This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re reading Chapter 1: Childhood of Volume II: Lived Eperience—US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 284-296

First Line: “The world is first present to the newborn only in the form of immanent sensations.”

Last Line: “…she must at least also be a woman; she must not lose her femininity.”

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We’re diving into the Childhood chapter this week! Volume II began with Beauvoir giving us a sense of her project— to describe the common ground of feminine existence and how a woman is taught to “assume her condition” (pg. 279).

See last week’s post for a recap!

We ran into her famous sentence last week. She posits ‘woman’ as a “thing” (in the phenomenological sense of a phenomenon) one becomes. Becoming is temporal, something that unfolds in and through time, and Beauvoir makes the claim that although ‘woman’ a becoming, it is “almost originary” in a child’s life because of how other people sexually differentiate children. She’s basically like, “look, none of us are born thinking and treating ourselves as boys and girls; infants don’t do this. We come to sexually differentiate ourselves because of how others are in relation to us. Being a woman (or a man) is relational through and through. If we extend this claim, it would be to say that all gendered positions are constituted, brought to life, in relation. There is not internal essence or identity to it.

Now we’re about to embark on a phenomenological investigation— a consideration of what happens in childhood such that individual children come to assume themselves as girls, and how they schooled (and by whom) into becoming women.

p.s.: We’re in Part One: Formative Years of Volume II, so there’s a developmental claim here: what happens in childhood is a crucial time that shapes who one becomes.

And, remember that she’s describing how experience unfolds in patriarchal context, and in relation to experience in which patriarchal norms and myths are imposed. So this isn’t a description of queer life or trans life, or any life of becoming other than what patriarchy desires, asks, demands of those who are supposed to become women. That normative dimension matters!

Let’s see what happens.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It’s week 26! We’re half way through the slow read and starting one of my favorite parts: Volume II: Lived Experience!

We’re beginning with the Introduction and Part One: Formative Years. US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 279-283

First Line: “Women of today are overthrowing the myth of femininity.”

Last Line: “…and her vocation is imperiously breathed into her from the first years of her life.”

New Readers?!

If you haven’t signed up for the slow read yet, now’s a great time to dive in. Volume II is my favorite volume (sorry not sorry). We get into the weeds of the experiential dimension of what it means to become and live as a woman in a patriarchal context, but there’s a ton of rich discussions of the sexual, affective, social, and economic consequences of gendered life under patriarchy.

I’ve made this week free for everyone in case it entices any of you out there to join us slow readers (there’s a bunch of us from all over the world!)

We’re starting slow— the beginning of Volume II packs a punch and taking our time to get oriented is important. Beside, the point of the slow read is to relish in the sentences and, well, go slow.

Come join us!

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Epigraphs

“What a curse to be a woman! And yet the very worst curse when one is a woman is, in fact, not to understand that it is one." — Kierkegaard

"Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone." — J.P. Sartre

For Beauvoir, these aren’t just two existentialist bon mots. Kierkegaard is one of Beauvoir’s major influences and this quote points to a paradox Beauvoir’s interested in: being a woman can be a difficult and constraining condition, but understanding that one is a woman—understanding the social condition one inhabits—is itself necessary to making sense of that experience. Sartre’s “half victim, half accomplice” highlights what Beauvoir takes to be an important dimension of women’s situation: women are constrained by structures they did not create, but they are also not simply passive objects of those structures; they participate in their own Otherness. Together, the epigraphs establish a driving question for Beauvoir: how do we understand women as both constrained by their situation and responsible, as free subjects, for what they do within it?

Introduction

"Women of today are overthrowing the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence concretely, but their success in living their human condition completely does not come easily. As they are brought up by women, in the heart of a feminine world, their normal destiny is marriage, which still subordinates them to man from a practical point of view; virile prestige is far from being eradicated: it still stands on solid economic and social bases. It is thus necessary to study women's traditional destiny carefully" (pg 279)

Beauvoir begins Volume II with the claim: women are rejecting the myth of femininity and asserting themselves, but that are still subjected to a patriarchal destiny. That destiny is hetero marriage. And, Beauvoir’s claim here is that it still men’s prestige and women’s submission is still the socioeconomic foundation of experience. She wants us to pay attention that “traditional destiny” to understand how it inflects and structures actual women’s lives, even as they reject patriarchal mythology.

