Behind Simone de Beauvoir's derrière

Jane Shilling write this on the controversial decision by Le Nouvel Observateur to celebrate Simone de Beauvoir’s 100 birthday by publishing a naked and retouched (they made her body less fat and less old) picture of her on its cover:

In case you’d missed the point, Nouvel Obs illustrated this tribute with a photograph of the great philosopheuse starkers (to see it, go to tinyurl.com/2talsp). The picture, a naked back view, was taken in 1952 by the American photographer Art Shay, when de Beauvoir was visiting her lover, the American writer Nelson Algren. Chay, now 85, insists that he didn’t snatch the picture, that de Beauvoir heard the shutter click, turned round, laughing, and said: “Naughty boy!” “She wasn’t bothered,” recalls the aged snapper. “Like Nelson, she had very loose morals.”

[…]The reaction of de Beauvoir’s admirers to the Nouvel Obs piece and its accompanying photograph was pained. A small demonstration of the feminist group Les Chiennes de Garde assembled outside the magazine’s offices, waving placards calling for Jean Daniel, the proprietor, to publish pictures of his own bare buttocks as well as those of various male philosophers. “My first thought on seeing the magazine,” said Florence Montreynaud, an authority on the relationship between de Beauvoir and her life’s companion, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre’s bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur.”

This is certainly true. And anyone who has seen a picture of the front elevation of Jean-Paul Sartre, fully clothed, will instantly understand why. […] Still, it isn’t the beauty of the naked portrait that’s at issue here, but its intimacy, and specifically the question of whether putting it on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur was a kind of violation, as the Chiennes de Garde and others claim. It has been said that de Beauvoir, whose father told her that she was ugly, and who wrote at 51, “I loathe my appearance”, would have been affronted by the intimate exposure. Then again, it depends what you mean by intimate. De Beauvoir herself was a ruthless exposer of other people’s intimacies. Sixteen years after they parted, in his last interview, Nelson Algren was still hopping mad about the use she made of his love letters in The Prime of Life. “Hell, love letters should be private,” he said. “It was an appalling thing to do.” She was bitterly criticised, too, for her unsparing descriptions of Sartre’s physical and mental decline in her memoir, La Cérémonie des Adieux.

To this you might argue that the force of words is different from that of images, and in any case, a writer is entitled to make use of the material her own life throws up. So let us consider another image of de Beauvoir, which appears (as the naked picture does not), in Deirdre Bair’s elegantly candid biography. It is a picture of the philosopher as an old woman, sitting ravaged with grief by the open grave of her great love, Sartre. She looks utterly undone. And although no one now can know what she might have felt about the various pictures of herself, it seems to me that of the two photographs, the pretty bare behind and the grief-stricken old woman, the second is by far the more terribly intimate.

It is true that Le Nouvel Obs would have never dared to publish a naked and private picture of Sartre or any serious male philosopher. However, in spite of  the double standards and the wrongness and shamefulness of the decision to undress Simone de Beauvoir to reduce her emblematic status to a naked derrière who wasn’t acceptable enough to be exposed without being retouched, I can’t muster the energy to get mad about it, because none of the happenings of this scandalous affair surprise me. I wouldn’t have expected any less of a magazine which is nothing more than a merchandise for after al what is can be a better marketing ploy in our times than to undress serious women especially when they can fight back to reminder them that no matter how intelligent and iconic they become, they can still be f*cked. The truth is, to be preachy, that I’m not up and arms about the affair of the naked de Beauvoir because I don’t’ think that a stolen naked picture of her has any effect on her legacy or even touches her legend. I think that the whole thing says nothing about de Beauvoir, but more about notre époque, our times. It shows simply that since her death, not much has changed in the sense that it is impossible to point to somebody and to say that s/he is de Beauvoir’s heir. What I’m saying is that the space, which de Beauvoir left is still unoccupied and that the big picture is that people are still living in a world that she would not only recognized, but be astonished by the fact that almost 60 years after she wrote Le Deuxième Sexe, much if not all of she said is still relevant.

Comments

[Craig]

To be honest,

I think if more important men were sexy, we might see more of them undressed. Most important men are white old upper class men, which is just gross.

Those who pass as sexy though show a little flesh, Sarko and Putin, for example. And while this isn't backside, it is comparable... the difference between backside and hunky chest underlines perhaps the feminist's point in these photos: the men are manly leaders, the women have backsides.

At the same time, its all just sexy bodies, and we can't really help the differences.

[Michael F.]

...following Craig, Twain observed: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” (There's a bare-chested photo of Twain somewhere, and it's still startling.)
Funny how years after the fancy dress of the pharaohs and the emperors, our species still gets so many signals from costume, another reminder that we're still primates beneath the pretense. Churchill used to play with this, self-mockingly sometimes, by affecting different styles of hat.
The New Yorker mentions the deBeauvoir contretemps in a "Talk of the Town" piece on Sarkosy's exhibitionism. So far everyone but me has resisted the temptation to ask if these buttocks are a fundamental question.
Re. the continuing relevance of Le Deuxième Sexe, I can testify as a male working in tradtionally female professions (hospitals, schools): deBeauvoir's observation that working women let themselves be bought with flattery rather than money or power still holds true. Again and again, I've seen management manipulate nurses and teachers into doing more for less with a lot of "we can't do this job without you", "you're the most important person in this institution" and a pastry tray instead of giving them decision making power or an increase in wages.