“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

[lucylucky1977]

Can someone help me explain how this quote has been detached and has become bastardised in a simple way to my 12 year old dd? (And possibly Phillip Pullman needs to understand this too.)

Is this a moment to wonder about rites of passage for adolescent males? I'm sure they still exist, just not sure what form they now take.

It was written back in the day before people started to believe in anti biology.

If you’ll excuse me bringing the opposite sex into it, I also think most men will have a concept of the difference between boy and man that comes down heavily of societal expectations, rather than hair cuts and testosterone patches.

This is true.
But the important difference, that S de B wrote about, is that boys grow into men and are understood by everyone to be the norm, the standard, the default, while women are the 'other'. So no matter how damaging masculinity is, males will always have the privilege of having society set up in their interests.

@vesuvia

The "one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman" observation made by de Beauvoir, about 70 years ago, is about how children of one sex, the female sex, have patriarchy-approved roles imposed upon them from birth, while they also mature biologically and emotionally. She is not describing the transition from one sex, gender or gender role to another sex, gender or gender role.

About 500 years ago, Erasmus wrote "One is not born a man, one becomes a man" and similarly to de Beauvoir, he was not referring to transition from one sex, gender or gender role to another sex, gender or gender role.

And for Pullman to quote it so willfully ignorant and smug makes me so angry. What a horrible human.

What most of them say! And Pullman can fuck off! His deliberate bastardisation is utterly aggregious.

Sorry Phil, you aren't that stupid, words are how you make your living, ergo you are that much of a misogynist!

That ...☝🏻

.....so, has PP misquoted it then? where?

twitter.com/PhilipPullman/status/1271560377273384962

During the JKR twitter spat!

thank you
I see he got taken to task. I wonder if he felt embarrassed.

Its important not to detach the sentence. De Beauvoir went on to say:

'.....it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.'

The quote is the first 2 sentences to chapter 12 and is all about the formative years of a female child and what actions occur to turn females into women. Taking the quote out of its context is brutal and can be made to mean anything.

I like to think of it as the genderising blowtorch of lifelong female socialisation that makes you a woman.

And obviously no one born with a penis is subjected to that. The fanny is a prerequisite. "Woman" can only be achieved by those born female.

How the concept got fucked up so badly is probably in large part to do with that human psychological tendency to assume we (as in the personality on the inside, not the body itself) are eternal and unchanging, that we have always been as we are now. A hell of a lot of people really strongly reject the obvious fact that our minds are moulded by our environments.

It's quite depressing really, and displays a woeful ignorance of evolution and what it means to be a social animal - we have to end up with similar-enough mindsets that we can be integrated members of society, otherwise the whole thing doesn't work.

genderising blowtorch of lifelong female socialisation

Ha! I like that.

erish that should be, sorry..

Ignore me I'm an idiot.

Here is Grace Lavery resurrecting the old claim: Simon de Beauvoir saw woman as a purely social category.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gender-criticism-versus-gender-abolition-on-three-recent-books-about-gender/

I've read enough Beauvoir to notice that she's clear women are female, and that femaleness is at the root of their oppression.

There are social expectations for women; otherwise there would have been no point in her writing her book.

When she said 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' she meant that female children learn those expectations as they're growing up.

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think she ever argued that a female person who rejected those expectations is not a woman.

The Second Sex and DeBeauvoir's intense sexual relationship with Sartre is not something easily explainable to a child.

For me, it was De Beauvoir's experiences in relation to men that led her deeper into her 'womanhood' - of which the physical body was but the outermost layer; but which at the same time also shaped the experineces of the person within.

Being a woman is an experiential journey shaped and conditioned by one's body; one's biology, its functions, and its psycho-social resonances.

...and also a psycho-social reality that is not separate from the body. The nature of adult human female life, on earth.

Yes, our culture of individualisation and 'self realisation' leads us to reject the limitations and conditions of nature. We are led to belive we can be anything we want - that all is possible. But as we progress through life we realise that there is a need to accept boundaries and limitations to some degree, if we are to achieve or to build anything of value.

We do not choose our life. It is handed to us via the background, parents, culture, society we inherit. We make of that what we are able, and what it is in our nature to effect. We do not have complete free will. Our lives are shaped by what went before us.

Anyone who uses that line as some kind of gotcha! to "prove" that men can become women just highlights how they haven't read or understood the book. I think there's an abridged version for those who can't concentrate for 700+ pages without any pictures?

I think Beauvoir struggled with being a woman - with what she perceived as its limitations and oppressions. She did not marry and did not have children.

Her life was nontheless shaped by the fact of being female/a woman.

I used to read a lot of Anais Nin - who was really quite the opposite - in embracing the more 'feminine' aspects of womanhood - even though she, too, had no children.

I read the abridged version. :)

If Beauvoir meant that society determines social expectations for men and women, then there's no scope for individual choice. A male person who adopts female social stereotypes would always be seen as a man flouting social norms, not as a woman.

Which is in fact that happens.

This is from Suzanne Moore's recent Unherd article about the article by Jacqueline Rose in the New Statesman (the one who said that "female" wasn't used until the 19th century):

'Of course, she uses the de Beauvoir quote — “One is not a woman, one becomes one” — but, predictably, chooses to ignore the rest of it: “No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine.” The second part of the quotation is key. The construction of gender is social and there is a difference between being female (sex) and femininity (gender) which is learnt.'

The bastardisation of feminist ideas is sickening.

These writers were talking about what it was like to be a woman: how women were treated and looking at whether different ways of considering womanhood might help us to break free of the societal expectations that restrain us.

Looking at womanhood in a different way was explored within the context that everyone knows what a woman is.

They were not, for a second, contemplating the ludicrous suggestion that some men are, or can become, women.

So sick of these greedy narcissistic men demanding to be us and taking our history as well as our spaces and our rights.