"What I will try to describe is how woman is taught to assume her condition, how she experiences this, what universe she finds herself enclosed in, and what escape mechanisms are permitted to her. Only then can we understand what problems women—heirs to a weighty past, striving to forge a new future— are faced with." (pg. 279)

I love Beauvoir’s use of “assume” here and in general. It’s very existentialist language and it’s drawing attention to how we take up ourselves to become who we are. But it gets at the active and passive dimension of self-making. Think about it like this: to assume oneself is to come into a particular selfhood, to make onself such and such a way; and, it’s also to assume something true about yourself, to believe something is true about who you are.

Beauvoir is now going to “describe” women’s experience, which is a gesture to the phenomenological method of Volume II. Rather than beginning with an abstract theory of what women are, she will offer a rich description of what it is like to live as a woman— how women are taught to assume their condition, how they experience that condition from the inside, what kind of world it creates for them, and what possibilities for escape that world allows. The point isn’t simply to catalogue women’s experiences, or to do a mere “this is what is the case. The point of the description is to understand how a social condition is lived and experienced by the person inhabiting it, to understand how one’s life comes to have the meaning it does when is a woman in a patriarchal context. That description is for the sake of understanding the problems facing women who inherit the “weighty” past of patriarchy. It’s like she’s saying if we don’t really see what women’s lives are like, then we won’t be able to get patriarchal baggage out of our lives.

"When I use the word 'woman' or 'feminine,' I obviously refer to no archetype, to no immutable essence; 'in the present state of education and customs' must be understood to follow most of my affirmations. There is not question of expressing eternal truths here, but of describing the common ground from which all singular feminine existence stems." (pg. 279)

Here’s a very important qualification! When she talks about “woman” or “feminine,” she is not describing an eternal female nature or universal truth about women. There is no such thing! She is, instead, describing women as they exist within a particular historical and social world. How women exist may change (it will since it’s not an essential or universal truth). So what then is she describing if women are not an essential category? She’s pointing to a “common ground”— not of women per se, but of “feminine existence,” the kind of existence that patriarchy imposes on and encourages those who are positioned as women to take up and/or judges and scrutinizes them in relation to it when they don’t/can’t. The common ground here isn’t that all women are the same; it’s that living in patriarchy does something to those who are women. What it is that it does, and how it does it, is what she’s going to unpack in Volume II.

Chapter 1: Childhood

“One is not born, but rather becomes, (a) woman.” (pg. 283)

Here it is. The most famous sentence of the text. And yes, I’ve modified it! And just to be upfront, my translation of the original text includes the ‘a’ (more on this soon.)

Let’s first start with the key distinction in the sentence: born vs. becoming. “Being,” in the Platonic sense, suggests something fixed, stable, and defined by an underlying essence: if woman were a kind of being in this sense, there would be some immutable feminine essence that determines what a woman is. “Becoming,” by contrast, names a dynamic, temporal mode of existence. For Beauvoir, human beings are not finished entities who simply are what they are; we exist through time, continually taking up and making something of ourselves within the situations in which we find ourselves.

I’d hesitate before equating ‘becoming’ with the claim that woman is a social construction. Being and becoming are not two discrete states, where one starts with a biological “being” and then society adds a gendered identity. Rather, becoming names the way human existence is always a process of taking up, inhabiting, and transforming a situation. Importantly, for Beauvoir, the fact that we become does not mean that we are infinitely malleable: we become from somewhere, through a body and a historically specific world, and our freedom operates within, not outside of, that context. So, we do become in relation to and through constructs, myths, etc. But, she wants to focus on the experiential dimension of becoming, how we come to experience and assume ourselves.

