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The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir,

H.M. Parshley (Translator & Editor)

Start date: February 19, 2012

Discussion: Side-Reads

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What Members Thought

Nov 14, 2011 Nina rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: i-expected-more, non-fiction, france, feminism-or-thereabouts, chunksters

This was surprisingly old-fashioned. It was published in 1949 but it just seems so out-dated and often - dare I say it? - wrong and irrelevant.

de Beauvoir's mission is to define woman and find out why the male is the "default" or "normal" sex, while the female sex is the other, the one who deviates from the norm. She does this by looking at biology, psychoanalysis, the history of women from the stone ages to today (or well, 1949) in France, USA, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, the Middle East. This was surprisingly old-fashioned. It was published in 1949 but it just seems so out-dated and often - dare I say it? - wrong and irrelevant.

de Beauvoir's mission is to define woman and find out why the male is the "default" or "normal" sex, while the female sex is the other, the one who deviates from the norm. She does this by looking at biology, psychoanalysis, the history of women from the stone ages to today (or well, 1949) in France, USA, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, the Middle East...She looks at how women have been represented in literature, religion and myths, and she looks at the different stages of a woman's life, from childhood through puberty to middle age. She leaves no stone unturned, and yet it just seems... out-dated. But what is worse, de Beauvoir comes across as a bitter old hag who blames men that their lives are so easy, while women's are oh, so hard.

For instance, puberty is apparently easy for boys, while it leads to neurosis and mental break-downs in girls. Men love conquering the world and see women as silly, stupid puppets, while women hate their lot in life, hate their off-spring, hate their husbands and are filled with Freudian complexes. When de Beauvoir started analysing why some women become lesbians I had to laugh out loud (this is one of the places where the out-datedness shines through).

The introduction was great and thought-provoking, the first chapter boring, the next handful of chapters OK, and from there on I started skipping pages here and there because of all the repetitions. de Beauvoir's central message can be boiled down to this: Men achieve transcendence, women are doomed to immanence (and I cannot tell you how many times she wrote that during the 740 pages. Every third page had de B. blaming men their transcendence and regretting women their immanence from whence everything bad comes. Oh, the repetitions!) And also, much as I love literature, I hardly think quoting passages from D.H.Lawrence, Tolstoy or even my beloved Virginia Woolf constitutes hardcore truth or facts that can be used in scientific study, which is what Simone de B. does here.

Finally, it is hard to take someone seriously who claims that a) marriages are never founded on love but is merely a social institution meant to keep women in place, and b) "Women's fellow feeling rarely rises to genuine friendship" because women must fight individually to gain a place in the masculine world and so they are hostile towards other women.

Seriously.

Simone de Beauvoir has not aged well. ...more

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Jun 01, 2017 firstedithion rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Even though this was probably the hardest book I have ever read, it was worth it. This book is definitely a must read for anyone that wishes to understand the inequality of the sexes and how this can be changed in today's society. ...more

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