 This week you are asked to read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. And there are a few things that she says in the author's introduction that I want to come back to, and that I want you to keep in mind. First of all, we're going to discuss her motivation for writing this book. So she said, for a long time I have hesitated to write a book on women. The subject is irritating, especially to women, and it is not new. This is 1949, and writing about women is not new. Something you already know, because last week you read Mary Wilsoncraft from 1792. So people have been talking about women for a while. And she asks all these questions about women. Do women still exist? Are there women really? What has become of women? One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist. Whether or not it is desirable that they should. What place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. But how can she ask these questions? Isn't it pretty obvious that women exist? I'm existing right here. Look at me. So these are questions we're going to come back to as we work through this lecture today. The last chapter of The Second Sex, which I should have brought to show you guys today, it's quite a big book. The last chapter is entitled The Independent Woman. And it's Beauvoir's, we didn't ask you to read it, but I'm going to talk about it a little bit, because it's Beauvoir's imagining in 1949 about what a truly independent woman would look like. Now she herself actually was criticized somewhat on this case, not on her visions of what an independent woman would look like, although she was, but also in terms of whether or not she herself actually was an independent woman. So in order to talk about Simone de Beauvoir, it has become almost fundamentally necessary to talk about Jean-Paul Sartre. The two of them were intellectual and romantic companions. They spent a lot of time together. They developed each other's ideas. They studied together. And as you can see in that middle picture, they were actually buried together. But they never got married. So I want to talk to you a little bit about Beauvoir's life. Beauvoir's parents had an arranged marriage, which was a little bit unusual in France at the time, but not totally unheard of. Her mother was the daughter of a very wealthy and successful family. So her mother actually came to Beauvoir's father with quite a substantial dowry, which pretty much took care of the family, which was good because her dad was an amateur actor and he didn't make a whole lot of money. So her mother brought the wealth and her mother was also the one who laid down the strict moral code at home. So remember where Freud talked a lot about concerns about the father and fear of the father and father is the head of the household and father is the one that sets down on the laws. Beauvoir's experience was actually different than this. For Beauvoir, her dad was not that big of an authoritarian figure in her life. It was much more her mother that set down the rules and the norms and punished the children. However, both her parents were strict Catholics. She grew up in a Catholic world and she had one younger sister. So she is the elder. She also grew up in a largely feminine world. So as I've said, in the home, her mother was the unofficial head of the household, the one who laid down the rules and laws and punished the children and also the one who brought the money. Well, her grandfather brought the money, but the money came with her mother. She also attended an expensive private girls' school. So at school, she was surrounded by other women and girls as well. And so she describes her early life as growing up largely in a feminine world by women. In 1928, she enrolled to study philosophy at the prestigious Sorbonne in France. This was a bit of a sticking point for her mother. Her mother did not want Beauvoir to actually go and pursue higher education because her mom feared that if Beauvoir got a higher education, she would lose her faith. However, unbeknownst to Beauvoir's mother, she was already an atheist prior to even enrolling at the Sorbonne. So she had lost her faith years before, and she's kind of been hiding it from mom. At this point, 1928, when she enrolled in the Sorbonne, she did not say that she did not care about feminism. She did not identify herself as a feminist and she did not feel underprivileged as a woman. It was in 1929 while studying philosophy that she met Sartre. Sartre was actually repeating a year. He had failed the demanding aggregate exam in philosophy the year before, and he was back to try again. So he's at least a year older than Beauvoir, probably a little older than that. I can't remember his dates right now, sorry. I should have put them up, but you can Google it. Anyway, he had failed and he was returning. And Beauvoir offered to be a study partner, and the two of them worked together studying and preparing for this demanding aggregate exam. At 21 years old, Beauvoir became the youngest person ever to pass the exam, and she passed with flying colors. In fact, only Sartre did better than she did. So while she helped him study, he outstripped her on the exam. There are some rumors fully unsubstantiated that part of the reason Sartre did better than Beauvoir is because the committee that was marking the exam decided that they couldn't have a woman come in scoring highest, and so Sartre scored higher. I have no idea if that's true, but it is a rumor that circulated around what had happened. Again, at this time, she said that she was not interested in votes for women, and she stated that if she had the right to vote, she would not exercise it. Women could not vote in France until 1944. So while women could vote in other parts of Europe at this time, and in North America, in Canada and the U.S., they could not vote in France, but Beauvoir was not troubled by this, and she was not setting out to try and get votes for women. Later, when she looked back at this time period, 1929 and through to the war, so that 10-year depression period there, she said she developed an ostrich-like attitude to the outside world. In fact, she spent a lot of time in libraries reading another philosopher's work, GWF Hegel, and developing her own philosophical ideas, and she didn't spend a lot of time interacting with the greater world or paying attention to what was going on around her. So what can I tell you about Beauvoir and Sartre? She kept an intellectual and romantic relationship with Sartre for her entire life. So some have criticized her claim to independence and stated that her intellectual interests and pursuits were determined by him. In fact, quite often when we read Beauvoir's work, what we see her doing is responding, clarifying, and strengthening Sartre's arguments. But she's often responding to him and not doing genuinely creative intellectual work of her own. So for example, in one of her other pieces, The Ethics of Ambiguity, she takes on a lot of the work that Sartre had already developed in being a nothingness, and she tries to clarify what this means for ethics and how it would work. So she takes Sartre's work and she responds. Some people have even said if you don't understand Sartre, go read Beauvoir. She is a little bit clearer than he is, at least to my mind. Sartre himself actually claimed that what Beauvoir did was not philosophy. They used to have huge fights about this, where she would take on the identity label of a philosopher and claim that she was a philosopher, and Sartre would say, no, no, you're not a philosopher. Eventually, Beauvoir agreed and she stopped calling herself a philosopher. And to those of us in philosophy, many of us think so much the worst for philosophy. So there was some tension in this relationship, but they continued this relationship their entire life, about his entire life, he died before she did. But they were never married and they were never exclusive. In fact, for a brief period, Beauvoir, Sartre, and a female student of Beauvoir had a relationship together. And then Beauvoir went on to write a novel based on that experience. The novel is called In English, She Came To Stay. And it was this novel that actually won Beauvoir quite a lot of respect and support in the intellectual community. So among other novelists and other writers, this is what she became really known for. And it opened a lot of doors to her to start having conversations with other literary people. So this book was a bit of a breakout hit. So there is a lot of question as to whether or not Beauvoir was an independent woman for much of her life. Because while she never married Sartre, she never became a mother, she was kind of linked to this man and often responded to his intellectual work. But that changed with the publication of The Second Sex. Beauvoir said World War II brought her head out of the sand. She said that when war was declared, she became a social being identifying with a community. In fact, she has a really interesting passage in the ethics of ambiguity, I think it is, where she talks about reading Hegel inside the library in Paris. And stepping outside the doors to see this city was being shelled, that it was being bombed, and suddenly realizing that everything Hegel had to say was great in the abstract, but was not helping her at all deal with the concrete reality in front of her. And so she said that the experience of the war made her a social being, pulled her out of the abstract realm of ideas and started making her think about the people around her. At this time, as you can expect, most of the men that she knew being around the same age as her, went to war. So Sartre went to the front. He was, what was he doing? Weather balloons, I think. I think he was testing winds to see how ballistic shells would fall and things like that. Anyway, they went to the front, and she was left again in a largely feminine world. And