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122-422: It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. – Camille Paglia Paglia's discovery of Simone de Beauvoir 's The Second Sex in 1963 inspired her to write a book larger in scope. Sexual Personae began to take shape in essays Paglia wrote in college between 1964 and 1968. The title was inspired by Ingmar Bergman 's film Persona , which Paglia saw on its American release in 1968. The book

244-614: A "shrewd and alarming sexual definition of charisma", though he also wrote that its "powerful sexual reductiveness ... necessarily produces distortions when applied to the personality of any prophet whosoever." Valerie Steele wrote, "Paglia has been attacked as an academic conservative, in league with Allan Bloom and other defenders of the 'Western canon,' but no conservative would be so explicitly approving of pornography, homosexuality, and rock-and-roll." The literature professor Robert Alter wrote in Arion , "[O]n purely stylistic grounds, this

366-399: A 1975 interview with Betty Friedan if she would support a minimum wage for women who do housework, Beauvoir answered: "No, we don’t believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It

488-605: A character that was a symbol of sexual ambiguity when he launched the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Spiders from Mars . Marc Bolan , the other pioneer of glam rock , performed on the BBC's Top of the Pops in 1971 wearing glitter and satins, with The Independent stating his appearance "permitted a generation of teeny-boppers to begin playing with the idea of androgyny". The 1973 West End musical The Rocky Horror Show also depicted sexual fluidity. Continuing into

610-431: A chic bob, which gave women an androgynous look. Coco Chanel, who had a love for wearing trousers herself, created trouser designs for women such as beach pajamas and horse-riding attire. During the 1930s, glamorous actresses such as Marlene Dietrich fascinated and shocked many with their strong desire to wear trousers and adopt the androgynous style. Dietrich is remembered as one of the first actresses to wear trousers in

732-559: A complex syntax." The jurist Richard Posner called Sexual Personae "an insightful book, written in a lively manner, though opinionated, uneven, and often difficult to follow", and compared it to Allan Bloom 's The Closing of the American Mind (1987), writing that they are both examples of "difficult academic works that mysteriously strike a chord with a broad public." The anthropologist Melvin Konner wrote that Sexual Personae

854-558: A couple for the next 51 years, until his death in 1980. After they were confronted by her father, Sartre asked her to marry him on a provisional basis. One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a two-year lease". Though Beauvoir wrote, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry", scholars point out that her ideal relationships described in The Second Sex and elsewhere bore little resemblance to

976-444: A culture or relationship is androgynous is to say that it lacks rigid gender roles , or has blurred lines between gender roles. The word genderqueer is often used by androgynous individuals to refer to themselves, but the terms genderqueer and androgynous are neither equivalent nor interchangeable. Genderqueer , by virtue of its ties with queer culture, carries sociopolitical connotations that androgyny does not carry. For

1098-879: A debt to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung . Her other major influences were Sir James George Frazer 's The Golden Bough (1890), Jane Harrison 's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Oswald Spengler 's The Decline of the West (1918), D. H. Lawrence 's Women in Love (1920), Sándor Ferenczi 's Thalassa (1924), the works of literary critics G. Wilson Knight and Harold Bloom , Erich Neumann 's The Great Mother (1955) and The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), Kenneth Clark 's The Nude (1956), Gaston Bachelard 's The Poetics of Space (1958), Norman O. Brown 's Life Against Death (1959) and Love's Body (1966), and Leslie Fiedler 's Love and Death in

1220-524: A deranged girl, published in English under the title A Disgraceful Affair ) that, while a student at Lycée Molière, she was sexually exploited by her teacher Beauvoir, who was in her 30s. Sartre and Beauvoir both groomed and sexually abused Lamblin. Bianca wrote her Mémoires in response to the posthumous 1990 publication of Jean-Paul Sartre's Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres: 1926-1963 (Letters to Castor and other friends), in which she noted that she

1342-473: A feminist in 1972 in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur . In 2018, the manuscript pages of Le Deuxième Sexe were published. Beauvoir published her first novel She Came to Stay in 1943. It has been assumed that it is inspired by her and Sartre's sexual relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz . Olga was one of her students in the Rouen secondary school where Beauvoir taught during

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1464-414: A feminist one: "One is not born but becomes a woman" (French: "On ne naît pas femme, on le devient"). With this famous phrase, Beauvoir first articulated what has come to be known as the sex-gender distinction , that is, the distinction between biological sex and the social and historical construction of gender and its attendant stereotypes. Beauvoir argues that "the fundamental source of women's oppression

1586-642: A form of resistance to the bio-heteronormative family unit. Beauvoir died of pneumonia on 14 April 1986 in Paris, aged 78. She is buried next to Sartre at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. She was honored as a figure at the forefront of the struggle for women's rights around the time of her passing. The Second Sex , first published in 1949 in French as Le Deuxième Sexe , turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into

1708-479: A letter of protest from Paglia, Vendler denied that Sexual Personae contained poetry criticism. The critic Terry Teachout , in The New York Times , called Sexual Personae flawed but "every bit as intellectually stimulating as it is exasperating". The novelist Anthony Burgess called Sexual Personae a "fine, disturbing book. It seeks to attack the reader's emotions as well as his/her prejudices. It

1830-428: A living for herself. She first worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss , when all three completed their practice teaching requirements at the same secondary school. Although not officially enrolled, she sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination that serves as a national ranking of students. It

