Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I hope you are
ready to think because today we are tackling
a figure who is nothing short of a titan. And
I don't use that word lightly. Not at all. We
are talking about a woman whose name is practically
synonymous with French intellectualism, with
the hazy smoke of the Café de Flore, with existentialism
and certainly absolutely with modern feminism.
We are unpacking the life, the work and the...
Well, the incredibly complicated legacy of Simone
de Beauvoir. Titan is exactly the right word.
In fact, you could argue it's an understatement.
This is someone who didn't just participate in
the culture of her time. No. She fundamentally
reshaped the way we think about gender, about
freedom, about ethics. She literally gave us
the vocabulary to talk about what it means to
be a woman and really what it means to be a human
being. But, and this is the key thing, she's
also a figure who completely defies easy categorization.
She's an icon for sure. But when you really peel
back the layers and you look at the sources we
have today, the biographies, her own memoirs,
the philosophical texts, and especially the letters,
you see a much more complex and at times a deeply
controversial person. Exactly. I think a lot
of people know the name. They might know she
wrote The Second Sex. Maybe. They almost certainly
know she was the partner of Jean -Paul Sartre.
But the image we have of her, it's often just
a silhouette. Yeah, it's a caricature almost.
It is. We see the philosopher in the cafe wearing
the turban, smoking a cigarette, writing furiously
in a notebook. It's all very chic, very Parisian.
But the reality, it is so much messier, more
fascinating, and frankly, more challenging than
that postcard version. It is. And that's really
our mission for this deep dive. We want to look
past the icon. We want to understand how a dutiful
daughter from a strict bourgeois Catholic family
transformed herself into a radical atheist. and
a groundbreaking social theorist. And we have
to unpack that famous soul partnership with Sartre.
We do. Because it was revolutionary. For its
time, sure. But it also had some very, very dark
corners that we need to shine a light on. The
sources are pretty clear about that now. And
we absolutely have to get into the heavy stuff.
We're going to decode the central thesis of the
second sex, that famous line, one is not born
but becomes a woman. A line that changed everything.
It did. And we need to figure out why the English
-speaking world... basically misunderstood that
book for decades. But then we're also going to
confront the uncomfortable truths. The sources
we have today, they don't shy away from the allegations
regarding her relationships with her students
or her signing certain political petitions that
look, well, they look very different through
a modern lens. You have to look at the whole
picture, the brilliance and the shadows. You
really can't separate the philosophy from the
life with Beauvoir because her entire project
was about living her philosophy, for better or
for worse. So let's start at the beginning. Because
to understand the radical, you really have to
understand the cage she broke out of. And honestly,
her beginnings sound like something out of a
19th century novel. Born in 1908, Paris. Right,
in the 6th arrondissement. Right. Wealthy banker's
daughter, lawyer father. It sounds... Picture
perfect. It was a very bourgeois upbringing and
very, very rigid. Her father, Georges Bertrand
de Beauvoir, was a lawyer. He was a man of culture,
loved literature, the theater. He had actually
aspired to be an actor at one point. Oh, interesting.
And her mother, Françoise, was a wealthy banker's
daughter and a deeply, deeply devout Catholic.
So you have this tension right from the start
inside the house. Between what? Art and religion.
Exactly. You've got the worldly, artistic, somewhat
agnostic aspirations of the father clashing with
the strict, pious, almost severe morality of
the mother. Simone was caught right in the middle
of that. And she was precocious. I mean, intellectually,
she was on fire from a very young age. She was
just devouring books. Completely. She taught
herself to read before she was even supposed
to. And there is this quote from her father that
I found in the notes. I guess it's supposed to
be a compliment, but it lands. Well, it lands
differently today. He used to boast to his friends,
Simone has a man's brain. She thinks like a man.
She is a man. That really sets the stage, doesn't
it? Yeah. It highlights exactly what she would
later dedicate her life to fighting against.
Yeah. This idea that intellect, logic, reason,
and capability are inherently male traits. Yeah.
But for her father in that era, that was the
absolute highest praise he could give his daughter.
So he was proud of her, but in a really... constrained
way he was seeing her potential absolutely but
he could only articulate it by erasing her gender
he encouraged her studies which was unusual for
the time but he was also reinforcing the very
binary that she would eventually spend her life
trying to dismantle but then the script of her
life the one that seemed pre -written for her
just got completely flipped it wasn't just ideas
that changed her path the material reality of
her life just it collapsed the money ran out
it's as simple as that after world war one the
family lost most of their fortune Her maternal
grandfather's bank, the bank of the muse, it
collapsed. So they went from wealthy to what?
To struggling. They had to maintain the appearance
being bourgeois, but the reality was very different.
They had to move from a grand apartment on the
Boulevard de Raspal to a smaller, darker one
on the Rue de Rennes. No running water. They
had to walk up six flights of stairs. It was
a deep humiliation for the family. And this is
crucial, right? Because of this financial collapse,
her dowry was gone. Gone. And we have to pause
on the dowry thing because for you listening
now, that sounds so archaic. But in the context
of 1920s French upper middle class society. Marriage
was a transaction. It was a business deal between
families. No dowry, no marriage. Is that basically
it? For her class, precisely. Without a dowry,
you couldn't buy a husband of suitable status.
Her marriage prospects just evaporated overnight.
But here is the aha moment, the turning point.
Beauvoir didn't see this as a tragedy. She saw
it as a liberation. It's the classic blessing
in disguise, but on a massive life -altering
scale. It completely forced her hand. Because
she couldn't rely on a husband to support her,
she had to work. She had to earn her own living.
That necessity drove her toward education and
eventually economic independence, which of course
became a cornerstone of her feminist philosophy
later on. So she knew from a young age that her
brain was her only asset. It was her only way
out. She realized that if she'd had that dowry,
she likely would have been married off to some
respectable lawyer. or a banker, had five kids,
and we never would have heard of Simone de Beauvoir.
So if the bank hadn't collapsed, we might never
have had the second sex. We might have just had
Simone, the Parisian housewife. It is very, very
likely. The loss of her family's privilege was
the catalyst for her personal and intellectual
freedom. It's profound irony. And there was another
major break from her background happening at
the same time. Her faith. Remember, she was raised
in this incredibly strict Catholic environment.
