As my title addresses, I do not like this book. Sadly like a nihilistic I find the sardonic vibe of irony that every week I am becoming weaker to the ideals of feminism and gender. The ideas increase because of De Beauvoir’s ideas match mind with her heavily leftist views. The pain that I have encountered is severe, from reading this text. As mentioned in my blog from last week, I cannot stand gender, and it makes me quite sad that I have to deal with this barrage. Unlike wollenstonecraft of the week prior de Beauvoir is shorter but dense. Making my hours upon hours of reading that much more difficult. As the electronic music blares and the movies play around me I deal with the idea of equality that stimulates me. Even I have a deep and burning hatred of the book, there are ideas that I do agree with. But I do ask the people who read this blog, where is the book that disgusts masculinity, and the plight of men? where is my book, talking about how men are not just chauvinistic, but were deep and complex creatures that have the mentality to only do what is needed? Until that book comes out and is critically acclaimed by the masses, I will not accept a book of feminists as an acceptable topic.

I am so ecstatic about this text that I can come up with neither a good title nor a good opening. This woman is seriously amazing, and I think I like this mostly because it’s not aggressive feminism but instead a push for equality. Her tone is readable and her language isn’t too flowery, and she refers to other philosophers we’ve read (and hated), particularly Freud. In fact, she dismisses Freud’s Electra complex as ‘nonsense’ on page 43, so she must know what she’s talking about.

“Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently a secondary being; others say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough draft and that God succeeded in producing the human being in perfection when He created Eve.” (lvi-lvii) This is a nice way to put the creation dilemma, and she goes on to say that we must get rid of the concepts of superiority and inferiority. Great.

“It is not the lack of the penis that causes this complex, but rather woman’s total situation; if the little girl feels penis envy it is only as the symbol of privileges enjoyed by boys. The place the father holds in the family, the universal predominance of males, her own education – everything confirms her in her belief in masculine superiority.” (44) I like this way of justifying her disbelief in penis envy. I think penis envy is just a simplified way of explaining that because men have traditionally held power, some women wish that they were men (or at least more like men, so they could have power as well). This makes a lot of sense and it’s completely true.

“All psychoanalysts systematically reject the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value, and therein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system.” (46) This dismisses traditional psychoanalysis in an educational way and points out the fatal flaw with a system that is widely believed to explain many of life’s phenomena.

To conclude, I just really love this, and I feel like it’s more of an ‘everyone is equal and all superiority/inferiority should be thrown out the window. As Simone de Beauvoir says, “The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual.” (And we shouldn’t just be part of some complex or some phenomenon or some idea; we should just be people.)

Wollstonecraft’s argument was really not what I was expecting. It’s basically the “legalize, regulate, and tax” argument but applied to women’s right. I mean her argument is basically: Women are naturally inferior, so don’t make us more inferior else we won’t be able to be good mothers and wives; besides, women are going to try and ‘educate’ themselves illictly anyway so we might as well have control over it. The entire argument is an appeal to men as well; Wollstonecraft seems rather contempteous of other women.At least on first glance. The thing is her writing style changes so drastically, and sometimes her opinion, it’s hard to get a handle on her (it would be in poor taste to make an ironic ‘WIMMIN M I RITE FELLAS?” joke here, wouldn’t it?). Sometimes she gets so righteously indignant, and other times almost apologetic and pandering, and I wonder if her whole deal with women staying naturally inferior could just be for placating people to what otherwise would be an extremely contentious argument.

Examining the writing style is really interesting too, in the way in which she mixes the masculine and feminine rhetoric of the day. While she says she’s going to ignore the language of sensibility (empathy, delicacy of sense, etc.) and use simple, rational rhetoric her style does get a little bit flowery (and dare I say, overwrought) at times. I can understand why she would want to avoid being associated with sensibility though, because that was one of the main arguments against women being able to think rationally (women have keener nerves ergo women feel more keenly ergo women are overcome by emotion and unable to think rationally). She vociferously decries sensuality, sexuality, sex, the body, and love, and that’s very interesting to observe: a women as an entity then was basically her body and her sexuality (and still today sometimes, sadly) and Wollstonecraft almost desperately tries to discard the flesh, to transcend the body to find rational thought. Love terrifies her because it makes people dependent, and for Wollstonecraft represents the real fear that women ARE dependent (which is one of the things that irks me about some feminist thought: to quote the great Poet Laureautes of our generation, The Black Eyed Peas, “Where is the love?”).

Wollstonecraft’s argument was really not what I was expecting. It’s basically the “legalize, regulate, and tax” argument but applied to women’s right. I mean her argument is basically: Women are naturally inferior, so don’t make us more inferior else we won’t be able to be good mothers and wives; besides, women are going to try and ‘educate’ themselves illictly anyway so we might as well have control over it. The entire argument is an appeal to men as well; Wollstonecraft seems rather contempteous of other women.At least on first glance. The thing is her writing style changes so drastically, and sometimes her opinion, it’s hard to get a handle on her (it would be in poor taste to make an ironic ‘WIMMIN M I RITE FELLAS?” joke here, wouldn’t it?). Sometimes she gets so righteously indignant, and other times almost apologetic and pandering, and I wonder if her whole deal with women staying naturally inferior could just be for placating people to what otherwise would be an extremely contentious argument.

