Simone de Beauvoir "Woman: Myth and Reality"

But the terms of eccentric ar by no means purely logical. Beauvoir develops that inspection by arguing the importance in human come of symbols and signs as building blocks of domain. Designating wo workforce as mythic, in their essence residing somewhere beyond what men see as the "absolute" (824) bless and logic and reason that is the natural province of male exist, is a way of reducing all females to a unitary symbol, or label. The complex facts of their experience become irrelevant because--mysterious as they are--their reality is nevertheless, paradoxically, known. That progression of vagarys leads to Beauvoir's all important(p) statement that "few myths subscribe to been more than advantageous to the ruling caste than the myth of women: it justifies all privileges and blush authorizes their abuse" (823).

Beauvoir, who asserts that males and females are equally mysterious to one another, charters the headway that the male conceptions of mystery, plus with their ability to establish and enforce interpretations of it, make mystery not a source of empowerment merely a source of social disempowerment. No one genuinely much yields to what is incomprehensible about women as an absolute of experience; only rationality and reason are absolute. Instead, the mystery is perceive as the inferior of reason. Accordingly, mysterious object is available for control.

wherefore that becomes the experienced reality of power ratios between the sexes has nothing to do with gender-specific psychoemotional realities. It has

everything to do with who holds "the position of economic and social privilege" (826). As Beauvoir points out, when a woman is the plentiful and elite member of a relationship, she and her thought and emotional processes have no need mystery.

Money and power grant her the term of the absolute, and "the mystery is reversed" (826).

For women to live and behave like men would be to deny their femininity, and for social reasons, they are unlikely to indigence to do so. Now that was written in 1949, before the diversity of feminism in Western culture. That helps explain the attention Beauvoir gives to the idea that a woman who holds a job does not mechanically lose her sex appeal (830). Even so, the evidence of modern-day cultural experience is that women seem constantly engaged (particularly by way of mass media) in problematic discourse. The cover lines and talk-show topics are all too familiar: They discuss what to do or what they should do or want or how they should behave or--this is an important one--what effect what they do will have on the men(!) in their lives. Thus does the Standard persist a half atomic number 6 on from Beauvoir's analysis. So does designation of what is "eternally" Other.

Even so, the haughty idea of who
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