My question is, is there a third way out? Or if she's tied into this concept of existentialist freedom, does it mean that the answer here has to be that women become subjects in the same way that men are?

26:24 Mark: You just said participation in the masculine. We should clear.

26:28 Seth: Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah.

26:29 Mark: It's like world creation, you know, so participation in actually having power to change the world. That's all it mean. Anything that has to be specifically masculine.

26:38 Dylan: And I also think that she spends the book talking about the situation of women and is focused on that. But it seems to me throughout the book, as Jenny said she's at least dropping hints, if not explicit points, focusing on existential morality and points out how other groups in the world are in this position of objectification and that she isn't going on an analysis of those other groups. And she also doesn't need to go on an analysis about masculinity, which I think she would end up having an analysis that would be a kind of existential analysis of the ways in which of bad faith, yada, yada, yada. I didn't get it, that it was a direct relationship between Women need to

27:25 Seth: become men, women don't need to become men, women need to become subjects.

27:30 Jenny: What it comes down to is, is there already some flaws though in that masculine world in the way that that world has been constructed as where men have theoretically been more free to do their projects and live out there, to transcend themselves, let's say. I think especially towards the end, in the conclusion. Actually it's also in the conclusion of, you know, this sort of character and situation stuff that there are things that will necessarily have to change in masculinity. And I don't know, I mean, I think the open question here is are those not real, true manifestations of masculinity as a sort of authentic expression or are they when men are trying to, you know, flee their metaphysical task of creating themselves in these projects.

But you know, things like the kind of irritation, you know, she gets in these nitty gritty things about the ways that men and women are irritated with each other for different reasons, you know, and the ways that men have constrained women's freedom sexually, economically, you know, in order to gain a kind of self esteem, I guess, from that. Or she spends a lot of time trying to figure out how that happened in the first place. And I don't think she ever satisfactorily can come up with an answer for why it is that women, in her view, have always been the second sex, always been objectified.

But it does seem like, you know, so I'm looking, I'll just give it a passage. So I'm not just talking in generalities, but at the Conclusion on page 851, she has this claim. Each sex is victim both of the other and of itself. Maybe because I spent a lot of time after reading de Beauvoir, reading Irigaray, who was probably the person I was most influenced by. I see in her this recognition that there is no way that masculinity can go forward as it has been once. Femininity, the kind of femininity that's been imposed on women has to be gotten rid of.

Because she does pretty clearly say that, that it's. Let me see if I can find that passage too. She has a clear statement about how we need to get rid of femininity.

29:23 Mark: Yeah, it's on 851 as well. This whole conclusion is kind of set up as is the battle of the sexes inevitable? Are we always going to have this conflict? And she says the conflict will last as long as men and women do not recognize each other as peers. That is as long as femininity is perpetuated as such.

29:40 Jenny: So on page 849 she says about femininity or the. Or woman. She can only abolish this inferiority femininity by destroying male superiority. And then all oppression creates a state of war. And then on 851, going back to where I was reading, she says this really puzzling thing that I've not figured out. But she says between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure freedom, an agreement could be easily found. Especially as this war does not benefit anyone. So there's this idea that you need this conflict and it will create something different.

30:15 Seth: For that conflict to take place, it has to be between two equals or two subjectivities. You can think of this practically, politically or metaphysically, like Hegelian. The issue is that somewhere between 724 and say 726, she says something to the effect that women are never in autonomous and closed societies. She talks about them not having a history in the same way that like, if you think about Jews, if you think about blacks, you can point to some point in history where before that they were one way and then they became another way. But women have always belonged to the male world and yet simultaneously been in a sphere where this belonging is challenged.

And the fundamental issue here is that women and men don't exist as equals. Where they're struggling and striving to create a self consciousness and manifest and realize themselves in their existential freedom against each other. It's that the women always take on a certain role as object and that it's the men who are doing that. And they objectify women, but they also objectify nature and their penis. And I mean, I could spend the rest of this time talking about her analysis of the whole. The way boys pee versus girls pee, which just fascinated me to no end.

I hope we get back to it. But all the downstream effects of this are all of the things that you discussed.

