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Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS

De Beauvoir on the Other

Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS

Talking Politics

Politics, News & Politics, News

4.81.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is one of the founding texts of modern feminism and one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It covers everything from ancient myth to modern psychoanalysis to ask what the relations between men and women have in common with other kinds of oppression, from slavery to colonialism. It also offers some radical suggestions for how both women and men can be liberated from their condition.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This week's episode of History of Ideas

0:25.6

brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books is about Simone de Beauvoir's

0:30.0

The Second Sex, a book that changed the way we think. Why do men persist in treating women like

0:36.8

the other and what can anyone do to stop them?

0:57.6

In these talks, I've discussed lots of the different ways in which human societies can be divided

1:02.2

between oppressors and the people that they oppress. Different hierarchies, structures, forms

1:09.1

of group discrimination, slave owners and slaves, white and black, capitalists and workers, the rich

1:18.3

and the poor. The many can oppress the few and the few can oppress the many. Unaccountable elites

1:25.3

can make the lives of almost everyone else miserable. And yet there is one kind of hierarchy,

1:31.1

one structure of power and of discrimination. That seems to be more pervasive than any of those,

1:38.7

more ubiquitous. It's there in every kind of human society, in some form or another,

1:44.8

more universal. And that is the way in which men oppress or discriminate against or use their

1:51.4

power over women. And the fact that this seems to be more pervasive, more universal, after all,

1:58.0

there are some societies that don't have slave owners and slaves in them. It's ubiquity raises

2:04.0

a puzzle. There's a kind of dilemma here, how to think about the oppression of women by men.

2:11.6

Is it like these other kinds of oppression? Can it be compared to forms of racial or religious

2:16.9

or other kinds of political discrimination? Can it be compared to structures of economic

2:21.8

oppression? Of course, it has a lot of that in it. But if you're thinking about how it works,

2:27.2

are these all part of the same basic category of the ways in which human beings

2:31.4

mistreat each other? Or is it different? Is there something about the male, female, man,

2:37.1

woman relationship that separates it out when thinking politically or philosophically from these

2:42.4

others? And the dilemma is that if you go down the, it's different route. There's something more

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