WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.319 Usually when we talk about a historical legacy, 00:00:02.759 --> 00:00:07.700 there's this expectation of precision, like engineering. 00:00:07.879 --> 00:00:09.980 Right, like it's a math problem. Exactly. You 00:00:09.980 --> 00:00:12.179 break your arm, the x -ray shows that jagged 00:00:12.179 --> 00:00:14.660 white line, and the doctor just points and says, 00:00:14.740 --> 00:00:18.100 there it is. Hero or villain, it's clean, it's 00:00:18.100 --> 00:00:21.600 binary, and honestly, it's comforting. We like 00:00:21.600 --> 00:00:23.980 things to be visible and easily categorized. 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:26.510 We really do. But then you step into the world 00:00:26.510 --> 00:00:28.449 of Simone de Beauvoir and suddenly that x -ray 00:00:28.449 --> 00:00:30.550 machine is just totally broken. We're looking 00:00:30.550 --> 00:00:33.270 at a biographical landscape that is frustratingly 00:00:33.270 --> 00:00:36.450 murky. Yeah, murky is putting it mildly. I mean, 00:00:36.450 --> 00:00:38.670 imagine writing a book that fundamentally changes 00:00:38.670 --> 00:00:41.270 how the world views gender, yet living a personal 00:00:41.270 --> 00:00:44.770 life so controversial it involved, well, everything 00:00:44.770 --> 00:00:47.509 from a two -year lease on a relationship to having 00:00:47.509 --> 00:00:50.570 your teaching license revoked to legally adopting 00:00:50.570 --> 00:00:53.570 your adult lover. That's a lot to unpack. It 00:00:53.570 --> 00:00:56.469 is. So today we are taking a deep dive into the 00:00:56.469 --> 00:01:00.030 life, the philosophy, and the intense controversies 00:01:00.030 --> 00:01:02.890 of Simone de Beauvoir. Using excerpts from her 00:01:02.890 --> 00:01:05.430 extensive Wikipedia biography, our mission is 00:01:05.430 --> 00:01:08.349 to help you, the listener, look past the idealized 00:01:08.349 --> 00:01:10.900 simplified image of a feminist icon. because 00:01:10.900 --> 00:01:13.280 the reality is so much more complicated. Exactly. 00:01:13.459 --> 00:01:16.459 We want to understand the profoundly complex, 00:01:16.819 --> 00:01:20.379 brilliant, and deeply flawed human being whose 00:01:20.379 --> 00:01:23.079 ideas revolutionized modern gender theory. And 00:01:23.079 --> 00:01:25.140 we want to see how her radical philosophies on 00:01:25.140 --> 00:01:28.319 freedom were mirrored and sometimes horrifically 00:01:28.319 --> 00:01:31.579 compromised by her real world choices. To understand 00:01:31.579 --> 00:01:34.079 how Beauvoir developed theories that completely 00:01:34.079 --> 00:01:36.680 blew up societal norms, I mean, we really have 00:01:36.680 --> 00:01:38.700 to start by looking at the incredibly rigid box 00:01:38.700 --> 00:01:41.700 she was born into. early 1900s Paris box. Right. 00:01:41.939 --> 00:01:44.620 The year is 1908 in the 6th arrondissement of 00:01:44.620 --> 00:01:47.340 Paris. She is born into a bourgeois family and 00:01:47.340 --> 00:01:50.000 her childhood home was essentially a philosophical 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:52.140 battleground. She experienced a massive intellectual 00:01:52.140 --> 00:01:54.180 clash right at the dinner table. Yeah. The sources 00:01:54.180 --> 00:01:56.319 talk about her parents being total opposites. 00:01:56.439 --> 00:01:59.060 Completely. On one side you have her mother, 00:01:59.239 --> 00:02:01.659 Francoise. She was a wealthy banker's daughter 00:02:01.659 --> 00:02:05.120 and a very devout, rigid Catholic. And then on 00:02:05.120 --> 00:02:08.680 the other side is her father, Georges, a lawyer 00:02:08.680 --> 00:02:11.500 who championed individualism and what Beauvoir 00:02:11.500 --> 00:02:15.039 called pagan ethical standards. Talk about cognitive 00:02:15.039 --> 00:02:17.139 dissonance for a kid. I mean her father used 00:02:17.139 --> 00:02:20.020 to boast to people and the sources quote him 00:02:20.020 --> 00:02:22.699 directly on this. He'd say, Simone has a man's 00:02:22.699 --> 00:02:26.060 brain. She thinks like a man. She is a man. Which 00:02:26.060 --> 00:02:28.479 is just, wow. Right, it's like being handed the 00:02:28.479 --> 00:02:30.599 blueprint to a fortress by the very architect 00:02:30.599 --> 00:02:33.000 you're planning to overthrow. It's this insult 