she noticed as she looked around that very few of the women around her had an independent existence apart from the men in their lives, that they identified with those men, that they supported those men, and that they worked for the goals of the men in their lives, or their daughters or sons. So Beauvoir got curious and she said she wanted to write again that this time she wanted to write about herself. And she began to wonder if other women had the same kind of experiences that she did. So during the war period, Beauvoir undertook an extensive research project to try and uncover the phenomenology of women. That's a huge and weird word. Basically what she was trying to do was try and understand what it was like to live as a woman. Particularly in this time period, not exclusively in France, she also talks about women in North America, but largely in France. And she's just trying to explain the lived experience of a woman. Now, to some degree, this should be familiar to you, because it's very similar to what Phenom was trying to do in Black Skin White Mask. Try and explain his lived experience. Beauvoir is doing the same kind of thing. So here's how she describes her impulse to write this book. I have described how this book was first conceived almost by chance. Wanting to talk about myself, I became aware that to do so, I should first have to describe the condition of women in general. How was the book received? Much in the same way that Moston Cross Book was received in some ways, actually. Beauvoir received a lot of public ridicule. In papers, in magazines, on the street. So she was ridiculed by strangers. She was called a misogynist. People said that some of the things she said in this book were derogatory towards women. And so that she herself was a misogynist. She was a woman-hater. She was also called a frigid woman. That the problem was that she was just too frigid and not having enough sex. She was called a wanton woman. The problem was that she was just too promiscuous and having way too much sex. And people also said that she was an ill creature who had obviously led a miserable life. Her neuroses, whether from too much sex or too little sex, was the only way that people could describe why she had written this. So many people said the whole problem came down to sexual neurosis. That might sound kind of familiar. Because we've been exploring a lot of ways in which sexuality, in particular, female sexuality has proved to be a problem in other areas of people's lives. And so, when Beauvoir wrote this book, a lot of people thought that she was the one who grew it in her sexuality. So, here it is in Beauvoir's own words. People offered to cure me of my fragility or to temper my labial appetites. I was promised revelations in the Corsus terms, but in the name of the true, the rude, and the beautiful, in the name of health and even of poetry, all unworldly trampled underfoot by me. I think it sounds a little bit like comment sections of blogs and videos today. Except that the identity of these commentators who were ridiculing Beauvoir was not hidden. Whereas you can hide your identity when you post on a YouTube video or on a blog. So it strikes me a bit like these comment sections of blogs and videos because if you look at blogs and videos, particularly ones that are espousing any kind of feminist change, you see a lot of stuff where people are talking about how the woman needs to get laid or needs to get back in the kitchen and make someone a sandwich. Maybe you've seen these. I'm going to send herself against this. Here's what she says in the autobiography. Again, this is very lengthy, but I will be sending around a link to the Prezi so you don't feel you have to write all this down. So Beauvoir says, far from suffering from my femininity, I have, on the contrary, from the age of 20 on accumulated the advantages of both sexes after writing the book She Came to Stay. So after writing this book, those around me treated me both as a writer, their peer in a masculine world and as a woman. This was particularly noticeable in America. At the parties I went to, the wives all got together and talked to each other while I talked to the men who nevertheless behaved towards me with greater courtesy than they did towards the members of their own sex. So Beauvoir actually feels that she is not a misogynist, that she quite enjoys being a woman and that she felt that there were a lot of advantages at her time to being a woman because she was a woman in a masculine world and she had entered this masculine world of writers and authors where men would talk to her about her intellectual ideas but they would still show her greater courtesy because she was a woman. So I was encouraged to write the second sex precisely because of this privileged position. So it's because she's a woman who has entered a masculine world that she felt she could write this kind of book. It allowed me to express myself in all serenity and contrary to what they suggest, it was precisely this placidity which exasperated so many of my masculine readers. A wild cry of rage, the revolt of a wounded soul that they could have accepted with a moved and pitying condescension. Since they could not pardon me my objectivity, they feigned a disbelief in it. So here she's saying that people said she was just wild and enraged because she was having too little sex or too much sex or because she hated all women but she said no, she doesn't write this in a wild and enraged way. She claims that the tone that she's taken in this book is an objective tone, a disinterested tone and it's because of this privileged position that she thinks she holds. For example, I will take a phrase of Claude Maurice's who perfectly illustrates the arrogance of the first sex. What has she got against me he wanted to know? Nothing. I have nothing against anything except the words I was quoting. So in writing this he is not trying to ridicule or criticize men so she claims you can consider whether her tone in the second sex bears out the way she describes it. Albert Camus who you might remember from my first lecture was a very close friend of Bovara's not a friend, just a friend they used to hang out in coffee shops and talk a lot about philosophy they were both existentialists so if you remember me talking about existentialism it will come back again here because Bovara is also an existentialist and Camus reacted rather badly to the second sex and I want to tell you a little bit about his reaction because it's a reaction that Bovara took to heart and thought was probably a serious one so Camus and a few morose sentences accused me of making the French male look ridiculous you can consider whether she has done so he had blithely admitted to us once that he disliked the idea of being sized up and judged by a woman he was the object, he was the eye and the consciousness he laughed about it, but it is true that he did not accept reciprocity so he wanted to be the one objectifying women and he didn't like it when the feminine gaze was turned and started objectifying him finally with sudden warrants he said there's one argument that you should have emphasized man himself suffers from not being able to find a real companion in women he does aspire to equality and I think this forward is a strengthening of Bovara's argument that it would have been stronger if she had acknowledged that the problem isn't just that women strive for equality and are hurt by a lack of equality but that men themselves are hurt by their superior position that things would be better if men could find an equal companion rather than having this dominance subordination where was I most men took it as a personal insult the information I've retailed I wanted to imagine that they could dispense pleasure whenever and to whomever they pleased to doubt such powers on their part was to castrate them so this is Bovara's explanation of why she felt that most men reacted the way they did to her text the book was published in French in 1949 it was not translated into English until 1953 there's a new translation that actually just came out a year or two ago that we're not using that translation because people are still in the academic community whether the new translation is better or worse than the old one so I've just decided for simplicity of stake to stick with the old one in the meantime so the 1953 translation with a few modifications is the one you were reading and this is how the book was received when it was translated into English at first it was marketed as a biology book so people didn't quite understand what the goal of the book was because it was represented as a science book not a humanities book if you went to this thinking it was a biology book now we skipped over chapter one which is called the data of biology and actually has quite detailed and at the time quite accurate biological discussions but it's all with this goal of explaining the felt experience of womanhood so if you came to this book thinking it was a biology book you might be a little bit surprised as to why it keeps coming back to this discussion of what it's like to be a woman and a biology text so it wasn't received that well when it was marketed as a biology book because it didn't seem to serve the purpose of a biology book however in general once that was kind of sorted out it received less controversy in Britain and in America than it had in France though some people said that it was too French I'm not quite sure what that means but they did and Margaret Mead who was a famous anthropologist working at the time said that it was unscientific but that's surprising because it's not a science text so that's kind of how it was first received in the English speaking community so these are some things I want you to keep in the background about how and why Beauvoir came to write this book and under what circumstances she came to