Blackboard

Post #1: Beauvoir on Myths of Women

"Man sinks his roots in Nature; he was engendered, like animals and plants, he is well aware that he exists
only inasmuch as he lives. But since the coming of patriarchy, life in man's eyes has taken on a dual aspect; it
is consciousness, will, transcendence, it is intellect; and it is matter, passivity, immanence, it is flesh.
Aeschylus, Aristotle , and Hippocrates proclaimed that on earth as on Mount Olympus it is the male principle
that is the true creator: form, number, and movement come from him; Demeter makes corn multiply, but the
origin of corn and its truth are in Zeus; woman's fertility is considered merely a passive virtue. She is earth and
man seed; she is water, and he is fire. Creation has often been imagined as a marriage of fire and water; hot
humidity gives birth to living beings; the Sun is the spouse of the Sea, Sun and Fire are male divinities; and
the Sea is one of the most universally widespread maternal symbols...Likewise, the still earth, furrowed by the
laborer's toil, receives the seeds in its rows. But its role is necessary: it is the soil that nourishes the seed,
shelters it, and provides its substances. Man thus continued to worship fertility goddesses, even once the
Great Mother was dethroned; he owes his harvests, herds, and prosperity to Cybele. Her owes er his very life."
-Beauvoir, Simone De. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf, 1953. Print. Page 163-164
The ambivalence shown in the text is of an interesting kind. In the passage I chose, Beauvoir uses describes
the relationship between men and women as of that water and fire; she is Mother nature and he feeds off of
her energy and what she gives.Essentialist feminists would argue that this dynamic exists as a result of the
dependence of women and men on each other; while being mindful of how each one offers something
different to the other. This would be one way to explain this absolute and dependent relationship between
women and men. This feminist approach explains the process of Othering done by the man naturally through
occupying his specific subject positionality. Since there are inherent differences between the two, that who
claims superiority and drills in the mind of the other inferiority is the one to have and maintain the upper hand.
Him who claimed superiority have managed to take a central pose in many other building blocks of a
community and culture, for instance, religion and interpretations of it, which sometimes is used to build social
norms and so on. Therefore, by being in control in the first place, women have learned, produced, and
reproduced the idea of inferiority, or being less than. In other words, a long slow process of dehumanization of
women. There are many other intersections that can be added on to this topic as well. Some of which are
language differences, and cultural differences. Those are topics of discussion that represent my personal
intersectionality as I read this chapter and thought about what Beauvoir is saying.
Finally, I feel that it is only appropriate to close with a relavent quote from one of my favorite critical pedagogy
thinkers, preachers, and some of the most influential feminist writers in our time, Chandra Mohanty. Chandra
Mohanty is an icon in transnational and postcolonial feminism, and says in her essay Under Western
Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses :
In other words, only I so far as woman/women and the east are defined as Others, or as peripheral, that
(Western) man/humanism can represent himself/ itself as the center. It is not the center that determines the
periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the center. (Mohanty, Chandra Talpade.
"Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Feminist Review 30 (1988): 61. Web. (P.353)
This goes only to complicate the idea that Simone introduces in her writings.