31:35 Jenny: So you're looking at. That's around page 7 24. And that's where she talks about a counter universe and that women don't have this sort of organic solidarity. Right. She says enclosed in this sphere involved in the male world, they cannot peacefully establish themselves anywhere. They have no space in that world to become something other than what they are, is what she's saying. And yeah, she said in the introduction and in those sections that they are unlike other oppressed groups because they live among the men. Right. They live among the men. And they find their interest with the men they're with. If they're bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie men, if they're black women with the black men, you know, there's nothing that's a basis of. For solidarity for them.

32:16 Seth: No, exactly. And this sex is somehow different than all of the other markers that are used in societies to create otherness, skin color, religion. There's something fundamentally different about being women. That they're other, but not other in a way that can be marginalized in the same way. In fact, it's impossible to marginalize them fully from the society. You can't have a Back to Africa movement for women.

32:46 Jenny: I think that's one of the most insightful parts of the whole book. For her, it's sort of like at this erotic encounter between men and women, that all the work has to be done because there is. Yeah, it's not just because we need to procreate, that there's something unique about this sexual difference, but that there's this sort of erotic aspect of it that we haven't worked out well. You know, I remember hearing recently a sort of contemporary feminist journalist talk about why feminism is so slow. But she said something smart, which was, you know, it's our intimate lives that are at stake when we head down this path of political activism.

You know, you're dealing with deep relationships and ties that bind. I think it's a phrase that she uses with your brother and your father and your uncle and your lover. You know, if you are heterosexual. I mean, it's just these very complex relationships that will have to change so dramatically to. I guess, as she says, going back to the conclusion around 8:51, that the devaluation of femininity is a necessary step.

33:50 Wes: Speaking to that on page 860, I mentioned the fact that she had a response to people who say, well, life will lose its vive la différence. And if women and men become the same, life will lose its spice. I think that's one of the big obstacles is how do you give up the. And I'm not sure I'm sold on this, by the way. How do you give up the charms of that very romantic idea about the importance of the difference between men and women and specifically masculinity and femininity and the idea that those things are actually desirable and that we can't live without them, that life would be meaningless without them?

Part of her response to that, which I think is very insightful, is that it is largely a fantasy. Maybe it's entirely a fantasy. And in many ways it compromises human relationships because people find out once you're in the relationship and the fantasy has subsided, if you're with a partner, they become a human being. They might be the masculine or feminine ideal for a while during courtship, but what you're left with is a real human relationship that you have to navigate. And so she says, bottom of page 860. Men reach out their eager hands to the marvel, but as soon as they grasp it, it vanishes.

The wife and the mistress speak like everyone else, with their mouths. Their words are worth exactly what they are worth. Their breasts as well. Does such a fleeting miracle, and one so rare justify perpetuating a situation that is so damaging for both sexes? The beauty of flowers and women's charms can be appreciated for what they are worth. If these treasures are paid for with blood or misery, one must be willing to sacrifice them. I found that to be an incredible passage because she's acknowledging something that's very important. You know, people are very attached to these ideals.

And she does a good job. I mean, she makes a actually persuasive case that, you know, I think more could be said about it. But it's the beginning of a persuasive case about giving them up, as sad as that might feel or sound.

35:49 Mark: So within the lived experience part, the largest chunk I picked out was in this social life chapter where it's about fashion. What femininity amounts to is not just a man sees a woman and is entranced. It has to do with, you know, literal illusions with makeup and with dresses and making yourself into a pretty painting, making yourself look like a bird. There are all these really interesting descriptions in that chapter. Yeah. So it's not even just that there's something illusory in the. I'm sort of thinking of our past discussions on Lacan and things. You know, I think there is something of that in approaching someone as a sexual object as opposed to as a fully 3D human being. But there's also literal illusions, not just that she doesn't live up to my expectations, but that what the woman has to be presented as is to deny her humanity in very visual, obvious ways.

36:45 Wes: Yeah.

36:45 Seth: So.

36:45 Wes: And we. We talked about some of this, as you point out, in our Lacan episodes, but also our Vertigo episode. There's a strong imaginary aspect to that. And for Lacan, right, that plays a big role in even our self concept. And actually de Beauvoir goes into some of that, drawing a connection to Lacan and the mirror stage and the idea that we sort of have this alienated, false conception of a cohesive self, and de Beauvoir goes into some of this. And sexual relations are implicated in this and part of the function of fashion. Right. And we discussed this at length in our Vertigo episode.