Convent schools, the whole nine yards. She was
incredibly religious as a child. She wrote in
her memoirs that she wanted to become a nun.
She would play at being a martyr. So what happened?
How do you go from wanting to be a nun to being
one of the world's most famous atheists? It was
a hard pivot. It happened during a crisis of
faith when she was about 14. But it wasn't just
a sort of drifting away like, oh, I'm too busy
for church now. It was a conscious... deliberate
intellectual decision she thought it through
deeply she decided that she wanted to confront
the world honestly on its own terms without what
she saw as the comfort of illusion she felt that
using faith to explain the world's suffering
or its mysteries was in her words an evasion
there's a quote here from her writings that is
just it's scathing she said the believer derives
a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice
itself ouch That is sharp. Right. She's basically
saying, you think you're better than me because
you have faith, but really you're just afraid.
I'm the brave one for facing the void without
a safety net. And that atheism stayed with her
for the rest of her life. It's absolutely central
to existentialism. The core idea is that if there
is no God, there's no predetermined purpose for
humanity. There's no divine blueprint for your
life. You are thrown into the world and you alone
are responsible for creating your own meaning.
That's terrifying for a lot of people. It's terrifying
but it's also radically freeing. She started
that journey at 14, deciding to face the universe
without a buffer. So she's broken with the church.
She's broken with the traditional path of marriage.
Now she throws herself completely into academia.
And domination really is the right word here.
She goes to the Sorbonne. She sits in on classes
at the École Normale Supérieure. Which is like
the Ivy League of French philosophy, but even
more exclusive. Yeah. It was the absolute training
ground for the intellectual elite. And she prepares
for the aggregation. We really need to explain
the aggregation because it doesn't have a perfect
equivalent in the U .S. or U .K. systems. It
isn't just a final exam or a Ph .D. defense.
It's a grueling, year -long, highly competitive
national ranking exam. So it's not just pass
-fail. It's about where you rank in the entire
country. Exactly. Your rank determines your entire
career. It determines whether you get to teach
at a prestigious university in Paris or get sent
off to a high school in the provinces. It separates
the wheat from the chaff in the French education
system. And she didn't just pass. She crushed
it. She did. In 1929, she was 21 years old. She
was the youngest person to ever pass the philosophy
aggregation at that time. The youngest ever.
That is just incredible. And looking at the final
ranking, she came in second. But we have to qualify
that because we have to ask. Who came in first?
Jean -Paul Sartre. Right. But Sartre was 24.
And crucially, he was retaking the exam. He had
failed it the previous year because he was too
arrogant in his answers. He tried to be too original,
and the judges, who valued tradition, failed
him for it. So he had an extra year of prep.
And he was older, and he was male. And the jury...
Well, the records show they debated heavily.
They narrowly awarded Sartre first place because
he was the boy genius, the established figure
from the ENS. But many on the jury felt that
Beauvoir was actually the sharper, more precise,
more philosophically rigorous candidate that
year. Still second place to Sartre at 21 as the
youngest ever to pass. That solidified it. She
was economically independent. She was a certified
genius. And she had met the man who would be
her partner for the next 51 years. Which brings
us to the pact. The pact. This is the stuff of
legend. This is what every philosophy undergrad
talks about. So they meet during college while
they're studying for the aggregation. She wasn't
interested at first, right? Not really, no. Sartre
was short. He had a wandering eye, literally.
He had strabismus. And he wasn't traditionally
handsome. He was, by all accounts, quite messy.
But he was relentless. He was completely captivated
by her determination and her intellect. He saw
her as an equal. He was the first person she'd
ever met who she felt was her intellectual equal.
That's what won her over. The conversation was
just on another level. But when things got serious
and her father confronted them, the expectation
was naturally... But Beauvoir had no dowry. And
as we've established, she had no interest in
the institution itself. She really, really hated
the idea of marriage. She viewed it as a trap.
She called it an alienating institution. She
thought it was dangerous for men because they
get saddled with the burden of providing. And
it was enslaving for women because they become
economically and emotionally dependent. There's
a quote of hers. Any institution which solders
one person to another, obliging people to sleep
together who no longer want to, is a bad one.
Right. So for her, marriage was a kind of institutionalized
bad faith. It forced you to pretend feelings
you might not have anymore. So instead of a wedding
ring, Sartratra proposes a lease. A two -year
lease. It's a very cinematic scene. They were
sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, and he
said, let's sign a two -year lease. A renewable
one, but a lease nonetheless. It sounds so transactional.
I'll take the apartment and the relationship
for 24 months, please, with an option to renew.
It was their attempt to structure freedom into
commitment. And they came up with this famous
distinction. They had their essential love, which
was what they had between them. Yeah. And then
there were contingent loves. Meaning they could
see other people. Exactly. The essential love
was the core, the primary, unshakable intellectual
and emotional bond. contingent loves affairs
flings even serious relationships with other
people were permitted what was the main rule
total transparency they promised to tell each
other everything no secrets no lies every detail
of their contingent loves had to be shared and
they actually stuck to this for 51 years they
never lived together they never married they
never had children it was a sexual relationship
especially at the beginning but it wasn't an
exclusive one And more than anything, it was
a profound intellectual symbiosis. They read
everything the other wrote, didn't they? Before
anyone else. Always. They were each other's first
and most important reader and critic. There's
still a huge debate among scholars about who
influenced whom more. For a long time, the story
was that she was his disciple. The junior partner.
Right. Even she downplayed her own philosophical
originality sometimes to her detriment. But modern
scholarship, especially looking at her diaries
and early essays, shows she was reading philosophers
like Hegel and Leibniz independently. She influenced
his seminal work being and nothingness just as
much, if not more, in some areas as he influenced
her. And he gave her that nickname, Castor. Yes,
Castor, which is French for beaver. It was given
to her by their friend René Mahou. It was partly
a play on her name. Beauvoir sounds a bit like
beaver in English, but also because, as Mahou
said, beavers are animals that live in communities
and have a constructive bent. She was a worker.
She was an incredibly hard worker, always building.
Yeah, building arguments, building books, building
a life. So they have this open relationship.
