This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting Chapter 5 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 126-142.

First Line: “The Revolution might have been expected to change the fate of women.”

Last Line: “French women would have to wait until 1945 to acquire political power.”

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These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re concluding Chapter 4 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 115-125.

First Line: “Altogether, men’s opinion in the Middle Ages is not favorable to women.”

Last Line: “…the sole means of defending themselves and escaping oppression.”

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“Altogether, men’s opinion in the Middle Ages is not favorable to women.” (pg. 115)

In spite of this courtly love thing that was going on, in the Middle Ages women were viewed as “fabliaux, farces, and plays criticize women for their laziness, coquetry, and lust” (pg. 115). So even if there was a version of “woman” romanticized by courtly love, don’t be fooled. Women were not viewed in a good light.

“In truth this dispute concerns women only indirectly. No one dreams of demanding a social role for them other than what they are assigned. It is more of a question of comparing the life of a cleric to the state of marriage; it is a masculine problem brought up by the Church’s ambiguous attitude to marriage.” (pg. 117)

At the bottom of pg. 115 Beauvoir points out that the clergy was women’s worst enemy. Even as the Christian Church made marriage a sacrament, it prohibited for their elite. The Church also cursed and scorned women for marriage just as they had to be married to be “good” women. Beauvoir’s pointing out here that the Church had a conflicting attitude toward marriage. It was glorified for women and women were cursed for what it did to men. This is why she names it a “masculine problem”— women didn’t have anything to do with the creation of the problem.

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This conversation concludes the first read in the New Books Series. Stay tuned for more on the next read!

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting Chapter 4 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 104-115.

First Line: “The evolution of the feminine condition was not a continuous process.”

Last Line: “...she had to be widowed and burdened with children for her to decide to earn her living by her pen.”

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“The evolution of the feminine condition was not a continuous process. With the great invasions, all of civilization is put into question. Roman law itself is under influence of a new ideology, Christianity; and in the centuries that follow, barbarians impose their laws. The economic, social, and political situation is overturned: a women’s situation suffers the consequences.” (pg. 104)

Right away, Beauvoir wants us to know that the history of women’s situation, i.e., “the feminine condition.” doesn’t move in a straight line. The great invasions basically blow-up everything Rome had built. Christianity and barbarian law fill the wreckage, and women’s lives get reshuffled in the process

(And by “feminine condition” Beauvoir isn’t saying that women are feminine. She naming the condition that is setup for women to assume.)

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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Real talk: Yes, I missed last week, and I’m not doing a scheduled live this week. Life has been HAPPENING lately, so I’m making up for it here with double the commentary and a video.

But don’t forget NEXT WEEK! MARK YOUR CALENDARS!

A LIVE WITH MANON GARCIA!! Wednesday, June 10th at 11am PST. If there’s anything to join me for it will be this “Author Meets Reader Session.”

This week our focus are the following chapters — The Videos, Writing Mazan, The Normal and the Pathological, The Judge in Us, A Good Victim, Lemaire, Dominique P.’s Final Act, 14 December

The Cost of Witness

One of the things Garcia grapples with in the chapters “The Videos” and “Writing Mazan” is a problem I don’t think has a clean solution: how do you describe sexual violence without reproducing its logic?

Garcia considers this question because she’s doing what many feminist thinkers, myself included, have done: write about sexual violence, and to write about you have to also engage the reality. Garcia’s engagement reaches another level. She’s sitting in a courtroom watching videos of Gisèle Pelicot being raped— an already surreal and disturbing reality— and then she has to decide what to do with what she’s seen. She wants to recount it, to understand it, to diagnose the problem. But she’s also aware of the risk: that description can tip into something that functions like pornography, that the very act of putting sexual violence into words can, in some registers, become a form of circulation rather than a form of witness.

Garcia invokes Nancy Bauer’s How to Do Things With Pornography here, and specifically Bauer’s claim that “to describe porn is to produce porn.” Garcia takes it seriously enough to ask herself: how can she convey the horror of what was done to Gisèle Pelicot without making that horror available for the wrong kind of consumption? I don’t think she fully resolves this, and I don’t think she’s meant to. But what I find valuable is that she names it.