write this book one thing to keep in mind that might seem very counterintuitive but it's really important is that Beauvoir even at the time that she wrote this book did not consider herself to be a feminist she is writing about what it is like to be a woman but she is not necessarily aligning herself with the feminist movement though this book has come to stand as one of the cornerstones in the feminist philosophical tradition in fact this book was published in 1949 it wasn't until 1972 that Beauvoir declared herself to be a feminist and when she did she started working to aid the women's movement she felt that women were not progressing to equality fast enough and she devoted the last years of her life she died in 1989 to promoting equality between the sexes so when she writes this book she is not necessarily writing it with any feminist agenda in mind she also though she did declare herself a feminist in 1972 said that her interest in feminism was part of her greater interest in humanism does anybody know what humanism means so her interest in promoting equality for women was driven by her interest in helping humanity flourish and in particular equality for humans which she saw as key in order for us to achieve our full potential as humans so her interest in feminism is always for Beauvoir subordinate to a greater interest in humanism in general if you're wondering why I'm sitting here it's because I have a cold I'm just really tired so I apologize that I may not be as animated as usual I'm just gonna perch here and talk to you okay so I want to come to the introduction we're gonna talk about the introduction first this is a really really big idea that runs through the author's introduction but actually it runs through the entirety all 900 pages of the second sex the idea of the subject and the other so Beauvoir tells us that women are the other and men are the subject in 1949 in France she is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her she is the incidental the inessential as opposed to the essential he is the subject he is the absolute she is the other now we've heard othering before we've heard the phrase other before can anyone remember where Fanon so you can see that there's some relationship here for Fanon do you guys remember or do you want to hazard a guess about how othering worked anyone remember it was a little bit complicated I suggest you go back and look at it but the Fanon and Beauvoir are both building their discussion of the other off of the same model and we're gonna talk about that model today but first what does this mean to say that he is the subject he is the absolute she is the other I suggest you think of it like this way think of it in this way now that makes more sense think of it like man is the norm and woman is the exception so one place she says in actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles for the man represents both the positive and the neutral whereas woman represents only the negative defined by limiting criteria without reciprocity what does that mean well think about the way we use the word man man or mankind can refer to man or men but it also sometimes can refer to humanity right so when we see the word mankind sometimes it refers to men and sometimes it refers to all of us men and women that is it can both refer to the positive criteria of men in general and the neutral criteria of all of us but when does it refer to humanity it's not always that easy to tell so for example when Christina gave her lecture she did some hedging on pain's rights of man because I don't think it's very obvious whether he means rights of man or whether he means rights for all of us in addition most in craft as I told you wrote the vindications of the rights of man in which she intended to write about the rights for all of us it's not clear and this ambiguity of itself is kind of something I want us to keep in mind because it's a little bit disconcerting or a little bit slippery that we can talk about men and mankind and we can slide very easily from meaning everyone to meaning just men such that I'm still not entirely sure from reading Kant if you remember Kant's discussion at the start where he remade Genesis I'm not really sure in that discussion whether he's talking about men or whether he's talking about humans and this is because man represents both the positive and the neutral and it can do so simultaneously so it's a little bit unclear and it still kind of does this in our society Star Trek changing its opening notwithstanding okay I'm the only Trekkie here in the 1960s talked about man in its opening segment but then when it moves to the next generation it says one instead of man so we have to change that okay what's really important to note here is that man is inclusive and woman is not and to some degree this is still true if I came into the room and I said hey you guys how are you all doing guys can mean men guys can mean all of us if I came into the room and said hey you girls how are you all doing that might be a problem it might be so this is somewhat still with us this use of language it is changing but it is somewhat still with us and that's why I showed you the clip at the start we have pens for all of us and pens for women and big isn't alone in this I'm sure you guys can think of some other companies that have done something similar any examples of any other products that are like this yeah there actually is now a yogurt for men isn't there although those tend to be more men or women not all of us and women yeah lego is a new one that's come out that's been a bit of a problem so lego is for all of us and then there's pink lego for girls murses man purses I think that's still one where one is designed for one sex and one is designed for another one hmm are there female kinder eggs now feminine kinder eggs kinder surprise for all of us and kinder surprise for ladies interesting so I think this is not across the board there are some products where it's for all of us and then special ones for women there are some where it's for all of us and then special ones for men but in bovara's time it tended to be much more the idea that there was the universal and then there was the feminine so far so good in fact should I do this yeah I will okay everyone stand up for a minute I'm going to move over here because then I have space so I might be out of the camera but that's okay up up up you need to stand for this to work put whatever is in your hand down you need your arms free alright your challenge should you choose to accept it is with your hands flat on the table get your elbows to touch how are we doing not well I can totally do it that's why I like this one okay you can stop you can sit down oh no no your arms have to be straight that's cheating alright you can sit down why did I make you do that because I'm going to tell you a little story one time when I was teaching bovara I often talk about the way in which historically though I hear rumors that this is changing health class would present men or the male body as the norm and the female body as the exception such that you would be taught the male body as the human body and then you would be taught the female body and all the ways in which our human standard had been modified to accommodate childbirth and rearing of children uh oh it will I'll keep going my story so how does this work for example female hips tend to be a bit wider which means that our knees tend to bend in a little bit more such that our legs are not as straight and this also actually translates to your arms so they say I don't know if this is true because I've done this with a lot of classrooms now but I've heard on average women have an easier time of doing this than men I don't know if it's true but in doing this one time in a classroom somebody surprised me and said that their health teacher in high school had told them that the reason women's arms are more likely to do this is because it provides a better cradle for the baby another way in which the human body has been modified to form a female body I don't know if that's still the case I hear that that is changing and that they don't represent the body and then the female body but what has been true historically also is that many drugs you know drug testing that they're doing in terms of figuring out what will work in humans are tested almost exclusively on male animals because it's supposed to be more normal because there are less hormone changes so the man or the male as the norm and the female is the exception that seems weird to me because aren't the drugs going to be prescribed to women but anyway that reminds us of the pens that's why we went back there okay so why do we have this polarity men as the subject men as the norm women as the exception Bovara says it actually has something to do with the way in which we understand identity and understand terms so she says the subject can be posed only in being opposed he sets himself up as the essential as opposed to the other the inessential the object so the way I've understood this is that in order to understand what man is we need to also understand what he is not for subjectivity to exist there must be something that is not subjectivity this is who I am and these are all the things that I am not and in particular I think if you think of it this way it might explain a little bit why when we talked about Wollstonecraft we had all those paradoxes around femininity so do you remember any of the paradoxes I talked about around femininity with Wollstonecraft yeah so we have the woman that is better than men lifting men up like the virgin Mary and then we have the temptress well why would that be well if man as the subject is the neutral and woman is everything that man is not that's a lot that's a really wide spectrum that women have to fill everything from way way better than man to way way worse than man