A world where men and women would be equal is easy to imagine because it is exactly the one the Soviet revolution promised: women raised and educated exactly like men would work under the same conditions and for the same salaries....marriage would be based on a free engagement that the spouses could break when they wanted to; motherhood would be freely chosen—that is, birth control and abortion would be allowed—and in return all mothers and their children would be given the same rights; maternity leave would be paid for by the society that would have responsibility for the children, which does not mean that they would be taken from their parents but that they would not be abandoned to them.

didn’t read all of it but close enough

“Nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity” (p. 49).

There are various worldviews people hold to explain sex: teleology holds that it is a grand design, constructivism asserts that we’ve created it ourselves by imbuing certain physical differences with social meaning. But as an existentialist, Beauvoir returns to experience. Indeed, this is her starting point—the phenomenology of womanhood. And the way she unfolds her analysis all stems from this initial premise, that existence precedes essence; or, in her famous words, “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”

Beauvoir’s view of sex is still not widely held, despite her influence on second-wave feminism. She argues that sex is not a single biological process or category, but rather the conflict between two wills: the species and the individual. Pregnancy, for example, is the species enslaving the female body, while the body’s responses to pregnancy (diseases, complications, even benign changes) are the body fighting back against the species (p. 42). Similarly, puberty is the species asserting its sovereignty over the female body (preparing it for reproduction, etc.), while menopause is the individual finally coming into herself: refuting the species. We can see this throughout the animal Kingdom, where many/most species are only useful until they’ve reproduced, after which the male and female parents quickly die. Even in cases where the female assassinates the male, the female is not dominant: she is just as much a slave to the species and its own preservation as the male is.

While trans and intersex bodies are virtually absent from this discussion, and only one chapter is dedicated to lesbian women, I think this work has immense theoretical potential for queer discourse than has been recognized so far. I can only wonder what Beauvoir would have had to say if she lived to see the visibility of trans people today.

If the process of sexual specification is a struggle between the tendencies of the individual and species, we can make a number of deductions. First, the development of the human embryo from anatomically ‘female’ to ‘male’; second, the way that intersexuality is seemingly a divergence or discontinuity in this finality/specification of the individual by the species (the sex binary); third, the way that trans bodies have an inherent conflict with the finality/specification of their own sexed individual. Everywhere, and just as Beauvoir argues, it seems as though the individual has biological tendencies of its own, and further, finds itself in conflict with those tendencies of its species, whether the subject is endosex, intersex, cis, or trans. Entertaining Beauvoir’s model for trans bodies then, the individual does not reassert itself until after the species has, and after it has specified the individual with apparent finality. Similarly to sickness during pregnancy, gender dysphoria is the conflict between the species’ sexual specification (and the body’s recognition of multiple possible sexual pathways it could have taken) and the development the individual had to undergo. Because sexual development is not linear, nor ‘final’ (both in species evolution and individual lifespan [e.g., puberty]), the body consistently finds itself in a struggle against its biology:

“But at puberty, the species reasserts its rights [over the individual]: influenced by ovarian secretions, the number of growing follicles increases, the ovary becomes congested and grows, one of the ova reaches maturity, and the menstrual cycle begins; the genital system attains its definitive size and form, the soma becomes feminized, and the endocrine balance is set up. It is worth noting that this event has all the characteristics of a crisis; the woman’s body does not accept the species’ installation in her without a fight; and this fight weakens and endangers her; before puberty, about the same number of girls die for every 100 boys: from fourteen to eighteen, 128 girls die for every 100 boys, and from eighteen to twenty-two 105 girls for every 100 boys. This is the period when chlorosis, tuberculosis, scoliosis, osteomyelitis, and such strike” (p. 39).

The view of biology as a struggle between species and individual instead of as teleology or essence is intriguing to me. First, it mirrors the social struggle we see in society with class, race, gender, etc. Second, it accounts for why biological processes are so lethal for the individual. Beauvoir seems to be getting at the idea that if biology were teleological and not contentious, then something like pregnancy would be far less dangerous and far more healthy for the individual body. Because a “purpose/design” for a body should be reflected in that body’s capability to efficiently and healthily carry it out.

“The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such. Some essential biological givens are not part of her lived situation: for example, the structure of the ovum is not reflected in it; by contrast, an organ of slight biological importance like the clitoris plays a primary role in it” (p. 49).

The remainder of Beauvoir’s analysis really stems from this central premise. All of the chapters that follow discussing lived experience are relatively self-explanatory. It could probably have done with some trimming down, and less psychoanalysis, but a work like this would hurt more from too little than too much. The final point I would end on is that there are seeds of third-wave feminism in Beauvoir, and she makes a very poignant observation about the intersectional nature of women’s liberation:

“The bourgeois woman clings to her chains because she clings to her class privileges. It is drilled into her and she believes that women’s liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her husbands, she would deplore even more having this property abolished; she feels no solidarity with working class women: she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own” (p. 130).

This is what I love most about existentialism: it sees that lived experiences are necessarily intertwined. This is one of my foremost recommendations in feminist theory.

mi ha cambiato la vita