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:35.240 wrapped in a compliment that accidentally gave 00:02:35.240 --> 00:02:37.400 her the intellectual armor to, you know, eventually 00:02:37.400 --> 00:02:39.699 tear down the exact same patriarchy her father 00:02:39.699 --> 00:02:41.860 represented. And Beauvoir herself recognized 00:02:41.860 --> 00:02:44.860 that friction. In her book, Memoirs of a Dutiful 00:02:44.860 --> 00:02:47.080 Daughter, she actually called this clash between 00:02:47.080 --> 00:02:49.419 her mother's rigid morals and her father's pagan 00:02:49.419 --> 00:02:52.680 standards a disequilibrium. Desequilibrium, I 00:02:52.680 --> 00:02:55.389 like that. Yeah, it made her early life a kind 00:02:55.389 --> 00:02:58.930 of endless disputation. But this very instability 00:02:58.930 --> 00:03:02.129 laid the foundation for her entire existentialist 00:03:02.129 --> 00:03:04.990 worldview. Because she learned early on that 00:03:04.990 --> 00:03:07.710 absolute authority was basically an illusion. 00:03:07.990 --> 00:03:10.789 And she didn't just question authority, she entirely 00:03:10.789 --> 00:03:13.030 upended her own worldview. I mean, she originally 00:03:13.030 --> 00:03:15.169 intended to be a nun. She was very devout as 00:03:15.169 --> 00:03:18.110 a child. Deeply, profoundly religious. But by 00:03:18.110 --> 00:03:20.909 age 14, she begins questioning her faith and 00:03:20.909 --> 00:03:23.629 just abandons it completely, becoming a lifelong 00:03:23.629 --> 00:03:25.969 atheist. And she didn't just quietly step away 00:03:25.969 --> 00:03:28.090 from religion either. She actively critiqued 00:03:28.090 --> 00:03:30.569 the mechanism of faith itself. She argued that 00:03:30.569 --> 00:03:33.129 faith allows believers to evade the difficult, 00:03:33.430 --> 00:03:35.629 inherently ambiguous realities of life. She called 00:03:35.629 --> 00:03:37.889 it a cowardice, right? Yes, a cowardice that 00:03:37.889 --> 00:03:39.930 gives believers a false sense of superiority 00:03:39.930 --> 00:03:42.270 over atheists who, in her view, actually face 00:03:42.270 --> 00:03:44.750 those difficulties honestly. She was transitioning 00:03:44.750 --> 00:03:47.689 from seeking absolute truth in God to seeking 00:03:47.689 --> 00:03:50.669 it in human intellect and freedom. And her intellect 00:03:50.669 --> 00:03:53.889 was terrifyingly impressive. At 17, she passes 00:03:53.889 --> 00:03:56.710 her baccalaureate exams in math and philosophy. 00:03:57.169 --> 00:03:59.710 She studies mathematics, literature. She writes 00:03:59.710 --> 00:04:02.449 a master's equivalent thesis on liveness. She 00:04:02.449 --> 00:04:04.889 was brilliant. But where she really makes history 00:04:04.889 --> 00:04:07.889 is the aggregation in philosophy. For those who 00:04:07.889 --> 00:04:10.969 don't know, this is a grueling, highly competitive 00:04:10.969 --> 00:04:13.689 post -graduate exam in France that serves as 00:04:13.689 --> 00:04:17.189 a national ranking. And in 1929, at just 21 years 00:04:17.189 --> 00:04:20.069 old, she passes it. She is the youngest person 00:04:20.069 --> 00:04:22.970 ever to do so and only the eighth woman in history. 00:04:23.009 --> 00:04:25.689 Which is incredible. And she's second. The only 00:04:25.689 --> 00:04:27.569 person who beat her, and apparently the jury 00:04:27.569 --> 00:04:30.290 was very narrowly split on this, was Jean -Paul 00:04:30.290 --> 00:04:33.129 Sartre. She is literally surrounded by the greatest 00:04:33.129 --> 00:04:35.290 minds of the century and completely holding her 00:04:35.290 --> 00:04:38.110 own. Which brings us to the actual so what of 00:04:38.110 --> 00:04:41.310 this exam for her life. Because she secured a 00:04:41.310 --> 00:04:43.949 civil servant's salary as a teacher, she achieved 00:04:43.949 --> 00:04:46.230 the one thing most women of her era just couldn't 00:04:46.230 --> 00:04:49.189 afford. Financial leverage. Exactly. The leverage 00:04:49.189 --> 00:04:51.449 to actually live out her radical philosophies 00:04:51.449 --> 00:04:53.730 without ending up destitute. She didn't have 00:04:53.730 --> 00:04:56.350 to rely on a husband to survive. And having that 00:04:56.350 --> 00:04:58.589 financial independence meant she could apply 00:04:58.589 --> 00:05:01.129 her rejection of tradition directly to her personal 00:05:01.129 --> 00:05:04.829 life. She viewed marriage as a profoundly dangerous 00:05:04.829 --> 00:05:07.910 institution. She really hated the idea of marriage. 