Simone de Beauvoir — Between Heartburn and Admiration
- Paulo Pereira de Araujo
- 17 de dez.
- 3 min de leitura
When the Male Reader Reads and Loses His Ground
Simone de Beauvoir, this woman gives me heartburn and admiration at the same time. A good kind of heartburn, the kind that warns you something there was never properly digested over a lifetime. I read The Second Sex the way one drinks a strong cognac, never for immediate pleasure. It burns the throat, unsettles the stomach, but cleans the blood, unclogs old ideas, and forces you to sit up straight in your chair.
Simone de Beauvoir did not ask permission to enter philosophy. This is a historical fact, not an opinion. She kicked the door down with her whole body, books under her arm, and truly little patience for condescending explanations. And she still took Jean-Paul Sartre by the hand, even though there is an entire academic industry devoted to saying it was the other way around.
An elegant bit of nonsense. If Sartre was the brain, Simone was the liver, an underestimated organ, yet essential, filtering the world with bitterness, clarity, and a French irony I savor with pleasure and a certain fear.
I read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter too late, I admit. I was already old, had already raised children, failed them in significant doses, loved poorly, loved crookedly, and accumulated enough foolishness to fill an entire bookshelf. Perhaps that is why the book hurts more.
I did not read it as a young person in formation; I read it as a man formed incorrectly. And there I understood, with a literary slap, what it means to be a woman within a structure that naturalizes female captivity with flowers, ribbons, and pretty phrases.
Simone de Beauvoir rips the veil off “femininity” the way one tears a scab from a wound still alive, without anesthesia, and shows that behind the myth of woman there has always been a project always male, always far too comfortable for those who created it. Me included. Mea culpa, Simone. There is no point pretending neutrality when the accusation is fair.
She writes with a frankness that unsettles me. She does not hide behind cute metaphors or strategic delicacies. She says, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and that sentence still echoes like a delayed gunshot.
Because it forces the reader to revisit everything: education, desire, guilt, power, and silence. It even forces an old man like me, who likes to imagine himself critical and attentive, to recognize how much he normalized what was never natural.
I do not agree with everything, obviously. At times I think Simone pushes existentialism to a point where it borders on pamphleteering, loses nuance, gains too much urgency. But I understand her perfectly. Those who lived through the rubble of war, occupation, the moral misery of Europe, and patriarchy have no time for academic subtleties.
She wrote against the clock, against injustice, and against the temptation to remain silent. And she lived as she wrote. She loved women, she loved Sartre, she loved freedom even when that freedom charged high interest: Lady Soleda, wear, and incomprehension.
What impresses me most about her today is her lucidity. A lucidity that humiliates me. I, who spend my days dialoguing with my guilt, my crooked memories, and the accusing gaze of Botox, this dog who seems to know far too much, am merely an apprentice before this woman who wrote with her body, with loss, with flesh, and with sharpened thought.
Simone de Beauvoir teaches me that growing old is not about retreating, but about resisting the comfort of ignorance. And that thinking, honestly thinking, is not a pastime; it is a dangerous and almost indecent act. That is why she still frightens so many people. And that is precisely why she remains necessary.
#SimoneDeBeauvoir #TheSecondSex #ExistentialistFeminism #FeministPhilosophy #GenderAndPower #PatriarchyCritique #PhilosophyAndLiterature #DangerousThinking
Comentários