so Bovara extends this even further in a way that I think again should remind us a bit of fennel she says this it is that no group not just men but no group ever sets itself up as the one without once setting up the other over and against itself everyone in identifying themselves identifies who and what they are not so in creating identity you also create exclusion and this brings us to one of Bovara's favorite philosophers Hegel a joke rhymes with bagel ok so Hegel has a passage in the phenomenology of spirit which is often called the master slave dialectic the passage itself if you actually want to go check it out is called lordship and bondage which sounds much more exciting than it actually is ok well it is exciting but not in the way you might be thinking ok this is being filmed right so Hegel says this is Hegel this is the way the passage is written once it is translated into English it was written in German the individual who has not wagered its life can indeed be recognized as a person but has not achieved the truth of this recognition by being recognized as an independent self-consciousness yeah so it goes on at this point you can be thankful maybe the master is the consciousness that is for itself and no longer merely the concept of such a consciousness rather he is consciousness existing for itself and mediated by an other consciousness one whose essence involves being synthesized with the independent being or objects in general Hegel is a very abstract writer and a very abstract thinker so I've tried to take these two quotes but I'm not sure for you what is he talking about so the master-slave dialectic starts out with two consciousnesses coming into contact with each other he calls them consciousnesses not people I'm not entirely sure why except to say that the master-slave dialectic is not restricted just to individuals it could happen within your own head so you can have parts of you battling within your own head so Hegel not only influences Beauvoir and Fenon but also Freud because he talks about different parts of your brain or your psyche that battle each other and Freud just took off with that so that's why I think he leaves it very very general in the idea of consciousnesses but I'm going to represent it as people because it's the easiest to understand in this way to start out with so two people come into contact with each other one becomes the master and one becomes the slave the master has power over the slave the master depends on the slave for the fulfillment of his desires and for the knowledge of his own identity so when I set up my own identity I also set up everything that I'm not and I need to have someone to fulfill that role of everything that I'm not because that way I can look at that someone and be like yes I am not you I know who I am I am not you so the master's life is effortless and his identity is secure but this is only as long as he is master over the slave but the master hasn't recognized the slave as anything more than a useful tool so he fails to recognize the way in which he is dependent on the slave for his existence and for his identity he's dependent on the slave in the most basic way because the slave is fulfilling the master's desires the master asks the slave to go do something get him a sandwich or whatever call back to what I talked about earlier and the slave goes and does it but the master is also dependent on the slave for his sense of who he is so this power creates a dependency on the slave even though the master feels like he has power over the slave he is actually dependent on the slave but he is unaware of his dependency so that's the master let's talk about the slave the slave actually knows that there's this power relation going on the slave recognizes the master is dependent on the slave but the slave recognizes this relationship and so the slave actually knows more about how the relationship works than the master does the slave knows that he is actively trying to please the master in exchange for protection or security that might sound familiar actively trying to please somebody in exchange for protection or security it's Wollstonecraft yeah, this is what Wollstonecraft says women do they actively try and please men in exchange for protection and security so the slave knows that they're trying to do this but the slave has no power so in Hegel's system the slave has all the knowledge but none of the power and the master has all the power but none of the knowledge unless you're Marx Marx also was deeply influenced by Hegel Marx thought the slave could turn the knowledge into power but we're not reading Marx this year so you don't need to worry about that okay, so now the arrows the master is self-conscious that's what that little arrow means the slave is self-conscious the slave can reflect on his or her own mind but when the master looks at the slave the slave reflects the master's desires back to him because the slave is actively trying to be who the master wants the slave to be as long as the slave can fulfill this role the slave can get protection and security so the slave knows the master's desires and fulfills them this means that the slave knows more about the master than the master knows about the slave the master never genuinely sees who the slave is but the slave has to identify who the master is because the slave's life depends on being able to reflect the master's desires back to him and fulfill them and then because it's Beauvoir the slave is female I added one more line there it is okay so that's how it works in the abstract and a lot of this we see in the Wollstonecraft discussion about the way in which women actively hide their own natural desires and urges in order to please men and that they do this because they are actively trying to get a man to marry them and take care of them whereas men may not actually recognize that women are deceiving them so we have Rousseau saying no no no this is just how women naturally are so if the master slave dialectic works in the case of men and women either in 1792 or 1949 then what is true is that women know more about men than men know about women which might explain why Freud keeps finding feminine sexuality to be so confusing maybe maybe it's not actually that confusing okay what else do I want to tell you about the subject and the other Beauvoir notes that unlike the subjugation of other groups of people women have almost without exception been the other so while other groups of people can perhaps historically pinpoint when they became subjugated for Beauvoir when she looks back in history women have always been subjugated this gives the role of women as other the appearance of necessity because it has always been this way it also makes it look natural but Beauvoir believes that the women in the role of the other is actually contingent it isn't necessary it isn't natural it's an historical event this is what she needs to explain and this is what most of the second sex is about so we're only going to get a small part of this argument the argument takes like 900 pages but here she is asking the question why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty no subject will readily volunteer to become the object nobody wants to be the other being the other sucks no one wants to be the inessential it is not the other who in defining himself as other establishes the one but if the other is not to regrain the status of being the one he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view whence comes the submission in the case of women why do women keep accepting being put in the role of the other I mean we've got from 1792 to 1949 that's a long time since wilson craft first said women deserve equality and she actually wasn't even the first why do women keep accepting the role of being the other here are a few of our friends I have some answers to this so that's rousseau on your left Freud in the middle and hegel on the right I think you know how rousseau and Freud answer this question anyone want to hazard how they answer this anyone remember why do women keep accepting the submission why are they submissive femininity is naturally submissive that's what rousseau and Freud both say I want to tell you what hegel said hegel is the longest influence so this might be surprising the difference between men and women is like between animals and plants men correspond to animals well women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principles that underlie it the rather vague unity of feeling if women when women hold the helm of government the state is at once in jeopardy because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions women are educated who knows how as it were by breath breathing in ideas like plants god I wish that were true that I could just put my head on a book and absorb ideas women were educated by breathing in ideas by living rather than by acquiring knowledge the status of manhood on the other hand is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion and this is actually something that we see in across many different cultures that womanhood happens very naturally but men have to strive to attain the status of manhood manhood is something you have to prove womanhood is not it's marked biologically and naturally and just happens so hegel says women are kind of like plants and plants are passive animals are active so women are naturally passive and submissive and apparently learn biosmosis that would be awesome okay so it's natural that's how most of the other people that bovara is referencing and that we have read are answering this question women's submission is natural so bovara starts out by answering the question why are women always the other and she will deny that it is natural so she has to give us an alternative explanation so she denies that there's any kind of natural state of womanhood at all and we'll come to why that is