It’s a tension that runs through a lot of feminist work on sexual violence. We can’t not describe it. Silence is its own kind of harm, its own erasure. And yet description is never neutral. It always carries a risk of amplification, of giving the violence more room to breathe than it deserves. Witness costs something. There’s no position outside that cost, there’s only the attempt to tend to the reality knowing the knowing the risk and working to mitigate the cost of bearing witness.

On Objectification

Right after this discussion, Garcia makes a point about objectification. She can’t not. Gisèle Pelicot was definitely treated like an object— by her husband, by her other rapists, in the courtroom. Garcia writes that pornography is based on the idea that the objectification of others is sexually arousing, that objectification erodes the humanity and dignity of the other person. She’s right that this is what’s at stake in Gisèle Pelicot’s experience. That much is not in question.

I want to flag something that feminist discourse on objectification has often glossed over, and that I think matters for how we do this analysis well: objectification is not a single thing. Most feminist work on the topic, including work I otherwise find valuable, often only talks about objectification as a form of violence, as something done to a person that diminishes them. But being a sexual object is a general feature of sexual desire, and it’s not always bad.

The tradition of existential phenomenology reminds us of something important: we are always objects for others. That’s not an aberration of intersubjective life; it’s a condition of it. To be in the world with other people is to be seen, appraised, categorized, desired even. It is to exist as an object in someone else’s field of experience. The question isn’t whether objectification happens to someone, but whether we are also, simultaneously, subjects.

Let’s be honest: there are moments when being objectified is actively wanted. When someone says “you’re such a hot piece of ass” and the person on the receiving end is into it, even if they didn’t say “tell me I’m a hot piece of ass” but they receive it with pleasure and say as much so as to give consent to being seen as a hot piece of ass— that’s objectification, and it doesn’t feel like an assault on dignity. Pleasurable objectification holds both dimensions at once: I am an object for you and a subject with you. Those two things aren’t in contradiction.

This matters because when feminist discourse collapses all objectification into a single harmful form, a few things happen. First, we misdiagnose the harm— locating the problem in the act of treating someone as a sexual object, rather than in the annihilation of their subjectivity. Second, we hand an easy rhetorical weapon to people who want to dismiss feminist sexual ethics as puritanical or out of touch. And third, we make it harder, not easier, to articulate what was so devastating about what happened to Gisèle Pelicot.

What was done to her wasn’t objectification in the sense of “someone found her sexually desirable.” Her subjectivity wasn’t set aside or ignored; it was made structurally impossible. She wasn’t there to be seen at all. That’s a specific form of objectification, and it deserves a precise name.

BUT, I understand why Garcia doesn’t pause here. It’s not where the book’s argument lives, and opening this up risks distraction at exactly the wrong moment. AND< I think feminist sexual ethics has to be honest about the pleasures and the complexity of objectification if we want to accurately name what its most harmful forms actually do.

Normal Men

In the chapters “The Normal and the Pathological,” Garcia does something I find unsettling in the best way.

As Garcia points out, the psychiatric experts called to testify in the trial are almost unanimous: the men were in full possession of their faculties. They are not pathological. Garcia also watches the defense try, repeatedly, to argue otherwise, to find pathology somewhere, because pathology would mean diminished responsibility, which would mean shorter sentences, which would mean something closer to acquittal. Meanwhile the men themselves insist their desires are normal, their sexuality is normal, that nothing about what they did falls outside the range of what men do.

Garcia’s worry, watching all of this, isn’t that the experts are wrong. It’s that the entire search for pathology, even when it fails, reinforces a narrow and unexamined idea of what “normal” sexuality looks like, without ever questioning whether that norm itself might be the problem.

If rape happens a lot, statistically speaking, then the men in that courtroom are normal. And the psychiatric experts have confirmed they’re normal in the clinical sense too. So what norm, exactly, does a man who rapes fall outside of? And then, of course, there are the rapists themselves who insist they’re not rapists, that they’re desires and “urges” are normal, except for the fact that Gisèle Pelicot’s age “made them look like perverts” (pg. 112). What I appreciate about Garcia’s discussion in this chapter is how she exposes how the frame of normality and pathology work to “give up on understanding how a man can do what he did” (pg. 107). Normal men doing statistically normal things….