There is also an important scholarly debate over how to translate this sentence. The 1953 Parshley translation renders the sentence as “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” while the 2010 Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation gives us “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” The difference is philosophically consequential: “a woman” can suggest becoming an individual member of an already existing category, while “woman” can suggest becoming the social and existential condition itself. The debate over the letter ‘a’ is taken up in the anthology On ne naît pas femme: On le devient: The Life of a Sentence, edited by Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari. It also opens onto a much larger question about what Beauvoir means by becoming and whether we should understand that becoming as the production of a social identity, or as the ongoing existential process through which a situated human being comes to inhabit and negotiate the condition of woman.

Stay tuned for a separate post on this seemingly simple sentence where I unpack all of this in detail.

“No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization has a whole that elaborate this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other.” (pg. 283)

Two main claims to pay attention to. 1) Beauvoir rejects the idea that biology, psychology, or economics determines what, or who. It’s an entire context that does that! 2) .Becoming a woman is fundamentally relational: we become who we are aby how others position and recognize us within. For a woman to be Other, requires her to be constituted as Other by others.

“Inasmuch as he exists for himself, the child would not grasp himself as sexually differentiated. For girls and boys, the body is first the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that brings about the comprehension of the world: they apprehend the universe through their eyes and hands and not through their sexual parts.” (pg. 283)

Beauvoir’s pointing to a difference having a sexed body and experiencing oneself as sexually differentiated. She claims children initially experience their bodies primarily as the means through which they encounter and act in the world, not as evidence of being sexed (or gendered) In other words, a child first experiences themself as a subject who has a body, rather than as a “boy” or “girl” whose body defines who they are.

She’s then going to say that a child becomes sexually differentiated as they become older, as their relationships to others are more concrete, as others come to treat them differently on the basis of being a “boy” or “girl.”

“Up to twelve, the girls is just as sturdy as her brothers; she shows the same intellectual aptitudes; she is not barred from competing with them in any area. If well before puberty and sometimes starting from early childhood she already appears sexually specified, it is not because mysterious instincts immediately destine her to passivity, coquetry, or motherhood but because the intervention of others in the infant’s life is almost originary, and her vocation is imperiously breathed into her from the first year’s of her life.” (pg. 283)

Prior to these sentences Beauvoir has been pointing out similarities in how infants and young children experience their bodies-in-the-world. She holds that they are not inherently sexually differentiated. But if young children do appear to be sexually differentiated at a very young age, before puberty, it is not the result of innate traits or instincts. If girls nevertheless begin to appear “feminine” very early, she argues, it is because other people intervene in their lives from the beginning, teaching and encouraging them to inhabit femininity. The key line, and one of my favorites!, is that the “vocation” of womanhood is not discovered within the girl—it is breathed into her by the social world around her. Femininity becomes oxygen— and this is how it comes to be lived as quasi-essential to who a woman is, as if it were natural, always just there.

The remainder of the childhood chapter is going to unpack how this sexual differentiation takes place. Remember that the relational dimension is key. One doesn’t become a woman on her own; it’s about HOW OTHERS INTERVENE IN HER EXISTENCE.

What are you thinking? What questions and curiosities do you have? Share them!

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re reading Chapter 3 of Part Three: Myths—US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 266-274

First Line: “The myth of woman plays a significant role in literature…”

Last Line: “…giving her her freedom.”

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“The myth of woman plays a significant role in literature; but what is its important in everyday life? To what extent does it affect individual social customs and behavior? To reply to this question, we will need to specify the relation of this myth to reality.” (pg. 266)

Here’s the pivot to the concrete. We’ve just had a look at the myth in literature (Ch. 2) and we’ve considered the meaning and function of the myth at large (Ch. 1), and now we need to consider the myth in relation to reality. This pivot gets us closer to the focus of Volume II: Lived Experience (which is up next!)

