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The Second Sex has a hyper refined language in some places in the book. This, I could barely follow. Fortunately Simone de Beauvoir was a woman flowering in her vital youth in the 1940s. She had access to modern amenities that were denied to her gender throughout 99.99% of human history. Let that sink in.

De Beauvoir had a great mind. It is of no surprise that she had Sartre as one of her lovers. De Beauvoir is a feminist, always will be. Her accessible ideas in this book of hers are what catch fire symbolically. She is one of the giantesses of Philosophy. I consider her higher than Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and Sartre himself! I am smitten. I think women should have a crack at ruling the world. It is a shame that Monarchies were ditched in Modernist times just as women were given quasi equal rights in enlightened societies. Is there causation? I wonder.

This book was so well written that I have some quibbles with it. My puny mind could not seize the portent of the initial chapters, which dealt with the biology of the 'inferior' creatures that de Beauvoir took for examples. The reason for the absence of a female gaze is rooted in the biology of creatures that are not close to being human.

Patriarchy is a trap so cunningly disguised that it does not look like one. I despair when I see online, women going against super achievers who are themselves women. I see people saying that de Beauvoir's work was understandable at her time and is now not so pat on the topic! As if women everywhere are treated similarly. De Beauvoir is sadly still relevant today. It was the same for Marx. People who do not know better keep saying that Marx's ideas were written at a time where people were being repressed in their workers's rights. That now Marxism is redundant. It is not. And Feminism is not. It is still needed.

Men and women need to see in women beyond a baby cranking machine. In Hindu mythology, the goddess of wealth is Lakshmi, but the male god Vishnu was the one who took her as his bride. She was subordinate to him. We still see in depictions the goddess pressing the feet of the god while he lies reposed. As if he were a peasant. As if this imagery was not aimed at the poorest and the least informed and the least educated. Goddesses were created so as to subjugate women even further in Vedic and other societies.

Like I said, women in our times look down on other women who are career-oriented. I remember a comment on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ where a woman was berating Julie Andrews for feeling sorry for herself when jetlagged (in her memoir) while her biological child was left behind in the US. One is not born a woman, one is born a female.

There seems, every 5 years or so, and now, where fashion peddlers market the cheapness of designer clothes. This is possible because of the slave wages which girls enjoy in developing countries. Girls are paid slave wages to work themselves to the bone. They incur the contempt of women on the other side of the world, who do not want to know how their gear was so cheap compared to the rising costs of other unrelated goods. Women are exploiting other women, but men who own the means of production pit these two classes of women agaisnt each other in a merciless and grotesque dance of exploitation.

De Beauvoir seems relevant. I have seen a few comments on a certain group on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ address her as Madame de Beauvoir, repeatedly so. She was not a matron. She had no fixed significant other, she knew she was the other sex, the second sex. I love Simone de Beauvoir in the same vein that I hate Arthur Schopenhauer et al.

The serf who owned nothing used to own a wife. The slave who was whipped goes to his hovel and beats his woman. The boy is embarrassed by being seen with his mother. The unfaithful husband dreads seeing his death in the shrivelling body of his wife even as he cuts up the golden jubilee cake of his wedding anniversary. The rich cover their women with silks and gems. The middle class man praises the resourcefulness of his wife. The working class man boasts on the grounds that his wife worships the ground he walks on. I hope Feminism is taken for what it has always striven to be, namely that it asks only that women are treated as the equal of men in all ways.

Man encroaches on the woman in all ways imaginable. When the Western man calls his kith and kin to announce that his wife is pregnant, he cries, 'We are pregnant!' Go do one, Man. Your body is far less beautiful than women's. Women's body is the aesthetic of the creative force of nature, not a rib taken from Adam's body. My, oh my, I'd better end this review here.