Usually when we talk about a historical legacy,
there's this expectation of precision, like engineering.
Right, like it's a math problem. Exactly. You
break your arm, the x -ray shows that jagged
white line, and the doctor just points and says,
there it is. Hero or villain, it's clean, it's
binary, and honestly, it's comforting. We like
things to be visible and easily categorized.
We really do. But then you step into the world
of Simone de Beauvoir and suddenly that x -ray
machine is just totally broken. We're looking
at a biographical landscape that is frustratingly
murky. Yeah, murky is putting it mildly. I mean,
imagine writing a book that fundamentally changes
how the world views gender, yet living a personal
life so controversial it involved, well, everything
from a two -year lease on a relationship to having
your teaching license revoked to legally adopting
your adult lover. That's a lot to unpack. It
is. So today we are taking a deep dive into the
life, the philosophy, and the intense controversies
of Simone de Beauvoir. Using excerpts from her
extensive Wikipedia biography, our mission is
to help you, the listener, look past the idealized
simplified image of a feminist icon. because
the reality is so much more complicated. Exactly.
We want to understand the profoundly complex,
brilliant, and deeply flawed human being whose
ideas revolutionized modern gender theory. And
we want to see how her radical philosophies on
freedom were mirrored and sometimes horrifically
compromised by her real world choices. To understand
how Beauvoir developed theories that completely
blew up societal norms, I mean, we really have
to start by looking at the incredibly rigid box
she was born into. early 1900s Paris box. Right.
The year is 1908 in the 6th arrondissement of
Paris. She is born into a bourgeois family and
her childhood home was essentially a philosophical
battleground. She experienced a massive intellectual
clash right at the dinner table. Yeah. The sources
talk about her parents being total opposites.
Completely. On one side you have her mother,
Francoise. She was a wealthy banker's daughter
and a very devout, rigid Catholic. And then on
the other side is her father, Georges, a lawyer
who championed individualism and what Beauvoir
called pagan ethical standards. Talk about cognitive
dissonance for a kid. I mean her father used
to boast to people and the sources quote him
directly on this. He'd say, Simone has a man's
brain. She thinks like a man. She is a man. Which
is just, wow. Right, it's like being handed the
blueprint to a fortress by the very architect
you're planning to overthrow. It's this insult
wrapped in a compliment that accidentally gave
her the intellectual armor to, you know, eventually
tear down the exact same patriarchy her father
represented. And Beauvoir herself recognized
that friction. In her book, Memoirs of a Dutiful
Daughter, she actually called this clash between
her mother's rigid morals and her father's pagan
standards a disequilibrium. Desequilibrium, I
like that. Yeah, it made her early life a kind
of endless disputation. But this very instability
laid the foundation for her entire existentialist
worldview. Because she learned early on that
absolute authority was basically an illusion.
And she didn't just question authority, she entirely
upended her own worldview. I mean, she originally
intended to be a nun. She was very devout as
a child. Deeply, profoundly religious. But by
age 14, she begins questioning her faith and
just abandons it completely, becoming a lifelong
atheist. And she didn't just quietly step away
from religion either. She actively critiqued
the mechanism of faith itself. She argued that
faith allows believers to evade the difficult,
inherently ambiguous realities of life. She called
it a cowardice, right? Yes, a cowardice that
gives believers a false sense of superiority
over atheists who, in her view, actually face
those difficulties honestly. She was transitioning
from seeking absolute truth in God to seeking
it in human intellect and freedom. And her intellect
was terrifyingly impressive. At 17, she passes
her baccalaureate exams in math and philosophy.
She studies mathematics, literature. She writes
a master's equivalent thesis on liveness. She
was brilliant. But where she really makes history
is the aggregation in philosophy. For those who
don't know, this is a grueling, highly competitive
post -graduate exam in France that serves as
a national ranking. And in 1929, at just 21 years
old, she passes it. She is the youngest person
ever to do so and only the eighth woman in history.
Which is incredible. And she's second. The only
person who beat her, and apparently the jury
was very narrowly split on this, was Jean -Paul
Sartre. She is literally surrounded by the greatest
minds of the century and completely holding her
own. Which brings us to the actual so what of
this exam for her life. Because she secured a
civil servant's salary as a teacher, she achieved
the one thing most women of her era just couldn't
afford. Financial leverage. Exactly. The leverage
to actually live out her radical philosophies
without ending up destitute. She didn't have
to rely on a husband to survive. And having that
financial independence meant she could apply
her rejection of tradition directly to her personal
life. She viewed marriage as a profoundly dangerous
institution. She really hated the idea of marriage.