1952-678: A male form of dress, frowned upon for women. However, during the 19th century, female spies were introduced and Vivandières wore a certain uniform with a dress over trousers. Women activists during that time would also decide to wear trousers, for example Luisa Capetillo , a women's rights activist and the first woman in Puerto Rico to wear trousers in public. In the 20th century, starting around World War I traditional gender roles blurred and fashion pioneers such as Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel introduced trousers to women's fashion. The "flapper style" for women of this era included trousers and

2074-428: A novella-length autobiography, A Very Easy Death , covering the time she spent visiting her aging mother, who was dying of cancer. The novella brings up questions of ethical concerns with truth-telling in doctor-patient relationships. Her 1970 long essay La Vieillesse ( The Coming of Age ) is a rare instance of an intellectual meditation on the decline and solitude all humans experience if they do not die before about

2196-588: A painful account of Sartre's last years. In the opening of Adieux , Beauvoir notes that it is the only major published work of hers which Sartre did not read before its publication. | She contributed the piece "Feminism - Alive, Well, and in Constant Danger" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology , edited by Robin Morgan . After Sartre died in 1980, Beauvoir published his letters to her with edits to spare

2318-424: A perfect merging of the sexes that predated the current corrupted world and/or was the utopia of the next – is also important in some strains of Rosicrucianism and in philosophical traditions such as Swedenborgianism and Theosophy . Twentieth century architect Claude Fayette Bragdon expressed the concept mathematically as a magic square , using it as building block in many of his most noted buildings . In

2440-525: A personal basis rather than on the basis of masculinity, femininity, or androgyny. In agenderism , the division of people into women and men (in the psychical sense), is considered erroneous and artificial. Agendered individuals are those who reject gender labeling in conception of self-identity and other matters. They see their subjectivity through the term person instead of woman or man . According to E. O. Wright, genderless people can have traits, behaviors and dispositions that correspond to what

2562-510: A play based on Algren, Beauvoir, and Sartre's triangular relationship. The play was stage read in 1999 in Chicago. Beauvoir also wrote a four-volume autobiography, consisting of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter , The Prime of Life , Force of Circumstance (sometimes published in two volumes in English translation: After the War and Hard Times ), and All Said and Done . In 1964 Beauvoir published

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2684-493: A political journal that Sartre founded along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books. Beauvoir remained an editor until her death. However, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a longstanding feud, which led Merleau-Ponty to leave Les Temps modernes . Beauvoir sided with Sartre and ceased to associate with Merleau-Ponty. In Beauvoir's later years, she hosted

2806-552: A population of undergrad students. Similar to the BSRI, the PAQ labeled androgynous individuals as people who ranked highly in both the areas of masculinity and femininity. However, Spence and Helmreich considered androgyny to be a descriptor of high levels of masculinity and femininity as opposed to a category in and of itself. Historically, the word androgynous was applied to humans with a mixture of male and female sex characteristics, and

2928-548: A premiere. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the women's liberation movement is likely to have contributed to ideas and influenced fashion designers, such as Yves Saint Laurent . Yves Saint Laurent designed the Le Smoking suit and introduced it in 1966, while Helmut Newton 's erotized androgynous photographs of the suit made it iconic and a classic. Elvis Presley introduced an androgynous style in rock'n'roll. His pretty face and use of eye makeup often made people think he

3050-677: A profoundly anti-feminist stance." Molly Ivins wrote a critical review of Sexual Personae , accusing Paglia of historical inaccuracy, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalizations . Teresa Ebert denounced the book as "deeply misogynist and rancorous" in the Women's Review of Books , writing that Paglia uses a biological basis to "justify male domination, violence, and superiority in Western culture." English professor Sandra Gilbert described Sexual Personae as "markedly monomaniacal ... bloated, repetitious" and "awkwardly written," adding that it

3172-511: A single immortal – provided a frame of reference used in Western culture for centuries. Androgyny and homosexuality are also seen in Plato's Symposium , in a myth where humanity started as three sexes: male-male people that descended from the sun, female-female people who descended from Earth, and male-female people who came from the Moon. This is one of the earlier written references to androgyny - and

3294-642: A sister, Hélène , who was born two years later, on June 6, 1910. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I , and Françoise insisted the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir was intellectually precocious, fueled by her father's encouragement; he reportedly would boast, "Simone thinks like a man!" Because of her family's straitened circumstances, she could no longer rely on her dowry , and like other middle-class girls of her age, her marriage opportunities were put at risk. She took this opportunity to take steps towards earning

3416-680: A society, and rather focus on what behavior is most effective within the situational circumstance. Some non-Western cultures recognize additional androgynous gender identities, called third genders . Gender expression that includes a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics can be described as androgynous. The categories of masculine and feminine in gender expression are socially constructed , and rely on shared conceptions of clothing, behavior, communication style, and other aspects of presentation. In some cultures, androgynous gender expression has been celebrated, while in others, androgynous expression has been limited or suppressed. To say that

3538-461: A survey than a curiously ornate harangue. Her percussive style—one short declarative sentence after another—eventually wearies the reader; her diction functions not so much to elicit the secrets of books as to hammer them into submission... The weary reader longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation; there is little sense, in her uncompanionable prose, of exploration occurring before our eyes, of tentative motions of thought reflected in

