The Second Sex

But often stipulating that a consciousness-raising group involves, at least in, like, the '70s, women getting together and talking about their experience qua women, realizing that experiences that they have had that they thought were about themselves, that were individual, were actually about gender, right? And were actually about this category, inhabiting this category of woman.

I don't think, and, you know, this is not an original thought, this is straight out of, uh, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, I don't think that masculinity and femininity or the category of men and the category of women, I don't think they function in the same way.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so I guess I feel like in so many homosocial settings, women are the ones that are harmed when, when men kind of, um, form these bonds.

and horrified her parents.

Beauvoir's 1949 book called The Second Sex, about women's situation as secondary to men, catapulted her to fame.

Beauvoir became an iconoclast who fought against oppressions such as sexism and classism.

Just like writing a poem, there aren't any specific rules or goals for composing our authentic selves.

didn't wear a bra and all that sort of wore trousers early on and stuff like that and you know was in that way sort of a woman early woman's liver if you like and argued for abortion and But actually, it was Giles Radice who introduced me much more to feminism.

He gave me Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex book to read, which made me much more of an intellectual, if you like, feminist.

So he was quite important.

And then there have been women...

And I was frustrated that it was so hard to read.

Or like Simone de Beauvais wrote The Second Sex, which is like a feminist philosopher, like foundational book you need to read.

It's 800 pages.

And the print is really small, but as you read it, you just feel like your brain is getting bigger.

This is where one of the long-term goals of radical feminism has been the creation of creches and government-paid daycare so that women can be free to work for the man in the office and so on.

Judith Butler intentionally links her book, Gender Trouble, back to Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex.

And she carries that argument forward.

I don't spend nearly as much time on Butler because her prose is terrible and her ideas I don't think are actually that interesting.

It's almost certain that our French reading writers did.

De Beauvoir's 1949 work, The Second Sex, is a real doorstopper, a thousand brilliant pages exploding the myth that women are inferior to men.

De Beauvoir puts forward the claim that women have been othered by the cultures they live in, made into the thing that normal people are not.

Her line, one is not born but rather becomes a woman, is iconic and pretty fundamental to some of the ways we understand gender in 2026.

Excerpts of The Second Sex caused a stir in early 1953 when they appeared in the Osaka Asahi Shinbun.

Notably, the target audience for these excerpts were Japanese housewives, not the Academy.

The entire work was translated into Japanese later that year, with some interesting editorial changes, and released in five volumes.

The Second Sex sold out more than 20 printings before Volume 5 even made it to bookstores.

But this is exactly, I think, one of the themes that he brings out very well.

It's also, incidentally, the source of his original notoriety, which he wrote a book in the early 2000s called The Second Sex, a play off Simone de Beauvoir's uh, famous book, uh, that men had effectively been relegated into this, into this position.

Uh, so there's, this is a really rich unit of, uh, of analysis.

And I think, um, is something that, uh, that much more, uh, could be said on, but I think the big thing that, uh, I think we can focus on it.

What was that book? The, the, the woman, um, a famous book of a feminist.

The Second Sex.

The Second Sex.

De Beauvoir.

I looked at that, and I was appalled because it had nothing to do with my life, and I thought, "This is a bit, this is a bit going, ongoing and heavy." That was not the kind of thing I wanted.