She described it as alienating, stating that
it solders one person to another. He said it
obliges people to sleep together who no longer
want to. She saw it as a trap for men who are
saddled with supporting a family and dangerous
for women who end up financially dependent. So
enter Jean -Paul Sartre. They met while studying
at the Ecole Normale, and in October 1929, they
began a relationship that would last for 51 years.
But because of her views on marriage, Sartre
proposed something entirely different. Right,
the famous bench conversation. Yeah, they were
sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, and he
said, let's sign a two -year lease. A lease!
Wait, a lease? Like you'd rent a Parisian apartment?
That sounds incredibly transactional and almost
like... clinical for a romance. It was a deliberate
subversion of romance. That lease was essentially
the framework for a lifelong soul partnership.
It was sexual but not exclusive and they never
even lived together. Wow. She chose never to
marry and never had children. This gave her the
time to advance her education, engage in political
causes, write, teach, and, you know, take other
lovers. And here is where the historical record
from her biographies details a deeply, deeply
controversial chapter. Because this radical freedom
they practiced, this rejection of all traditional
boundaries, It came with severe, often damaging
consequences for others. It really did. We have
to talk about the abuse allegations. Looking
strictly at the historical documentation provided
in our sources, a very grim picture emerges.
Beauvoir, who was bisexual, used her position
as a teacher to groom teenage female students,
drawing them into exploitative sexual triangles
with herself and Sartre. Yeah, there's the case
of Bianca Lamlin, originally Bianca Bienenfeld.
She was a student of Beauvoir's at the Lice Moli.
Beauvoir was in her 30s at the time. Bianca was
16. Just a high school student. Right. And the
sources state that Beauvoir groomed the teenager,
then introduced her to Sartre, who was 33. The
three had a sexually exploitative relationship
over the course of three years. Later in life,
Bianca actually wrote a book called A Disgraceful
Affair. She wrote that after Sartre's letters
were published posthumously. Right. Yes, she
discovered she had been mocked in their correspondence
under the pseudonym Louise Vidrine. Bianca stated
she felt nauseated and disgusted when she realized
the true personality of the woman she had loved
all her life. And it wasn't just her. In 1939,
Beauvoir was also accused of seducing a 17 -year
-old pupil named Natalie Sorokin. And Natalie's
parents actually got the law involved. They did.
They laid formal charges against Beauvoir for
debauching a minor. Contextually, the age of
consent in France at that time was 13, but the
parents still pressed charges. And as a result,
Beauvoir's license to teach in France was temporarily
revoked in 1943. It's a heavy legacy. It is.
And both Sorokin and Lamblin, along with another
woman named Olga Kosakovich, stated later in
life that their relationships with Beauvoir had
damaged them psychologically. And I just, I have
to interject and push back on the philosophy
here. I am struggling to reconcile this behavior.
with her own writing. I mean Beauvoir wrote a
philosophical essay in 1947 called the Ethics
of Ambiguity. She literally argued, and this
is a quote, to act alone or without concern for
others is not to be free. That is what she wrote,
yes. She explains that no project can be defined
except by its interference with other projects.
So how on earth does a philosopher who explicitly
argues that the freedom of the self requires
the freedom of others justify the psychological
damage and exploitation of a 16 -year -old student?
It is a glaring contradiction, and it's one that
requires us to look at how they apply their philosophy
and practice. Beauvoir and Sartre's pursuit of
absolute personal freedom created massive ethical
blind spots for them. Blind spots is a polite
way to put it. Well, they essentially treated
their own lives as an ongoing avant -garde philosophical
experiment. They wanted to tear down every bourgeois
rule. But in doing so, they abstracted human
lives into philosophical concepts. Ah, so they
stopped seeing them as real people. Exactly.
This abstraction allowed them to ignore the very
real, very damaging power dynamics between a
teacher in her 30s and her teenage students.
The philosophies sounded egalitarian on paper,
but in practice, they reduced vulnerable young
women to mere collateral damage in their quest
for intellectual rebellion. It's a stark reminder
that brilliant minds are not immune to profound
moral failings. of this messy, fiercely independent
and highly scrutinized life came her defining
intellectual achievement. Yes, the big one. In
1949, she publishes The Second Sex. This work
synthesizes her lived experience and her existential
philosophy in a way that literally changes history.