3660-643: A t-shirt saying "Gender is Over," a riff on the John Lennon and Yoko Ono "War is Over" poster. Singer Billie Eilish has also openly called gender roles "ancient." Since her musical debut in 2016, Eilish has worn both traditionally masculine and feminine silhouettes, wearing a Marilyn Monroe inspired Oscar de la Renta gown to the Met Gala in 2021 to being referred to as a "hey mamas" lesbian after an appearance on Chicken Shop Date in 2024 where she wore an oversized tee, bandana, and backwards cap. In

3782-432: Is "a powerful account of gender as depicted in Western art and literature." In 2013, the singer David Bowie listed Sexual Personae among his 100 favorite books. Simone de Beauvoir Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir ( UK : / d ə ˈ b oʊ v w ɑːr / , US : / d ə b oʊ ˈ v w ɑːr / ; French: [simɔn də bovwaʁ] ; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986)

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3904-472: Is "so ' essentialist ' as to outbiologize even Freud." Gilbert accused Paglia of "vulgar homophobia " and said she deserved "moral contempt" and "loathes liberalism, egalitarianism, feminism, and Mother Nature." Martha Duffy wrote that the book had a " neoconservative cultural message" that was well-received, but rejected by many feminists. Beth Loffreda censured Paglia, writing, "She garners most of her publicity by loudly and nastily proclaiming everyone wrong on

4026-449: Is a bad one. Instead, she and Sartre entered into a lifelong "soul partnership", which was sexual but not exclusive, nor did it involve living together. She chose never to marry and never had children. This gave her the time to advance her education and engage in political causes, write and teach, and take lovers. Unfortunately, Beauvoir's prominent open relationships at times overshadowed her substantial academic reputation. A scholar who

4148-513: Is a way of forcing women in a certain direction", further stating that motherhood "should be a choice, and not a result of conditioning”. In about 1976, Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon made a trip to New York City in the United States to visit Kate Millett on her farm. In 1977, Beauvoir signed a petition along with other French intellectuals that supported the freeing of three arrested paedophiles . The petition explicitly addresses

4270-671: Is an immense tour de force." Gerald Gillespie called Sexual Personae "vigorous and capacious," and wrote of Paglia, "Her passion for her subject matter [...] radiates as a beacon of hope for the survival of the Western heritage beyond the current Babylonian captivity of the American academy." Christina Hoff Sommers wrote in Who Stole Feminism? (1994) that Sexual Personae should have led to Paglia being "acknowledged as an outstanding woman scholar even by those who take strong exception to her unfashionable views", and criticized

4392-894: Is an individual who has a high degree of both feminine (expressive) and masculine (instrumental) traits. A feminine individual is ranked high on feminine (expressive) traits and ranked low on masculine (instrumental) traits. A masculine individual is ranked high on instrumental traits and ranked low on expressive traits. An undifferentiated person is low on both feminine and masculine traits. According to Sandra Bem, androgynous individuals are more flexible and more mentally healthy than either masculine or feminine individuals; undifferentiated individuals are less competent. More recent research has debunked this idea, at least to some extent, and Bem herself has found weaknesses in her original pioneering work. Now she prefers to work with gender schema theory . One study found that masculine and androgynous individuals had higher expectations for being able to control

4514-416: Is androgynous may engage freely in what is seen as masculine or feminine behaviors as well as tasks. They may have a balanced identity that includes the virtues of both men and women and may disassociate the task with what gender they may be socially or physically assigned to. People who identify as androgynous typically disregard which traits are culturally constructed specifically for males and females within

4636-440: Is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation." Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the " immanence " to which they were previously resigned and reaching " transcendence ", a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and

4758-528: Is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity." Paglia seeks to demonstrate "the unity and continuity of western culture". Accepting the canonical Western tradition, she "rejects the modernist idea that culture has collapsed into meaningless fragments." Paglia argues that Christianity did not destroy paganism , which flourishes in art, eroticism, astrology , and popular culture. She examines antiquity ,

4880-552: Is currently viewed as feminine and masculine, and the mix of these would vary across persons. Nevertheless, it does not suggest that everyone would be androgynous in their identities and practices in the absence of gendered relations. What disappears in the idea of genderlessness is any expectation that some characteristics and dispositions are strictly attributed to a person of any biological sex. Throughout most of twentieth century Western history, social rules have restricted people's dress according to gender. Trousers were traditionally

5002-404: Is described as transforming men into women. The 2nd century CE Mishnah , a foundational text of Rabbinic Judaism , mentions the term androgynos 32 times. In one mention, Rabbi Meir describes the androgynos as "a creation of its own type, which the sages could not decide whether is male or female". The ancient Greek myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis , two divinities who fused into

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5124-405: Is its [femininity's] historical and social construction as the quintessential" Other. Beauvoir defines women as the "second sex" because women are defined as inferior to men. She pointed out that Aristotle argued women are "female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities", while Thomas Aquinas referred to women as "imperfect men" and the "incidental" being. She quotes "In itself, homosexuality

5246-428: Is normally associated with their given sex. Due to the possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics, androgynous individuals have access to a wider array of psychological competencies in regards to emotional regulation, communication styles, and situational adaptability. Androgynous individuals have also been associated with higher levels of creativity and mental health. The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI)

5368-424: Is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. [emphasis added] [...] Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of

5490-423: Is one of the few thoroughly enjoyable works of criticism written in the American language in the last couple of decades." He called the book "immensely ambitious, vastly erudite, feisty, often outrageous, and sometimes dazzlingly brilliant." Pat Righelato concluded, "Camille Paglia's syncretic theoretical enterprise invoking Frazer, Freud, Nietzsche, and Bloom, from anthropology to influence theory and psychobiography,

