Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986), whom we’ve discussed a little in another article, was born and raised in France. She ended up hanging out with (and having a very open relationship with) Jean-Paul Sartre, another huge name in the existentialist movement going on at the time. The two, while behaving with questionable ethics in their professional lives, were definitely in the set of 20th century philosophical rockstars.

In her most important work, The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir blows up the status quo, explaining how women live and behave in a society that does not treat them with the same respect as men. The nearly 800-page volume rocked the world at the time because it minutely detailed what it is like to be a woman: that is, to use her most famous quotation, “One is not born, but rather one becomes a woman.”

One Becomes a Woman

For Beauvoir, certain things about men and women are very biological, but according to her, a lot of the behaviors we display are mandated by the society in which we live. Behaviors and gender roles are modeled and controlled by our culture, and most of us obey them religiously. Those who don’t are seen as weird or wrong, and get punished for our perceived wrongness, in various ways.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir explains that one “becomes a woman.” The phrase, often misconstrued in inspirational quotes without context, shares something about the nature of gender. One becomes a woman not from growing up from a girl, but from learning the appropriate behaviors that make her into a woman, an acceptable placeholder in society. For Beauvoir, the term “woman” is a social position rather than something to do with the female biological sex.

To better explain, when they are born, girls do not know how to act in the social role of girl. They are taught to play with dolls, for instance, or to like the color pink. They are taught to start nurturing, while boys are taught to embrace violence in sports and play. Beauvoir shares an example of this in her explanation of the subject/object conundrum with girls and boys.

Girls Will Be Girls, Etc.

A large part of The Second Sex is about “lived experience,” that is, what a woman faces on the daily. Lived experience is very practical, very mundane. In some respects, it can be autobiographical, but in philosophy of this time period, lived experience is often based on research or statistics. Simone de Beauvoir used a lot of psychological and other academic research at the time.

In the section on “Childhood,” Beauvoir explains what it is like for a Western European girl at the time, versus the lived experience of a boy of the time. She talks about the role of the doll in the life of a girl, juxtaposing it with the role of the penis for the boy.

According to Simone de Beauvoir, the boy engages in a certain autonomy by being able to manipulate his penis, taking pride in his urination, the size of the member, and later, the quality of its erection. His penis is an extension of himself, something in which he can see himself, his own subjecthood.

A girl, however, does not possess this part. As a result, while the boy is encouraged to rejoice in the fact that he has a penis, the girl is shamed for her part, and it is hidden away, ignored and unseen. The girl, Beauvoir says, instead, is given a doll. The doll is her projection of herself, and she is the projection of the doll.

The doll is a pliant, submissive object. It flops around and does what anyone makes it do. In playing with the doll, the girl sees what she should aspire to: to become “a marvellous doll.” This, writes Beauvoir, is how she begins the transformation into a woman. She becomes, like a doll, an object, something that others act upon. She is told that she is not supposed to engage in her own autonomy. In a sense, while her experience is her own, her actions are not, because she is encouraged to not act.

Subject vs. Object: How Does It Relate to Feminism?

In philosophy, especially the existentialism of the 20th century, the idea of being a subject in one’s own life is super important. Subjects are actors, that is, they are responsible for their own decisions, and they make their own decisions. This is closely tied to the idea of agency, or being an actor in one’s own life. Earlier, Christian thinkers would tie this to the idea of free will, that we all have the ability to choose what we do, unfettered.

For Simone de Beauvoir’s boo, Jean-Paul Sartre, this agency, this idea of being the subject in one’s own life, is essential. Sartre considers the absurdity and meaning of life, and comes to the conclusion that there really isn’t an overarching meaning, but instead of embracing the absurdity, we should be actors in our own life, and live authentically, go by our own code of ethics, our own values system. In that case, we can be free within the confines of a life that has only the meaning we ascribe to it.

And Beauvoir uses this term of subject, the actor, when talking about the relationship that women have with the world, versus that of men. In The Second Sex, men are the subjects, the actors in the world. They end up making all the decisions, doing all the cool stuff in the world. Women are expected to be passive, to be receptive to what men do to them. They are meant to look pretty, to be available for the delectation of men.

In short, women are the “second sex,” because they are secondary to men, because they are perceived as objects in society, things which are acted upon, rather than acting. And this is how one “becomes a woman.” One accepts the fact that she is an object, and becomes the object. It is not necessarily how she is, in her essence, but rather the role she must play in a society that would not otherwise accept her.

Think of it like this, in terms of mid-century French society. The norm for women at the time was to become housewives, to marry men and become a housekeeper and mother. Women tend to the matters of the house and become available for their husbands, but the husbands make the decisions and do the labor outside of the house. This is similar in other societies during the middle of the 20th century, and in some respects more rigid.

You can see the reason why Beauvoir and others during the 20th century might take issue with the position in which women were placed, consistently having to do the unpaid labor of housework and childbearing and rearing, yet at the same time, having to maintain a physically pleasing appearance.

The Doll and the Object

And this is where we get back to where we started: the doll. As Beauvoir wrote prior, girls of the time had a doll thrown at them and were expected to become doll-like themselves. What does this entail?