00:05:08.129 --> 00:05:10.370 She described it as alienating, stating that 00:05:10.370 --> 00:05:12.810 it solders one person to another. He said it 00:05:12.810 --> 00:05:14.829 obliges people to sleep together who no longer 00:05:14.829 --> 00:05:18.290 want to. She saw it as a trap for men who are 00:05:18.290 --> 00:05:21.029 saddled with supporting a family and dangerous 00:05:21.029 --> 00:05:23.629 for women who end up financially dependent. So 00:05:23.629 --> 00:05:26.779 enter Jean -Paul Sartre. They met while studying 00:05:26.779 --> 00:05:30.639 at the Ecole Normale, and in October 1929, they 00:05:30.639 --> 00:05:33.360 began a relationship that would last for 51 years. 00:05:33.959 --> 00:05:36.480 But because of her views on marriage, Sartre 00:05:36.480 --> 00:05:38.720 proposed something entirely different. Right, 00:05:38.839 --> 00:05:40.720 the famous bench conversation. Yeah, they were 00:05:40.720 --> 00:05:42.920 sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, and he 00:05:42.920 --> 00:05:45.399 said, let's sign a two -year lease. A lease! 00:05:45.620 --> 00:05:47.839 Wait, a lease? Like you'd rent a Parisian apartment? 00:05:48.180 --> 00:05:50.240 That sounds incredibly transactional and almost 00:05:50.240 --> 00:05:52.800 like... clinical for a romance. It was a deliberate 00:05:52.800 --> 00:05:55.319 subversion of romance. That lease was essentially 00:05:55.319 --> 00:05:58.000 the framework for a lifelong soul partnership. 00:05:58.579 --> 00:06:00.920 It was sexual but not exclusive and they never 00:06:00.920 --> 00:06:03.819 even lived together. Wow. She chose never to 00:06:03.819 --> 00:06:06.209 marry and never had children. This gave her the 00:06:06.209 --> 00:06:08.870 time to advance her education, engage in political 00:06:08.870 --> 00:06:11.870 causes, write, teach, and, you know, take other 00:06:11.870 --> 00:06:13.689 lovers. And here is where the historical record 00:06:13.689 --> 00:06:16.490 from her biographies details a deeply, deeply 00:06:16.490 --> 00:06:19.769 controversial chapter. Because this radical freedom 00:06:19.769 --> 00:06:21.889 they practiced, this rejection of all traditional 00:06:21.889 --> 00:06:25.060 boundaries, It came with severe, often damaging 00:06:25.060 --> 00:06:28.120 consequences for others. It really did. We have 00:06:28.120 --> 00:06:30.379 to talk about the abuse allegations. Looking 00:06:30.379 --> 00:06:32.779 strictly at the historical documentation provided 00:06:32.779 --> 00:06:36.000 in our sources, a very grim picture emerges. 00:06:36.639 --> 00:06:39.480 Beauvoir, who was bisexual, used her position 00:06:39.480 --> 00:06:42.420 as a teacher to groom teenage female students, 00:06:42.759 --> 00:06:44.899 drawing them into exploitative sexual triangles 00:06:44.899 --> 00:06:46.680 with herself and Sartre. Yeah, there's the case 00:06:46.680 --> 00:06:49.519 of Bianca Lamlin, originally Bianca Bienenfeld. 00:06:49.860 --> 00:06:52.100 She was a student of Beauvoir's at the Lice Moli. 00:06:52.650 --> 00:06:55.329 Beauvoir was in her 30s at the time. Bianca was 00:06:55.329 --> 00:06:58.050 16. Just a high school student. Right. And the 00:06:58.050 --> 00:07:00.610 sources state that Beauvoir groomed the teenager, 00:07:00.990 --> 00:07:04.389 then introduced her to Sartre, who was 33. The 00:07:04.389 --> 00:07:07.189 three had a sexually exploitative relationship 00:07:07.189 --> 00:07:10.189 over the course of three years. Later in life, 00:07:10.370 --> 00:07:12.769 Bianca actually wrote a book called A Disgraceful 00:07:12.769 --> 00:07:15.170 Affair. She wrote that after Sartre's letters 00:07:15.170 --> 00:07:18.129 were published posthumously. Right. Yes, she 00:07:18.129 --> 00:07:20.269 discovered she had been mocked in their correspondence 00:07:20.269 --> 00:07:23.290 under the pseudonym Louise Vidrine. Bianca stated 00:07:23.290 --> 00:07:26.850 she felt nauseated and disgusted when she realized 00:07:26.850 --> 00:07:28.949 the true personality of the woman she had loved 00:07:28.949 --> 00:07:32.269 all her life. And it wasn't just her. In 1939, 00:07:32.569 --> 00:07:35.269 Beauvoir was also accused of seducing a 17 -year 00:07:35.269 --> 00:07:38.029 -old pupil named Natalie