“There are different kinds of myths. This one, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition— is a static myth, it projects into a Platonic heaven a reality grasped through experience of conceptualized from experience; for fact, value, significance, notion, and empirical law, it substitutes transcendent Idea, timeless, immutable, and necessary. This idea escapes all contention because it is situated beyond the given; it is endowed with an absolute truth.” (pg. 266)

The claim: the myth of Woman is "static"— it doesn't stay grounded in lived, changeable experience. Rather, it takes something drawn from real life (the “multiple existence of women”) and freezes it into a fixed, eternal Idea, the way Plato's Forms sit above and beyond the messy world of particulars. That move is what makes the myth so hard to challenge: since it's positioned as timeless and necessary rather than as a claim about actual women, it can't be tested or contradicted by evidence — it's placed "beyond the given," immune to contention by definition.

"Though in a way, it source if in experience. It is thus true that woman is other than man, but the real relation is one of reciprocity; as such, it gives rise to authentic dramas: through eroticism, love, friendship, and their alternatives of disappointment, hatred, and rivalry, the relation is a struggle of consciousness… To posit the Woman is the to posit the absolute Other, without reciprocity, refusing, against experience, that she could be a subject, a peer." (pg. 266)

She concedes something to the myth here: it does have root in a real experience of otherness, where there is a struggle between consciousness (yes, we’re back to some Hegelian traces here), and also reciprocity. But the myth of Woman erases reality by positing her as the absolute Other, with no reciprocity built in at all, flatly denying reality, including the reality that a woman could ever be a subject or a peer.

“In concrete reality, women manifest themselves in man different ways; but each of the myths built around woman tries to summarize her as a whole...” (pg. 266)

Here’s the core distortion of how myth works: in actual life, women show up differently, individually, situationally— there's no single way woman "manifests." But each myth tries to collapse that whole variety into one totalizing image, a single essence meant to stand in for all of it.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re still in Chapter 2 of Part Three: Myths— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 246-265

First Line: “In spite of the gulf separating Claudel’s religious world…”

Last Line: “However, woman as other still plays a role inasmuch as even to transcend himself....”

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Breton: Another Dude into the Myth

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting Chapter 12 of Part Three: Myths— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 214-246

First Line: “In order to confirm this analysis of the feminine myth…”

Last Line: “…but on the contrary attempts to fix it in general.”

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Intro to Chapter 2

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re still in Chapter 1 of Part Three: Myths— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 179-199

First Line: “But even the Wife was a dangerous prey.”

Last Line: “…still have flourishing careers today.”

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A quick reminder about where we left off: in Week 20, we were working through the mythology of Woman as Mother Earth. Beauvoir shows us how woman gets cast as both cradle and grave — the "Chaos" and "Nothingness" that man came from and dreads being swallowed back into. We ended on the flip side of that: Woman as the last line to the cosmos, the medium, the clairvoyant men turn to when they want to touch (and conquer) nature again.

Let’s see what patriarchal mythology is up to now:

"However, even if subjectively man can go through erotic experience where woman is not present, she is objectively involved in his sexuality: as Plato said in the myth of the androgynes, the male organism presupposes the woman's. He discovers woman in discovering his own sex, even if she is not given to him in flesh and blood, no in image; and inversely, woman is fearsome inasmuch as she embodies sexuality. The immanent and transcendent aspects of living experience can never be separated: what I fear or desire is always an avatar of my own existence, but nothing comes to me except through what is not my self. The nonself is involved in wet dreams, in erection, and if not in the precise figure of woman, at least in Nature and Life: the individual feels possessed by a foreign magic." (pg. 180)

Okay, so now Beauvoir’s getting us into patriarchal mythology about men’s sexuality about Woman. She’s taking a look at Plato’s account first to consider what it shows us. With Plato, we get the view that male sexuality is constituted by its “missing half,” so a man "discovers" woman just by discovering his own sex, even in solitary experience. This is going to be a key feature of the myth of Woman.

But, then Beauvoir makes a more general claim about sexuality by turning to her key terms of immanence and transcendence. She’s basically saying: these are never separate in lived experience: what you feel is always your own, but it only ever arrives through something not-you, some other, some foreign force.