Examining the writing style is really interesting too, in the way in which she mixes the masculine and feminine rhetoric of the day. While she says she’s going to ignore the language of sensibility (empathy, delicacy of sense, etc.) and use simple, rational rhetoric her style does get a little bit flowery (and dare I say, overwrought) at times. I can understand why she would want to avoid being associated with sensibility though, because that was one of the main arguments against women being able to think rationally (women have keener nerves ergo women feel more keenly ergo women are overcome by emotion and unable to think rationally). She vociferously decries sensuality, sexuality, sex, the body, and love, and that’s very interesting to observe: a women as an entity then was basically her body and her sexuality (and still today sometimes, sadly) and Wollstonecraft almost desperately tries to discard the flesh, to transcend the body to find rational thought. Love terrifies her because it makes people dependent, and for Wollstonecraft represents the real fear that women ARE dependent (which is one of the things that irks me about some feminist thought: to quote the great Poet Laureautes of our generation, The Black Eyed Peas, “Where is the love?”).

EWWW!!! To properly define my opinion I need to use a youthful word for disgust. There is no shame in my hatred for this book as it was a tortuous experience for me. I would never want to torture someone like this book has tortured me. If by now you haven’t guessed it I do not like gender-dominated books. At all. Ever!! The sheer idea that I was going to have to go through a moment of my life that involved this book, was a day I would reckon. As I had several suicidal thoughts as reading this book, I decided that one book was not going to decide my faith. Although this book to its very core is evil, I can have some respect for it. The respect lies in the author, as she was an innovative thinker for her time. It has nothing to do with the book, It will never be about the book, it is evil.

I am actually genuinely sad that I had such an insane week/weekend last week, because this is a book I wish I’d already finished. I wonder why? Maybe because it’s about feminism! Not kind of hidden in the background feminism, or super aggressive feminism (Antigone’s Claim), but just a discussion. About feminism.

I like her tone right from the start, but she uses very flowery language. I don’t know if this is just who she is, or how writing was at the time, or if it’s partially to make a point. She references Rousseau a lot, which leads me to believe that there will probably be some kind of comparative question on the list of essay prompts. This excites me, because I liked Rousseau. Also, Wollstonecraft asks a lot of questions as well as maintaining the ‘in my opinion’/'I think’ kind of statements. This feels conversational and approachable rather than somewhat pretentious and stuck up …

Just a few quotes today:

“Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood.” (127) This is interesting, because she goes on to say that innocence is essentially the same as weakness, and that children should be innocent, but men and women who are innocent just look weak. I like this point.

“Another instance of that feminine weakness of character, often produced by a confined education, is a romantic twist of the mind, which has been very properly termed sentimental. (330) Girls these days always get complained at for being ‘too sentimental’. I don’t understand why, because it’s natural that girls are a little bit more emotional and a little bit more romantic. Is it ‘weakness of character’? I don’t know. This could lead to a huge argument and I don’t want to get into that.

“Could these girls have been injured by the perusal of novels?” (331) This reminds me so much of Northanger Abbey, because it suggests the same thing, that by reading certain kinds of books, our ideals (and especially female ideals) of love and romance have been warped to something super unrealistic. I love it because it’s completely true.

Okay! That’s enough of my feminine thoughts. I’m excited to hear Jill’s lecture on this and even more excited to finish the book!

Snow is just passive-aggressive rain.

I’m still not sure what to think of this book. I really like Paine’s writing style, and I find him pleasingly sarcastic and sassy. However, I  have the some problem with this text that I have with most Enlightenment texts. Seinfeld syndrome. The ideas which were so radical at the time have proliferated and embedded themselves into everyday thought and discourse that when I read this, my reaction to most everything Paine says is “So what?”

I also find the text to be disappointingly uncritical. The majority of a text feels like a bit of a slap fight between Burke and Paine, and most of the text comes off as Paine just going “Nuh uh, cause this and this and this” with everything feeling a bit cursory. Quite often Paine will be laying something out and then saying “its time to move on to the next point.”

The book is littered with ad hominems of Edmund Burke and it prevents actual critical analysis, both of Burke’s argument (I would barely have any idea what Paine was talking about if I hadn’t had previous knowledge with the book, and my edition comes with both The Rights of Man and Reflections on the Revolution in France, so I was able to flip through both texts. My edition has terrible binding though). Josh gave this criticism of my last essay “you tend to focus too much on attacking Freud wherever you see fit, and it ends up eroding your argument instead of his. Try not to be frustrated with Freud himself, instead give solid criticism of his case study”, and I think that applies for Paine too. And because Paine is so focussed on defending and vindicating the French Revolution he does not adequately discuss why the Revolution was necessary or the principles it was predicated on (at least not so far, not finished, but even if he does get to it, he takes too long to do so). History has shown that the French Revolution was far from the perfect, principled moment Paine portrays it as (he was later imprisoned by The Terror, grand irony) and opportunity was lost for critical reflection both by Burke and Paine.

Interesting though is that I found some almost Foucaultian (proto-Foucaultian I suppose) themes in the work, when he discusses despotisms that reside on the institute of monarchy and “this species of despotism, proceeding on through an endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible, there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of duty, and tyrannizes under the pretense of obeying”. Proliferation of despotism through multiple institutions that manipulates our desires. Sounds like bio-power to me.

I’ll end it with a casual moment of anti-semitism from within the book (it was so blatant it made me yell out “Oh no” on the bus, completely involuntarily): “By the universal economy of nature it is known, and by the instance of the Jews it is proved, that the human species has a tendency to degenerate, in any small number of persons, when separated from the general stock of society, and intermarrying constantly with each other.”

You’re a gem, Thomas Paine.