The Second Sex [Paperback]

I, a young white man, read Second Sex last week. Although it contained almost nothing that I had not read before, it did what was necessary to my head. It somehow made the position of woman as the Other imaginable by me. Reading it, I imagined what it would be like for me to live in a society that had been dominated by women for more than three thousand years, a society where almost all the most renowned people, heroes, and religious icons were women. A society where the United States of America had had nothing but women presidents and every state was predominantly represented by women, though males account for half the population. Where the predominant forms of music for the last fifty years have all treated men as an interesting and occasionally useful, but often annoying or even maddening objects, and us men run around in skimpy calvin klein-style underwear on MTV while hip-hop women constantly call us "dogs" in their raps and the classic rock section of the local used music store overflows with female lyrics that question what is more important in life, men, cars, or booze? and blame us men for breaking their poor girl hearts and for being warlocks, (...), or idiots (while the woman rock stars collect millions of dollars and boy groupies run around ready to have sex with any security guard to get a shot to have sex with the famous women).

A society where families are dominated by mothers and their husbands live in fear of having their allowance terminated, and have to do menial chores around the house to try to feel, or at least look, useful. Where a boy child realizes before he is 10 that he is a failure and, at best, a second-rate human being (if not an object)(...) A society that is obsessed by the symbol of the womb--in which musical instruments, spaceships, means of transportation, weapons, religious ornaments, political regalia, and thousands of other things are designed to resemble the shape of a womb. A society in which men are scared, brutally scared, of walking around alone at night because almost any woman can physically overpower them and rape them with a sex toy. In which the most famous and influential philosophers of all time, the ones that get taught in university classes and whose books are actually bought and read and that influence the intelligensia, are all women, mostly women who loathe and/or misunderstand men and write things such as "What is the cure for all of a man's problems? Impregnating a woman" but despite such stupidities are adored by female thinkers.

And so on...

So that's why I rated this 5 stars. It did something to me, which is the most important quality in a book for someone who's read thousands.

The Second Sex is an excellent philosophical work on woman; the English translation is not. Terms are translated poorly, such as "l'experience vecue" (the lived experience similar to Husserl's life-world) being translated as "Woman's Life Today" (a slam), "en-soi" and "pour-soi" being translated interchangeably as in-itself and for-itself (they cannot be used interchangeably-they are not synonyms), etc. In fact, while the original work was published in two volumes, the English translation fits into one...because the translator cut some three-hundred pages that he felt were "boring." The original French is lucid, direct, and quite beautiful. The reason that the book sounds so "dated" in English is because the man who translated it was. (He was a zoology emeritus with no background in philosophy). Thus, a lot is lost in the translation, and, since the publisher will not commence with a new translation for the sake of accuracy while the poor one sells so well (think dollar-signs), one could probably learn French and read the original writings first. "The Second Sex" (or rather "Le Deuxieme Sexe") is a good opening forum into what it is to be the Other, and the philosophical ramifications are just as relevant today as when the book was written.

I recently finished THE SECOND SEX by Simone de Beauvoir, which I had been "reading on" for more than a year. I adopted a system of reading chapters of it between other books after starting out great guns the summer of 2004, reading 200 pages and realizing that if I didn't do something to break it up, I would never finish it.

That is not to say that THE SECOND SEX is not a great book. It is. It's valuable. It's interesting. It's educational, not just about views of women in the first part of this century in Western culture, but also about the logical and writerly process that de Beauvoir uses to address such a massive topic: The topic of Woman; the topic, really of Woman as Other.

But there are issues with the translation that can't be ignored. If memory serves me, Parshley had trouble getting de Beauvoir to help him with his translation. Questions he directed to her went unanswered for months, so he not only translated the book, but cut large sections (yes, this 732-page version is abridged!) that he thought were not important, or were redundant. Parshley also was not a philosopher, but was a zoologist, and as such did not understand the depth of such existential and philosophical terms as "immanence." Once the translation was finished and published, de Beauvoir was furious with the results. Though Parshley can hardly be blamed given the situation in which he was working, it does make one wonder how much what one is reading resembles de Beauvoir's original ideas and objectives.

Considering her objectives, this leads me to one of my favorite quotes about THE SECOND SEX. Nelson Algren, the Chicago writer who was the longtime lover of de Beauvoir (with whom she traveled when she wrote America Day by Day; he was also the writer of The Man with the Golden Arm), said that when the book came out, there was much brou-haha, especially when 22,000 copies were sold in France the first week after it was published. Algren noted that de Beauvoir was the most reviled and the most beloved woman in Paris, and it was clear: "She meant it."

The book is quite logically organized, which makes it easy to pick up and put down (and to read bits of between other works). Part I: Destiny includes chapters on biology, psychoanalysis and historical materialism. The other parts of the book are: history, myths, the formative years, sitautions, justifications and toward liberation. De Beauvoir uses examples from myth, literature and doctor's case files to illustrate her positions. And her positions are more and less relevant today than they were in the 1940s when she wrote the book. The chapter on lesbians seesm less relevant, since she bases her understandings of the homosexual orientation on situational and envrionmental factors. However, I found her chapter on motherhood to be extremely cogent, as she deals with the issues of expectations of self-realization through children, the disappointments and the isolation of mothers, and the societal expectations of mothers of both girls and boys. And de Beauvoir notices the logical conflict between a society that lauds motherhood for women, but denies them a public voice and equal public standing. This is a typical style of argument for de Beauvoir, and I find her insight, her wisdom, her logic and her organization in this book to be impressive.

De Beauvoir writes, "One is not born a woman; one becomes one." I think it can be argued that she is not saying that female humans are born the same as male humans, because we all know, or are ourselves, people who were born with strong tradtional male or female traits inherently. Rather, after reading this large and complete work, I think she is saying that women are not born second-class citizens, they become them, through societal shaping, political pressure and self-monitoring. They become the Other because they start to believe they are. While I think we have made strides since THE SECOND SEX was written, reading this book nearly 70 years after it was written is a little upsetting: some of the saddest aspects of the life of the Other for women still ring true.