Beauvoir thinks any embodied consciousness experiences desire and sexuality this way — as something that's "mine" yet arrives through and is constituted by others. That part isn't patriarchal, it's just her existentialist account of what a body is.

The patriarchal move is this: instead of letting that strangeness stay where it belongs —"my own body is partly other to me"— man externalizes it. He doesn't sit with the fact that his own flesh is opaque to him; he names the opacity Woman. He projects his fear, desire, ambivalence about his sexuality and body onto woman.

So here’s a key feature of patriarchal myth that Beauvoir is unpacking: taking a general fact about what it is to have a body and resolving it by pinning it onto Woman (as idea, concept, image), so she ends up carrying the weight of his self and sexuality. She's not just an object of desire here— she's the container he invents so he doesn't have to own his own strangeness to himself.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re still in Chapter 1 of Part Three: Myths— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 163-179.

First Line: “Man seeks the Other in woman as Nature and as his peer.”

Last Line: “They embody the disturbing figure of the Mother, while the charms of the Wife have faded away.”

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These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting Chapter 1 of Part Three: Myths— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 159-163

First Line: “History has shown that men have always held all the concrete powers…”

Last Line: “However she is considered, it is this ambivalence that is the most striking.”

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These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot

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photo by Cai Pigliucci

This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re finishing Chapter 5 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 142-156.

First Line: “New Zealand gave woman full rights in 1893.”

Last Line: “…since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.”

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VIDEO 1: pgs. 142-148 The Emergence of Feminist Movements

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting Chapter 5 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 126-142.

First Line: “The Revolution might have been expected to change the fate of women.”

Last Line: “French women would have to wait until 1945 to acquire political power.”

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These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re concluding Chapter 4 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 115-125.

First Line: “Altogether, men’s opinion in the Middle Ages is not favorable to women.”

Last Line: “…the sole means of defending themselves and escaping oppression.”

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“Altogether, men’s opinion in the Middle Ages is not favorable to women.” (pg. 115)

In spite of this courtly love thing that was going on, in the Middle Ages women were viewed as “fabliaux, farces, and plays criticize women for their laziness, coquetry, and lust” (pg. 115). So even if there was a version of “woman” romanticized by courtly love, don’t be fooled. Women were not viewed in a good light.

“In truth this dispute concerns women only indirectly. No one dreams of demanding a social role for them other than what they are assigned. It is more of a question of comparing the life of a cleric to the state of marriage; it is a masculine problem brought up by the Church’s ambiguous attitude to marriage.” (pg. 117)

At the bottom of pg. 115 Beauvoir points out that the clergy was women’s worst enemy. Even as the Christian Church made marriage a sacrament, it prohibited for their elite. The Church also cursed and scorned women for marriage just as they had to be married to be “good” women. Beauvoir’s pointing out here that the Church had a conflicting attitude toward marriage. It was glorified for women and women were cursed for what it did to men. This is why she names it a “masculine problem”— women didn’t have anything to do with the creation of the problem.

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This conversation concludes the first read in the New Books Series. Stay tuned for more on the next read!

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting Chapter 4 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 104-115.

First Line: “The evolution of the feminine condition was not a continuous process.”

Last Line: “...she had to be widowed and burdened with children for her to decide to earn her living by her pen.”

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“The evolution of the feminine condition was not a continuous process. With the great invasions, all of civilization is put into question. Roman law itself is under influence of a new ideology, Christianity; and in the centuries that follow, barbarians impose their laws. The economic, social, and political situation is overturned: a women’s situation suffers the consequences.” (pg. 104)

Right away, Beauvoir wants us to know that the history of women’s situation, i.e., “the feminine condition.” doesn’t move in a straight line. The great invasions basically blow-up everything Rome had built. Christianity and barbarian law fill the wreckage, and women’s lives get reshuffled in the process

(And by “feminine condition” Beauvoir isn’t saying that women are feminine. She naming the condition that is setup for women to assume.)