They're the undisputed power couple of the Parisian
intellectual scene. But this wasn't just about
living a bohemian lifestyle. They were turning
their lives into philosophy. And Beauvoir started
doing this through fiction. Fiction was a major
vehicle for her philosophical ideas. She believed
that philosophy wasn't just abstract logic you
write in an essay. It had to be lived. It had
to be experienced in the complexities of human
relationships. And her first novel is a perfect
example of this. She Came to Stay, published
in 1943. Right. On the surface, it's a novel
about a tense love triangle in Paris. But really,
it's a thinly veiled, fictionalized account of
a real -life menage a trois. Wait, actual sisters?
Yes. Olga was one of Beauvoir's students. Beauvoir
became, you could say, infatuated with her, perhaps
obsessed is the better word. Sartre then tried
to pursue Olga. Olga rejected him, so he moved
on to her sister Wanda. It was incredibly messy
and emotionally fraught. Vessi is an understatement.
That sounds like a modern -day reality TV show,
not high philosophy. But in the book... Beauvoir
uses this very real, very painful drama to explore
a deep philosophical concept, the relationship
between the self and the other. It's about consciousness.
How so? The book's core idea is that the existence
of another person, another consciousness, is
a threat to your own. When someone else enters
the room, they steal the world from you because
they see it from their own perspective, turning
you into an object in their world. The novel
ends in a... rather violent way to resolve this
philosophical problem. So she's taking her real
-life jealousy and emotional turmoil and turning
it into a high -stakes analysis of human consciousness.
Exactly. And she did it again and again. Her
most famous novel is probably The Mandarins from
1954. That book actually won the Prix Goncourt,
which is France's highest literary prize, like
the Booker or the Pulitzer. And that's another
one based on her life, right? Yes. It's a Romana
Cleffa novel with a key. It's about her intellectual
circle after World War II grappling with their
political commitments in the new Cold War era.
All the characters are based on real people.
Sartre, Camus, herself. And that one was dedicated
to Nelson Algern, right? The American writer.
We'll definitely get to him later. But it just
shows again that for her, life, love, politics
and philosophy were all completely intertwined.
You can't separate them. And this feeds directly
into her more explicit work on existentialist
ethics. She wrote these important but lesser
-known essays like Pyrrhus and Sineas and The
Ethics of Ambiguity. And in them, she argued
that existentialism is the only philosophy that
really takes evil seriously. How so? Because
usually people think existentialism means nothing
matters, so do whatever you want. That's the
common nihilist misinterpretation. But Beauvoir
fought fiercely against that. She takes on Dostoevsky's
famous lines from The Brothers Karamazov. If
God does not exist, everything is permitted.
But she flips it. She says, because there is
no God, we are solely responsible for everything.
The buck stops with us. Entirely. We don't have
a divine rule book or a cosmic plan to hide behind.
So freedom isn't just doing whatever you feel
like. That's childish. Authentic freedom requires
recognizing and willing the freedom of others.
That is a crucial distinction. There's a quote
here. No project can be defined except by its
interference with other projects. Right. It means
your freedom is bound up with everyone else's.
You cannot be truly free. if you are oppressing
others. If you're a tyrant, you aren't free.
You are dependent on your slaves for your identity.
It's a deeply moral and responsible philosophy,
contrary to what a lot of its critics claimed.
And they try to put this into practice with their
political journal, Les Temps Modernes, The Modern
Times. Yes, co -founded in 1945 with Sarch and
the philosopher Maurice Merleau -Ponty. The guiding
philosophy was engagement. Writers and intellectuals
must be engaged. They must take sides on the
political issues of the day. You can't just be
an ivory tower academic. Exactly. You can't sit
on the sidelines of history. Sartre, in the journal's
famous preface, blamed the writer Flaubert for
the bloody repression of the Paris Commune in
1871. Not because Flaubert was a soldier or a
politician, but because, as Sartre put it, he
did not write a line to stop it. Wow. That is
a ridiculously high bar for a writer. If you
don't actively write against injustice, you are
complicit in it. That was their creed. Silence
is not neutral. Silence is an act of support
for the oppressor. It's a very demanding ethical
position. OK, so she's established herself as
a major philosopher, a pre -Goncourt winning
novelist, a public intellectual. She is a giant
in the French scene. But then comes 1949. The
book that changed everything? The second sex.
Leducium sex. This is the big one. It is, without
exaggeration, the foundation of second wave feminism.
And it gave us that dictum, probably one of the
most famous sentences of the 20th century. One
is not born, but rather becomes a woman. It's
a line that has echoed through the decades. And
we need to really, really unpack it because it's
so often misunderstood or just quoted out of
context. So what was she actually saying there?
What does it mean to become a woman? She was
making a radical distinction for the time between.
Biological sex, being born with female anatomy,
and the social construct of gender, the process
of becoming a woman as society defines it. So
female is biology, but woman is an idea. It's
an idea that is imposed upon you. She's saying
that womanhood... With all its associated traits,
passivity, domesticity, being emotional, being
focused on beauty and pleasing others, isn't
a natural state. It's not your destiny. It's
a process. It is something society forces upon
you from the moment you are born, from the moment
you're wrapped in a pink blanket and told to
be a good little girl. It's the difference between
biology and a script you're forced to perform.
That's a great way to put it. And to explain
how this happens, she reintroduces her concept
of the other. She argues that throughout history,
man has defined himself as the subject, the absolute,
the default human being. And woman is always
defined relative to him. She is the other. She's
not her own person. She's defined by her relationship
to the man. Precisely. And she dives deep into
history for this, doesn't she? She goes through
mythology, biology, psychoanalysis, and historical
materialism to prove her point. She cites Aristotle.
Right. She quotes Aristotle, who said women are
female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.
She quotes St. Thomas Aquinas, who called women
imperfect men or incidental beings. She shows
how this isn't just a few misogynists. It's baked
into the very foundation of Western thought.
And she says men create a mystery around women.
What does she mean by that? It's a tactic. She
says that when men don't understand women or
don't want to make the effort to, they label
them mysterious. If women are these strange,
unknowable, mystical creatures, then men are
excused from treating them as equals or trying
to understand their actual problems. It's a convenient
myth to maintain power. And this all leads to
her famous ideas of imminence versus transcendence.
I love these terms because they sound very philosophical
and fancy, but they're actually very practical.