the other big question is something like hacking's looping effect of human kinds alright so the second thing that I think is really important to note in the author's introduction is something that we can examine and interpret from a different perspective maybe than bovara's contemporaries because we've all had the experience of reading and hacking and so we know something about the looping effect of human kinds so what's the looping effect of human kinds? yep that's the first half humans become like the labels that are placed on them anyone want to finish off the second half? so we become like the labels but in doing so we still have our idiosyncrasies which might change the label which might change us and so we get this loop there's something kind of similar to this idea though bovara wouldn't have called it the looping effect of human kind since she predates hacking by quite a bit so I think she wrote this when hacking was like eleven or something so there's something like the looping effect of human kinds which happens in this text I should really fix that come back there we go okay so that shouldn't be happening do they skip ahead where are we back up back up back up sorry technical difficulties there we go this is a really really famous passage from the second sex not from anything you read but it's important to know so bovara says on page 236 of the second sex one is not born a woman one becomes a woman now she doesn't mean that we're all born babies and then we grow up to be men and women she means the category of womanhood itself is something that you become it is created and you are created something kind of like hacking's looping effect this leaves us with two questions in this text how does woman become woman and how on the other hand did women become the other that's one question and two the question that we've already explored why do women stay the other why don't they resist so one is not born one becomes a woman but there is no difference between men and women so bovara says there are distinctions in truth to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gates, interests, and occupations are manifestly different so we can see that there are women when she starts out asking are there women really well all you have to do is walk through the world and you can see two different types of people with manifestly different ways of dressing different ways of carrying themselves different smiles different ways of interacting, different interests all that stuff is there saying that one becomes a woman doesn't deny that these distinctions exist instead it challenges the origins of these distinctions which brings me to something I talked about in my Judith Butler lecture see all the lectures are coming back together the difference between sex and gender do you guys remember what this was the distinction between sex and gender yeah so sex is your biology or your physiology your anatomy and gender it covers a really wide spectrum actually it's complicated on the one hand it is how you identify yourself but on the other hand gender is often talked about as kind of a social phenomenon such that we know some cultures have more than two genders others don't gender is exploring different gender options but for a lot of its history western culture has had a binary gender system so gender is both your identification but your identification is mediated by society by how many identification options are available to you for example so gender is at once kind of a mental identification and a social classification and it has something to do with your anatomy to some degree because we have tended to have a binary gender system because we think we have a binary sex system turns out that's not entirely true either but gender can be much much more than your anatomy or much much different than your anatomy so we have a few questions why do men want women to stay the other why do women want to stay the other if they do why have women always been the other and how is this all tied up with hacking's looping effect why do men want women to stay the other at least in 1949 in France Bovara says that it's quite obvious why the dominant wants the subordinate because there is a benefit to being dominant it brings a sense of superiority so she says in the introduction here is a miraculous balm for those afflicted with an inferiority complex and indeed no one is more arrogant towards women more aggressive or scornful than the man who is anxious about his virility so any man who is feeling unmanly or is feeling like he doesn't measure up to other men can at least say well at least I'm not a woman I'm better than women in 1949 so this is from XKCD for example but why do women want to stay the other that's another question because Bovara thinks that it's not just men who are keeping women in a subordinate's position but women themselves are keeping themselves in a subordinate position because there is an advantage to being subordinate to decline to be the other to refuse to be a party to this deal this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste that is with men what are these advantages man the sovereign will provide women the leash with material protection what is material protection what do you think she means money money, security, somewhere to live yeah and man will undertake the moral justification of her existence that is she exists to look after him and any children that come from this union so the justification of her existence is taken care of she doesn't have to find meaning for her life it's already there thus she can evade at once both economic risk and metaphysical risk of a liberty in which the ends and aims must be contrived without assistance that is to say if you did not have a superior being who is telling you what to do and who is protecting you you would have to figure out what to do with your own life and you would have to figure out how to support yourself and in some ways it's a lot easier to have somebody else tell you what you should do and have somebody else look after and support you so it's not that there aren't advantages to being the other while Beauvoir says no one would willingly choose to become the other once you are the other there are advantages to being in this role this is Marilyn Monroe and a famous quote I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it so again I think this takes us back to Wilsoncraft's idea that women have tended historically to not need to learn anything about morality for themselves so Wilsoncraft says women learn manners before morals they learn how to behave but they don't learn why they should behave that way women learn to please men but they don't learn how to take care of themselves and this can be advantageous because it lets you off the economic and physical hook you don't have to find meaning for your life you don't have to find security why have women always been the other this actually takes the entire book to uncover but I'm going to gesture at some of the things she says in the introduction because like many other people writing in the tradition Beauvoir is writing in the introduction provides kind of a mini snapshot for the entire book so I referenced Tegel's phenomenology of spirit earlier if you read the introduction to the phenomenology of spirit all the ideas in the book are in the introduction and the same thing to some extent is true in the second sags so there are a few things that Beauvoir hints at in the introduction to try and explain why it is women have always been the other first thing to remember is that Beauvoir is an existentialist she was working in this tradition so we talked about existentialism really briefly many many months ago but I'll just remind you that existentialists they're one doctrine that existence precedes essence what does that mean it means essentially that you show up in the world you're born but you don't have any purpose there's nothing essential about you that dictates who you are supposed to be or how you are supposed to conduct your life you find your own purpose so some people found existentialism really kind of despairing and depressing because it said there's no meaning in your life but other people found it very liberating because what it's saying essentially is all the meaning that's in your life is meaning you put there otherwise it's not there but if you're an existentialist you can't be an essentialist about women because you're not an essentialist about anything so there's no essential role that women are meant to fulfill because there's no essential role that any of us are meant to fulfill it's all up to individual choice but Beauvoir says there's been a lot of tools that have been employed by society to keep women in the position of the other one is the role of religious mythology so she says legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of women is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth the religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination so religious mythology she thinks has historically helped to keep women in a position of this subordinate so on your left I have an image that should be fairly familiar to you it's the temptation of Eve we talked about that with last time and the ways in which the story of the temptation of Eve which you actually read many many months ago might help keep women in a position of subordination because they cannot be trusted they're easily corrupted by Satan so they can't be trusted to govern their own lives and the other one is a myth that some of you may or may not know which is Pandora's box from the ancient Greek religion anyone familiar with this one? anyone want to tell me what Pandora's box is about what happens? yep because they have insatiable curiosity and they can't be trusted yeah so Pandora and the first man are given this box I can't remember why and they're told not to look at it