It takes the existentialist mantra that existence
precedes essence and applies it directly to the
concept of womanhood. We should probably unpack
what existence precedes essence actually means
for the listeners because it's the engine driving
her entire theory. Oh, definitely. Break it down.
Think of a manufactured object like a pair of
scissors. Its essence, its design, its purpose
to cut paper existed in someone's mind before
it was physically created. The essence comes
first. Makes sense. But for humans, existentialists
argue the exact opposite. We exist first. We
are born into the world as blank slates without
a predetermined purpose or nature. And we have
to define our own essence through our choices
and actions. Which gives us what might be the
most famous feminist sentence ever written. One
is not born but becomes a woman. She is taking
that scissors analogy and saying society treats
women like they have a predetermined essence
that they are naturally submissive or maternal
or overly emotional. But Beauvoir says no, you
merely exist first. Everything else, all those
feminine traits are thrust upon you by society.
She first articulated what we now call the sex
-gender distinction. She separated biological
sex from the social and historical construction
of gender. Decades before that became mainstream.
Right. She argued that the fundamental source
of women's oppression is that society historically
constructs femininity specifically to make women
the quintessential other. And she traces this
all the way back to the ancients. She points
out that Aristotle argued women are female by
virtue of a certain lack of quality. Lack of
qualities. Well, and Thomas Aquinas referred
to women as imperfect men and incidental beings.
It's like... It's like how we treat the default
settings on a smartphone. Men established themselves
as the factory default, the standard human. And
women were categorized as the custom complicated
software deviation that requires a whole different
user manual. That's a great way to put it. By
labeling women as mysterious or other, the default
group doesn't have to put in the work to understand
them as equals. Like, oh, women are just so mysterious
who can understand their problems. It's a convenient
smoke screen to maintain a patriarchy. And Beauvoir
identified that exact mechanism. She recognized
that this stereotyping is always done by the
group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower
down. And she used two crucial philosophical
terms to explain how this affects women. Imminence
and transcendence. Let's break those down for
the listener because they are heavy concepts.
Imminence is a state of stagnation. It's an inward
-focused existence where you are acted upon by
the world, constrained by your circumstances,
and denied the ability to creatively shape your
own destiny. So being stuck. Exactly. Historically,
society forced women into imminence, confining
them to the domestic sphere, focusing solely
on their biology and reproductive capabilities.
Transcendence, on the other hand, is the active
outward reach of human consciousness. Going beyond
yourself. Right. It's taking agency, imposing
your will on the world, creating and taking responsibility
for your own freedom. Beauvoir argued that men
laid claim to transcendence while systematically
forcing women into imminence. The profound so
what for you, the listener, is this. Every time
you hear a modern debate about gender roles,
about a gender performativity or systemic inequality,
you are hearing the direct echoes of the second
sex. By shifting the burden of inequality from
biology to society, she showed that if gender
is constructed, it can be dismantled. But, you
know, this groundbreaking book almost didn't
reach the English -speaking world intact. Oh,
the translation disaster. Yes. There is a deeply
frustrating translation tragedy attached to the
second sex. The first American translation was
prompted by Blanche Knopf, the wife of publisher
Alfred A. Knopf, and they gave the job to a man
named Howard Parshley. Let me just emphasize
this for a second. Howard Parsley was a zoology
professor at Smith College. He had only a basic
familiarity with the French language and a minimal
understanding of philosophy. Zoologists. Translating
complex existential phenomenology. Yeah, the
results were disastrous. Parsley just didn't
understand the philosophical framework, so he
translated existential terms into biological
or medical ones. He completely missed the nuances
of Hegelian and Sartrean concepts. He turned
a philosophy text into a biology textbook. He
turned a text about the social construction of
gender into a book that sounded like a biological
treatise, which is the exact opposite of her
point. Furthermore, he actually removed a third
of the original work. A third. He cut out the
names of 78 women in history, seemingly because
he found the historical accounts of women's lives
boring or irrelevant. He fundamentally distorted
the mechanism of her argument. And for years,
the publisher prevented a more accurate retranslation,
declining all proposals. It wasn't until 2009,
60 years after the original publication, that
a second translation was finally commissioned.
And Constance Bord and Sheila Milovny Chevalier
produced the first interal translation in 2010.
So having written the definitive text on how
society artificially constructs a woman's place,
Beauvoir was now under immense pressure to prove
that a woman could live entirely outside those
constructs. Practice what you preach. Exactly.
And she did that by deeply engaging with the
world. She travels, she has international romances,
and she takes deeply polarizing political stances.