Sorokin. And Natalie's 00:07:38.029 --> 00:07:40.089 parents actually got the law involved. They did. 00:07:40.269 --> 00:07:42.350 They laid formal charges against Beauvoir for 00:07:42.350 --> 00:07:44.800 debauching a minor. Contextually, the age of 00:07:44.800 --> 00:07:46.980 consent in France at that time was 13, but the 00:07:46.980 --> 00:07:49.300 parents still pressed charges. And as a result, 00:07:49.639 --> 00:07:51.959 Beauvoir's license to teach in France was temporarily 00:07:51.959 --> 00:07:55.199 revoked in 1943. It's a heavy legacy. It is. 00:07:55.420 --> 00:07:57.759 And both Sorokin and Lamblin, along with another 00:07:57.759 --> 00:08:00.540 woman named Olga Kosakovich, stated later in 00:08:00.540 --> 00:08:02.720 life that their relationships with Beauvoir had 00:08:02.720 --> 00:08:07.660 damaged them psychologically. And I just, I have 00:08:07.660 --> 00:08:09.560 to interject and push back on the philosophy 00:08:09.560 --> 00:08:13.000 here. I am struggling to reconcile this behavior. 00:08:13.230 --> 00:08:16.569 with her own writing. I mean Beauvoir wrote a 00:08:16.569 --> 00:08:19.589 philosophical essay in 1947 called the Ethics 00:08:19.589 --> 00:08:22.889 of Ambiguity. She literally argued, and this 00:08:22.889 --> 00:08:25.829 is a quote, to act alone or without concern for 00:08:25.829 --> 00:08:28.310 others is not to be free. That is what she wrote, 00:08:28.509 --> 00:08:30.889 yes. She explains that no project can be defined 00:08:30.889 --> 00:08:33.169 except by its interference with other projects. 00:08:33.500 --> 00:08:36.399 So how on earth does a philosopher who explicitly 00:08:36.399 --> 00:08:38.840 argues that the freedom of the self requires 00:08:38.840 --> 00:08:42.000 the freedom of others justify the psychological 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:45.080 damage and exploitation of a 16 -year -old student? 00:08:45.279 --> 00:08:47.720 It is a glaring contradiction, and it's one that 00:08:47.720 --> 00:08:50.059 requires us to look at how they apply their philosophy 00:08:50.059 --> 00:08:52.480 and practice. Beauvoir and Sartre's pursuit of 00:08:52.480 --> 00:08:55.139 absolute personal freedom created massive ethical 00:08:55.139 --> 00:08:57.080 blind spots for them. Blind spots is a polite 00:08:57.080 --> 00:08:58.700 way to put it. Well, they essentially treated 00:08:58.700 --> 00:09:01.960 their own lives as an ongoing avant -garde philosophical 00:09:01.960 --> 00:09:04.870 experiment. They wanted to tear down every bourgeois 00:09:04.870 --> 00:09:07.889 rule. But in doing so, they abstracted human 00:09:07.889 --> 00:09:10.549 lives into philosophical concepts. Ah, so they 00:09:10.549 --> 00:09:12.429 stopped seeing them as real people. Exactly. 00:09:12.649 --> 00:09:15.110 This abstraction allowed them to ignore the very 00:09:15.110 --> 00:09:18.169 real, very damaging power dynamics between a 00:09:18.169 --> 00:09:20.470 teacher in her 30s and her teenage students. 00:09:21.110 --> 00:09:23.429 The philosophies sounded egalitarian on paper, 00:09:23.429 --> 00:09:25.750 but in practice, they reduced vulnerable young 00:09:25.750 --> 00:09:28.210 women to mere collateral damage in their quest 00:09:28.210 --> 00:09:30.470 for intellectual rebellion. It's a stark reminder 00:09:30.470 --> 00:09:32.789 that brilliant minds are not immune to profound 00:09:32.789 --> 00:09:36.450 moral failings. of this messy, fiercely independent 00:09:36.450 --> 00:09:39.250 and highly scrutinized life came her defining 00:09:39.250 --> 00:09:41.669 intellectual achievement. Yes, the big one. In 00:09:41.669 --> 00:09:44.870 1949, she publishes The Second Sex. This work 00:09:44.870 --> 00:09:47.350 synthesizes her lived experience and her existential 00:09:47.350 --> 00:09:49.990 philosophy in a way that literally changes history. 