The Second Sex By Simone De Beauvoir: The State Of Self?

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We hold the idea that our life is our’s for the grabbing, that we are entitled whatever sense of self we desire. However, problems with this arise when others inhibit our ontological freedom by depriving us of a place of being. Simone de Beauvoir, an existential philosopher and first wave feminist, writes heavily on the destructive state of self pushed upon women. Her most famous text, The Second Sex, provides an immense amount of evidence supporting the idea that individual embodiment affects our subjectivity, particularly focusing on that of a woman’s. Despite Simone de Beauvoir’s transgression in demonstrating sex as a binary term, the principle of subjectivity as embodiment laid the groundwork of sex-gender distinction for following feminists, …show more content…
She becomes the house of gratuitous feminine virtues, obtaining gifts such as baby-dolls, fake kitchenettes, and mock cleaning supplies. These developing years are meant to train the young girl to become a nurturing, cooking, cleaning, ‘ideal’ wife. “In brief, she is pressed to become, like her elders, a servant and an idol,” (Beauvoir 2014). By imposing this behavioral code upon young girls, Simone de Beauvoir states that they become alienated from their personhood, thereby arresting them in the cycle of not claiming their identity and falling deeper into their hegemonic role. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir demonstrates how the androcentric society capitalizes on anatomical diversity among the genders. “Men, who define themselves in opposition to women, are the One, the positive pole. But men are also the neutral standard that defines humanness itself; woman is both a negative and a lack,” (Hekman 2014). This structural and systematic bias is still shown in contemporaneous dialect with the use of terms such as “mankind” in replacement of human-kind, along with other sexist words such as “man-made,” “businessman,” and

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