In hindsight

Abstract

This essay was written for Dr. Alain Beauclair's PHIL 333: Sex and Sexuality. The assignment, an explication paper, was to write an interpretive dissection of a short passage selected from the course readings. I chose Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. It's a spectacular piece of philosophical text, and I found myself emphatically engrossed with her every word. The preface alone is striking- and from there on Beauvoir continued to challenge my make of our world. The essay's ten pages flesh out the conceptual architecture I take to be doing the heaviest lifting in Beauvoir's project: subjectivity, the Other, recognition, and transcendence, and the way this delicate dialectical framework was depreciated to facilitate (and maintain) female oppression via patriarchal structures. Following Beauvoir's lead, we will then trace how exactly patriarchy perverts authentic intersubjectivity by freezing the framework to forever fix Woman as Other. The final section pulls Beauvoir into the present through two contemporary formations, the "pick-me girl" and the manosphere, reading them as mirror-image identities constructed around patriarchal scaffolding; a bad faith approach to self-creation that disqualifies the individual from Beauvoir's "authentic freedom". This choice isn't ornamental; recontextualizing any keystone philosophical work for the modern day is important not only for analyzing what endures and why, but also for keeping philosophy accessible and in active contact with the modern reader.