Chelsea Swan

Simone de Beauvoir in the Second Sex Part two, Lived experience, she talks about how women are conditioned to assume their roles. This she works through methodically by age. It begins with the formative years and the well-known quote “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman” We are gradually brought to terms with our otherness, inferiority, and the demands that occupy a women’s role, rather that the natural and innate state of manhood. She argues that young girls are given dolls to incarnate the self, the alter ego, in an object outside of themselves. Whereas men have a penis, women are mysteries to themselves, entirely interior, the outer is like the doll, a representation, not real, a play, a foreign object, “a figurine with a human face”.  “The doll represents the whole body and, on the other hand, is a passive thing. As such the little girl will be encouraged to alienate herself in her person as a whole and to consider it as an inert object” She has to be pretty to please and so she disguised herself. She argues that for the girl she is “twelve years old and her story is already written in the heavens; she will discover day after day without shaping it; she is curious but frightened” she is moved irrevocably towards her destiny. “Once she enters puberty, the future not only moves closer, it settles into her body; it becomes the most concrete reality” We often are so convinced that there is no other path that we do not even try to imagine anything we would want beyond it. Her body becomes a “ a screen between the woman and the world, a burning fog that weighs on her, stifling her and separating her” “this lack of physical power expresses itself as a more general timidity: she does not believe in a force she has not felt in her body, she does not dare to be enterprising, to revolt, to invent; doomed to docility, to resignation, she can only accept a place that society has already made for her.” There is a divorce between her properly human condition and her feminine vocation. “she does not accept the destiny nature and society assigned to her; and yet, she does not actively repudiate it: she is too divided internally to enter into combat with the world; She confines herself to escaping reality or to contesting it symbolically.” Beauvoir also states that “above all the adolescent girl is condemned to the lie of pretending to be an object, and a prestigious one, while she experiences herself as an uncertain, dispersed existence, knowing her failings.”