They really are. Transcendence is the goal of
human existence for any existentialist. It's
reaching out into the world, taking action, creating,
having projects, shaping your future. It's building
a bridge, writing a book, inventing a vaccine,
starting a company. It's about transcending your
current situation. And imminence is the opposite.
Imminence is stagnation. It's passive existence.
It's being acted upon rather than acting. It's
the realm of maintenance, of repetition. And
she argued that women are systematically forced
into a life of imminence. Yes. She talks about
housework in a very specific philosophical way.
Cooking, cleaning, washing dishes. These are
endless cycles of repetition. You wash the dishes
just so they can get dirty again tomorrow. You
aren't creating anything new that lasts, you
are just maintaining the status quo. She argued
that women are resigned to this world of imminence
and the only way out is through transcendence,
which for her requires economic independence
above all else. You can't have projects if you
can't pay your own rent. Basically, yes. Now,
here's the absolute tragedy of this book. It
comes out in France in 1949. It causes a massive
scandal. The Vatican puts it on the Index of
Prohibited Books. Albert Camus is furious about
how she portrays men. But when it gets translated
into English... Something goes terribly wrong.
Something goes wrong is putting it very, very
mildly. The American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf,
hired a man named Howard Parsley to translate
it in 1953. Parsley was a professor of zoology
at Smith College. Wait, let me get this straight.
A zoology professor to translate one of the most
important and dense philosophical texts of the
century. Yes. His academic expertise was in reproduction
and insects, not existentialism or Hegelian philosophy.
And the publisher's wife, Blanchnoff, who prompted
the translation, urged him to simplify it, to
cut things down to make it more palatable for
an American audience. So what did he do? How
bad was it? It was a disaster. First, he cut
huge sections. About 15 % of the book just vanished.
He cut out dozens of historical figures she mentioned.
He cut out entire arguments about the history
of women's rights. But far worse than the cuts,
he mistranslated key philosophical concepts.
Can you give an example? Sure. When Beauvoir
used a specific Hegelian or Heideggerian term
for, say, consciousness or being for itself,
he would just translate it with a generic English
word that lost all the philosophical weight.
He made it seem less like a rigorous... philosophical
argument and more like a dry, if radical, sociological
study about the sexes. So for decades, English
speakers, including all major feminists in America
and the UK in the 60s and 70s, were reading a
butchered, dumbed -down version of the second
sex. Yes. It fundamentally distorted her message.
It made her seem less original, less philosophically
rigorous than she actually was. A faithful, integral
translation wasn't published until 2009, 60 years
later. That is just mind -blowing. We spent half
a century misunderstanding one of the most important
books of the 20th century because of a bad translation
by a bug expert. It really is a tragedy of intellectual
history. It seriously delayed the full appreciation
of her genius in the English -speaking world.
Okay, so we have the philosopher, but let's look
at the woman herself. We talked about the essential
love with Sartre, but there are many contingent
loves, and one of them seems to have been pretty
essential too, Nelson Algren. This is such a
fascinating and humanizing chapter of her life.
It shows a completely different side of her.
She met Nelson Algren in Chicago in 1947. She
was doing a four -month lecture tour of the U
.S., which she wrote about in her book, America
Day by Day. And who was he? He wasn't part of
her Paris circle. Not at all. He was the absolute
opposite of the Parisian intellectual she knew.
Algren was a gritty, tough American writer. He
wrote The Man with the Golden Arm. He knew the
streets, the junkies, the underbelly of Chicago.
He was raw and masculine in a way Sartre wasn't.
And they fell hard for each other. They did.
It was an incredibly passionate, physical, and
deeply emotional love affair. In her letters
to him, which are just heartbreaking to read,
she called him her beloved husband. Think about
that. This is the woman who rejected marriage
as an institution, calling this man her husband.
That says so much. But the relationship, it didn't
last. It couldn't. It couldn't. This was the
pact in action, and this is where you see its
brutal side. She would not leave Paris. She would
not leave Sartre and her intellectual life there.
That was the essential. Algren wanted her to
move to Chicago and build a life with him. She
refused. Ultimately, she chose her work and her
partnership with Sartre over her romantic love
for Algren. And Algren was bitter about it for
the rest of his life. Extremely. He felt used
and betrayed, especially because she took their
intimate relationship and put it directly into
her novel, The Mandarins. He felt his privacy,
their love had been mined for literary material.
He famously said, hell, love shouldn't be that
one -sided. A woman who sleeps with you all night
and then gets up and writes about it in a book.
But she never forgot him. Never. Decades later,
when she died in 1986, she was buried wearing
a silver ring that Nelson Algren had given her.
Wow. That just adds such a layer of sadness to
the whole story. She made her existential choice
to stick with Sartre and her freedom in Paris,
but she carried that other love, that other possible
life to her grave. And there were others, too.
It wasn't just Algren. She lived with Claude
Landsman, the filmmaker who later made the monumental
documentary Shoah from 1952 to 1959. She had
a long -term relationship with a writer named
Jacques -Laurent Bost. She was a woman who lived
fully in her body as well as her mind. She was
not some cold, detached ascetic. But, and here's
where the deep dive gets really difficult. Her
romantic and sexual life wasn't just about consenting
adults like Algren or Landsman. There are serious
allegations that tarnish this image of the liberated
woman. We have to talk about her time as a teacher.
We do. And this is the part of her biography
that often gets left out of the celebratory articles,
but the sources are clear and we have to confront
them. In 1943, during the Nazi occupation of
Paris, Beauvoir was suspended from her teaching
position. She was accused of seducing a 17 -year
-old student named Natalie Sorokin. And this
wasn't just a school board rumor. There were
legal charges. Sorokin's parents pressed charges
for debauching a minor. Now, the age of consent
in France at the time was 13, but there were
specific laws against the corruption of minors
by people in positions of authority, like a teacher.
As a result, Beauvoir's national teaching license
was permanently revoked. It was later reinstated
after the war, but the incident is on the record.