5612-437: Is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism . In the essay, Beauvoir clears up some inconsistencies that many, Sartre included, have found in major existentialist works such as Being and Nothingness . In The Ethics of Ambiguity , Beauvoir confronts the existentialist dilemma of absolute freedom vs. the constraints of circumstance. At the end of World War II, Beauvoir and Sartre edited Les Temps Modernes ,

5734-585: Is the main reason why I became an intellectual." Beauvoir pursued post-secondary education after completing her high school years at Cours Desir  [ fr ] . After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy at the age of seventeen in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique de Paris and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie  [ fr ] . She then studied philosophy at

5856-777: Is the possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics. Androgyny may be expressed with regard to biological sex or gender expression . When androgyny refers to mixed biological sex characteristics in humans, it often refers to conditions in which characteristics of both sexes are clearly expressed in a single individual, with fully developed sexual organs of both sexes, also called hermaphrodites. It also refers to intersex people, who are born with congenital variations that complicate assigning their sex at birth , but do not have fully developed sexual organs of both sexes. The term derives from Ancient Greek : ἀνδρόγυνος , from ἀνήρ , stem ἀνδρ - ( anér, andro- , meaning man) and γυνή ( gunē, gyné , meaning woman) through

5978-424: Is very learned. Each sentence jabs like a needle." Harold Bloom wrote, " Sexual Personae will be an enormous sensation of a book, in all of the better senses of ’sensation.’ There is no book comparable in scope, stance, design, or insight. It compels us to rethink the question of the literary representation of human sexuality." In The American Religion (1992), Bloom called it a "masterwork" and credited Paglia with

6100-654: The Latin : androgynus . Androgyny is attested from earliest history and across world cultures. In ancient Sumer , androgynous and intersex men were heavily involved in the cult of Inanna . A set of priests known as gala worked in Inanna's temples, where they performed elegies and lamentations. Gala took female names, spoke in the eme-sal dialect, which was traditionally reserved for women, and appear to have engaged in sexual acts with men . In later Mesopotamian cultures, kurgarrū and assinnu were servants of

6222-694: The Lycée Molière (Paris)  [ fr ] (1936–39). During the trial of Robert Brasillach Beauvoir was among a small number of prominent intellectuals advocating for his execution for 'intellectual crimes'. She defended this decision in her 1946 essay "An Eye for an Eye". Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre met during her college years. Intrigued by her determination as an educator, he intended to make their relationship romantic. However, she had no interest in doing so. She later changed her mind, and in October 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir became

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6344-675: The Marquis de Sade , Goethe, William Blake , Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley , John Keats , Honoré de Balzac , Théophile Gautier , Charles Baudelaire , Joris-Karl Huysmans , Brontë, Algernon Charles Swinburne , Walter Pater , Oscar Wilde , Edgar Allan Poe , Nathaniel Hawthorne , Herman Melville , Ralph Waldo Emerson , Walt Whitman , Henry James , and Emily Dickinson . The works of literature Paglia analyzes include Spenser's The Faerie Queene , Shakespeare's As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra , Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship , Coleridge's Rime of

6466-469: The Renaissance , and Romanticism from the late eighteenth century to 1900, contending that "Romanticism turns almost immediately into Decadence ." She believes that the "amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics" and that sex and nature are "brutal pagan forces." She also stresses the truth in sexual stereotypes and

6588-513: The Sorbonne and after completing her degree in 1928, wrote her Diplôme d'Études Supérieures Spécialisées  [ fr ] (roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis) on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg (the topic was "Le concept chez Leibniz" ["The Concept in Leibniz"]). Her studies of political philosophy through university influenced her to start thinking of societal concerns. Beauvoir

6710-467: The Women's Review of Books for calling the book "crackpot extremism" and feminist professors at Connecticut College for comparing it to Adolf Hitler 's Mein Kampf . The classical scholar Bruce Thornton called it "wild and brilliant", adding, "Even when she's wrong, Paglia is more interesting than any dozen poststructuralist clerks." The novelist John Updike wrote that Sexual Personae "feels less

6832-826: The neuter gender , lately started up among us. It is called a macaroni." An example is portrait artist Richard Cosway , referred to as "the Macaroni artist." In psychological study, various measures have been used to characterize gender, such as the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire . Masculine traits are categorized as agentic and instrumental, dealing with assertiveness and analytical skill. Feminine traits are categorized as communal and expressive, dealing with empathy and subjectivity. Androgynous individuals exhibit behavior that extends beyond what

6954-455: The planet Mercury and the botanical sign for hermaphrodite. That sign is now sometimes used for transgender people. Another common androgyny icon in the medieval and early modern period was the Rebis , a conjoined male and female figure, often with solar and lunar motifs. Still another symbol was what is today called sun cross , which united the cross (or saltire ) symbol for male with

7076-688: The variability hypothesis in evolutionary psychology : Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egoism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper. But already more conflicted in tone, another one of her main explanations for this asymmetry instead runs: Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius

7198-426: The "androgynous" look, with several current celebrities being hailed as creative trendsetters. The rise of the metrosexual in the first decade of the 2000s has also been described as a related phenomenon associated with this trend. Traditional gender stereotypes have been challenged and changed since the 1960s, which included the hippie movement and flower power . Artists in film such as Leonardo DiCaprio sported

