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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
sad
slow-paced
This is such a famous book and was such a game-changer when it was published that I was very curious to find out what it had to say. I must confess, I was disappointed. Large swathes are taken up with Freudian psychology, which no one believes anymore and are just largely irrelevant. For such a long book, that is quite a lot of hard work for nothing. She also makes the same mistake that Freud did, that is, to take the case notes of mentally ill patients and extrapolate from those people to the normal healthy population. It is really not the case that most boys feel "horror towards their father" because they are jealous of his relation with their mother, for example.
The book was published in 1949. I was surprised that there is little explicit mention of the war, aside from a few references to a soldier being a normal occupation. But in many other ways, it is clearly a book of its time. For example, she says that Darwin's idea that sexual selection is frequently by the female in many species is "disparaged today". Nowadays, we know that Darwin was right.
A lot of the ideas that must have been very radical at the time, e.g. that women and men are equal in intellectual capacity (limited only by a confined life experience) are at least in theory common belief now (albeit not in practice). She writes that "in no country is her legal status identical to man's". In 14 countries, that is now the case and 143 guarantee equality in their constitution.
She writes down a lot of the common prejudice of her time as fact. Muslims over the whole world are lumped together as the same and dismissed. Colonial and racist statements such as "infanticide has always been frequent in nomadic peoples" are sometimes quite shocking. And of course, she clearly doesn't understand homosexuality at all, let alone more modern insights into the whole spectrum of gender identities.
This was a hugely important book when it was written. I have to say that it was not really worth the effort to struggle to the end of this long volume.
The book was published in 1949. I was surprised that there is little explicit mention of the war, aside from a few references to a soldier being a normal occupation. But in many other ways, it is clearly a book of its time. For example, she says that Darwin's idea that sexual selection is frequently by the female in many species is "disparaged today". Nowadays, we know that Darwin was right.
A lot of the ideas that must have been very radical at the time, e.g. that women and men are equal in intellectual capacity (limited only by a confined life experience) are at least in theory common belief now (albeit not in practice). She writes that "in no country is her legal status identical to man's". In 14 countries, that is now the case and 143 guarantee equality in their constitution.
She writes down a lot of the common prejudice of her time as fact. Muslims over the whole world are lumped together as the same and dismissed. Colonial and racist statements such as "infanticide has always been frequent in nomadic peoples" are sometimes quite shocking. And of course, she clearly doesn't understand homosexuality at all, let alone more modern insights into the whole spectrum of gender identities.
This was a hugely important book when it was written. I have to say that it was not really worth the effort to struggle to the end of this long volume.
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I read this book at the advent of women's history month after years of Tbr-ing it. My primary reason for the lack of enthusiasm for reading this was that it is too old and maybe the proposals and scenarios mentioned here would be drastically different than this 21st-century world but to my surprise, they weren't exaggerated and the topics mentioned in every chapter still hold relevance to this age which makes me think even if we have progressed so much in terms of wealth distribution, educational opportunities and technology how much unjust discrimination and scorn are still prevalent in the depth of the human mind. How we are still fighting against prejudice, hypocrisy, stereotype and the eternal case of making us the 'other' party who has no place other than the shadow of the 'superior' sex, the marginalised group who are still considered competitors and not someone who has equal rights to the fairer sex.
Especially the first half of the book mindblown me and made me think deeply about things like the deeply flawed logic of misogyny and how a sexist mindset deeply affects all the people of our society especially harms the marginalised section of our society. I was also fascinated by how volatile the sexist parameters are and how they changed in terms of human conclusionslike how Virginal blood is considered to be harmful to male virility and brides were being deflowered before she was officially wed. At some point(and it still prevails), these perceptions and conclusions changed and how virginal maidens are considered pure and worthy of their male counterpart My favourite parts of this book are vol 1 part 1 chapter 1 biological data, vol 1 part 2 history, vol 1 part 3 myths chapter 1.
p.s- Gonna throw the second sex at someone's face(metaphorically!!) the next time I debate with someone on misogyny.
4.5 stars/ 5 stars
Especially the first half of the book mindblown me and made me think deeply about things like the deeply flawed logic of misogyny and how a sexist mindset deeply affects all the people of our society especially harms the marginalised section of our society. I was also fascinated by how volatile the sexist parameters are and how they changed in terms of human conclusions
p.s- Gonna throw the second sex at someone's face(metaphorically!!) the next time I debate with someone on misogyny.