Think, perhaps, of Barbie. There is a lot of feminist material written about that iconic doll. The one with the thin waist, the elegant chest, and the hips that were so hourglass that it made it impossible to slide pants on her. (I swear, Barbie! Get some better fitting pants . . .) In playing with Barbie (who post-dates The Second Sexby a decade), girls are taught standards of beauty to aspire to, and what to expect as a woman.

Barbie, for instance, had a glamorous house (if you were lucky), and everything she owned was pink. She had an impossible but admirable figure. Her feet, even, were made for toe-walking because she was expected to wear heels. As I grew up in the 90s, people began speaking of the problematic aspects of this particular doll, and its relation to eating disorders and other body image issues with young girls.

And while Barbie is a good example of a doll off which we often mirror ourselves at a young age, of course the doll that Beauvoir describes could be anything, even a crudely carved block of wood. But it is this thing that early on gives girls the idea that they need to become the doll.

And so, as a result, the girl becomes the woman, made up beautifully, dressed to perfection, and made to be used. Being an object makes the woman a resource to be exploited, a product to be consumed. She has to be sexy but demure. The woman who titters but does not go too far when it comes to sex. Her desires are tied to those of a man. And as a result, the subject can exploit her as an object.

It is important to know here that this criticism is not directed at men, because societal and cultural norms are beyond men and women. After a while, it is a norm, a practice that a society takes as a whole, and so, it is not a condemnation of men as such for existing within a society that encourages them to exploit women. It is not a condemnation of the women who portray these parts, as a way to survive. It is a condemnation of a societal norm.

What is later known as objectification is an extremely important concept, because in objectifying someone (in this case, women), we turn them into things rather than people who have agency, subjectivity, and who are actors in the world. In treating women as objects, Beauvoir (and later others) asserts, we are doing them a disservice. We are not treating them as humans.

And this is where we return to the doll once more. The doll does not have a brain nor ambition (blonde or otherwise). The doll cannot think or act. It is acted upon in play. Human beings, whatever their gender, are not at all like this, and should not be treated as though they are objects without brains. And this, whatever you may think about the juxtaposition of 20th century boy and girl, is the point.

Simone de Beauvoir: A Jumping Off Point

In 2007 or so, as a baby feminist and undergrad, I decided to look through some magazines in the student lounge. I thought to myself, “Damn, these ads are pretty sexist and exploitative.” I had just read some of The Second Sex for the first time, and found a flyer for an undergrad philosophy conference. I had the idea for my paper!

Apologies to my alma mater, but I tore advertisements from several magazines frenetically. I made copies of them and added them to a paper in which I discussed objectification in modern advertising. The truth of the matter is, it was pretty bad. I still remember a MAC ad for a charitable AIDS campaign, which featured the burlesque star Dita von Teese in her iconic martini glass. I thought to myself, “Well, that’s not quite appropriate.”

I presented the paper, one of two women at the small student conference, to some acclaim, but to very little understanding from the mostly male crowd. The other woman had presented a more “radical” feminist paper, and got criticized by the young men there, to an unfair extent, I recall. I swallowed hard, then read my paper.

The one question that I recall getting, nearly 20 years ago, was, “But aren’t men objectified too? Like, in porn, dudes aren’t really in the picture, but their schlongs are.” That question still haunts me to this day for multiple reasons, because (1) pornography was different back then, in the sense that it wasn’t as easy to access, and as an asexual person, I did not access it, and (2) I was unsatisfied with my response, in which I blandly – and in a frankly conciliatory manner – said that they could be objectified too, as it’s not limited to women.

And it’s true, objectification is not limited to women. We often objectify people we don’t understand. We objectify people when we lump them into categories and dehumanize them so that we can justify our own cruel actions. Sexual objectification, however, which is specifically what Beauvoir talks about, is verytraditionally (and also currently) done mainly to women and female-presenting people.

In rethinking about this question, if I had that same audience in front of me now, I would say that it is not the same, because there are several reasons why (especially in straight pornography) men’s bodies are mostly hidden. The first is that pornography is entertainment, and as such, there is an element of fantasy. In this, eliminating the face of the male performer allows the voyeur more fodder to imagine himself as the male performer, the actor.

The second is that the woman is portrayed to minute detail and featured prominently in the videography because she is the object. This is a part of the process of objectification. She is the item to be consumed, the decor to be displayed. That is why she is more visible, in many cases, than her male performer(s).

I think it’s easy to look at Beauvoir’s theory of objectification and get angry, in multiple ways. For sure, the mid-century housewife is mostly not a thing now, and the modern housewife looks a lot different from the woman reduced to taking pills to be complacent. When I’ve had conversations about this, from men and others, online and off, there is a lot of discomfort and anger, because men do not want to believe they are doing something wrong, and women do not want to believe they are being played.

In truth, we should look at the theory as a jumping off point for a conversation about how we can make things better for everyone. We should think about it in the sense of being responsible and compassionate people who treat others as fellow human beings acting in the world, rather than something we can use and exploit. In my personal opinion, the idea of objectification is not simply a condemnation of a society. It is a call to do better.