7320-429: The "skinny" look in the 1990s, a departure from traditional masculinity, which resulted in the fad "Leo Mania". Musical stars such as Kurt Cobain of Nirvana , Andre 3000 , and the band Placebo have used clothing and makeup to popularize androgynous and genderqueer aesthetics throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. While the 1990s unrolled and fashion developed an affinity for unisex clothes, there

7442-483: The 'Affaire de Versailles', where three adult men, Dejager (age 45), Gallien (age 43), and Burckhardt (age 39) had sexual relations with minors of both sexes aged 12–13. When Things of the Spirit Come First , a set of short stories Beauvoir had written decades previously but had not considered worth publishing, was released in 1980. In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie des adieux ( A Farewell to Sartre ),

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7564-521: The 1930s inspired a whole generation of French thinkers, including Sartre, to discover Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit . However, Beauvoir, reading Hegel in German during the war, produced an original critique of his dialectic of consciousness. Beauvoir was bisexual , and her relationships with young women were controversial. French author Bianca Lamblin (originally Bianca Bienenfeld) wrote in her book Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée (Memoirs of

7686-575: The 1954 Prix Goncourt , the 1975 Jerusalem Prize , and the 1978 Austrian State Prize for European Literature . She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961 , 1969 and 1973 . However, Beauvoir generated controversy when she briefly lost her teaching job after being accused of sexually abusing some of her students. She and her long-time lover, Jean-Paul Sartre , along with numerous other French intellectuals, campaigned for

7808-434: The 1960s, when Beauvoir was in her fifties and Sylvie was a teenager. In 1980, Beauvoir, 72, legally adopted Sylvie, who was in her late thirties, by which point they had already been in an intimate relationship for decades. Although Beauvoir rejected the institution of marriage her entire life, this adoption was like a marriage for her. Some scholars argue that this adoption was not to secure a literary heir for Beauvoir, but as

7930-402: The 1980s, as seen in the work of Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo , who brought in a distinct Japanese style that adopted distinctively gender ambiguous theme. These two designers consider themselves a part of the avant-garde, reinvigorating Japanism. Yamamoto has expressed the lack of necessity behind gender distinctions, stating "I always wonder who decided that there should be a difference in

8052-406: The 1980s, the rise of avant-garde fashion designers like Yohji Yamamoto , challenged the social constructs around gender. They reinvigorated androgyny in fashion, addressing gender issues. This was also reflected within pop culture icons during the 1980s, such as Grace Jones , Prince , Annie Lennox and Boy George . Power dressing for women became even more prominent within the 1980s which

8174-476: The American Novel (1960). Paglia also acknowledges astrology as an influence. Paglia said of the book, "It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written

8296-657: The Ancient Mariner , Byron's Don Juan , Brontë's Wuthering Heights , and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray . Works of art to which Paglia applies her analysis of the Western canon include the Venus of Willendorf , the Nefertiti Bust , Ancient Greek sculpture , Donatello's David , Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera , da Vinci's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne . Paglia questions

8418-399: The French language, and a minimal understanding of philosophy (he was a professor of biology at Smith College ), much of Beauvoir's book was mistranslated or inappropriately cut, distorting her intended message. For years, Knopf prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's work, declining all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars. Only in 2009

8540-604: The National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm in 1950, and in 1954, Beauvoir won France's most prestigious literary prize for The Mandarins , in which Algren is the character Lewis Brogan. Algren vociferously objected to their intimacy becoming public. Years after they separated, she was buried wearing his gift of a silver ring. When Beauvoir visited Algren in Chicago, Art Shay took well-known nude and portrait photos of Beauvoir. Shay also wrote

8662-618: The United States and China and published essays and fiction rigorously, especially throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Her 1955 travels in China were the basis of her 1957 travelogue The Long March , in which she praised the efforts of the Chinese communists to emancipate women . She published several volumes of short stories, including The Woman Destroyed , which, like some of her other later work, deals with aging. She lived with Claude Lanzmann from 1952 to 1959, but perhaps her most famous lover

8784-530: The age of 60. In the 1970s Beauvoir became active in France's women's liberation movement . She wrote and signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, a manifesto that included a list of famous women who claimed to have had an abortion, then illegal in France. Signatories were diverse as Catherine Deneuve , Delphine Seyrig , and Beauvoir's sister Hélène. In 1974, abortion was legalized in France. When asked in

8906-547: The aggressive "western eye," which seeks to refine and dominate nature's ceaseless hostility and has created our art and cinema. Paglia criticizes feminists for sentimentality or wishful thinking about the causes of rape , violence, and poor relations between the sexes. She prominently argues for the vital role that patriarchy has played in civilizational development, even noting that "Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny." In one of her most infamous passages, she grounds this claim in what effectively amounts to

9028-428: The ancient and medieval worlds, androgynous people and/or hermaphrodites were represented in art by the caduceus , a wand of transformative power in ancient Greco-Roman mythology. The caduceus was created by Tiresias and represents his transformation into a woman by Juno in punishment for striking at mating snakes. The caduceus was later carried by Hermes / Mercury and was the basis for the astronomical symbol for

9150-653: The appearance of secondary sex characteristics. An individual's gender identity, a personal sense of one's own gender, may be described as androgynous if they feel that they have both masculine and feminine aspects. The word androgyne can refer to a person who does not fit neatly into one of the typical masculine or feminine gender roles of their society, or to a person whose gender is a mixture of male and female, not necessarily half-and-half. Many androgynous individuals identify as being mentally or emotionally both masculine and feminine. They may also identify as " gender-neutral ", " genderqueer ", or " non-binary ". A person who