and the man goes out and the woman stays home because men work outside of the home and women stay in the home all day she gets really curious and so she opens the box and lets all the evil out in the world but she did let out hope so okay so yes all the plagues and pestilence and disease and war is all because of Pandora and the reason we don't live in the Garden of Eden is all because of Eve and I think both of our lists a few other mythologies and religious doctrines as well that you can look at because religion and religious mythology has been used as a tool to keep women subordinate she was an atheist remember she also says that what she calls anti-feminists even though she didn't identify as a feminist at this time what she calls anti-feminists have become even more clever in her time at perpetuating the idea of women as subordinate because she says they come up with this idea of equal but different men and women are equal but they're different okay and she says actually the doctrine of equal but different is only another way of perpetuating inequality so she says that improving women's inferiority the anti-feminists then began to draw upon science, biology, experimental psychology at most they were willing to grant equality and difference to the other sex there are differences we can track them scientifically or psychologically religion may not be working anymore so now we're using science and so they grant equality and difference this is what Beauvoir has to say about the doctrine of equality and difference that profitable formula is most significant it is precisely like the equal but separate formula of the Jim Crow laws aimed at North American Negroes as is well known this so-called equal egalitarian segregation has resulted only in the most extreme discrimination so Beauvoir thinks that equal but different is not equal at all you can't be equal and different that's her idea because the minute we have difference we have the risk of segregation and of subordination and superiority again and she says the exact same line of equal but different has actually been used before in cases where we can look back and say that wasn't equality at all so you can look up the Jim Crow laws or talk about them in seminar if you're interested what is equality the looping effect of being the other so for Beauvoir women are put in the position of being the other and this just kind of reinforces things so she says when an individual or a group of individuals there should be another bracket outside of individuals when an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority the fact is that he is inferior what does this tell us about inferiority for Beauvoir is it natural it is, it's nurtured inferiority if you are told over and over again that you are inferior Beauvoir says you will become inferior if you are kept in a position of inferiority you will be inferior but it doesn't mean that your inferiority predated being told that you were inferior so it comes as a result of the way you are treated so when a society treats you as inferior and labels you as inferior you effectively become inferior sort of like hacking, sleeping effect so she says yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men today being 1949 in France that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities the question is should this state of affairs continue so Beauvoir is accepting that women in her time are inferior to men that this is just a truth and it is a truth that society has created her question isn't are women inferior her question is should women continue to be inferior if you are an existentialist you don't think there is anything natural about women's inferiority so the question is is this something that society should continue to perpetuate or to put it in hacking's terminology we made up womenhood and we can change it we being all of us because both men and women are complicit in this role of women continuing to be the other according to Beauvoir so being the other is a type of humankind if you like in hacking's terminology it's a way of being in the world Beauvoir will argue that it is an evil way of being in the world because it limits everyone's freedom why does it limit everyone's freedom because the master is dependent on the slave so the subject is dependent on the other and the slave is dependent on the master the master is dependent on the slave to get the master the things he needs like laundry and sandwiches to reaffirm his identity I don't know why I keep going back to sandwiches and the slave is dependent on the master because the slave is dependent on the master for security and for justifying her metaphysical existence so there is a huge amount of dependency happening here and not a whole lot of freedom and Beauvoir believes in the importance of freedom because without freedom you cannot determine yourself you cannot determine the meaning of your own life so being the other is an evil way of being in the world because it limits everyone's freedom both men's and women's so existence precedes essence we can change what it means to be a woman not only can we it says Beauvoir but we should so that's the author's introduction in a nutshell women are the other women are inferior in 1949 various tools have been used over the centuries to keep women as inferior and Beauvoir says psychology has been one of these tools which brings me back here I think we've talked a lot about the ways in which psychology has been used to talk about femininity what I think is really interesting is that Beauvoir identified psychology as one of the ways in which women are kept in a subordinate position and then we look at the way in which this text was reacted to and a lot of it was something wrong, she's neurotic which seems like another appeal to psychology another reason I brought up psychology is because chapter 2 is all about psychoanalytic psychoanalytic point of view which is the other chapter that I asked you guys to read not quite in its entirety so again I have two big ideas one we're already familiar with man is the subject and woman is the other and another one which is an existentialist doctrine that pretty much all existentialists believe which is the doctrine of situated freedom so situated freedom is not something necessarily you would get directly out of the text so it's something I'm going to tell you to help you understand the text and then we'll talk through what's happening in chapter 2 but first something familiar, man the subject and woman is the other so Beauvoir talks about psychoanalysis she talks about two psychoanalysis psychoanalysis in general I'm going to focus on one, the one that we already know well, I know okay so she says psychoanalysis has taken the theory of masculine sexual development and assumed it can with only a few modifications explain feminine sexuality as well that is the masculine development is the normal one and the feminine sexual development is explained as deviations from that norm in the same way as male pens or normal pens and female pens that cost more okay so women's sexuality is seen as complex female sexuality as the exception to the male sexual norm so Beauvoir said Freud never showed much concern with the destiny of woman it is clear that he had simply adapted his account from that of the destiny of man with slight modifications that is I'm going to assume women are pretty much like men in their sexuality and that what I've said about male sexuality too so he declines to regard the feminine libido as having its own original nature and therefore it will necessarily seem to him like a complex deviation from the human libido in general that is the male libido which is standing in for the human libido in general so Beauvoir seems to be suggesting here that if you start with a view of masculinity as somehow normal and unproblematic female sexuality is going to look really weird and fit that masculine model so as we know this is kind of going over what Freud has already told us in femininity there is only one genital stage for man but there are two for women she runs a much greater risk of not reaching the end of her sexual evolution of remaining at an infantile stage and thus developing neuroses we already know that Beauvoir was charged with having done this so is male sexuality clear and perhaps a different question is Freud's sexuality clear okay so I want to borrow from the philosopher Wittgenstein Ludwig Wittgenstein a Wittgensteinian idea Wittgenstein says often when you find one set of facts unintelligible it's because you've taken another set of facts as unproblematic so we might explain what's going on with Freud is that he finds female sexuality to be so confusing because he's assumed that male sexuality is really really clear I don't know if male sexuality is clear maybe that's because I'm a woman so perhaps we find female sexuality to be so complex because we assume male sexuality as intelligible is Freud's sexuality clear I don't know so women's sexuality is seen as complex Beauvoir argues because men's sexuality is seen as clear because this is all coming from the masculine gaze so the castration complex now we get to talk about penises Freud's story of the castration complex this is how Beauvoir reports it but actually this is pretty genuinely how Freud talks about it the girl child identifies herself with the father we already know this from femininity but towards the age of five she discovers the anatomical difference between the sexes and she reacts to the absence of the penis by acquiring a castration complex this is actually worse than penis envy it's not just that she wants a penis she acquires a castration complex that is she imagines that she has been mutilated and is pained at the thought in fact Freud will actually say that female genitalia looks like a scar it looks like somebody has ripped that penis off okay so women develop a