00:09:50.169 --> 00:09:53.070 It takes the existentialist mantra that existence 00:09:53.070 --> 00:09:55.629 precedes essence and applies it directly to the 00:09:55.629 --> 00:09:57.970 concept of womanhood. We should probably unpack 00:09:57.970 --> 00:10:00.909 what existence precedes essence actually means 00:10:00.909 --> 00:10:03.250 for the listeners because it's the engine driving 00:10:03.250 --> 00:10:05.529 her entire theory. Oh, definitely. Break it down. 00:10:05.870 --> 00:10:09.070 Think of a manufactured object like a pair of 00:10:09.070 --> 00:10:12.779 scissors. Its essence, its design, its purpose 00:10:12.779 --> 00:10:15.539 to cut paper existed in someone's mind before 00:10:15.539 --> 00:10:18.159 it was physically created. The essence comes 00:10:18.159 --> 00:10:21.460 first. Makes sense. But for humans, existentialists 00:10:21.460 --> 00:10:24.879 argue the exact opposite. We exist first. We 00:10:24.879 --> 00:10:27.539 are born into the world as blank slates without 00:10:27.539 --> 00:10:29.980 a predetermined purpose or nature. And we have 00:10:29.980 --> 00:10:32.440 to define our own essence through our choices 00:10:32.440 --> 00:10:34.720 and actions. Which gives us what might be the 00:10:34.720 --> 00:10:37.460 most famous feminist sentence ever written. One 00:10:37.460 --> 00:10:40.460 is not born but becomes a woman. She is taking 00:10:40.460 --> 00:10:43.000 that scissors analogy and saying society treats 00:10:43.000 --> 00:10:44.919 women like they have a predetermined essence 00:10:44.919 --> 00:10:46.919 that they are naturally submissive or maternal 00:10:46.919 --> 00:10:50.559 or overly emotional. But Beauvoir says no, you 00:10:50.559 --> 00:10:53.620 merely exist first. Everything else, all those 00:10:53.620 --> 00:10:56.419 feminine traits are thrust upon you by society. 00:10:56.700 --> 00:10:58.919 She first articulated what we now call the sex 00:10:58.919 --> 00:11:01.360 -gender distinction. She separated biological 00:11:01.360 --> 00:11:03.519 sex from the social and historical construction 00:11:03.519 --> 00:11:06.220 of gender. Decades before that became mainstream. 00:11:06.480 --> 00:11:08.990 Right. She argued that the fundamental source 00:11:08.990 --> 00:11:11.929 of women's oppression is that society historically 00:11:11.929 --> 00:11:15.309 constructs femininity specifically to make women 00:11:15.309 --> 00:11:17.950 the quintessential other. And she traces this 00:11:17.950 --> 00:11:20.789 all the way back to the ancients. She points 00:11:20.789 --> 00:11:23.210 out that Aristotle argued women are female by 00:11:23.210 --> 00:11:26.230 virtue of a certain lack of quality. Lack of 00:11:26.230 --> 00:11:28.230 qualities. Well, and Thomas Aquinas referred 00:11:28.230 --> 00:11:33.129 to women as imperfect men and incidental beings. 00:11:33.610 --> 00:11:36.580 It's like... It's like how we treat the default 00:11:36.580 --> 00:11:39.539 settings on a smartphone. Men established themselves 00:11:39.539 --> 00:11:42.960 as the factory default, the standard human. And 00:11:42.960 --> 00:11:45.600 women were categorized as the custom complicated 00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:48.320 software deviation that requires a whole different 00:11:48.320 --> 00:11:50.500 user manual. That's a great way to put it. By 00:11:50.500 --> 00:11:53.159 labeling women as mysterious or other, the default 00:11:53.159 --> 00:11:54.799 group doesn't have to put in the work to understand 00:11:54.799 --> 00:11:57.120 them as equals. Like, oh, women are just so mysterious 00:11:57.120 --> 00:11:59.159 who can understand their problems. It's a convenient 00:11:59.159 --> 00:12:02.220 smoke screen to maintain a patriarchy. And Beauvoir 00:12:02.220 --> 00:12:05.320 identified that exact mechanism. She recognized 00:12:05.320 --> 00:12:07.600 that this stereotyping is always done by the 00:12:07.600 --> 00:12:10.120 group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower 00:12:10.120 --> 00:12:13.480 down. And she used two crucial philosophical 00:12:13.480 --> 00:12:16.740 terms to explain how this affects women. Imminence 00:12:16.740 --> 00:12:19.299 and transcendence. Let's break those down for 00:12:19.299 --> 00:12:21.059 the listener because they are heavy concepts. 00:12:21.440 --> 00:12:24.350 Imminence is a state of stagnation. It's an inward 00:12:24.350 --> 00:12:27.250 -focused existence where you are acted upon by 00:12:27.250 --> 00:12:29.549 the world, constrained by your circumstances, 00:12:30.049 --> 00:12:32.429 and denied the ability to creatively shape your 00:12:32.429 --> 00:12:36.049 own destiny. So being stuck. Exactly. Historically, 00:12:36.230 --> 00:12:38.909 society forced women into imminence, confining 00:12:38.909 --> 00:12:41.210 them to the domestic sphere, focusing solely 00:12:41.210 --> 00:12:43.570 on their biology and reproductive capabilities. 