9272-471: The ascension of power dressing as a popular style for women. Women begin to find through fashion they can incite men to pay more attention to the seduction of their mental prowess rather, than the physical attraction of their appearance. This influence in the fashion world quickly makes its way to the world of film, with movies like "Working Girl" using power dressing women as their main subject matter. Japanese designers began popularizing androgynous fashion in

9394-418: The association with homosexuality , some androgynes may find the label genderqueer inaccurate, inapplicable, or offensive. Androgyneity is considered by some to be a viable alternative to androgyn for differentiating internal (psychological) factors from external (visual) factors. An alternative to androgyny is gender-role transcendence : the view that individual competence should be conceptualized on

9516-529: The atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself." From 1929 through 1943, Beauvoir taught at the lycée level until she could support herself solely on the earnings of her writings. She taught at the Lycée Montgrand  [ fr ] ( Marseille ), the Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc (Rouen)  [ fr ] , and

9638-428: The biological basis of sexual difference, noting that her stance is "sure to cause controversy." Paglia sees the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they fleetingly escape through rationalism and physical achievement. Portraying Western culture as a struggle between phallic sky-religion ("Sky Cult") on the one hand and chthonic earth-religion ("Earth Cult") on

9760-475: The book is dedicated. Algren was outraged by the frank way Beauvoir described their sexual experiences in both The Mandarins and her autobiographies. Algren vented his outrage when reviewing American translations of Beauvoir's work. Much material bearing on this episode in Beauvoir's life, including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death. Androgyny Androgyny

9882-443: The clothes of men and women" Also during the 1980s, Grace Jones , a singer and fashion model, gender-thwarted appearance in the 1980s, which startled the public. Her androgynous style inspired many and she became an androgynous style icon for modern celebrities. Androgyny has been gaining more prominence in popular culture in the early 21st century. Both the fashion industry and pop culture have accepted and even popularized

10004-457: The contemporary culture at large", and that Paglia "derives appalling social conclusions." Maya Oppenheim of The Independent called Sexual Personae a "seminal feminist work." Paglia wrote in Free Women, Free Men (2017) that "academic and establishment feminists" made "vicious attacks" on the book, in most cases without reading it, and that these attacks will stand as "an indictment of

10126-429: The early 1930s. She grew fond of Olga. Sartre tried to pursue Olga but she rejected him, so he began a relationship with her sister Wanda. Upon his death, Sartre was still supporting Wanda. He also supported Olga for years, until she met and married Jacques-Laurent Bost , a lover of Beauvoir. However, the main thrust of the novel is philosophical, a scene in which to situate Beauvoir's abiding philosophical pre-occupation –

10248-456: The eighth woman to pass the agrégation solidified her economic independence and furthered her feminist ideology. Writing of her youth in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she said: "...my father's individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother's teaching. This disequilibrium, which made my life a kind of endless disputation,

10370-402: The fashion industry. The 21st century additionally saw global conversations around gender identity which helped further the presence of androgyny in fashion. In the mid-2010s, online searches for the word "nonbinary" skyrocketed, and young people began to see themselves as nonbinary or gender nonconforming. Actor Lachlan Watson , who uses they/them pronouns, posted a photo on Instagram wearing

10492-547: The feelings of people in their circle who were still living. After Beauvoir's death, Sartre's adopted daughter and literary heir Arlette Elkaïm would not let many of Sartre's letters be published in unedited form. Most of Sartre's letters available today have Beauvoir's edits, which include a few omissions but mostly the use of pseudonyms. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary heir Sylvie Le Bon , unlike Elkaïm, published Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre and Algren. Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir and Simone de Beauvoir met in

10614-555: The feminine principle (Luna) producing the "Divine Androgyne," a representation of alchemical Hermetic beliefs in dualism, transformation, and the transcendental perfection of the union of opposites. The symbolism and meaning of androgyny was a central preoccupation of the German mystic Jakob Böhme and the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg . The philosophical concept of the "Universal Androgyne" (or "Universal Hermaphrodite") –

10736-447: The feminist movement, especially the French women's liberation movement, and her beliefs in women's economic independence and equal education, Beauvoir was initially reluctant to call herself a feminist. However, after observing the resurgence of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Beauvoir stated she no longer believed a socialist revolution to be enough to bring about women's liberation. She publicly declared herself

10858-471: The goddess Ishtar (Inanna's East Semitic equivalent), who dressed in female clothing and performed war dances in Ishtar's temples. Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also engaged in sexual activity with men. Gwendolyn Leick, an anthropologist known for her writings on Mesopotamia, has compared these individuals to the contemporary Indian hijra . In one Akkadian hymn, Ishtar

10980-600: The human species. The "sexual personae" of Paglia's title include the female vampire ( Medusa , Lauren Bacall ); the pythoness (the Delphic Oracle , Gracie Allen ); the beautiful boy ( Hadrian 's Antinous , Dorian Gray ); the epicene man of beauty (Byron, Elvis Presley ); and the male heroine (the passive male sufferer; for example, the old men in William Wordsworth 's poetry). Writers Paglia discusses include Spenser, Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ,

11102-526: The journal's editorial meetings in her flat and contributed more than Sartre, whom she often had to force to offer his opinions. Published in 1954, The Mandarins won France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt . It is a roman à clef set after the end of World War II and follows the personal lives of philosophers and friends among Sartre's and Beauvoir's intimate circle, including her relationship with American writer Nelson Algren , to whom

