(Paris, 1908-1986) French thinker and novelist, representative of the atheist existentialist movement and an important figure in the vindication of women’s rights. Originally from a bourgeois family, she stood out from an early age as a brilliant student. She studied at the Sorbonne and in 1929 she met Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her companion for the rest of her life.

He graduated in philosophy and until 1943 he devoted himself to teaching at the lycées of Marseilles, Rouen and Paris. His first work was the novel The Guest (1943), followed by The Blood of Others (1944) and the essay Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944). She participated intensely in the ideological debates of the time, harshly attacked the French right wing and assumed the role of a committed intellectual. In her literary texts she revised the concepts of history and character and incorporated, from an existentialist point of view, the themes of “freedom”, “situation” and “commitment”.

Together with Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, she founded the magazine Tiempos Modernos, whose first issue was published on October 15, 1945 and became a political and cultural reference of French thought in the mid-twentieth century. Subsequently, he published the novel All Men Are Mortal (1946), and the essays For a Morality of Ambiguity (1947) and America a Day (1948).

Her book The Second Sex (1949) was a theoretical starting point for various feminist groups, and became a classic work of contemporary thought. In it she elaborated a history of the social condition of women and analyzed the different characteristics of male oppression. She asserted that by being excluded from the processes of production and confined to the home and reproductive functions, women lost all social ties and with them the possibility of being free. She analyzed the gender situation from the point of view of biology, psychoanalysis and Marxism; she destroyed feminine myths, and urged the search for authentic liberation. She argued that the struggle for the emancipation of women was distinct from and parallel to the class struggle, and that the main problem to be faced by the “weaker sex” was not ideological but economic.

Simone de Beauvoir founded with some feminists the League of Women’s Rights, which set out to react firmly to any sexist discrimination, and prepared a special issue of Modern Times devoted to the discussion of the subject. She won the Prix Goncourt with The Mandarins (1954), in which she dealt with the difficulties of post-war intellectuals in assuming their social responsibility. In 1966 she participated in the Russell Tribunal, in May 1968 she showed solidarity with the students led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in 1972 she presided over the Choisir association, in charge of defending free contraception, and until her last days she was a tireless fighter for human rights.

Her abundant testimonial and autobiographical titles include Memoirs of a Formal Young Woman (1958), The Fullness of Life (1960), The Force of Things (1963), A Very Sweet Death (1964), Old Age (1968), The End of Accounts (1972) and The Farewell Ceremony (1981).

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    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Oh god they totally are but I’m seeing something new in them.

      If I tried this like 2 years ago or earlier there’s NO chance that I’d have gotten anything from them, they were locked into the fascist circles. They’d have gone on screaming rants about the woke-eys and other shit. I legitimately considered all of them to be risks for individual terror actions or just flying off the rails or whatever. They were all really dangerously cultish.

      The biggest brainworm they seem to have currently however is believing covid is fake… Which I can work with. Not like we don’t have those brainworms already among people in the left too. They believe some pretty weird shit about gates and other billionaires but some of it at least has some real basis. That can be worked with too.

      It’s like… The whole crowd Russel Brand was previously targeting, who were untargetable, now feel like they’re targetable. There’s a different attitude about them now.

      There’s still some “the globalists” shit in them, which I don’t think they realise the fascists were using as a swap word for jews. They aren’t really that bright, which is why they were in the q anon crowd to begin with. You know what I mean? I don’t mean to insult too much since I don’t think looking down on people helps with being authentic when speaking to them which is pretty essential for persuasive speaking, but being real here… I have to admit how they are. This issue with them not really understanding “globalists” in the fash spaces was code for jews is actually beneficial because we can swap that shit for zionism and they seamlessly and instantly take to it while not being antisemitic. None of these people are antisemitic in my opinion, I talk to them and they have VERY positive views about the non-zionist jews protesting. They understand the destinction between zionists and not which helps in getting them to take to it.

      I sincerely want to try and take this online and figure out how to reach large quantities of them because I think it’s viable now. The time is right for it. Especially before the right realises how vulnerable they are to losing this crowd and finds a new way to lock them in again.