Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir looks into the biology of the female body because for a long time, people have defined women in biological terms only. She addresses this because just by looking at the female animals of a few selective species, one could apply those traits to women and have a justification for their supposed inferiority. For example, the termite queen that rules over enslaved males, the praying mantis which eats the male after mating, the tigress that "beds down slavishly under the imperial embrace of the male". Some men will use these examples from the animal kingdom to explain why they feel hostility towards women.
There are many historical ideas regarding sexual reproduction; one of which is the belief held by some biologists that even in species which can reproduce asexually, there still needs to be occasional times where fertilization is needed to "renew the vigor of the race". They believe that if a species goes too long without the mixing of hereditary materials from the male and female, it will be weakened and may die out. Based on this view, it seems that sexuality is a necessity in higher and more complex forms of life. However, today this view has been for the most part rejected. "Research has proved that under suitable conditions, asexual multiplications can go on indefinitley without noticeable degeneratioin... more and more daring experiments in parthenogenisis are being performed, and in many species the male appears to be fundamentally unnecessary." (Parthenogenesis is when the egg of a virgin female develops into an embryo without fertilization by the male.)
Also while the existence of the sperm and egg, two highly different reproductive cells, might seem to prove that there should exist two distinct sexes, this is not always the case. Sometimes they are produced in the same animals, which usually occurs in plants and the lower animals. Hermaphrodites have long been acknowledged in philosophical thought. According to the Platonic myth, at the beginning, there were females, males, and hermaphrodites, each with 2 faces, 4 arms and legs, and 2 conjoined bodies. At a certain time they were split in two and since then each half seeks to find it's formerly conjoined half.
There have been a variety of beliefs/social myths regarding the the respective functions of the two sexes. Many of these had no scientific basis. It was long thought that the father plays no part in conception. This is still believed in some primitive, matriarchical societies. However, with the beginning of patriarchical institutions, men laid "eager claim" to their role in the event. The mother still had to have a role in procreation, but now, her only task was to carry and nurture the living seed that had already been provided by the father. "Aristotle fancied that the fetus arose from the union of sperm and menstrual blood, woman furnishing only passive matter while the male principle contributed force, movement, activity, life. Hippocrates held a similar belief, that there were two kinds of 'seed'; the weak one, or female, and the strong one, or male.
At the end of the 17th century, ovaries were discovered in the female body, except they were called female testicles. In the late 1600's, two scientists said that the sperm contained a homunculus, or little man inside of them. Under these imaginative hypothesis, woman was reduced to the role of nourishing an "active, living principle already preformed in perfection". Eventually, the reality of conception was discovered, the equivalence of the nuclei of the sperm and egg were established, however, Aristotles ideas still held onto. There was still the pervasive belief that there was a active sex and a passive one, and of course, the female is the passive one. However, among some scientist today, there is the opposite belief that really the egg is the active one while the sperm may be quite unnecessary because there have been experiments that have shown that in some species, the egg will start developing into an embryo at the stimulus of an acid or even a needle prick.
De Beauvoir writes that "if the body is not a thing, it is a situation." This is because the body is an instrument we use to live in this world, and "the world is bound to be a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another." Merleau-Ponty points out that man is not a natural species, he is a historical idea. Man is defined as a being who is not fixed; he makes himself what he is.
She concludes by saying that we cannot define the female in purely biological terms, but instead must take in the influences of society, psychology, ecological contexts. The reasons for why women are the Other (the secondary) are complex and cannot just be caused by her biology.

so... don't open doors for girls.

I love it when the root meanings of words are explored and picked apart. (It's called etymology) So Frye picks apart the word 'oppression'. She says that the root of the word is 'press', rather obvious, but I didn't think of it. "Presses are used to mold things, or flatten them, or reduce them in bulk... Something pressed is caught between things that restrain, restrict, or prevent an object's movement or mobility. Mold. Immobilize. Reduce. "
I believe that women have been oppressed throught out the history of the world, and in every culture. Oppressed people or groups often experience the double bind. Situations where no matter what they do, they are criticized for. One example Frye gives is the sexual double bind on young women. First, if a young woman is sexually active, she is criticized by family, peers, religious people, but if she isn't sexually active, she is criticized by another set of people for being frigid or a prude. On the one hand, she'll be thought of as a whore, on the other, too uptight. Her sex life, or lack of can also be related to rape. For example, if she is sexually active, and then gets raped, some might say that she liked it and did something to invite it since she has had sex before. Yet, if she's a virgin, some will still believe that she liked it or needed it since she was supposedly "repressed and frustrated" before. Therefore, the woman just can't win. These two ways of thinking make it possible for someone to rationalize the offense and conclude that she wasn't raped after all since in both scenarios, the woman enjoyed it.
I'm sure most people don't think like that, but that way of thinking exists in the world and has existed for a while. For example, here is a quote by Ovid recorded in 5 AD:
"You may use force; women like you to use it, they often wish to give unwillingly what they like to give. She whom a sudden assault has taken by storm is pleased, and counts the audacity as a compliment. "
What a messed up thought process.

test review

Lugones writes half in Spanish and half in English. At first, I thought this was very interesting; new and different, and I would read through the spanish parts and wonder what it might mean. However, as I read more of the article, it became a distraction, because I'd be in the middle of an english paragraph, and trying to make sense of it, and then suddenlly there's a part in spanish which caused me to lose my focus and have to skip ahead to find where the english begins again. It was also rather frustrating to not know what she was writing in Spanish.
I think what Lugones meant by ethnocentrism is when one has beliefs about one's own cultural superiority, or in other words, that their culture is better than another's culture. This can be done by acting as though other cultures do not exist, or by stereotyping other cultures. To quote her exact words, "the explicit and arrogantly held action-guiding belief that one's culture and cultural ways are superior to others'; or the disrespectful, lazy, arrogant indifference to other cultures that devalues them through not seeing appreciatively any culture or cultural ways except one's own when one could do otherwise; or the disrespectful, lazy, arrogant indifferent that devalues other cultures through stereotyping of them or through non-reflective, self- satisfied acceptance of such stereotypes. "
Her definition of racism was kind of controversial, at least for one person in my class who was very upset by it. Her definition is "one's affirmation of or acquiescence to or lack of recognition of the structures and mechanisms of the racial state; ( so, one's approval of, or not recognizing how race influences and affects different areas of people's lives) one's lack of awareness of or blindness or indifference to one's being racialized; one's affirmation of, indifference or blindness to the harm that the racial state inflicts on some of its members." Basically, she's saying that anyone who doesn't recognize the strong influence that race plays is in fact, racist. I understand what she's saying. I think it's similar to the old adage of 'if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem'. The more one is not aware of something, the more easily that person will be influenced by it.
She says that one form of incompetance she sees in white people is 'infantilization of judgement'. She says this is a form of ethnocentric racism because white women will often retreat into a "child-like" state where they can be ignorant of certain things and not be held responsible for their ignorance.