11224-647: The marriage standards of the day. I think marriage is a very alienating institution, for men as well as for women. I think it's a very dangerous institution—dangerous for men, who find themselves trapped, saddled with a wife and children to support; dangerous for women, who aren't financially independent and end up by depending on men who can throw them out when they are 40; and very dangerous for children, because their parents vent all their frustrations and mutual hatred on them. The very words 'conjugal rights' are dreadful. Any institution which solders one person to another, obliging people to sleep together who no longer want to

11346-467: The mid-18th century, the macaronis of Georgian-era England were a wealthy subculture of young men, known for androgynous gender expression . Their unusually large wigs , lavish fashion , and sentimental behavior prompted backlash from conservative generations of the time. In 1770, the Oxford Dictionary declared, "There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of

11468-554: The only case in classical Greek texts that female homosexuality (lesbianism) is ever mentioned. Philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria , and early Christian leaders such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa , continued to promote the idea of androgyny as humans' original and perfect state during late antiquity ." In medieval Europe , the concept of androgyny played an important role in both Christian theological debate and alchemical theory. Influential theologians such as John of Damascus and John Scotus Eriugena continued to promote

11590-593: The other, Paglia draws on the Greco-Roman polarity between the Apollonian and Dionysian. She associates Apollo with order, structure, and symmetry, and Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. She analyzes literature and art on the premise that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these forces. In her view, the major patterns of continuity in Western culture originate in paganism. Other sources of continuity include androgyny , sadism, and

11712-517: The outcomes of their academic efforts than feminine or undifferentiated individuals. The Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ) was developed in the 70s by Janet Spence, Robert Helmreich, and Joy Stapp. This test asked subjects to complete a survey consisting of three sets of scales relating to masculinity, femininity, and masculinity-femininity. These scales had sets of adjectives commonly associated with males, females, and both. These descriptors were chosen based on typical characteristics as rated by

11834-494: The pre-fall androgyny proposed by the early Church Fathers , while other clergy expounded and debated the proper view and treatment of contemporary hermaphrodites. Western esotericism 's embrace of androgyny continued into the modern period . A 1550 anthology of alchemical thought, De Alchemia , included the influential Rosary of the Philosophers , which depicts the sacred marriage of the masculine principle (Sol) with

11956-428: The relationship between the self and the other. In the novel, set just before the outbreak of World War II , Beauvoir creates one character from the complex relationships of Olga and Wanda. The fictionalised versions of Beauvoir and Sartre have a ménage à trois with the young woman. The novel also delves into Beauvoir and Sartre's complex relationship and how it was affected by the ménage à trois. She Came to Stay

12078-442: The release of people convicted of child sex offenses and signed a petition which advocated the abolition of age of consent laws in France . Beauvoir was born on 9 January 1908, into a bourgeois Parisian family in the 6th arrondissement . Her parents were Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a lawyer who once aspired to be an actor, and Françoise Beauvoir (née Brasseur), a wealthy banker's daughter and devout Catholic . Simone had

12200-551: The sensitive issues of gender, sexuality and rape." She concluded, "Hers is a seductiveness of simple answers, of clear narratives, of motivations and actions traced solely to a biological origin—a place stripped of the complex ambiguities, the complex interactions of self, skin, group, and institutions that make up daily life." The critic Mary Rose Kasraie wrote, "Paglia gives no indication she has read any studies related to women, or recent studies about imagination, nature and culture" and had "terrible gaps in her coverage." Kasraie called

12322-558: The sociologist Max Weber 's definition of charisma , according to which it must be manifested in heroic deeds or miracles, writing that she sees charisma as "the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality" and "the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality", rather than something dependent upon "acts or external effects." Sexual Personae received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars. Robin Ann Sheets wrote that Paglia "takes

12444-543: The sorry process by which important political movements can undermine themselves through the blind insularity of their ruling coteries." The critic Helen Vendler gave Sexual Personae a negative review in The New York Review of Books , writing that while Paglia could be "enlightening and entertaining" when dealing with a subject congenial to her, she failed in her discussions of subjects that demanded more than appreciation of images and stories. In response to

12566-408: The word androgynous is rarely used to formally describe mixed biological sex characteristics in humans. In modern English, the word intersex is used to more precisely describe individuals with mixed or ambiguous sex characteristics. However, both intersex and non-intersex people can exhibit a mixture of male and female sex traits such as hormone levels, type of internal and external genitalia, and

12688-908: The work "distractingly antischolarly" and "an unacademic wallow in Sadean sadomasochistic chthonian nature." Judy Simons criticized Paglia's "potentially sinister political agenda" and decried her "intellectual sleight of hand." Germaine Greer wrote that Paglia's insights into Sappho are "vivid and extremely perceptive", but also "unfortunately inconsistent and largely incompatible with each other". Professor Alison Booth called Sexual Personae an "anti-feminist cosmogony." Literary scholar Marianne Noble wrote that Paglia misread sadomasochism in Dickinson's poetry, that "Paglia's absolute belief in biological determinism leads her to pronouncements about female nature that are not only detestable but dangerous, because they routinely receive serious widespread attention in

12810-577: The world, where one chooses one's freedom. Chapters of The Second Sex were originally published in Les Temps modernes , in June 1949. The second volume came a few months after the first in France. It was published soon after in America due to the quick translation by Howard Parshley , as prompted by Blanche Knopf , wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf . Because Parshley had only a basic familiarity with