And it gets worse and more detailed with the
revelations from another former student, Bianca
Lamblin. Yes. This is perhaps the most damning
account we have. Bianca Lamblin, who was born
Bianca Bienenfeld, wrote a book in the 1990s
titled Memoirs of a Deranged Young Girl. She
was a brilliant student of Beauvoir's during
the war, and she alleges that Beauvoir groomed
her starting when she was 16. Groomed her for
what, exactly? For a sexual relationship that
would involve both Beauvoir and Sartre. Bianca
describes what she calls a trio dynamic. She
says Beauvoir first seduced her, gained her absolute
trust and love, and then introduced her to Sartre
to become his lover as well. So it wasn't a relationship
between three equals? Not according to Lamblin.
She describes feeling like a sexual toy. for
the famous couple. She felt that they used her
and other young women to spice up their own relationship,
to test their philosophical ideas, and then discarded
her when they got bored. That is just devastating.
A sexual toy. It sounds like they were treating
people not as subjects with their own freedom,
but as objects for their own projects. And it
gets even more chilling. Decades later, after
Sartre died, his and Beauvoir's letters to each
other were published. Bianca Lamblin read them
and found that they referred to her by a cruel
pseudonym, Louise Vidrine. She read what they
wrote to each other about her while the affair
was happening, analyzing her, mocking her insecurities,
discussing her sexual performance. She said she
felt nauseated. She realized the woman she had
loved and admired, her teacher, had been systematically
deceiving her. It really complicates the whole
idea of the pact and its transparency, doesn't
it? Their freedom, their honesty with each other.
It seems it came at the direct expense of these
vulnerable young women. It forces us to ask a
very uncomfortable question. Was their brand
of existentialist freedom predatory? Beauvoir
argued in her philosophy that your freedom requires
the freedom of others. But in these cases, it
seems their project interfered destructively
with the projects of these young women. They
treated them as objects, not as free subjects.
It's a profound contradiction. And looking at
her political activism later in life, there's
another controversy that jumps out, and it's
a really shocking one. The 1977 petition. This
is a very difficult context to understand today,
but it's crucial. In 1977, the intellectual climate
in post -1968 France was extremely libertarian,
especially around issues of sexuality. And Beauvoir,
along with Sarch, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
and many other leading intellectuals signed a
public petition. What was the petition for? It
was supporting the release of three men who had
been arrested for having sex with minors, some
as young as 12 and 13. 12 and 13. That is just
shocking to hear. It is. It was known as the
Affair de Versailles. The petition argued against
the age of consent laws. The argument, which
seems completely alien to us now, was framed
as a matter of sexual liberation. It argued that
children had a right to their own desire and
consent and that the state shouldn't police sexuality.
It's hard to even process that logic. Looking
back, it is profoundly disturbing to see these
intellectual giants defending what we would unequivocally
call pedophilia today. It's a stark reminder
that even the most progressive icons can have
moral blind spots that are horrifying in retrospect.
Absolutely. You can't just gloss over that. It
shows how the dogma of liberation, if it's not
grounded in ethics of care and the protection
of the vulnerable, can be taken to a very dangerous
extreme. Let's pivot to her later years, where
her activism took a more recognizable feminist
shape. Because, interestingly, she didn't always
call herself a feminist, did she? No, not at
all. Initially, she was a socialist, first and
foremost. Like many intellectuals of her generation,
she believed that the class struggle was the
primary struggle. The theory was that if you
solved capitalism and had a socialist revolution,
the woman question would just sort of resolve
itself automatically. She changed her mind on
that. she did by the 1970s she looked around
and realized that wasn't happening she saw that
sexism was just as rampant in leftist circles
the male socialists were just as patriarchal
as the capitalists so in 1972 she publicly and
formally declared herself a feminist She joined
the women's liberation movement. And she put
her name and her body on the line with the manifesto
of the 343. This was a huge deal. It was in 1971.
Abortion was completely illegal in France and
very dangerous. So 343 prominent women signed
a public manifesto, which Beauvoir wrote, admitting
that they had had illegal abortions. So they
were admitting to a crime. A serious crime. They
were risking prosecution. Beauvoir signed it.
Her sister Helene signed it. Famous actresses
like Catherine Deneuve signed it. It was a massive
act of civil disobedience designed to show how
widespread the practice was and to demand reproductive
rights. It was nicknamed the Manifesto of the
343 Sluts. And it worked eventually. It was a
major catalyst. It paved the way for the Vail
Law in 1975, which legalized abortion in France.
It was a huge, concrete political victory. But
even in her feminist phase, she still had some
pretty controversial or at least very rigid views
on women's roles. I was reading about an interview
she did with Betty Friedan, the American feminist,
and she was totally against the idea of paying
women for housework. She was, vehemently. Friedan
and others in the Wages for Housework movement
suggested that maybe women should be compensated
for the labor they do in the home. Beauvoir was
completely opposed. She believed that if you
paid women for housework, it would just institutionalize
their oppression. It would trap them in the home
forever. It would make being a housewife a formal
profession. Exactly. And she took it a step further.
She said, and this is a direct quote from that
interview, no woman should be authorized to stay
at home to raise her children. Authorized? That
sounds incredibly authoritarian. It does to our
ears. Her reasoning was that as long as the choice
to stay home exists, social and family pressure
will always push women into taking it. She wanted
to essentially force women into the public sphere,
into the workforce, because she saw that as the
only possible path to transcendence and equality.
So it's a very rigid, almost unforgiving form
of liberation. You must be free in this specific
way, even if you don't want to be. That's a very
Beauvoir way of putting it. She demanded a lot
from women because she believed they were capable
of a lot, and she saw domesticity as an existential
trap. As she got older, she also made some interesting
and unconventional moves regarding her own family,
or lack thereof. She adopted a daughter late
in life. Yes, Sylvie Le Bon. But this wasn't
a traditional adoption of a child. Sylvie was
a philosophy student and a close friend of hers
for years, and she was in her late 30s when Beauvoir
legally adopted her in 1980. So why adopt a grown
woman? There were two main reasons. Part of it
was practical. She needed a literary executor.
She wanted someone she trusted absolutely to
manage her literary estate, to handle her copyrights
and legacy, especially after seeing the conflicts
that arose over Sartre's estate after he died.
And the other reason. The other reason was philosophical.
