For Women, it is always about love and pain

For some reason, Toril Moi's review of the latest English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe in the London Review of Books bugs me . I shouldn't say "for some reason" for I know what it bugs me. It seems that the fact that Beauvoir is the author of Le Deuxième Sexe has given all of her biographers the manly obligation to prove that she was a woman first and foremost and thus very much guided by her womanhood, not her brain or any type of rigorous analytical enterprise. The presumption is that those "facts" should lead to the logical conclusion that her work is secondary to the one of Sartre because when she thought or wrote, she never stopped to be the Castor, a woman with a big derrière who sought love everywhere else even in literature and philosophy when he refused to give it to her. Outrageous excerpt:

The roots of The Second Sex are here, in Beauvoir’s realisation that her life had been affected in countless ways by her having been born a girl. This massive book was written fast: the first volume appeared in Paris in June 1949, the second five months later. But Beauvoir did not spend all the intervening time on her analysis of women’s condition. In January 1947 she travelled to the United States for the first time, and in 1948 she published America Day by Day, a deeply perceptive book about the experience. Moreover, she met Nelson Algren there. The writing of The Second Sex thus coincided with her discovery of America and with her passionate affair with Algren. It also coincided with Sartre’s transatlantic affair with the New York-based Frenchwoman Dolorès Vanetti, which caused Beauvoir much pain.
That much of Beauvoir’s personal experience went into the making of her investigation of the situation of women is beyond doubt. Judith Okely has drawn attention to Beauvoir’s ‘hidden use of herself as a case study’ in The Second Sex. The urgency of her style, the conviction that every scrap of evidence must be piled up to show the world the truth about women’s condition, surely comes from a sense that she was, after all, writing a kind of confession, offering the public intimate and unsettling truths about herself, and about other women.

Boy, women really do have trouble taking each other seriously or rather they have this disturbing notion that seriousness is equated to manliness and womanhood (I hate that word) is a particularity. I have yet to see Sartre's sex life been given the same dehumanizing and belittling treatment.