The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

“The Second Sex” by Beauvoir has destabilized the deep-rooted patriarchal construction of myths to human manifest in the works of literature and society.

She has vehemently refused the notion of women’ essence prior to the individual existence the patriarchal has been based on the false essence of women. Such an essence for her is just a male contradiction to establish the patriarchal supremacy over women.

Behavior believes that a female like a male is accidental and is thrown on the earth among the multiple choices. So, she says that women is not born she is a social construct constructed on the measurement of loss and gain by men.

In her given essay, she powerfully argues about the binary opposition of self and other from existential view point. She says that the male has contracted himself as self and female as other in order to get power and authority calling the female as inferior, weak, passive and fragile.

But Behavior states that the male while establishing himself as self by negating the other has forgotten his own existence, since in Lacanian psychological view without other there exits no “self”. Similarly the male has accused women as flesh and blood but the great irony lies in the male’s existence which is possible only among the same flesh and blood.

She is against all the behavior, sentiment, poetry, love, adventure, happiness, passion, attribution to women by the patriarchal myths. De Beauvoir in her essay, basically focuses on the five male writers and their constructed myths about women in their literary works.

According to the patriarchal myths, women are taken as immanent, passive, static, terrestrial, limited, inferior, mysterious, poetic, fleshy, weak, to be enjoyed and so on. But men on the other hand, stand as transcendental active, dynamic, celestial, boundless, superior, transparent, reasoning, powerful, prosaic and the self. Beauvolr brings reference of the writers like Montherlant and Lawrence.

Montherlant views an ideal woman as stupid, submissive, purely flesh, mutilating male, always receiving and never giving an object to be enjoyed. D. H. Lawrence takes men with public pride and as active beings while women as passive beings and the wife as merely someone who always derives for fulfillment from her husband.

Beauvoir further brings the reference of Breton and Claudel. Breton defines women as poetry with no vocation except love, emotion and passion. For Claudel, a woman is a tempter who tempts men forcing to evil acts as eve did to Adam in the Bible. A woman, he thinks, has only secondary existence for she came out of man’s body. Man for him is capable of winning salvation, but women’s destiny is to dedicate herself to family.

On the basis of such myths, women are exploited as they are made subordinate to male. They are given no opportunity to share the world of quality with men, and are forced to act as per the expectation of male not as per her own wish and nature. The patriarchy has made marriage women’s tradition, her destiny and a means to serve the male.

Thus to came up from such myths to the reality of her own existence, Beauroir calls forth women to deny the system of traditional marriage and traditional education and to accept contraceptives and abortion and to work for economic independence and other patriarchal conventions that create binaries of I sex and II sex, self and other and so on.