Scholars see it as another act of resistance
against the traditional family. She was resisting
the bio -heteronormative family unit. Just as
she had created her own relationship structure
with Sartre, she was creating her own family
structure. She chose her daughter. It was an
act of will. Speaking of Sartre, his decline
in his final years was brutal, and she wrote
about it very unflinchingly. In a dew. A Farewell
to Sartre, published in 1981, a year after his
death, is a painful, raw, almost clinical account
of his last decade. He went blind, he lost control
of his bodily functions, his mind started to
slip, and she chronicled it all. And that caused
controversy too, right? A huge controversy. Many
in their circle felt it was a betrayal, that
she was exposing him at his most vulnerable.
But for her, it was the ultimate act of transparency,
the final fulfillment of their pact to tell each
other, and the world, everything. But again,
conflict followed. She edited Sartre's letters
after his death, omitting things, using pseudonyms
to protect people, which led to accusations of
censorship. It seems like conflict just followed
her everywhere she went. It did. But she kept
working until the very end. She wrote a powerful
book about aging called The Coming of Age, which
is a brutal look at how society discards the
elderly, and a heartbreaking book about her mother's
death from cancer called A Very Easy Death. She
never stopped analyzing the human condition.
And she died in 1986. Of pneumonia at the age
of 78. She is buried next to Sartre at Montparnasse
Cemetery in Paris in a single grave. So we've
covered the bourgeois rebel, the existential
lover, the feminist pioneer, and the alleged
predator. It is a lot to hold in one's head about
one person. It is. And I think that complicated
legacy is best summed up by a famous anecdote,
something that happened when she was speaking
at Harvard. Oh, I know this one. It's so telling.
A male scholar who was on stage with her became
exasperated and chastised the audience. He said,
every question you've asked about Sartre concerned
his work, his philosophy. But all the questions
you've asked about Beauvoir have concerned her
personal life. That is the tragedy right there,
isn't it? Even at Harvard, even at the height
of her fame, she was still the woman, the personality,
the partner, while he was the philosopher. But
look at where we are now. Her influence is undeniable
and, in many ways, has outlasted Sartre's in
popular culture. Kate Millett, Germaine Greer,
Betty Friedan, the titans of second wave feminism
all cited the second sex as their starting point.
And today, a thinker like Judith Butler takes
Beauvoir's idea of becoming a woman and expands
it into the modern theory of gender performativity.
So you can't tell the story of the 20th century
without her. Her work is the bedrock for so much
of what came after. It is. And in 2019, Time
magazine, as part of a project to correct its
history, retroactively awarded her Woman of the
Year for 1949, the year The Second Sex was published.
A little late to the party, but deserved. Better
late than never. So as we wrap up this deep dive,
I'm left thinking about that quote on faith we
talked about at the beginning. She said, faith
allows an evasion of those difficulties which
the atheist confronts honestly. She wanted to
confront the void, to live without excuses. Which
I think raises a really provocative final thought
for you, our listener, to take away. Beauvoir
wanted to live without bad faith. She wanted
to be totally responsible for her actions in
a godless universe. So when we look at her whole
life, the incredible triumphs of freedom she
achieved for herself and for millions of women,
but also the real damage she caused to people
like Bianca Lamblin and her pursuit of that freedom,
does her life serve as the ultimate test of her
own existentialist ethics? Did she pass her own
test? That is for you to decide. But one thing
is for sure. She certainly didn't evade the difficulty
of living. Thank you for listening to The Deep
Dive. We'll see you next time. Welcome to The
Debate. Today we're opening what is, well, it's
arguably the Bible of modern feminism. We are
traveling back to the smoke -filled cafes of
Paris, 1949, to discuss a book that didn't just
describe women's lives, it completely re -engineered
how the Western world understands the concept
of woman. We're discussing Simone de Beauvoir
and her magnum opus, The Second Sex. It's a massive
text, over 800 pages of history, biology, and
existentialist philosophy. And while its impact
is undeniable, I don't think either of us would
dispute that it shifted the tectonic plates of
culture, we're here to question the cost of that
shift. The central question we need to wrestle
with is this. Does Beauvoir's framework of absolute
freedom actually liberate women? Or does it impose
a cold, almost masculine standard of success
that devalues the lived experiences of mothers,
caregivers, and, well, anyone who doesn't want
to live their life as a public intellectual?
I represent the position that the second sex
is the indispensable toolkit for liberation.
Beauvoir provided the first. rigorous philosophical
argument for separating biological sex from social
gender. She gave women the intellectual weaponry
to stop being the other and become free subjects
capable of choosing their own destiny. And I
take the position that while her diagnosis of
the problem was sharp and necessary, her cure
was elitist and ethically dangerous. I'll argue
that Beauvoir's definition of transcendence,
her ideal of freedom, explicitly demonizes domestic
life and motherhood. And furthermore, I believe
her philosophy of existence precedes essence,
when applied to real human beings, led to a form
of narcissism that justified the exploitation
of vulnerable people in her own life. Okay, so
let's ground this discussion in the woman herself
before we get into the density of the philosophy.
Simone de Beauvoir wasn't merely Sartre's girlfriend,
as the 1940s press just loved to paint her. She
was an intellectual phenomenon. She passed the
aggregation in philosophy at age 21, the youngest
person ever to do so. For our listeners who aren't
familiar with the French system, this isn't just
a final exam. It is a grueling, highly competitive
ranking of the best minds in the country. Though,
to be fair to the history, she did come in second.
John Paul Sartre came in first. Right, but only
because Sartre had failed it the year prior and
was retaking it. The jury actually debated awarding
it to her because she was younger, passed on
her first attempt, but, you know, ultimately
they gave it to the senior student. The point
is, she possessed a rigorous systematic mind.
The second sex is not a memoir or a complaint.
It is a dismantling of a millennial old myth.
Her core thesis is that throughout history, humanity
has been defined as male. Man is the absolute.
Man is the subject. Woman is defined only in
relation to him. She is the other. Right. I don't
dispute the historical accuracy of that observation.
When she cites Aristotle saying women are female
by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, or
Thomas Aquinas calling women imperfect men, the
evidence is just damning. That historical survey
she does is brilliant. It is foundational. Beauvoir
argued that this othering isn't natural. It's
a story men tell to maintain power. By identifying
femininity as a historical and social construction,
she breaks the spell. She tells women, your inferiority
isn't written in your DNA. It's written in your
laws, in your culture. And because it was made
by humans, it can be unmade by humans. I grant
you the power of the diagnosis. But we have to
look at the philosophical engine driving this
car. Beauvoir is an existentialist. We need to
be clear about what that means because existentialism
is a word people throw around at parties without
really defining it. She operates on the maxim
that existence precedes essence. A concept that
is often quoted but rarely understood in its
full weight. So let's define it then. It means
we are born as a blank slate. That's existence.