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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Real talk: Yes, I missed last week, and I’m not doing a scheduled live this week. Life has been HAPPENING lately, so I’m making up for it here with double the commentary and a video.

But don’t forget NEXT WEEK! MARK YOUR CALENDARS!

A LIVE WITH MANON GARCIA!! Wednesday, June 10th at 11am PST. If there’s anything to join me for it will be this “Author Meets Reader Session.”

This week our focus are the following chapters — The Videos, Writing Mazan, The Normal and the Pathological, The Judge in Us, A Good Victim, Lemaire, Dominique P.’s Final Act, 14 December

The Cost of Witness

One of the things Garcia grapples with in the chapters “The Videos” and “Writing Mazan” is a problem I don’t think has a clean solution: how do you describe sexual violence without reproducing its logic?

Garcia considers this question because she’s doing what many feminist thinkers, myself included, have done: write about sexual violence, and to write about you have to also engage the reality. Garcia’s engagement reaches another level. She’s sitting in a courtroom watching videos of Gisèle Pelicot being raped— an already surreal and disturbing reality— and then she has to decide what to do with what she’s seen. She wants to recount it, to understand it, to diagnose the problem. But she’s also aware of the risk: that description can tip into something that functions like pornography, that the very act of putting sexual violence into words can, in some registers, become a form of circulation rather than a form of witness.

Garcia invokes Nancy Bauer’s How to Do Things With Pornography here, and specifically Bauer’s claim that “to describe porn is to produce porn.” Garcia takes it seriously enough to ask herself: how can she convey the horror of what was done to Gisèle Pelicot without making that horror available for the wrong kind of consumption? I don’t think she fully resolves this, and I don’t think she’s meant to. But what I find valuable is that she names it.

It’s a tension that runs through a lot of feminist work on sexual violence. We can’t not describe it. Silence is its own kind of harm, its own erasure. And yet description is never neutral. It always carries a risk of amplification, of giving the violence more room to breathe than it deserves. Witness costs something. There’s no position outside that cost, there’s only the attempt to tend to the reality knowing the knowing the risk and working to mitigate the cost of bearing witness.

On Objectification

Right after this discussion, Garcia makes a point about objectification. She can’t not. Gisèle Pelicot was definitely treated like an object— by her husband, by her other rapists, in the courtroom. Garcia writes that pornography is based on the idea that the objectification of others is sexually arousing, that objectification erodes the humanity and dignity of the other person. She’s right that this is what’s at stake in Gisèle Pelicot’s experience. That much is not in question.

I want to flag something that feminist discourse on objectification has often glossed over, and that I think matters for how we do this analysis well: objectification is not a single thing. Most feminist work on the topic, including work I otherwise find valuable, often only talks about objectification as a form of violence, as something done to a person that diminishes them. But being a sexual object is a general feature of sexual desire, and it’s not always bad.

The tradition of existential phenomenology reminds us of something important: we are always objects for others. That’s not an aberration of intersubjective life; it’s a condition of it. To be in the world with other people is to be seen, appraised, categorized, desired even. It is to exist as an object in someone else’s field of experience. The question isn’t whether objectification happens to someone, but whether we are also, simultaneously, subjects.

Let’s be honest: there are moments when being objectified is actively wanted. When someone says “you’re such a hot piece of ass” and the person on the receiving end is into it, even if they didn’t say “tell me I’m a hot piece of ass” but they receive it with pleasure and say as much so as to give consent to being seen as a hot piece of ass— that’s objectification, and it doesn’t feel like an assault on dignity. Pleasurable objectification holds both dimensions at once: I am an object for you and a subject with you. Those two things aren’t in contradiction.

This matters because when feminist discourse collapses all objectification into a single harmful form, a few things happen. First, we misdiagnose the harm— locating the problem in the act of treating someone as a sexual object, rather than in the annihilation of their subjectivity. Second, we hand an easy rhetorical weapon to people who want to dismiss feminist sexual ethics as puritanical or out of touch. And third, we make it harder, not easier, to articulate what was so devastating about what happened to Gisèle Pelicot.

