Women: Myth and Reality

I loved this reading! Simone de Beauvoir was brilliant! I found myself laughing while reading this; not because it was funny, but I found the way in which she approached the material at hand sarcastic. She didn't necessarily choose sides, male or female. She created situations in which the female was viewed by men and sometimes by themselves and then presented contradicting situations in which these same females could no longer be viewed as such. "The saintly mother has the cruel stepmother, the angelic youth has the perverse" (de Beauvoir 786).

While I understood her writing because it was pretty straight forward in presenting its ideas, I was still somewhat thrown back by some of it's wording. For instance in the opening paragraph de Beauvoir describes her opening myth in stating, "...sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition - namely, the "division" of humanity into two classes of individuals..." (de Beauvoir 784). I didn't know whether she meant separating man and woman into two classes or separating how women are viewed into two classes.

Another interesting thing that kinda ticked me off in reading this was a passage in paragraph 7 referring to how a man is not obligated to respect a womans body when inflicting pain upon her. I took this in terms of during sexual intercourse. "Men not need bother themselves with alleviating the pains and the burdens the physiologically are women's lot, since these are "intended by nature"; men use them as a pretext for increasing the misery of the feminine lot still further, for instance by refusing to grant to woman any right to pleasure, by making her work like a beast of burden" (de Beauvoir 787). Wow! That quote is horrible. I feel men should always respect a women, and in-turn this means respecting their bodies, wife or not. This quote totally undermines that.

de Beauvoir, Simone. "Women: Myth and Reality." A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus. 7th ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martins. 2006. pp. 784-794.