Gender differences are learned developmental outcomes, not natural expressions

Evidence

Beauvoir’s guiding principle was that growing up female made a bigger difference to a person than most people realised, including women themselves. Some differences were obvious and practical. French women had only just gained the right to vote (with Liberation in 1944), and continued to lack many other basic rights; a married woman could not open her own bank account until 1965. But the legal differences reflected deeper existential ones. Women’s everyday experiences and their Being-in-the-world diverged from men’s so early in life that few thought of them as being developmental at all; people assumed the differences to be ‘natural’ expressions of femininity. For Beauvoir, instead, they were myths of femininity — a term she adapted from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and which ultimately derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical’ way of digging out fallacies about culture and morality. In Beauvoir’s usage, a myth is something like Husserl’s notion of the encrusted theories which accumulate on phenomena, and which need scraping off in order to get to the ‘things themselves’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 668

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Beauvoir’s ‘myth of femininity’ concept and traces its lineage through Lévi-Strauss and Nietzsche to Husserl’s ‘encrusted theories’.
• XREF: Connects to the phenomenology of ‘things themselves’ established in earlier chapters on Husserl. — connects to: Observed male-female differences reflect social situation, not fixed essence — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 608; Early divergence between boys and girls is socially imposed, not instinctual — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 676; Gendered adolescence routes girls toward inward distress and boys toward outward aggression — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 672 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Early divergence between boys and girls is socially imposed, not instinctual #corroborates (0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 676
• Observed male-female differences reflect social situation, not fixed essence #corroborates (0.88) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 608