What was done to her wasn’t objectification in the sense of “someone found her sexually desirable.” Her subjectivity wasn’t set aside or ignored; it was made structurally impossible. She wasn’t there to be seen at all. That’s a specific form of objectification, and it deserves a precise name.

BUT, I understand why Garcia doesn’t pause here. It’s not where the book’s argument lives, and opening this up risks distraction at exactly the wrong moment. AND< I think feminist sexual ethics has to be honest about the pleasures and the complexity of objectification if we want to accurately name what its most harmful forms actually do.

Normal Men

In the chapters “The Normal and the Pathological,” Garcia does something I find unsettling in the best way.

As Garcia points out, the psychiatric experts called to testify in the trial are almost unanimous: the men were in full possession of their faculties. They are not pathological. Garcia also watches the defense try, repeatedly, to argue otherwise, to find pathology somewhere, because pathology would mean diminished responsibility, which would mean shorter sentences, which would mean something closer to acquittal. Meanwhile the men themselves insist their desires are normal, their sexuality is normal, that nothing about what they did falls outside the range of what men do.

Garcia’s worry, watching all of this, isn’t that the experts are wrong. It’s that the entire search for pathology, even when it fails, reinforces a narrow and unexamined idea of what “normal” sexuality looks like, without ever questioning whether that norm itself might be the problem.

If rape happens a lot, statistically speaking, then the men in that courtroom are normal. And the psychiatric experts have confirmed they’re normal in the clinical sense too. So what norm, exactly, does a man who rapes fall outside of? And then, of course, there are the rapists themselves who insist they’re not rapists, that they’re desires and “urges” are normal, except for the fact that Gisèle Pelicot’s age “made them look like perverts” (pg. 112). What I appreciate about Garcia’s discussion in this chapter is how she exposes how the frame of normality and pathology work to “give up on understanding how a man can do what he did” (pg. 107). Normal men doing statistically normal things….

Your turn — what got you? What questions are you bringing to the Live with Garcia on June 10th?

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There’s a respectability pivot at stake when polyamory gets framed as not really being about sex. And yes, even when a person practicing nonmonogamy does it.

The BBC article profiles someone named Naomi, who insists that polyamory is “not based around sex, it’s about a lot more than that.”

I get what the profile is doing. There are a lot of harmful misconceptions about polyamory floating around that are used to dismiss and pathologize non-monogamy. This profile confronts the stereotype that poly people just want to sleep around. In that context, pushing back makes sense, and is important. When done well, polyamory involves emotional depth, commitment, and sometimes shared calendars that are not only helpful but a masterclass in relational coordination and care. Monogamy doesn’t have anything on the kinds of tending that polyamory requires.

But even if, for some people, it isn’t about sex, there’s an implication in centering this experience, in insisting on it: if no monogamy is “just about sex” we’d have a problem. A relations “just about sex,” without the scaffolding of long-term meaningful relationship, isn’t quite enough to justify and validate nonmonogamy. That nonmonogamous relationships need the emotional credentials or scheduling credentials to prove that they are in it for more than sex.

The profile doesn’t frame it as a matter of respectability. Naomi doesn’t say it explicitly. But I’m calling it a respectability pivot because it’s sidelining sex, and sex with multiple people is a key feature of polyamory. What this sidelining does is a classic move of neoliberal sexual politics. We’re not threatening, we’re just like you, we love deeply and schedule carefully and feel jealousy too. Love is love. And sure, it works. In a way. Maybe it makes polyamory more legible to the masses. It’s seen as more like the monogamous couples who juggle busy, packed calendars. We’re not sexual deviants. We’re honest, normal Google calendar users with great organizational skills.