4.5 stars/ 5 stars
Generalizations, either descending from abstract ideals or ascending from concrete experience, are hard to apply on every single individual case. Therefore, their predictive value is bounded. In particular, gender, race and religious generalizations infuriatingly debilitate our communication and limit our expressions of the solitary self, because they present the individual through its lens and, at the same time, implicitly compel him to be and behave in accord with its ideology or vision. While, in fact, assigning the subjects of such general categories is an arbitrary matter. For instance, Judith Butler in her Gender Trouble book devoted a chapter on "what is the subject of feminism?", we think, oh, easy, females. She demonstarted that, first, the biological determinant of sex are blurred; second, even so, grouping females by the mere biology is insufficient because they tremendously differ in many other aspects: culture, ethnicity, religion, education and temperaments. Moreover,
Dataclysm, a book on data analysis of millions of user's inputs in a dating website named Cupid) - beautifully shows that differences within females are greater than differences between males and females.
"Dreams, when collective and controlled—clichés—are so poor and monotonous compared to living reality: for the real dreamer, for the poet, living reality is a far more generous resource than a worn-out fantasy."
However, generalizing we do and always will. Once we recognize its limits, abstractions help us make sense of the whole or the big picture.
The Second Sex is one of the books that leave you the same, albiet a different person, and is flooded with generalizations in an attempt at describing and explaining the "mysterious" phenomenon of Woman:
A woman's situation, not essence, explains her inferiority. Man is a subject who grasps himself as such, in contrast, woman is a subject who grasps herself as an object. Man is free to act and hence transcend himself, unlike woman, who is not free to do anything so she reaches for the world indirectly, throught a man. While she is only a part in man's destiny, he is her disteny.
Simone de Beauvoir does not certainly suffer from "verbal diarrhea"! I'd rather call it an eloquent epilepsy, for instance, I found some exaggerations in her speculations and she used extreme and pathological examples to arrive at some miserable conjectures about the female's situation. However, she represented the second sex well enough I related so much:
"Inasmuch as the woman wants to be woman, her independent status produces an inferiority complex; inversely, her femininity leads her to doubt her professional opportunities."
A woman's genuine interest in feminism arises from the very beginning of her teens when she confronts the heavy weight of expectations and myths surrounding her through the way of her "existential project", which she is not to have, at least directly. Her individuality is supressed or dismissed by the very abstract ideals and myths that were created about her, she can't just be what she chooses to be, she is implicitly expected to satisfy the ambivalent and unrealistic demands of patriarchial dreams, which are impossible to realize because when Narcissus bends over the river, he only sees himself and never the river as something in-itself. To men, woman is a mean to an end that revolves only about them, whether that end is physical, aesthetic or even existential. It is "replacing lived experience and the free judgments of experience ... by a static idol."
She suggests an existential solution, which requires evolutionary years to come true: to let women be free and regard her in her subjectivity.
Dataclysm, a book on data analysis of millions of user's inputs in a dating website named Cupid) - beautifully shows that differences within females are greater than differences between males and females.
"Dreams, when collective and controlled—clichés—are so poor and monotonous compared to living reality: for the real dreamer, for the poet, living reality is a far more generous resource than a worn-out fantasy."
However, generalizing we do and always will. Once we recognize its limits, abstractions help us make sense of the whole or the big picture.
The Second Sex is one of the books that leave you the same, albiet a different person, and is flooded with generalizations in an attempt at describing and explaining the "mysterious" phenomenon of Woman:
A woman's situation, not essence, explains her inferiority. Man is a subject who grasps himself as such, in contrast, woman is a subject who grasps herself as an object. Man is free to act and hence transcend himself, unlike woman, who is not free to do anything so she reaches for the world indirectly, throught a man. While she is only a part in man's destiny, he is her disteny.
Simone de Beauvoir does not certainly suffer from "verbal diarrhea"! I'd rather call it an eloquent epilepsy, for instance, I found some exaggerations in her speculations and she used extreme and pathological examples to arrive at some miserable conjectures about the female's situation. However, she represented the second sex well enough I related so much:
"Inasmuch as the woman wants to be woman, her independent status produces an inferiority complex; inversely, her femininity leads her to doubt her professional opportunities."
A woman's genuine interest in feminism arises from the very beginning of her teens when she confronts the heavy weight of expectations and myths surrounding her through the way of her "existential project", which she is not to have, at least directly. Her individuality is supressed or dismissed by the very abstract ideals and myths that were created about her, she can't just be what she chooses to be, she is implicitly expected to satisfy the ambivalent and unrealistic demands of patriarchial dreams, which are impossible to realize because when Narcissus bends over the river, he only sees himself and never the river as something in-itself. To men, woman is a mean to an end that revolves only about them, whether that end is physical, aesthetic or even existential. It is "replacing lived experience and the free judgments of experience ... by a static idol."
She suggests an existential solution, which requires evolutionary years to come true: to let women be free and regard her in her subjectivity.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
informative
slow-paced