12932-461: Was American author Nelson Algren . Beauvoir met Algren in Chicago in 1947, while she was on a four-month "exploration" trip of the United States using various means of transport: automobile, train, and Greyhound . She kept a detailed diary of the trip, which was published in France in 1948 with the title America Day by Day . She wrote to him across the Atlantic as "my beloved husband." Algren won

13054-417: Was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist , and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory . Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, autobiographies, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She

13176-650: Was a rather " effeminate guy", When the Rolling Stones played London's Hyde Park in 1969, Mick Jagger wore a white "man's dress" designed by Michael Fish . Fish was the most fashionable shirt-maker in London, the inventor of the Kipper tie , and a principal taste-maker of the peacock revolution in men's fashion. His creation for Mick Jagger was considered to be the epitome of the swinging 60s . In 1972, David Bowie presented his alter ego Ziggy Stardust ,

13298-551: Was a rise of designers who favored that look, including Helmut Lang , Giorgio Armani , and Pierre Cardin . Men in catalogues started wearing jewellery , make up , visual kei , and designer stubble. These styles have become a significant mainstream trend of the 21st century, both in the Western world and in Asia. Japanese and Korean cultures have featured the androgynous look as a positive attribute in society, as depicted in both K-pop , J-pop , in anime and manga , as well as

13420-433: Was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy. She wrote that a similar kind of oppression by hierarchy also happened in other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion, but she claimed that it was nowhere more true than with gender in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy . Despite her contributions to

13542-462: Was best known for her "trailblazing work in feminist philosophy", The Second Sex (1949), a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism . She was also known for her novels, the most famous of which were She Came to Stay (1943) and The Mandarins (1954). Her most enduring contribution to literature are her memoirs, notably the first volume, Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (1958). She received

13664-497: Was constructed by the early leading proponent of androgyny, Sandra Bem (1977). The BSRI is one of the most widely used gender measures. Based on an individual's responses to the items in the BSRI, they are classified as having one of four gender role orientations: masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated. Bem understood that both masculine and feminine characteristics could be expressed by anyone and it would determine those gender role orientations. An androgynous person

13786-615: Was finished in 1981, but was rejected by seven major New York publishers before being released by Yale University Press in 1990. Paglia credits editor Ellen Graham with securing Yale's decision to publish the book. Sexual Personae 's original preface was removed at the Yale editors' suggestion because of the book's extreme length, but was later published in Paglia's essay collection Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992). Paglia describes Sexual Personae 's method as psychoanalytic and acknowledges

13908-574: Was followed by many others, including The Blood of Others , which explores the nature of individual responsibility, telling a love story between two young French students participating in the Resistance in World War II. In 1944, Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas , a discussion on existentialist ethics. She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947); it

14030-660: Was lecturing with her chastised their "distinguished [Harvard] audience [because] every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life." Sartre and Beauvoir always read each other's work. Debate continues about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works, such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and "Phenomenology and Intent". However, recent studies of Beauvoir's work focus on influences other than Sartre, including Hegel and Leibniz. The Neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in

14152-430: Was previously only something done by men in order to look structured and powerful. However, during the 1980s this began to take a turn as women were entering jobs with equal roles to the men. In the article "The Menswear Phenomenon" by Kathleen Beckett written for Vogue in 1984 the concept of power dressing is explored as women entered these jobs they had no choice but to tailor their wardrobes accordingly, eventually leading

14274-498: Was raised in a Catholic household. In her youth, she was sent to convent schools. She was deeply religious as a child, at one point intending to become a nun. At age 14, Beauvoir questioned her faith as she saw many changes in the world after witnessing tragedies throughout her life. Consequently, she abandoned her faith in her early teens and remained an atheist for the rest of her life. To explain her atheist beliefs, Beauvoir stated, "Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which

14396-409: Was referred to by the pseudonym Louise Védrine. In 1943, Beauvoir was suspended again from her teaching position when she was accused of seducing her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine in 1939. Sorokine's parents laid formal charges against Beauvoir for debauching a minor (the age of consent in France at the time was 13 until 1945, when it became 15) and Beauvoir's licence to teach in France

14518-498: Was revoked, although it was subsequently reinstated. Beauvoir described in La Force de l'âge ( The Prime of Life ) a relationship of simple friendship with Nathalie Sorokine (in the book referred to as "Lise Oblanoff"). Natalie Sorokine, along with Bianca Lamblin and Olga Kosakiewicz , later stated that their relationships with de Beauvoir damaged them psychologically. Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about time spent in

14640-513: Was sometimes used synonymously with the term hermaphrodite . In some disciplines, such as botany, androgynous and hermaphroditic are still used interchangeably. When androgyny is used to refer to physical traits, it often refers to a person whose biological sex is difficult to discern at a glance because of their mixture of male and female characteristics. Because androgyny encompasses additional meanings related to gender identity and gender expression that are distinct from biological sex, today

14762-551: Was there a second translation, to mark the 60th anniversary of the original publication. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced the first integral translation in 2010, reinstating a third of the original work. In the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality" of The Second Sex , Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by the application of a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping

14884-479: Was while studying for it that she met École Normale students Jean-Paul Sartre , Paul Nizan , and René Maheu (who gave her the lasting nickname " Castor ", or "beaver"). The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam. Additionally, Beauvoir finished an exam for the certificate of "General Philosophy and Logic" second to Simone Weil . Her success as

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