castration complex and they are pained at the thought that somebody took their penis away from them okay her feeling of frustration is the keener since loving her father she wishes in vain to be like him but she can't because she got castrated and inversely her regret strengthens her love so the more she can't be like her father the more she loves and admires him for being what he is for she is able to compensate for her inferiority through the affection she inspires in her father so women work harder or young girls do to attain their father's love precisely because they feel that they have been castrated this is serious all right how does Beauvoir explain this? this is Beauvoir's rewrite of the castration complex two essential objections there are two essential objections that may be raised against this view derived from the fact that Freud based it upon a masculine model he assumes that a woman feels she is a mutilated man that he assumes that women feel the same way men do which is that men are the subject and women are the object women are the other women are the different do women actually feel like this? if you assume that normal equals wet male then women must feel abnormal because they are by definition not male it only makes sense so many psychoanalysts today admit that the young girl may regret not having a penis without believing however that it has been removed from her body and even this regret is not general so since Freud's time until Beauvoir's time and even more so now the psychoanalysis I believe is less taught or followed today than it had been in the past but many psychoanalysis still held the doctrine of penis envy but they dropped the idea of the castration complex such that they no longer thought little girls saw their own body as a mutilated masculine body in general women who do have penis envy don't believe themselves to be castrated and Beauvoir argues they don't actually want the penis per se what they want is what the penis represents in our society that is virility and autonomy they want to be the subject not the other and it seems that being the subject goes hand in hand with having a penis so they want the penis Beauvoir also says there's a bit of a confirmation bias hidden in psychoanalysis especially Freudian psychoanalysis and I think some of you may have talked about this so she says the psychoanalysts have had no trouble in finding empirical confirmation for their theories lots and lots of confirmation for their theories as we know it was possible for a long time to explain the position of the planets on the Ptolemaic system by adding to its sufficiently subtle complications the idea is if we just keep modifying our masculine model to fit women psychoanalysis is fine and if we just keep modifying the Ptolemaic system to fit all the anomalies it works too but maybe we need a new system finally what does this all look like from the feminine perspective as opposed to from the masculine perspective what happens if we take the female perspective as the normal one the fact that the feminine desire in the daughter is directed towards a sovereign being gives it a special character why is it directed towards a sovereign being in 1949 especially in France who is it directed towards why is feminine desire directed towards a sovereign being sovereign like supreme who would Freud say feminine desire is directed at I heard it the father why would the father be a sovereign being if you aren't in Beauvoir's household who's the head of the household if you're not in Beauvoir's household typically the father so she says masculine desire as a child growing up in France is directed towards not a sovereign being it's directed towards the mother who is not a sovereign being feminine desire is directed towards the father who typically is a sovereign being and this is what gives feminine desire a special character it does not determine the nature of its object whereas masculine desire is a subject determining the nature of its object feminine desire does not do this rather it is affected by the object of desire because the object is a sovereign being the sovereignty of the father is a fact of social origin though which Freud fails to account for in fact Freud never really explains how it is that the father comes to be the sovereign he just kind of does some hand-wavy stuff and says well it just makes sense it's magic, yeah sure Beauvoir says this needs to be explained and it needs to be understood when talking about feminine desire the point of feminine desire is that it has historically been directed at least heterosexual feminine desire there is a chapter where she talks about homosexual feminine desire but it's later in the book heterosexual feminine desire has historically been directed at a sovereign being who makes you instead of you determining them and that that's what's important about feminine desire and that the origin of this sovereign being has to be explored how did this come into being and how does it shape desire so what we know is that female desire is shaped by social structures presumably so is male desire Freud treats them both as though they're natural objects but Beauvoir says no what's important is to look at this in play and how that affects you and your desire and your feeling of desire finally the feminine gaze penis envy makes no sense why does penis envy make no sense I couldn't resist this quote the little boy obtains from his penis a living experience that makes it an object of pride to him but this pride does not necessarily imply corresponding humiliation for his sisters since they know the masculine organ in its outward aspect only that is the male has a felt connection to his penis but females don't they don't have one so they know the object in it the way it appears only from the feminine gaze so what does it look like from the feminine gaze according to Beauvoir this outgrowth, this weak little rod of flesh can in itself inspire them only within difference or even disgust so I take you back here did Beauvoir make the French male look ridiculous or is Camus right that being judged by a woman feeling the feminine gaze on you as a male is uncomfortable pretty harsh judgment okay so psychoanalysis has viewed women as an object of study from a male perspective women's sexuality only makes sense clearly and non-complicatedly from a female perspective and in particular from a perspective that acknowledges the importance of the social origins of the sexuality and of this desire so let's talk about situated freedom situated freedom works something like this you find yourself in a situation in the world that was not chosen by you and that you cannot change I think all of us found this actually there is some Wiccanism actually does not necessarily subscribe to this but many other religious schools have thought and non-religious believe this so Wiccanism actually believes that you chose your parents so you chose the situation you're in but most other schools of thought and religious schools don't necessarily think this you kind of find yourself in a situation that you didn't necessarily choose you didn't choose your parents you didn't choose your home or your town hometown or your birth country you just kind of were there and you don't have a lot of choice about it it's all kind of decided when you're born in this situation you are free to make decisions so even though there's a lot about your life that you did not choose there are a lot of facts that were in place and that you couldn't change within this structure you can make choice this is the idea of situated freedom you're situated in a structure that automatically limits your choice to some extent but within that structure you're not determined you still have choices open so in what ways will your choices be limited by your structure I was not born a bird I can't fly at least not under my own power any other examples I can't breathe under water either at least not under my own power anything else ways in which your situation is limited yeah you mean with full fluency right so I think it's what by the age of 12 your brain kind of has hardwired in a different way you learn new languages so languages you learn before the age of 12 languages you were exposed to possibly by your parents you probably are much more fluent in and you can still make the choice to learn languages when you're older but it's not going to be as effortless or as fluent one more way in which your situation not necessarily yours personally but your situation has limited your choice hacking gives this example I cannot be a garçon de café a boy working in a café it's a French label it refers to a specific kind of waiter I, not living in France and not being male cannot fulfill this rule I can't be Pope either also because I'm not Catholic so I hope this idea is familiar to you but there are things that I can do and I can become given the role place I was born that perhaps wouldn't be open to me in other places so the avenues that are open to me change depending on my situation but the key point here is that well not all options are open to you your life is also not determined there are options open to you you can make choice why is this important because a lot of the debate that happens between Beauvoir and Freud is to my mind kind of a debate between free will and determinism that is Freud is a determinist and Beauvoir is not I have a philosopher raptor here for you the smartest reptile anyway so this is a philosopher raptor meme is showing you a modern argument for determinism but an argument that probably is something like what's in the back of Freud's mind atoms and particles behave in probabilistic ways but our minds are made up of atoms and particles so how can free will exist because it seems like we're kind of determined by laws of nature such that our minds end up working in probabilistic ways that can be predicted in