Your turn — what got you? What questions are you bringing to the Live with Garcia on June 10th?

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I get what the profile is doing. There are a lot of harmful misconceptions about polyamory floating around that are used to dismiss and pathologize non-monogamy. This profile confronts the stereotype that poly people just want to sleep around. In that context, pushing back makes sense, and is important. When done well, polyamory involves emotional depth, commitment, and sometimes shared calendars that are not only helpful but a masterclass in relational coordination and care. Monogamy doesn’t have anything on the kinds of tending that polyamory requires.

What’s frustrating is the respectability pivot at stake when polyamory gets framed as not really being about sex. The defense is: we’re not just about sex. And the implication, even if unintended, is that “just about sex” would be a problem. That sex, on its own, without the scaffolding of long-term meaningful relationship, isn’t quite enough to justify non-monogamy. That we need the emotional credentials or scheduling credentials to prove that we are in it for more than sex.

The profile doesn’t frame it as a matter of respectability. Naomi doesn’t say it explicitly. But I’m calling it a respectability pivot because it’s sidelining sex, and sex with multiple people is a key feature of polyamory. What this sidelining does is a classic move of neoliberal sexual politics. We’re not threatening, we’re just like you, we love deeply and schedule carefully and feel jealousy too. Love is love. And sure, it works. In a way. Maybe it makes polyamory more legible to the masses. It’s seen as more like the monogamous couples who juggle busy, packed calendars. We’re not sexual deviants. We’re honest, normal Google calendar users with great organizational skills.

What gets left behind in this framing of polyamory is sex. Or more precisely, the legitimacy of sex as a reason, a value, an organizing principle of a life. The idea that sex itself might be enough, not a gateway to something more meaningful but is the thing that fuels meaningful connection. And even granting that polyamory centers love—it’s right there in the name—sex with multiple people is still part of what makes it structurally distinct. Not every polyamorous person is having sex with multiple partners, but non-monogamy opens that possibility in a way monogamy doesn’t. That’s not incidental to polyamory. For many people it’s the point. It's something to acknowledge and embrace, not decenter, even if it's not your version.

The article mentions, almost in passing, that a good chunk of the polyamory community is asexual—that sex isn’t their priority, and they’re looking for emotional support and companionship. This is completely valid and worth knowing. Asexuality pushes back on the assumption that all intimacy is sexual, so it deserves acknowledgment on its own terms, not just as evidence that polyamory isn’t about sex. But notice what’s happening in the logic here: asexuality is offered as further evidence that polyamory transcends the merely sexual. The spectrum goes from “not about sex at all” to “also about more than sex.” What drops out is the person for whom sex is genuinely central, not as a symptom of something unserious, but as a value they’re organizing their intimate life around. That person doesn’t get the good press. They’re the stereotype the article works against.

I’m not saying that all versions of non-monogamy are sexually motivated. I’m saying that the urge to prove it isn’t—to lead with the calendar and the emotional depth and the meaningful relationships—is itself shaped by norms that make sex something to be explained away rather than claimed and that treat sex as an acceptable foundation for a life and relationships only when it’s dressed in the right clothes.

How we talk about sex and sexuality is never neutral. It can reflect, reproduce, or resist a particular vision of the good life.

So fine, good organizational skills are great. And maybe that’s what polyamory is truly about for some people. But so is wanting sex with multiple people. Neither needs to apologize for the other.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re finishing Chapter 3 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 95-103.

First Line: “The customs of the Greeks are very similar….”

Last Line: “...she is free ‘for nothing.’”

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“The customs of the Greeks are very similar to the Oriental ones yet they do not practice polygamy. No one knows exactly why. Maintaining a harem always entails heavy costs: only the ostentatious Solomon, the sultans from The Thousand and One Nights, kings, chiefs, or rich property owners could afford the luxury of a vast seraglio; an ordinary man had to be satisfied with three or four women; a peasant rarely possessed more than two.” (pg. 95)

Despite the word choice we now cringe at, Beauvoir is noting that Greek monogamy is less a moral achievement than an economic one. Polygamy was always a luxury of the wealthy, and the Greeks simply didn’t institutionalize what most men couldn’t afford anyway.

