Simone De Beauvoir Duality Of Gender

I identify as human because another human said I was one. That human was told she was human by another human who was told she was a human by the human who gave birth to her. With that in mind, it seems arbitrary for a human to define what a human is, mainly because the umbrella of humanity is diverse phenotypically, genetically, and culturally. Alas, the wide ambiguous definition of “human” is perplexing for the species that decided it was their duty to define everything on the planet. Out of desperation and ignorance, people resort to distorting the definition to what individuals know best-their own reflection. Historically, those in power decide which interpretation are given more weight than others. Some examples of this duality are seen

Consider, before a fetus is born, it is given a gender, not to mention all the preconceived nuances of identifying with that gender. Hence gender becomes the first way in which to define a human’s identity, an effect of duality. Simone De Beauvoir explains how this duality between men and women has been pounded into humanity, down to the etymology of “men” and “women.” In her book, The Second Sex, she writes “the man represents both the positive and the neuter to such an extent that in French hommes designates human beings, the particular meaning of the word vir being assimilated into the general meaning of the word “homo.” Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as a limitation, without reciprocity” (25). Here Beauvoir explains how gender has transcended being positive and negative. Instead, the way we talk about gender gives men privileges in defining themselves, that women are not granted. What is more frustrating is the origin of this stalemate, the fact that “no one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or more disdainful, than a man anxious about his own virility” (Beauvoir 34). This explanation, is an example of how fear of not having a substantial identity causes humans to create “others” as subordinates. Not only is this selfish, but futile in the

Incontestably, groups of people that have commonalities in their race share a cultural bond because of common experiences-some of which pertain to the way they look. Today, we still live in a world where those lines are drawn abusively, perpetuating inequality. The root of a lot of these inequalities is a tendency for the majority to deal out decrees of inferiority amongst minorities. One of the Civil Rights Movement’s leaders in the 1960’s, Martin Luther King Jr., wrote about the discrimination facing African Americans in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” amplifying an infamous example of inequality. The leader wrote that his community was “forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” (King 3) being treated as second class citizens. MLK’s words imply that duality has the power to negate an entire population, a dangerous consequence of ignoring the problem of using fabricated definitions of symbolic “others” to define the majority. By refusing to confront this issue, everyone loses. Following, inequality for the sake of fictitious self identification leads to segregation, which “distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority” (King 4). Ultimately, encouraging these false identifications,