We have no predefined purpose, no human nature.
no God -given soul that tells us who to be. We
create our essence solely through our actions
and our choices. Precisely. We are what we do.
We are the sum of our actions. But here is the
tension, and it's a big one. Beauvoir argues
that existence precedes essence, meaning we are
radically free to define ourselves. Yet the second
sex spends hundreds of pages arguing that women
are almost entirely constructed by society, biology,
and men. If we are radically free, how can we
be the victims of such total social conditioning?
It feels like she's trying to have it both ways.
Women are victims of a trap, but they are also
somehow responsible for not breaking out of it.
I think you're conflating freedom with power.
Beauvoir argues that women possess the ontological
freedom, the potential to define themselves,
but they are in a situation where that freedom
is blocked. The tragedy of the other is that
she is a free subject who is forced to live as
an object. She isn't saying the trap isn't real.
She's saying the trap isn't natural. Hmm. I think
it goes deeper than just being blocked. I think
Beauvoir views the specific reality of being
female, the biological reality, not just as a
situation, but as a curse. She seems to view
the female body as a trap that drags women back
into the muck of nature, preventing them from
achieving the kind of abstract intellectual freedom
she valued so much. That is a harsh reading.
She's analyzing how the body is used against
women, not attacking the body itself. Is it?
Let's look at the text. She describes the female
body with words that, I mean, they evoke horror.
She talks about the tyranny of reproduction.
She calls the fetus a parasite that feeds on
the woman's resources. She describes the pregnant
body as life -passive and uncontrolled. This
isn't just analysis. This is revulsion. But it's
revulsion at the loss of autonomy. You have to
remember, she's writing in 1949. No pill. No
legal abortion. Pregnancy often was a tyranny
for women who had no choice in the matter. Fair
point on the context. But it feels like she is
trying to solve the problem of women's oppression
by suggesting women should become more like men.
You know, detached, autonomous, project -oriented.
She doesn't seem to want to validate a female
experience. She wants to transcend it. She wants
women to escape their bodies to become minds.
Because historically, validating that experience
was the trap. Oh, you're so good at nurturing,
you stay in the kitchen while I go run the government.
Both Warr saw that glorifying the mystery of
motherhood was just a consolation prize given
to women to keep them docile. And this leads
us directly to the most famous concept in the
book, the one that launched a thousand gender
studies departments. One is not born, but becomes
a woman. It is the bedrock of the entire modern
debate. And for good reason. Before Beauvoir,
woman was seen as a static, biological destiny.
Anatomy was destiny. If you had a womb, your
purpose was to be a mother. Beauvoir shattered
that. She distinguished between female, the biological
fact, and woman, the social construct of femininity,
the makeup, the passivity, the domestic role.
This distinction, sex versus gender, is something
we take for granted in 2026. But in 1949, it
was absolute heresy. It was revolutionary. It
implies that femininity is a learned performance.
This anticipates thinkers like Judith Butler
by 40 years. Butler, who cites Beauvoir extensively,
argues that gender is a stylized repetition of
acts. It's something we do, not something we
are, Beauvoir is saying. You don't have to accept
the script society handed you just because of
your biology. That is the essence of liberation.
I understand the utility of that argument for
liberation. It's a powerful tool. But there's
a risk in taking it too far. If woman is entirely
a social construct, something we just become,
where is the ground to stand on? It seems to
erase the material reality of the female experience.
And this brings me to my major critique, her
ethical system, the battle between transcendence
and eminence. These are the key terms. We need
to unpack them carefully because she uses them
in a very specific existentialist way. Please,
go ahead. Transcendence is the gold standard
for an existentialist. It's the act of reaching
out into the future. It is action, creativity,
building, engineering, writing. It is changing
the world. It is the project. It is doing something
that hasn't been done before. And imminence?
Imminence is stagnation. It is repetition. It
is circular. Washing dishes that will just get
dirty again. Cooking meals that will just be
eaten. Cleaning a house that will get dusty tomorrow.
It is maintaining life rather than creating something
new. Beauvoir argues that men have claimed transcendence
for themselves, war, politics, art, and relegated
women to imminence. And this is where I get off
the train. She creates a hierarchy where career
is good and care is bad. She looks at the work
of raising a child or maintaining a home, work
that is essential for the survival of the species,
work that is foundational to civilization, and
she dismisses it as mere repetition. She calls
it torture and a waste. She calls it a waste
because it produces nothing lasting for the individual
woman. The woman puts her energy in, and at the
end of the day she has nothing to show for it
but a clean floor that will be dirty again. But
that is a profoundly capitalistic, almost masculine
way of looking at value. If you aren't building
a skyscraper or writing a novel, you aren't doing
anything. That is elitist. It invalidates the
lived reality of millions of women who find profound
meaning in the imminent sphere of care and connection.
It's an intellectual from the left bank telling
a mother in the suburbs that her life is meaningless.
But do they find meaning or are they told to
find meaning? That's Beauvoir's point. She warns
us about using happiness as a metric. She writes
that we shouldn't ask if women are happy in their
chains. We should ask if they are free. The happiness
of the housewife is often just a coping mechanism
for a lack of freedom. But she doesn't just ask
the question. She wants to dictate the answer.
We have to talk about her 1975 interview with
Betty Friedan. This is years after the book,
so these are her mature, solidified views. This
isn't just theory anymore. This is prescription.
I know the one you're referring to. It is. Uncompromising.
Friedan asked her a simple question. Should we
pay women for housework? Should there be a wage
for raising children? It was a popular feminist
idea at the time to give economic value to domestic
labor. And Beauvoir said no. She said no because
she believed it would trap women in the home
forever. If you pay them to stay, they will never
leave. She went much further than that. She said,
and I'm quoting, no woman should be authorized
to stay at home to raise her children. Authorized?