It’s a characteristically materialist move here. What looks like a cultural or ethical difference between societies turns out to be largely a question of resources.

“She spends her whole life as a minor; she is under the control of her guardian: either her father, or her husband, or her husband’s heir or, by default, the state, represented by public officials; here are her masters, and they use her like merchandise, the guardian’s control extending over both her person and her property; the guardian can transmit her rights as he wishes: the father gives her daughter up for adoption or in marriage; the husband can repudiate his wife and hand her over to another husband.” (pg. 95)

This is likely a reality we’re familiar with now. Beauvoir’s cataloguing how Greek law made woman a permanent minor. She never passes from dependence into personhood, just from one “master” to another.

The focus on Greece is important—she’s shedding light on the origins of Western society. So the significance here is that she’s like listen, male domination is not a matter of barbarism or backwardness but the law of one of the civilizations Western culture idealizes most.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting Chapter 3 of Part Two: History— US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 90-95

First Line: “Once woman is dethroned by the advent of private property…”

Last Line: “...woman’s role in public life was a secondary one, and in private life, fidelity was required of her without reciprocity.”

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Before we begin: Remember that Chapter 2 narrates the emergence of private property and how women become the Other in relation to that emergence. The point being both to show that (and how) women’s situation is not essential, but contingent, i.e., historical, economic, etc. Chapter 3 begins by focusing on how women’s status is encoded into the family. Across this chapter, the through line is that women’s oppression is always backed by economic and legal arrangements that give men a material interest in maintaining it.

Alright, let’s get into it.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re in Part Two: History with Chapter 2 — US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 76-89

First Line: “We have just seen that the fate of woman…”

Last Line: “…and this will also entail an evolution in women’s destiny.”

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“We have just seen that the fate of woman is very harsh in primitive hordes; in female animals, the reproductive function is naturally limited, and when it occurs, the particular animal is more or less released from other labors; only domestic females are sometimes exploited to the point of exhaustion of their forces as reproducers and in their individual capacities by a demanding master. This was without doubt the case of woman at the time when the struggle against a hostile world demanded the full employment of community resources; to the fatigues of incessant and unregulated procreation were added those of heavy domestic tasks (pg. 76)

Let’s think about what Beauvoir is up to. She uses the female animal as a foil — even animals are naturally released from other labor during reproduction, but women are not, which means women’s double burden is a social imposition, not a natural one. The analogy here is the domestic animal, whose reproductive capacity is extracted beyond natural limits by a master who owns her. This is the implicit parallel to women’s condition. She then historicizes: the full exploitation of women’s bodies was a response to material scarcity, not simply male malice, drawing on an Engels-inflected materialist framework. (Of course, she could do better here if she were to consider how reproduction and domestic are historically racialized.)

But why does she start this way? The passage sets up her coming argument that agriculture and private property turned women’s bodies into owned economic instruments.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This week our focus is 4 chapters — ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby?’, To Subdue a Unsubmissive Woman, Anger, The Trial.

One of the reasons I started the community reads on this Substack is that I think reading is a practice of attention. Especially in these times when more and more people are reading fewer books and spending less time reading, slowing down enough to not just read, but think with a book is increasingly rare. When I was a professor, I assigned one full book in most of my undergraduate courses not only for the content but because most of my students hadn't read a book cover to cover in a full year. The book was the practice.

Reading this book, I’m reminded that slowing down and staying with something is a different proposition when that something is sexual violation. I've read (and written) a lot of work like this. It's still hard and also worth it.

Here’s what’s on my mind after reading the chapters this week.

• We get more on Garcia’s “ordinary men argument.” She claims, “the demand for women’s submission is not the product of a sick mind, it is the very way in which hegemonic masculinity works. To be a man, a real man, is to have a ‘submissive slut’” (pg. 70). Once gain, Garcia’s refusing the exceptionalism often reached for when we want to explain men’s violence. The men in the Pelicot trial weren’t aberrations. They were, in a disturbing sense, doing masculinity.

