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hanadibeg 's review for:
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
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.