What gets left behind in this framing of polyamory is sex. Or more precisely, the legitimacy of sex as a reason, a value, an organizing principle of a life. The idea that sex itself might be enough, not a gateway to something more meaningful but is the thing that fuels meaningful connection. And even granting that polyamory centers love—it’s right there in the name—sex with multiple people is still part of what makes it structurally distinct. Not every polyamorous person is having sex with multiple partners, but non-monogamy opens that possibility in a way monogamy doesn’t. That’s not incidental to polyamory. For many people it’s the point. It's something to acknowledge and embrace, not decenter, even if it's not your version.

The article mentions, almost in passing, that a good chunk of the polyamory community is asexual—that sex isn’t their priority, and they’re looking for emotional support and companionship. This is completely valid and worth knowing. Asexuality pushes back on the assumption that all intimacy is sexual, so it deserves acknowledgment on its own terms, not just as evidence that polyamory isn’t about sex. But notice what’s happening in the logic here: asexuality is offered as further evidence that polyamory transcends the merely sexual. The spectrum goes from “not about sex at all” to “also about more than sex.” What drops out is the person for whom sex is genuinely central, not as a symptom of something unserious, but as a value they’re organizing their intimate life around. That person doesn’t get the good press. They’re the stereotype the article works against.

I’m not saying that all versions of non-monogamy are sexually motivated. I’m saying that the urge to prove it isn’t—to lead with the calendar and the emotional depth and the meaningful relationships—is itself shaped by norms that make sex something to be explained away rather than claimed and that treat sex as an acceptable foundation for a life and relationships only when it’s dressed in the right clothes.

How we talk about sex and sexuality is never neutral. It can reflect, reproduce, or resist a particular vision of the good life.

So fine, good organizational skills are great. And maybe that’s what polyamory is truly about for some people. But so is wanting sex with multiple people. Neither needs to apologize for the other.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re finishing Chapter 3 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 95-103.

First Line: “The customs of the Greeks are very similar….”

Last Line: “...she is free ‘for nothing.’”

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“The customs of the Greeks are very similar to the Oriental ones yet they do not practice polygamy. No one knows exactly why. Maintaining a harem always entails heavy costs: only the ostentatious Solomon, the sultans from The Thousand and One Nights, kings, chiefs, or rich property owners could afford the luxury of a vast seraglio; an ordinary man had to be satisfied with three or four women; a peasant rarely possessed more than two.” (pg. 95)

Despite the word choice we now cringe at, Beauvoir is noting that Greek monogamy is less a moral achievement than an economic one. Polygamy was always a luxury of the wealthy, and the Greeks simply didn’t institutionalize what most men couldn’t afford anyway.

It’s a characteristically materialist move here. What looks like a cultural or ethical difference between societies turns out to be largely a question of resources.

“She spends her whole life as a minor; she is under the control of her guardian: either her father, or her husband, or her husband’s heir or, by default, the state, represented by public officials; here are her masters, and they use her like merchandise, the guardian’s control extending over both her person and her property; the guardian can transmit her rights as he wishes: the father gives her daughter up for adoption or in marriage; the husband can repudiate his wife and hand her over to another husband.” (pg. 95)

This is likely a reality we’re familiar with now. Beauvoir’s cataloguing how Greek law made woman a permanent minor. She never passes from dependence into personhood, just from one “master” to another.

The focus on Greece is important—she’s shedding light on the origins of Western society. So the significance here is that she’s like listen, male domination is not a matter of barbarism or backwardness but the law of one of the civilizations Western culture idealizes most.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting Chapter 3 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 90-95

First Line: “Once woman is dethroned by the advent of private property…”

Last Line: “...woman’s role in public life was a secondary one, and in private life, fidelity was required of her without reciprocity.”

Reading Schedule

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Before we begin: Remember that Chapter 2 narrates the emergence of private property and how women become the Other in relation to that emergence. The point being both to show that (and how) women’s situation is not essential, but contingent, i.e., historical, economic, etc. Chapter 3 begins by focusing on how women’s status is encoded into the family. Across this chapter, the through line is that women’s oppression is always backed by economic and legal arrangements that give men a material interest in maintaining it.

Alright, let’s get into it.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

Read more