There's a fetishizing aspect and a way of concealing enough to keep desire alive and to create this kind of mystique and this fantasy. And the correlate in the ethics of ambiguity is the idea of the serious man. And the idea that other people can fulfill our lack. Right, can fill us up, or that any project or even projects, but also people that they can satisfy us, that they can complete me, that someone else could complete me. That whole dynamic has elapsed into bad faith and into immanence, into kind of an abdication of freedom. When you set up these fantasies, including the feminine ideal, as something over and above that, we are all determined by the men in their heterosexual, men in the desiring relation, and women in their position as objects.

38:09 Jenny: I'm not probably going to get this outright, but this idea that some of that charm and the fashion, the decoration, all of that will be lost. I wonder, though, if what she's a precursor to is what we're seeing now happening in. You know, there's a book that came out called the Ethical Slut, Right. Or this sort of queer Theory on sexuality, where you can imagine. And again, this is all imaginary. This is illusions. But you can imagine constructing new kinds of, I don't know, those features that have been attached to femininity in this terrible situation of oppression.

But you can imagine playing out those fantasies or playing those roles where you've also made some kind of structural change to the sexual and intimate or whatever relation, that there aren't accompanying punishments for playing that role. You know, women can now say, many of them young women that I teach think that they're sort of fully in charge of their sexuality, but they still live in a situation, at least I see on college campuses, but more broadly, where that power's not as much as they think it is. And even De Beauvoir says this, right?

Women have never emancipated themselves with their sexuality. She sort of describes that once the chase is finished. And maybe that's the point you're making, Wes, by reading those passages. But this idea that people just find themselves in relationships with human beings, I think that chase, once it's consummated and the woman has been caught and the man is now in control, that's it. Like it's played itself out. Because once a woman has become the married woman or become the permanent, you know, partner of the man in this oppressive patriarchal situation, then she's not allowed to still have a kind of robust sexuality because she might then have affairs or someone else might flirt with her or, you know, there'll be a kind of risk in the relationship.

And I think that only those relationships that have sort of willingly embrace the risk when you take out that faux security that people think they have in a patriarchal, conditioned, let's say, duality. And even you see this even in non heterosexual relationships, this, this sort of playing out of a kind of femininity seems still possible, but only if you eliminate all of those constraints that are in, at least in the heterosexual relationship, and maybe get played out in homosexual relationships or whatever, polyamorous relationships, where there's a kind of like, agreement that you get to play this sort of coquettish feminine other, as long as at a certain point you're all mine.

40:46 Wes: Something like femininity, which, if De Beauvoir is right, you know, we might think of this as something that's socially constructed in a very subtle way. So it's such that it would be almost impossible, right, to socialize a woman out of. What would it take to become unmasculine for a masculine male or unfeminine for a woman. It's not something that can even be done later in life. You'd have to start with someone and it can't be done by parents either. Right. Because it requires a whole. As de Beauvoir points out, it would require a whole societal change.

And it's so psychically deep that we don't really have any real control over it. And I don't even think consciousness raising is enough because we've been socialized into it. And I'm not saying I accept this point of view. I have mixed feelings about this point of view, but I'm accepting it for the sake of argument. But if that's true, I think I'm very skeptical of the idea that someone could say, well, I'm Just playing with my. The semiotics of femininity is the semiotics of submission and submissiveness and being an object and being objectified and all sorts of.

And de Beauvoir does an amazing job. We really should get into some of the detail of this, of explaining that, you know, doing the phenomenology and explaining the very subtle details of how all that works. It's so ingrained into our behavior. And I don't think she fully knows how that would change if men and women were truly equals. I'm not sure that she's not making the strong claim that what looks like femininity to us would completely disappear, although she suggests that. That we ought to be able to accept that in that passage that I read.

I think it's hard to say what things would look like, but they certainly would not look like the way they do now. We would see dramatically different gender roles. And that doesn't just mean women having equal numbers in certain professions and things like that. That means subtle changes in human behavior and dramatic changes in human relationships and neurotic relationships between men and women and their courting rituals and all of that stuff.