It's a strong word, I admit. It's a tyrannical
word. She continued, women should not have that
choice, precisely because if there is such a
choice, too many women will make that one. That
is not liberation, my friend. That is authoritarianism.
She is saying you are too stupid or too conditioned
to know what is good for you. So I, the philosopher,
will remove the option. She wanted to outlaw
the choice of motherhood as a primary vocation.
You're reading it as authoritarianism. I read
it as structural intervention. Beauvoir understood
that choice does not exist in a vacuum. As long
as the path of least resistance, the path of
imminence, is available and glorified by society,
women will be pressured into it. If you want
equality, true equality, you have to burn the
bridge behind you. You have to force women into
the economy because economic independence is
the sine qua non of freedom. You cannot be a
free subject if you are dependent on a man for
your food. So to save women, she has to destroy
the things many women love? It implies that the
only way to be a successful woman is to act like
a successful man. It replaces the patriarchy
with a matriarchy of the intelligentsia. It's
saying your freedom only counts if it looks like
my freedom. It's not about acting like a man.
It's about participating in the human enterprise.
And Beauvoir lived this. She didn't just write
about it. She refused to be a mother. She refused
to be a wife, which I think brings us to the
third dimension of our debate, her lived philosophy.
She and Sartre were the ultimate power couple,
but they rejected the bourgeois rules of ownership.
They certainly rejected the rules, but looking
back, I'm not sure they replaced them with something
better. They had a soul partnership. They never
married, they never lived together, they had
other lovers, often many of them, but they maintained
total transparency with one another. It was a
radical experiment in honesty and freedom. They
wanted to prove that you could love someone without
possessing them. Experiment is the right word.
And like many experiments, there was collateral
damage. significant damage. They were attempting
to break the mold of the dutiful wife and the
cheating husband. But if we look at the historical
record, specifically the memoirs of the women
who were pulled into their orbit, Bianca Lamblin,
Natalie Sorokini, the picture isn't one of noble
transparency. It looks like predation. You are
referring to the trio relationships. I am referring
to the fact that Beauvoir as a teacher in her
30s would cultivate intense sexual and romantic
relationships with her teenage female students.
She would then groom them, to use the modern
terminology, and pass them over to Sartre. These
were complex relationships in a time of very
different sexual mores. Let's not relativize
this away. Bianca Lamblin, who was originally
known as Bianca Beanfeld, she wrote that she
felt she was a sexual toy for the couple. She
said their letters, which were published after
their deaths, revealed they laughed about her.
used her, and then just discarded her. Beauvoir's
philosophy was, existence precedes essence. I
am free to do what I want. But she seemed to
forget the other half of the equation, responsibility.
I admit, the letters were a shock to the scholarly
community. They revealed a coldness, a callousness
toward these third parties that is hard to reconcile
with her public stance on justice. It's not just
hard to reconcile. It's a direct violation of
her own ethics. She wrote in The Ethics of Ambiguity
that no project can be defined except by its
interference with other projects. Basically,
my freedom ends where yours begins. Yet she treated
these young women not as projects or subjects,
but as objects. They were props in her and Sartre's
grand narrative of freedom. I won't defend the
abuse of power dynamics. It was exploitative.
Her teaching license was actually revoked in
1943 because of a complaint from Natalie Sorkini's
parents. It was a serious feeling. However, I
have to ask, does the personal failing of the
architect cause the building to collapse? Does
the fact that Beauvoir was manipulative in her
love life negate the structural analysis of the
second sex? It makes us question the philosophy
itself. If absolute freedom leads to treating
other people like disposable tissues, maybe absolute
freedom is a bad goal. And it wasn't just her
sex life. In 1977, Beauvoir, along with Sartre
and Foucault, the giants of French intellect,
signed a petition to decriminalize sex with children.
The petition regarding the age of consent, yes.
That is a difficult document to look at today.
They argued that a 12 or 13 -year -old child
could consent and that laws protecting them were
oppressive. This is the logical endpoint of a
philosophy that idolizes liberty above all else.
When you strip away all social norms because
you view them as constructs, You lose the protective
barriers that keep vulnerable people safe. She
was so obsessed with freedom that she couldn't
see the power imbalance. That petition was a
catastrophic error in judgment, shared by an
entire generation of French libertarians who
confused liberation with license. It is a stain
on her record, and it shows the danger of abstracting
everything. But I would argue we must separate
the tool from the user. Beauvoir gave us the
tool to analyze oppression. We can use that tool
to analyze her oppression of others. That is
a convenient way to salvage the legacy. She gave
us the weapon we use against her. It is a necessary
way. Look, without Beauvoir, we don't have second
-wave feminism. Betty Friedan, Kate Millett,
Shalameth Firestone, they all stood on her shoulders.
Even if we reject her specific prescriptions
on motherhood or her personal behavior, her core
insight that women are made not born, is the
oxygen that modern sociology breathes. If we
throw that out, we are back to biological essentialism.
We are back to women are naturally submissive.
I agree that the second sex is historically vital.
You cannot tell the story of the 20th century
without it. But I maintain it is a cautionary
tale. It shows what happens when you prioritize
abstract concepts over human beings. She offered
a brilliant diagnosis. Women were second -class
citizens. But her cure was to demand women become
super beings, stripped of their biological ties,
stripped of the imminence of home, operating
in a cold, competitive world of projects. And
I would argue that what you call coldness was
a necessary hardness. To break a chain that had
held for 5 ,000 years, she couldn't be soft.
She had to be absolute. She had to demand that
women step into the frightening light of responsibility.
She knew it would be hard. She knew it would
be alienating. but she believed it was the only
way to be fully human. Perhaps. But in doing
so, she created a new set of expectations that
weigh heavily on women today. The pressure to
have it all, to be the intellectual, the worker,
the creator. And the shame women feel when they
just want to be mothers, or when they find joy
in the imminent. That shame is Beauvoir's ghost
haunting us. And yet, because of her, that shame
is a choice, not a destiny. The door is open.
Whether you walk through it and what you carry
with you, a briefcase, a diaper bag, or both,
is now up to you. A complex freedom, indeed.
And one that we are still figuring out how to
inhabit safely. That is the challenge she left
us. To take the freedom she fought for and perhaps
build a more ethical world with it than she managed
to do herself. I can agree with that. Thank you
for listening to The Debate.