• There’s a moment I keep coming back to. Garcia is at an airport watching two men in their 50s, seemingly ordinary, unremarkable men, and she finds herself thinking: “do they rape their wives as they sleep?” (pg. 74). Something about this is both completely right and deeply eerie. It’s eerie because of course you can’t know, and of course these men would probably seem perfectly fine by every available metric. There’s also something philosophically interesting happening here. This is what attention does. Once we’re oriented toward something, once a phenomenon is foregrounded for us, it shows up everywhere. So Garcia isn’t being paranoid. She’s being perceptive. What does it mean that most of us have been trained not to notice this? Patriarchy doesn’t just organize behavior; it organizes perception. It structures what stands out and what recedes.

• “The Trial.” I’ll be honest: I wanted something different here. Not because the description Garcia offers isn’t valuable, but because the terrain feels familiar. The argument that criminal trials are not, and cannot be, the sole solution to sexual violence is one feminists, especially Black feminists and abolitionists, have been making for a long time. Garcia makes this point explicitly by the chapter’s end. But I wonder if the chapter’s center of gravity is still the trial, still oriented toward the criminal justice system as the primary frame, even while questioning it. I think this is partly an audience question. Garcia’s writing for readers who may still believe that a verdict settles something, that the courtroom is where justice lives or fails. And that’s a real audience. So I understand the move. But I found myself wanting the critique of carceral logic to arrive earlier, and louder.

Your turn — what got you?

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We've just wrapped up Part One: Destiny and are making our way into Part Two: History. In this video above, I walk through her key moves in Part One and set up what's coming next in Part Two— her genealogical account of how women's subordination has been concretely produced over time.

And just so you know, it’s never too late to join! I get that a slow read may feel like a slog. Honestly, sitting with that has made me think more carefully about my own why behind offering one. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how reading shapes the brain, captures it better than I could. In Proust and the Squid she writes: "We are not only what we read. We are how we read."

So, come read with us. It’s a cool way to become.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re beginning Part Two: History with Chapter 1 — US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 71-75

First Line: “This world has always belonged to males…”

Last Line: “How have men defined it?”

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“This world has always belonged to males, and none of the reasons given for this have ever seemed sufficient.” (pg. 71)

Men’s dominance is real, and people have offered reasons for why that is the case, but none of them hold up.

“We have already posited that when two human categories find themselves face-to-face, each one wants to impose sovereignty on the other; if both hold to this claim equally, a reciprocal relationship is created, either hostile or friendly, but always tense.” (pg. 71)

We’re back to Hegel. So, we know, we know. Whenever two groups meet, there’s a power struggle. Neither group naturally says, “you go ahead, you’re in charge.” If the groups are equally matched, the struggle doesn’t just resolve itself. It becomes an ongoing relationship. Maybe they fight, maybe they negotiate, maybe they coexist uneasily, but the tension never fully disappears because neither side has “won.”

“If one of the two has advantage over the other, that one prevails and works to maintain the relationship by oppression.” (pg. 71)

This is a the key turn. If the standoff isn’t equal, i.e., if one group has some kind of edge, that group wins, and then works to keep winning. Oppression, then, isn’t just cruelty for its own sake. It’s the dominant group actively protecting its position.

“It is thus understandable that man might have had the will to dominate woman: but what advantage enabled him to accomplish this will?” (pg. 71)

This is her pivot, and how she’s setting up this section. She’s separating wanting power from getting power. Not all groups achieve dominance. So, the real question isn’t “did men want to be on top?” ; it’s “what gave them the actual ability to pull it off?” And we definitely need to ask this question given what we’ve rejected the determinist and essentialist ideology critiqued in Part One.

“Ethnologists give extremely contradictory information about primitive forms of human society, even more so when they are well-informed and less systematic. It is especially difficult to formulate an idea about woman’s situation in the preagricultural period. We do not even know if…” (pg. 71)

This is a classic Beauvoir move. She’s basically like, “Look, what we think we know is a mess. We got to question it and not just rely on it for explanation.” When it comes to the ethnographical record, it’s a mess. Scholars contradict each other constantly, so we can’t get a clean picture of prehistoric women’s lives. We don’t even know for certain how physically different men and women were back then.