42:50 Mark: Let's get a little specific. So one of the things in childhood that she points out that infants are pretty much boys or girls. They act pretty much the same. They kind of have the same, you know, attention seeking behaviors. But then she says there's a second weaning for boys. So boys are told, no, you can't hug mommy anymore. You need to, you know, stand up on your own. You need to stop crying. Like that, kind of drilling in of masculine stoicism. Whereas the little girl, they continue to dote on her and make a little doll of her. So they kind of go to unhealthy extremes in both sorts of treatment. And so you can kind of see in the way that she describes those two bad ways of raising kids what an appropriate way, which I think is probably a bit of progress that is much more widespread if it hasn't been fully made in this country.

43:46 Seth: Tell them all to suck it up and stop complaining.

43:49 Mark: Well, at least, you know, having less distinction between the kids in terms of what you expect from them in that way that. Yeah, so the way you were just describing it, Wes, makes it sound like, oh, this is just. We would have to completely change the society. Well, some of the things, obviously not all of it, not the crushing weight of thousands of years of tradition and myth and things, but like, some of these very practical things have been changed.

44:14 Wes: Yeah, but she tells those Anecdotes of, you know, the parents having their little girls wear pants and how the reaction to that. Right. Do you remember that? The teacher will be shocked by that. And I think that's the tip of the iceberg because it's not just what your parents do to you. You're immersed in a whole social existence and cultural existence that subtly influences you through you identify and the identifications are innumerable and the influences are innumerable. And the idea that parents simply changing parenting behavior could reverse all this, that to me is not realistic.

44:50 Seth: It wouldn't be enough for just your parents to do it. It would have to be for all parents to suddenly be gender blind in the way they treat their kids and give them equal measure toys.

45:00 Wes: And it's what hacking called the Matrix. It's institutions. It could even be the physical environment. It could be all kinds of things.

45:05 Dylan: Maybe this partly underscores your point, but I think that maybe points to some differences that we see. Look at the effect of Title IX and the embracement of women's sports over the past 40 years and the way in which that's changed and the way in which girls are raised. Beauvoir talks about how girls aren't allowed to compete and aren't allowed to participate in certain kinds of, let's call it just dominating behavior that boys are and the way that affects their ambition and the way they interact with the world and the way they understand themselves.

I mean, it's been progressively more true every year that there are more and more robust educations of girls and women via sport than just as there is for young men. And it's not true that every man participates in sports as a boy just any more than it is that every girl does. But in terms of part of a longer term, deeper seated social experiment, those kinds of expectations in learning environment have been true. And I think that it's changed the way a lot of women now interact with the world and their jobs than if they hadn't had it. And that goes towards the expectations that people have for their performance and being tougher and all that stuff.

46:22 Jenny: I think that's a really good point. I want to come back to it. But all of this discussion is putting in mind for me a movie that I don't know if you all have seen, but it might be an example of the kind of feminism and sort of utopianism that de Beauvoir might have been aware of. I think it's called Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. It the sort of a picture that describes the polyamorous relationship between this psychologist and his wife and then another woman that gives way to him making the comic book series Wonder Woman. And it's a whole project, because he's a child psychologist.

I think it's a whole project of sort of transforming en masse how women are seen, how gender roles are played out. What I did not know was the early Wonder Woman comics, lot of S and M and bondage and stuff like that was featured in it. Because these three people started trying to play around with roles and femininity, for example, within a non traditional, patriarchal heterosexual relationship. And their goal was to make this something that became that you were influencing children very young about how to see women. And also like raising questions about what does it mean to sort of want to be submissive but not become an object?

You know, I mean, there's all these sort of interesting experiments. I guess it comes down to, like, what are the kind of experiments out there that didn't exist when de Beauvoir was writing, or that did exist, that Beauvoir knew about, that gave her hints or clues to what might it take to transform the way that men and women interact that will give birth to equally erotic fantasies or equally interesting ways of inhabiting one's sexuality or one's body or one's person personality? You know, I think that's what she leaves open. A lot of feminists have come after her and taken up that project.

