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Beauvoir asks, "What is woman?" [8] She argues that man is considered the default, while woman is considered the "Other": "Thus, humanity is male, and man defines woman not herself, but as relative to him." Beauvoir describes the relationship of ovum to sperm in various creatures (fish, insects, mammals), leading up to the human being.
In the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality" of The Second Sex, [81] Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by the application of a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in ...
Beauvoir examined women's subordinate role as the 'Other', patriarchally forced into immanence [11] in her book, The Second Sex, which some claim to be the culmination of her existential ethics. [12] The book includes the famous line, "One is not born but becomes a woman," introducing what has come to be called the sex-gender distinction.
Her analysis focuses on the social construction of Woman as the Other, this de Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. [18] She argues that women have historically been considered deviant and abnormal, and contends that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. De Beauvoir argues ...
A woman she realizes is always perceived of as the "other", "she is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her". In this book and her essay, "Woman: Myth & Reality", de Beauvoir anticipates Betty Friedan in seeking to demythologize the male concept of woman. "A myth invented by men to confine women to ...
In this further analogy of women "on the market," understood through Marxist terms, Irigaray points out that women, like commodities, are moved between men based on their exchange value rather than just their use value, and the desire will always be surplus – making women almost seem like capital, in this case, to be accumulated.
The major theme of The Blood of Others is the relation between the free individual and 'the historically unfolding world of brute facts and other men and women.' [1] Or as one of Beauvoir's biographers puts it, her 'intention was to express the paradox of freedom experienced by an individual and the ways in which others, perceived by the individual as objects, were affected by his actions and ...
The principle of male as norm holds that grammatical and lexical devices such as the use of the suffix-ess (as in actress) specifically indicating the female form, the use of man to mean "human", and similar means strengthen the perceptions that the male category is the norm, and that corresponding female categories are derivations and thus less important.