![Simone De Beauvoir]()
The great Simone de Beauvoir.
Honestly, what are women? Sure, there are differences between males and females. But what about gender? Men have taken it upon themselves to become Subjects, whereby women have been presumed to be Others.
In this world men and women are compared to each other according to standards built by men. Men are forcers of the upper hand they hold. But now what? Once we smash this subjugation asunder and create new standards for all Subjects, where will we go?
Simone de Beauvoir (pictured) conceded this in her magnum opus The Second Sex:
'[T]he categories of "clitorid" and "vaginal", like the categories of "bourgeois" or "proletarian", are equally inadequate to encompass a concrete woman. Underlying all individual drama, as it underlies the economic history of mankind, there is an existentialist foundation that alone enables us to understand in its unity that particular form of being which we call a human life. The virtue of Freudianism derives from the fact that the existent is a body: what he experiences as a body confronted by other bodies expresses his existential situation concretely. Similarly, what is true in the Marxian thesis is that the ontological aspirations—the projects for becoming—of the existent take concrete form according to the material possibilities offered, especially those opened up by technological advances. But unless they are integrated into the totality of human reality, sexuality and technology alone can explain nothing … In our attempt to discover woman we shall not reject certain contributions of biology, of psychoanalysis, and of historical materialism; but we shall hold that the body, the sexual life, and the resources of technology exist concretely for man only in so far as he grasps them in the total perspective of his existence. The value of muscular strength, of the phallus, of the tool can be defined only in a world of values; it is determined by the basic project through which the existent seeks transcendence.'
Thus we ask: ‘What should women grasp?’ And, again, we are left directionless.
