Project books: Those books you read because they're good for ya, because they make you think, because they're difficult and interesting. Not the fluffy, funny ones, not the ones that make you giggle. But the other ones. This is one of those books.
And it must be admitted, I didn't read every single word. That's the beauty of being out of school and an adult: I can read however darn much or little of a book that I care to. Yeah. Power to the people, power to the reader.
Power to the blogger, too, because I'm going to throw some quotes at you from The Second Sex, minorly [1] elaborate them, and call it a day. I'm not trained in SWAG or philosophy, nor am I particularly inclined to have a long, political rant about the state of woman.
So if you want to learn in-depth about de Beauvoir's take on being a woman, I say read the book. If you want to learn some sound-byte-y things, some of which have to do with women, some of which don't, I say read the following.
1. Symbolism did not come down from heaven nor rise up from subterranean depths - it has been elaborated, like language, by that human reality which is at once Mitsein [the being with other people; lit. 'with-being'] and separation... (47) Which is to say, symbolism works because we, as humans, imbue it with power.
2. The middle-class woman clung to her chains because she clung to the privileges of her class (112). Shackles of gold are still shackles - Magic, the Gathering. It's sure hard to give up safe unpleasantness for unsure good.
3. Queen Isabella, Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great were neither male nor female - they were sovereigns (130). QEI is my favorite, for all time.
4. She is an idol, a servant, the source of life, a power of darkness; she is the elemental silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip, and falsehood; she is healing presence and sorceress; she is man's prey, his downfall, she is everything that he is not and that he longs for, his negation and his raison d'etre (142). Sounds exhausting.
5. From the day of his birth man begins to die... (165). All who lives must die, passing through nature to eternity - Gertrude, explaining to Hamlet how the world works. Which goes nicely with #6, women being the keepers of the boundaries of life and all.
6. She heals the wounds of the males, she nurses the newborn, and she lays out the dead (181). A woman is necessarily there when a child is born...and seeing as she often outlives her male peers, she'll be there when it dies.
7. Poetry is supposed to catch what exists beyond the prose of every day (182). YES. All times yes.
8. But to say that Woman is Flesh, to say that the Flesh is Night and Death, or that it is the splendor of the Cosmos, is to abandon terrestrial truth and soar into an empty sky (255). Gratuitous capitals deployed for their best use: ridicule.
9. And no doubt it is more comfortable to submit to a blind enslavement than to work for liberation: the dead, for that matter, are better adapted to the earth than are the living (263). See #2.
10. Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition...(451) And people wonder why I don't hardly ever make my bed, and flat-out (heh) refuse to iron.
11. The world is not a dream carved in stone, it is made of dubious stuff subject to rot...(454) Yikes.
12. Save during the brief flare of an amorous passion, two individuals cannot constitute a world that protects each of them against the world (459). I'm not a romantic; this speaks to me.
13. A fallen god is not a man; he is a fraud (656). Amen.
xo,
Devo
[1] Chrome tells me this isn't a word, but I refuse to be stifled. The Chrome willn't keep me down!
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