48:16 Mark: So I think it's page 850 where she's talking about this sort of sex positive Madonna feminism of I will Madonna feminism. I remember this phrase, you know, when she released her book on sex. And it was the kind of, but I will embrace. I will embrace your making me an object. And I will use that as the weapon against you. And I think this is ultimately something that Beauvoir is against. So this is a top of page 850. She's saying, the feminine woman, by becoming passive prey, tries to reduce the male to carnal passivity as well. She works at entrapping him, imprisoning him by the desire she arouses, decisively making herself a thing.

The emancipated woman, on the contrary, wants to be active and prehensile and refuses the passivity of the man. Attempts to impose on her. A little further down the page, she's like, well, you know, kind of, what if you take this up intentionally and use the fact that you're making the man by his desire to make it into a thing? The woman's very being is opacity. She does not stand in front of man as a subject, but as an object paradoxically endowed with subjectivity. She assumes herself as both self and other, which is a contradiction with disconcerting consequences.

When she makes a weapon of both her weakness and her strength is not a deliberate calculation, she assumes spontaneously seeking her salvation in the path imposed on her, that of passivity. At the same time, she's actively demanding her sovereignty. So when Madonna or somebody says, I'm going to enslave you with my sexuality, look how powerful I am, it's actually just because she's already in this. She's kind of making the best of a bad situation. She's been put in the object role and just saying, okay, well, I can at least make you an object too.

Right? And that's not going to be the way out. The goal is to have two transcendent subjects dealing with each other, not two objects.

49:59 Wes: She says the conflict will last as long as men and women do not recognize each other as peers. That is, as long as femininity is perpetuated as such.

50:07 Jenny: Well, and even in the introduction, she's quick to point out what she thinks are flaws and feminist arguments that want to assert a kind of superiority of women. Some of that did exist and would have been known to her when she was writing this. This idea that. And again, going back to this reference of the story of how Wonder Woman was developed, the comic book, you know, there was a kind of, I think, bad idea in that, which is that Marston, the psychologist, thought that women were inherently peaceful and they would prevent, like, World War I from happening again. I think anything that sort of sets women up as, like, a cure or superior or better is a problem. It's got to be something unknown, you know, like something we don't haven't seen yet.

50:45 Seth: The Wonder Woman myths is based on a utopia and a certain concept of utopia, which would bring us back to a whole topic of feminist utopias and the exploration of what that. And I think we should probably avoid that, at least for tonight. I want to invoke Hegel here because I feel like it had to happen. It had to happen. Well, it didn't just have to happen. She does it. This notion of two subjectivities or two entities capable of transcendence, encountering each other, the Hegelian dialectic, the self overcoming. She mentions the master slave dialectic at several points.

But it's not that submission itself is bad, Right? It's understanding that in submission you have power. Because she discusses. I think it's somewhere around page 35 ish. She makes the point that in the master slave dialectic, the master dynamic doesn't posit his need for the slave. He holds power without internalizing or mediating it. But the difference is the slave mediates and internalizes this. But that's the secret for being able to actually ultimately overcome it is recognizing the need and the lack and then also recognizing that there's reciprocity.

I don't want to harp on the point, but if she's positing a framework of this existentialist freedom and self realization through projects, and if we've got a Hegelian construct that underpins this. Right. It's not that submission is bad. It's that objectification without the possibility of transcendence or subjectification. It's the problem.

52:23 Jenny: Well, in your passage that you just read, I think it's the one that you read around. Maybe it's not, though. On 29, I think what she's saying is that that kind of master slave dialectic, when it is an oppressive one, is the problem. Right. So the oppression factor in this, because she says, however equally compelling the need may be to them both, it always plays in favor of the oppressor over the oppressed. This explains the slow pace of working class liberation, for example. So I think there is something to this. In the conclusion, she gets this idea of we need this conflict, this sort of two free subjects, you know, working it out, and that dialectic and maybe the truer Hegel sense, but.

But somehow it's been conditioned by this overarching oppressive force so that one person never gets the chance to then make an object of the other. And then both of them sort of move beyond that into an Aufhebung of that relationship or something. So I think that's important. I mean, she also just on that point, I mean, one of my favorite lines, and I'm gonna not find the passage right now, is she says something like the subject is posed and only being opposed. I mean, that's probably not the translation from this translator, but there is a deep sense that we become subjects in that dialectic.