Articulo_4_EN_Doxa_29

1. Introduction

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 the book which was considered as the reference in making people realised what it meant to be a woman in a modern society. It was a book which moved the status quo of a society dominated by men, where she implied for the first time that women, as such, were only products of the cultural movements of a society.

The book lead to gender studies (term officialised by Joan W. Scott in 1986) in the following years, listing the reasons for which over the years, the men managed to create their own rules in order to impose them to the women. An uncomfortable truth which stirred up the social and political norms and which did not leave anyone unconcerned because it was conceived as a global study of the women conditions in the modern society (Cobo, 2014).

The French Philosopher concluded that the woman was “the Other”, someone different to the man with whom she was not on an equal level because the man is always in need of going beyond or taking on projects to prove himself as a person, whereas the woman is condemned to adherence, to not do anything, to not be able to develop projects out of the house: some rules established by the men on the basis of the patriarchal society which protect their domination of the women.

Like Lopez Pardina (2015:13) said, this would be a moral fault if is allowed by the subject, if it is inflicted, it will lead to frustration and oppression. In both cases, it is a real damage. For this reason, Beauvoir considers the woman as the other, the otherness, the dominated. The French philosopher tried to convince a fair part of the society of the necessity to include the women in the “generalised Human being”, something which is still of a daily talk ( as per words from Celia Amoros-2009)and is still very much on today’s agenda. It is something you cannot forget and which is not obvious.

Simone de Beauvoir considered that women were defined as nature and the men as culture but after checking the biological, psychological, historical and characteristic sides, it was established that the reasons why the women are not on the same level as the men , were that the women is not born but she makes herself through the cultural aspects generated by a patriarchal society where men have always been dictating the rules which affected also the women, in order to avoid losing the privileges such as the power of decision in both private and public fields.

Beauvoir is very conscious that this build up starts from the moment the human being begins to reflect on its own existence and the origins of the Earth. The explanation comes from the myths, as much as from the ones issued from classical Greece than from the growth of the religions theories, especially Christianity. She believes they are made by and for the man, and the women is always relegated to the back row as the author mentions (2015: 358).

“the majority of the myths find their roots in the spontaneity of the man in relation to this own existence and the world he lives in (…) through religions, traditions, language , fairy tales, songs, films, the myths enter the lives deeper subject to the materialistic realities”.

In the 50’s and 60’s in Europe and the USA, they carried on developing different investigations on the effects of the media (communication research) on the consumption as well as on the creation of ideologies. They emphasize on the use of stereotypes as models of knowledge or on what the representatives of the Critical Theory (Adorno or Horkheimer amongst a few) think, even though it did not even come to mind to leading this analysis from a feminine point of view.