fact Freud as you read him you might have noticed this definitely thinks this is true he was a neurologist a neuroscientist and he is a determinist he thinks that the way in which your mind works even on the unconscious level determines conscious choice so he believes that our bodies determine our lives and everything can be explained at a physiological level personal choice is then an illusion it all actually traces back to sex and aggression that's why we do everything according to Freud we have two instinctual drives sex and aggression so all psychoanalysis systems systematically rejects the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value and therein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system says Beauvoir psychoanalysis denies that we have any kind of active choice because it explains all of our actions in reference to an origin in Freud's case, sex drive and death drive Beauvoir is against determinism she thinks you do have a choice albeit a limited one but if the body and sexuality are concrete expressions of existence it is with reference to this existence that their significance can be discovered lacking this perspective that this existence is for granted unexplained facts the body and sexuality are things that exist here we are having a felt experience of this existence and we have to explain our biology and our sexuality with reference to the social and life of our own existence it has to come back to how we exist in the world so psychoanalysis takes the fact of our lived experience it treats it as an instinctual and natural part of ourselves as biological beings but Beauvoir argues that it's not just natural it is shaped by social forces it is shaped by the way in which we exist in the world by the choices that we have made not we here necessarily but humanity throughout all of history though our choices right now are nudging our sexuality in one direction or another so for example before asking whether the male is proud or whether his pride is expressed in his penis it is necessary to know what pride is and how the aspiration of the subject can be incarnated in an object what does it mean to have pride in our society or in France in 1949 and how would pride come to be attached to a physical organ how would that happen and what does that mean and what are the connotations of all of this so social forces shape natural phenomena shape where we find pride and where we find shame social forces shape our lived experience but of course we know that we shape social forces so none of this is determined or given or unchanging and the choices you make now could influence future generations and influence future understandings of sexuality or to put it in Hacking's term a looping effect there's another thing that you need to know going into the psychoanalytic chapter is not a physical object but as a situation so if we have situated freedom part of our situation is our bodies your body definitely affects how you experience the world but your body itself is affected by social forces and these forces are different in different contexts so here's a way in which my body affects the way I experience the world I am the shortest member of my family at 5 foot 4 I never even grew taller than my mom a lot of my family members are a lot taller than I am I'm shortest and I'm the smallest so I was home visiting my parents and my brother one summer and my dad had this project he was doing in his bathroom where he was trying to put in a new tub unfortunately the bathroom where he was trying to do this butts up right against the hot water heater there's really hardly any space between the bathroom wall and the hot water heater and none of the other members of my family came in here to do the plumbing for the tub so how did I spend my summer this is my body as a situation sometimes being the shortest member of my family is very inconvenient because of the rest of my family is a lot taller than me they don't always think about things like putting things on tall shelves where I can't reach them on the other hand I was instrumental to my family members at this time because I was the only person who could do the plumbing on the tub and I've never been a problem whereas other members of my family are constantly doing this so your body is a situation and the height of your body the shape of your body the ableness of your body affects the way in which you interact with the world around you it affects your situation in the world but Bovara says that your body itself is also subject to other social forces like the forces of my family encouraging me to climb between the hot water heater and the wall and wedge myself in there for an afternoon or two which was really unpleasant so there are social forces that affect you based on your body's physiology so she says your body by itself does not make you a man or a woman your body in a social context combined with your reactions to that social context is what affects your identity so she says woman is a female to the extent she feels herself as such this is your body in a context combined with your reactions to that context this is Bovara getting very very close to the distinction between sex and gender she doesn't have that distinction available to her it came along a little bit after she wrote but you can see that she's anticipating this distinction it is not nature that defines woman it is she who defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in her emotional life that is each woman and each man if you define yourself as a woman or a man are redefining what it means to be a woman or a man by the way in which you live by the example you set so your body in its social context might affect the number and types of choices open to you but you still get to choose and that's what's important for Bovara you are not determined so you have to think about whether or not you think Bovara or Freud is right in this context are we determined or are we not that's what's kind of at root in this debate so that the body as a situation just feeds into situated freedom so I wanted to remind you of that so what is this choice Bovara spent a lot of time talking about the importance of women making a choice women still have to choose women have a choice and it's not actually just women as she continues on in the book she quite drives the point how because we have this choice as social animals about what we want to do what is the choice in the language of psychoanalysis the choice is put like this it is among the psychoanalysis in particular that man is defined as a human being and woman is female whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male so remember Wollstonecraft actually got charged with this she got charged with trying to make women masculine why because men are the positive and the neutral they try and occupy this neutral space the space for all humanity they are charged with being masculine being too much like men so psychoanalysis says every time a woman deviates from what they think of as traditional womanhood roles she is being masculine and that's bad Bovara puts it in a different type of language she says the psychoanalyst describes the female child the young girl as incited to identification with the mother and the father that is the virile masculine and the feminine tendencies women are torn between identifying with their mother and trying to love their father so their sexuality is really complex because they are torn between being virile men and being submissive women whereas Bovara says I conceive of her as hesitating between the role of the object the other which is offered to her an assertion of her liberty so Bovara says women's choice is between the role of the other with all the advantages it confers and we've talked about what those advantages are and asserting liberty which is a very uncertain place where in 1949 France nobody is really sure what the advantages are so it's not an easy choice because otherness is familiar and liberty is unknown territory not just for women but for men as well so Bovara says we can hardly blame men for not supporting women's moves because men don't see what they are going to gain from it in 1949 no one knows what they are going to gain from it this is uncharted territory but it is a choice and it's a choice we should mindfully make we can't assume that it's just natural and given it's a choice that our society is continually making so Bovara argues that the female looks complicated and strange because she's always been gazed at from the male point of view this is in the psychoanalytic chapter from her own point of view things don't look as odd and acknowledge and women's submission is social not natural and we all of us can change that if we choose to so I want to suggest to you that this text I'm almost done is rewriting psychoanalysis from a female existential perspective instead of the male dominated psychoanalytic perspective that we have seen so far this leaves us with a few questions that I want to put up that you guys can maybe ponder or not, you might come up with other questions is situated freedom true because if we're not free then it's hard to see how we're going to remake society is male sexuality just as complex as female sexuality or to put it in a different way is female sexuality just as simple as male sexuality and finally I hope this now makes sense as to why Bovara starts the author's introduction with all these questions if women still exist, if they will always exist whether or not it is desirable that they should exist and what place they occupy in this world and what their place should be these are the questions she thinks we need in order to need to answer in order to make a mindful choice have women always been the same should they continue to be like this why might that be desirable or not be desirable what should their place be and where are they now thank you