The Beauvoir Bluff What Gender Idealists Keep Getting Wrong about The Second Sex

[AlwaysComingHome]

Really interesting post by Aoife Assumpta Hart on how Simone Beauvoir’s work has been misrepresented by TRAs:

areomagazine.com/2019/04/11/the-beauvoir-bluff-what-gender-idealists-keep-getting-wrong-about-the-second-sex/

Note, the author’s fee is going to the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter

Thank you - brilliant article to share. Chimes with my reading of de Beauvoir. She was raging against the assumptions being made about having female biology. She was arguing that female biology was not deterministic in terms of how women acted in society - that the cultural view of women was a construct. In common with other existential thinkers, she believes that it is the realisation that this is a construct and one is acting out a social norm that causes the ‘crisis’ and the only way out of that is to fight against the norms. But material reality is not in doubt and possibly, it would follow, that some people with trans identities seem to heavily identify with social norms and constructs and that would be viewed with caution. Although the subversive element of identifying against your social norms might well be welcomed.

Glad that awful, glib Hay article is traduced. The following extract is my favourite from the Hart article.

"Beauvoir did not write she makes herself or she becomes herself, nor does she argue that female-specific biological concerns are disembodied myths. Quite the opposite. For example, Beauvoir also writes this, in the immediate context of the infamous citation: “Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her subjectivity … the body of a woman as a hindrance, a prison weighed down, by everything peculiar to it." In this passage, and throughout the book, Beauvoir first locates womanhood and female embodiment as a biological precedent."

Quite.

Brilliant. I especially like the takedown of Hay's awful line about de Beauvoir "quipping" the part in question, like it was some smartarse Twitter soundbite. It's so demeaning to de Beauvoir and her work, and a book I'm willing to bet my life that idiot has never read.