00:12:44.309 --> 00:12:46.330 Transcendence, on the other hand, is the active 00:12:46.330 --> 00:12:48.470 outward reach of human consciousness. Going beyond 00:12:48.470 --> 00:12:50.830 yourself. Right. It's taking agency, imposing 00:12:50.830 --> 00:12:53.549 your will on the world, creating and taking responsibility 00:12:53.549 --> 00:12:56.690 for your own freedom. Beauvoir argued that men 00:12:56.690 --> 00:12:59.370 laid claim to transcendence while systematically 00:12:59.370 --> 00:13:02.730 forcing women into imminence. The profound so 00:13:02.730 --> 00:13:06.110 what for you, the listener, is this. Every time 00:13:06.110 --> 00:13:08.250 you hear a modern debate about gender roles, 00:13:08.669 --> 00:13:11.029 about a gender performativity or systemic inequality, 00:13:11.610 --> 00:13:13.990 you are hearing the direct echoes of the second 00:13:13.990 --> 00:13:17.389 sex. By shifting the burden of inequality from 00:13:17.389 --> 00:13:20.009 biology to society, she showed that if gender 00:13:20.009 --> 00:13:22.269 is constructed, it can be dismantled. But, you 00:13:22.269 --> 00:13:24.509 know, this groundbreaking book almost didn't 00:13:24.509 --> 00:13:26.690 reach the English -speaking world intact. Oh, 00:13:26.870 --> 00:13:29.649 the translation disaster. Yes. There is a deeply 00:13:29.649 --> 00:13:32.389 frustrating translation tragedy attached to the 00:13:32.389 --> 00:13:34.950 second sex. The first American translation was 00:13:34.950 --> 00:13:37.169 prompted by Blanche Knopf, the wife of publisher 00:13:37.169 --> 00:13:40.350 Alfred A. Knopf, and they gave the job to a man 00:13:40.350 --> 00:13:42.950 named Howard Parshley. Let me just emphasize 00:13:42.950 --> 00:13:45.610 this for a second. Howard Parsley was a zoology 00:13:45.610 --> 00:13:48.129 professor at Smith College. He had only a basic 00:13:48.129 --> 00:13:50.570 familiarity with the French language and a minimal 00:13:50.570 --> 00:13:53.889 understanding of philosophy. Zoologists. Translating 00:13:53.889 --> 00:13:56.509 complex existential phenomenology. Yeah, the 00:13:56.509 --> 00:13:58.789 results were disastrous. Parsley just didn't 00:13:58.789 --> 00:14:00.950 understand the philosophical framework, so he 00:14:00.950 --> 00:14:03.549 translated existential terms into biological 00:14:03.549 --> 00:14:06.429 or medical ones. He completely missed the nuances 00:14:06.429 --> 00:14:09.269 of Hegelian and Sartrean concepts. He turned 00:14:09.269 --> 00:14:12.490 a philosophy text into a biology textbook. He 00:14:12.490 --> 00:14:14.649 turned a text about the social construction of 00:14:14.649 --> 00:14:17.110 gender into a book that sounded like a biological 00:14:17.110 --> 00:14:19.389 treatise, which is the exact opposite of her 00:14:19.389 --> 00:14:22.779 point. Furthermore, he actually removed a third 00:14:22.779 --> 00:14:25.399 of the original work. A third. He cut out the 00:14:25.399 --> 00:14:28.539 names of 78 women in history, seemingly because 00:14:28.539 --> 00:14:30.820 he found the historical accounts of women's lives 00:14:30.820 --> 00:14:33.840 boring or irrelevant. He fundamentally distorted 00:14:33.840 --> 00:14:36.460 the mechanism of her argument. And for years, 00:14:36.659 --> 00:14:39.220 the publisher prevented a more accurate retranslation, 00:14:39.639 --> 00:14:42.820 declining all proposals. It wasn't until 2009, 00:14:43.019 --> 00:14:45.440 60 years after the original publication, that 00:14:45.440 --> 00:14:47.320 a second translation was finally commissioned. 00:14:47.549 --> 00:14:50.350 And Constance Bord and Sheila Milovny Chevalier 00:14:50.350 --> 00:14:52.990 produced the first interal translation in 2010. 00:14:53.389 --> 00:14:55.450 So having written the definitive text on how 00:14:55.450 --> 00:14:58.049 society artificially constructs a woman's place, 00:14:58.649 --> 00:15:00.570 Beauvoir was now under immense pressure to prove 00:15:00.570 --> 00:15:02.789 that a woman could live entirely outside those 00:15:02.789 --> 00:15:04.889 constructs. Practice what you preach. Exactly. 00:15:05.090 --> 00:15:07.029 And she did that by deeply engaging with the 00:15:07.029 --> 00:15:09.570 world. She travels, she has international romances, 00:15:09.570 --> 00:15:12.350 and she takes deeply polarizing political stances. 