Yeah. In 1947, she took a four -month exploration
trip of the United States. traveling by car,
train, and Greyhound bus, which resulted in her
book, America Day by Day. And it was in Chicago
that she met the American author, Nelson Algren.
Which became a massive romance. Huge. She wrote
him letters across the Atlantic, calling him
her beloved husband. She then wrote a novel called
The Mandarin's, which won France's highest literary
prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1954. The book featured
a character named Louis Brogan, who was very...
clearly based on Algren. And Algren was outraged
by that. He vehemently objected to their intimacy
becoming public and the frank way she described
their sexual experiences in her writing. He felt
exposed. He felt betrayed by how she transformed
their private life into public intellectual property.
Yet, despite their eventual bitter separation,
when Beauvoir died decades later, she was buried
wearing a silver ring that he had given her.
It just highlights how she constantly defied
expectations. And that defiance continued right
to the end of her life. In 1980, when she was
72 years old, Beauvoir legally adopted her adult
lover, Sylvie Le Bon, who was in her late 30s
at the time. Which is pretty wild. Right, they'd
already been in an intimate relationship for
decades. But this was a fascinating subversion
of the legal system. Since Beauvoir rejected
the institution of marriage her entire life,
this adoption functioned essentially as a marriage
for her. It secured her literary estate, right,
making Sylvie her heir. Exactly. It was a legal
loophole used to validate a relationship that
society had no conventional framework for. Her
late in life actions also included intense political
activism. She was weaponizing her platform in
ways that showcase both the triumph and the absolute
peril of her philosophy. On one hand, she was
a crucial signatory of the 1971 manifesto of
the 343. That was a huge moment in France. It
was a manifesto signed by famous women declaring
they had had an abortion, which was illegal in
France. at the time. This act of public defiance
directly paved the way for the legalization of
abortion in France in 1974. It was a monumental
moment for the women's liberation movement. But
her activism also took turns that are frankly
difficult to comprehend today. Yeah the sources
get pretty dark here again. In 1977 she signed
a petition along with other French intellectuals
supporting the freeing of three arrested men
in what was known as the Affair de Versailles.
Just impartially reporting what the sources say
here, these were adult men aged 45, 43, and 39
who had sexual relations with minors aged 12
and 13. And she signed a petition supporting
them. And her views on motherhood were equally
rigid in her later years. In a 1975 interview
with Betty Frieden, when asked if she supported
a minimum wage for women doing housework, Beauvoir
said no. Wait, she didn't support paying women
for housework. No, she said no woman should be
authorized to stay at home and raise her children.
She argued that women should not have that choice,
precisely because if there is such a choice,
too many women will make that one. It's an incredibly
authoritarian stance from someone whose entire
philosophy is based on personal freedom. It reveals
the core logic of her later years. She believed
intellectuals must take sides. In the very first
issue of their journal, Les Temps Modernes, Sartre
wrote that their intention was to influence society
and that the journal would take sides. And she
really lived by that. Completely. She believed
her philosophy had to be enacted in the real
world to have meaning. Whether fighting for women's
liberation or taking indefensible stances on
age of consent laws, she never shied away from
public scrutiny. For Beauvoir, to be passive
was to fail existentially. Which brings us full
circle to where we started. Simone de Beauvoir
teaches us that being well -informed means holding
multiple conflicting truths at once. She is the
architect of modern feminism. She is a brilliant
philosopher who gave us the vocabulary to understand
gender as a social construct and who fought fiercely
for women to achieve transcendence. And she is
a deeply flawed individual who caused real harm
to vulnerable people in her personal life and
held political stances that shock the conscience.
The historical sources demand that we look at
the whole picture. The emancipatory power of
the second sex is an undeniable historical fact,
but the human cost of her pursuit of absolute
freedom in her private life is equally documented.
We cannot untangle the brilliance of her theory
from the messy reality of her practice. So we
want to leave you with a final thought to mull
over, one that shifts how we view this kind of
legacy today. Consider the modern era with our
current landscape of cancel culture and strict
institutional ethics. If Simone de Beauvoir were
a young philosopher writing and living today,
would her defining philosophical works ever even
get published? It's a great question. Or would
the intense scrutiny of her personal life, her
exploitative relationships, and her controversial
petitions see her entirely erased from the intellectual
record before she ever had the chance to change
the world? When the history is this messy, how
much intellectual progress are we willing to
risk losing in the pursuit of moral purity?