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608 pages, Paperback
First published October 21, 1954
It’s a horrible thing, a woman who labors to lead a man’s hands to her body by appealing to his mind.The irony of the author of The Second Sex having published this five years after the previous kills me, it really does. What's worse is her having won the Prix Goncourt for it, a weighty stamp of approved literature prowess that says nothing less than, yes, this is how you discuss philosophical theories in the midst of love and warfare: trot the men out trigger happy and reduce the women to self-hating despair. I can imagine a younger self of mine picking this up before TSS; imagining what would have inevitably resulted makes me sick.
“If others don’t count, it’s meaningless to write. But if they do count, it’s wonderful to gain their friendship and their confidence; it’s magnificent to hear your own thoughts echoed in them.”However. Those up there are only a few of many of the wonderful things Beauvoir pens in regards to education, literature, the intersection of humanity with the written word. A few years ago, for the sake of these pearls, I might have excused her atrocious double standards when it came to characterizing both shell and core of the gendered dichotomy. I even gave her the benefit of the doubt until the last page was turned, hoping this all too rigorous misogyny would be flipped over, left wriggling and wailing on its thickened carapace with its soft and sickening underbelly all too clearly exposed. There are instances, perfectly gorgeous instances where the author could have stepped forward and outfitted phrases like these:
"All that writing about the melancholy of the Portuguese and how mysterious it is. Actually it's ridiculously simple: of seven million Portuguese, there are only seventy thousand who have enough to eat."
When I was a child, a teacher seemed to me a much greater person than a duchess or a millionaire, and through the years that hierarchy had not changed appreciably.
To maintain that I alone hold our affair in my hands is to substitute a puppet for Lewis, to transform myself into a ghost and our past into anemic memories. Our love isn’t a story I can pull out of the context of my life in order to tell it to myself. It exists outside myself; Lewis and I bear it together. Closing one’s eyes isn’t enough to do away with the sun; disavowing that love is only blinding myself. No, I rejected cautious thinking, and false solitude, and sordid consolations.with the sharp and incisive insight I knew in TSS that they so rightfully deserve. Instead, the malaise extends to all reaches of the third person man and the first person woman, generating a plot with girlfriends in a refrigerator, male characters with not a physical description or unsubstantiated denigration in sight, and the good old colonialist mindset. Practice reducing those around you to ciphers long enough, and something's gotta give.
“You throw men into a war and then, at the first rape, you hang them!”
"I don't want to think about myself any more," she said violently. "I've had enough of thinking about myself. Don't give me bad advice."You can't think yourself out of feeling alienated. You can think yourself into it right quick if you insist on dressing it up in the word "freedom", treating your interpersonal relationships like trash, and pretending your work and your money will see fit to care when you're lost and alone and thinking of ending it all. You'll be free when you're dead, not only dead but forgotten, not only forgotten but negligible in the impact you made on the reality of others through your ideologies, your habitus, how you lived and what you learned and the whys and wherefores of the things you said. You'll be free when what you did in the name of what you held dear is so warped by the ones who come after you that no one will believe the origin of it all was you, and you alone.
"The freedom of a writer—it would be interesting to know what that means,"Beauvoir wasn't free, and so I don't blame her. I don't blame any woman who views thought as equivalent to self-immolation and conducted/conducts/will conduct herself as such. What I will do is remember my introduction to feminism, when it first became clear that it was not and had never been just me. What I will do is not sacrifice my political ideals just because I can't sway millions in a day. What I will do is better myself with the ideas and live for the humans, for at the end of the day and the triumphs and the horrors and the same old same old, it is awfully nice to sit down and reaffirm one's existence with someone who cares.
"What happened? I don't understand."
"That champagne you drank was spiked with brandy,"Nadine replied, laughing.
"You spiked my champagne with brandy?"
"I did. It's a little trick I often play on the Americans when I have to get them drunk. Anyhow," she said, still smiling, "it was the only way to have you."
He carefully touched his head. "I don't remember a thing."
"Oh, there was nothing much to it."