00:15:12.669 --> 00:15:15.330 Yeah. In 1947, she took a four -month exploration 00:15:15.330 --> 00:15:17.759 trip of the United States. traveling by car, 00:15:17.960 --> 00:15:20.299 train, and Greyhound bus, which resulted in her 00:15:20.299 --> 00:15:23.279 book, America Day by Day. And it was in Chicago 00:15:23.279 --> 00:15:25.860 that she met the American author, Nelson Algren. 00:15:26.019 --> 00:15:29.580 Which became a massive romance. Huge. She wrote 00:15:29.580 --> 00:15:31.419 him letters across the Atlantic, calling him 00:15:31.419 --> 00:15:34.059 her beloved husband. She then wrote a novel called 00:15:34.059 --> 00:15:36.519 The Mandarin's, which won France's highest literary 00:15:36.519 --> 00:15:40.399 prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1954. The book featured 00:15:40.399 --> 00:15:43.139 a character named Louis Brogan, who was very... 00:15:43.200 --> 00:15:46.559 clearly based on Algren. And Algren was outraged 00:15:46.559 --> 00:15:49.240 by that. He vehemently objected to their intimacy 00:15:49.240 --> 00:15:51.480 becoming public and the frank way she described 00:15:51.480 --> 00:15:53.539 their sexual experiences in her writing. He felt 00:15:53.539 --> 00:15:56.200 exposed. He felt betrayed by how she transformed 00:15:56.200 --> 00:15:58.659 their private life into public intellectual property. 00:15:58.740 --> 00:16:01.299 Yet, despite their eventual bitter separation, 00:16:01.720 --> 00:16:04.200 when Beauvoir died decades later, she was buried 00:16:04.200 --> 00:16:05.960 wearing a silver ring that he had given her. 00:16:06.120 --> 00:16:08.519 It just highlights how she constantly defied 00:16:08.519 --> 00:16:11.360 expectations. And that defiance continued right 00:16:11.360 --> 00:16:14.730 to the end of her life. In 1980, when she was 00:16:14.730 --> 00:16:18.929 72 years old, Beauvoir legally adopted her adult 00:16:18.929 --> 00:16:21.529 lover, Sylvie Le Bon, who was in her late 30s 00:16:21.529 --> 00:16:23.929 at the time. Which is pretty wild. Right, they'd 00:16:23.929 --> 00:16:26.029 already been in an intimate relationship for 00:16:26.029 --> 00:16:28.269 decades. But this was a fascinating subversion 00:16:28.269 --> 00:16:31.470 of the legal system. Since Beauvoir rejected 00:16:31.470 --> 00:16:33.769 the institution of marriage her entire life, 00:16:34.309 --> 00:16:36.309 this adoption functioned essentially as a marriage 00:16:36.309 --> 00:16:38.710 for her. It secured her literary estate, right, 00:16:38.889 --> 00:16:41.549 making Sylvie her heir. Exactly. It was a legal 00:16:41.549 --> 00:16:44.350 loophole used to validate a relationship that 00:16:44.350 --> 00:16:46.929 society had no conventional framework for. Her 00:16:46.929 --> 00:16:49.870 late in life actions also included intense political 00:16:49.870 --> 00:16:52.389 activism. She was weaponizing her platform in 00:16:52.389 --> 00:16:55.250 ways that showcase both the triumph and the absolute 00:16:55.250 --> 00:16:58.230 peril of her philosophy. On one hand, she was 00:16:58.230 --> 00:17:01.129 a crucial signatory of the 1971 manifesto of 00:17:01.129 --> 00:17:03.970 the 343. That was a huge moment in France. It 00:17:03.970 --> 00:17:06.869 was a manifesto signed by famous women declaring 00:17:06.869 --> 00:17:09.289 they had had an abortion, which was illegal in 00:17:09.289 --> 00:17:12.240 France. at the time. This act of public defiance 00:17:12.240 --> 00:17:14.539 directly paved the way for the legalization of 00:17:14.539 --> 00:17:17.799 abortion in France in 1974. It was a monumental 00:17:17.799 --> 00:17:20.259 moment for the women's liberation movement. But 00:17:20.259 --> 00:17:22.819 her activism also took turns that are frankly 00:17:22.819 --> 00:17:25.380 difficult to comprehend today. Yeah the sources 00:17:25.380 --> 00:17:28.720 get pretty dark here again. In 1977 she signed 00:17:28.720 --> 00:17:31.339 a petition along with other French intellectuals 00:17:31.339 --> 00:17:33.319 supporting the freeing of three arrested men 00:17:33.319 --> 00:17:35.500 in what was known as the Affair de Versailles. 00:17:35.740 --> 00:17:38.039 Just impartially reporting what the sources say 00:17:38.039 --> 00:17:42.180 here, these were adult men aged 45, 43, and 39 00:17:42.180 --> 00:17:44.819 who had sexual relations with minors aged 12 00:17:44.819 --> 00:17:46.839 and 13. And she signed a petition supporting 00:17:46.839 --> 00:17:49.200 them. And her views on motherhood were equally 00:17:49.200 --> 00:17:52.640 rigid in her later years. In a 1975 interview 00:17:52.640 --> 00:17:54.619 with Betty Frieden, when asked if she supported 00:17:54.619 --> 00:17:57.299 a minimum wage for women doing housework, Beauvoir 00:17:57.299 --> 00:17:59.759 said no. Wait, she didn't support paying women 00:17:59.759 --> 00:18:03.039 for housework. No, she said no woman should be 00:18:03.039 --> 00:18:05.160 authorized to stay at home and raise her children. 00:18:05.880 --> 00:18:08.279 She argued that women should not have that choice, 00:18:08.579 --> 00:18:10.680 precisely because if there is such a choice, 00:18:11.019 --> 00:18:13.460 too many women will make that one. It's an incredibly 00:18:13.460 --> 00:18:16.059 authoritarian stance from someone whose entire 00:18:16.059 --> 00:18:18.750 philosophy is based on personal freedom. It reveals 00:18:18.750 --> 00:18:21.930 the core logic of her later years. She believed 00:18:21.930 --> 00:18:25.390 intellectuals must take sides. In the very first 00:18:25.390 --> 00:18:28.250 issue of their journal, Les Temps Modernes, Sartre 00:18:28.250 --> 00:18:30.809 wrote that their intention was to influence society 00:18:30.809 --> 00:18:32.950 and that the journal would take sides. And she 00:18:32.950 --> 00:18:35.089 really lived by that. Completely. She believed 00:18:35.089 --> 00:18:37.069 her philosophy had to be enacted in the real 00:18:37.069 --> 00:18:39.950 world to have meaning. Whether fighting for women's 00:18:39.950 --> 00:18:42.470 liberation or taking indefensible stances on 00:18:42.470 --> 00:18:45.109 age of consent laws, she never shied away from 00:18:45.109 --> 00:18:48.019 public scrutiny. For Beauvoir, to be passive 00:18:48.019 --> 00:18:51.400 was to fail existentially. Which brings us full 00:18:51.400 --> 00:18:53.910 circle to where we started. Simone de Beauvoir 00:18:53.910 --> 00:18:56.769 teaches us that being well -informed means holding 00:18:56.769 --> 00:18:59.769 multiple conflicting truths at once. She is the 00:18:59.769 --> 00:19:02.150 architect of modern feminism. She is a brilliant 00:19:02.150 --> 00:19:04.549 philosopher who gave us the vocabulary to understand 00:19:04.549 --> 00:19:07.509 gender as a social construct and who fought fiercely 00:19:07.509 --> 00:19:10.130 for women to achieve transcendence. And she is 00:19:10.130 --> 00:19:12.930 a deeply flawed individual who caused real harm 00:19:12.930 --> 00:19:15.470 to vulnerable people in her personal life and 00:19:15.470 --> 00:19:18.029 held political stances that shock the conscience. 00:19:18.750 --> 00:19:20.630 The historical sources demand that we look at 00:19:20.630 --> 00:19:23.309 the whole picture. The emancipatory power of 00:19:23.309 --> 00:19:26.130 the second sex is an undeniable historical fact, 00:19:26.589 --> 00:19:28.950 but the human cost of her pursuit of absolute 00:19:28.950 --> 00:19:31.890 freedom in her private life is equally documented. 00:19:32.549 --> 00:19:34.970 We cannot untangle the brilliance of her theory 00:19:34.970 --> 00:19:38.210 from the messy reality of her practice. So we 00:19:38.210 --> 00:19:39.990 want to leave you with a final thought to mull 00:19:39.990 --> 00:19:42.269 over, one that shifts how we view this kind of 00:19:42.269 --> 00:19:45.089 legacy today. Consider the modern era with our 00:19:45.089 --> 00:19:47.490 current landscape of cancel culture and strict 00:19:47.490 --> 00:19:50.059 institutional ethics. If Simone de Beauvoir were 00:19:50.059 --> 00:19:51.920 a young philosopher writing and living today, 00:19:52.220 --> 00:19:54.279 would her defining philosophical works ever even 00:19:54.279 --> 00:19:56.880 get published? It's a great question. Or would 00:19:56.880 --> 00:19:59.680 the intense scrutiny of her personal life, her 00:19:59.680 --> 00:20:01.859 exploitative relationships, and her controversial 00:20:01.859 --> 00:20:05.220 petitions see her entirely erased from the intellectual 00:20:05.220 --> 00:20:07.339 record before she ever had the chance to change 00:20:07.339 --> 00:20:10.579 the world? When the history is this messy, how 00:20:10.579 --> 00:20:12.740 much intellectual progress are we willing to 00:20:12.740 --> 00:20:15.039 risk losing in the pursuit of moral purity?