She briefly entertains the idea that maybe women weren’t weaker — after all, they carried heavy loads. But she walks it back: that probably just meant men had their hands free to fight, which was actually the more dangerous and strength-demanding job.

Bottom line on the physical question: men probably were stronger, and in a world of clubs and wild animals where survival was a daily struggle, that gap mattered enormously.

“In any case, as robust as women may have been at that time, the burden of reproduction represented for them a severe handicap in the fight against the hostile world: Amazons were said to mutilate their breasts, which meant that at least during the period of their warrior lives they rejected maternity. As for ordinary women, pregnancy, giving birth, and menstruation diminished their work capacity…” (pg. 72)

Pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation. These weren’t just inconveniences; they were serious physical limitations in a world where you needed your full body every single day just to survive

Yes, this is an assertion about physiological difference (it kind of feels weird!). But let’s consider WHY she’s making this claim.

Remember her question at the end of the last passage? “What advantage enabled man to accomplish his will to dominate?” This passage is her answer: physical strength + the burden of reproduction. Importantly, she’s not saying women are inferior. She’s saying women were caught in a specific set of circumstances that created a vulnerability. She’s building a case that male dominance wasn’t inevitable because men are better; it was a historical accident produced by certain concrete conditions.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This week our focus is three chapters — Incest, Ordinary Men, and Masculinity/Masculinities. When you read them together, it’s clear that Garcia’s building an argument about where domination begins, who carries it forward, and what holds the whole structure up.

Let’s dig in.

The Cradle of Domination

In her book The Cradle of Dominations, French anthropologist Dorothée Dussy argues that incest is not a closed scene between victim and perpetrator but a practice embedded within a family across generations — woven into the very fabric of how intimacy and closeness get defined and passed down. In the chapter on incest, Garcia draws on this to argue that the family is where domination is first learned and internalized.

This phrase— “the cradle of domination”— suggests that incest isn't an aberration of family life so much as a grotesque clarification of the power relations already present within it. It invites us to consider how the family functions as an original training ground for hierarchies of gender and power: who commands, who submits, whose desires matter, whose body is available. And further, it suggests that the violence isn’t erupting from outside ordinary life, but is incubated inside it.

What struck me is how this reframes the Mazan trial. We’re not looking at men who developed their sense of entitlement in a vacuum. We’re looking at men who were formed somewhere, especially in families, in close relationships, that taught them, implicitly or explicitly, domination.

The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape

Garcia turns to Nicola Gavey’s work on the "cultural scaffolding of rape" to further elucidate the social problem of rape. In the most basic sense, Gavey's argument is that rape doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's not just the act of a deviant individual who fell outside the norms of his culture. Rather, rape is enabled, held up, made possible, by the ordinary, everyday structures of heterosexual culture: its scripts, its norms about male desire and entitlement, its assumptions about what men want and what women are for.

What I love about this concept, and how Garcia draws on it, is that it refuses two tempting but ultimately unhelpful moves: the "monster" move (this was an aberration, nothing to do with ordinary men) and the "it's everywhere" move, which flattens the reality and tends to lead to paralysis.

While reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the recent news about an online "rape academy" where men were literally teaching other men how to drug and assault women, including their girlfriends and wives. It’s a clear example of ordinary men building the infrastructure of domination— constructing it deliberately, passing it down, and institutionalizing it.

"I Had a Penis Instead of a Brain"

One of the men on trial said: "I did it because I no longer had a conscience, I had a penis instead of a brain."

On the surface it reads as an admission of guilt, almost. But what this man is actually doing is reaching for one of the most culturally available scripts there is: male sexuality as an uncontrollable force. I couldn’t help it. My desire took over. I was driven by something beyond my control. This is the cultural scaffolding in action, in real time, in a courtroom. The justification is available to him because the culture has long provided it.

Of course, the excuse doesn’t hold. As Garcia points out in the consent chapter and continues here, these men knew. They knew they were doing something wrong. The excuse of uncontrollable desire is not an explanation. It’s a performance of a script.

Garcia's point isn't just that these were statistically average men with unremarkable jobs, families, neighbors. It's that their ordinariness is the whole point. Hegemonic masculinity doesn't require monsters. It runs on ordinary men following ordinary scripts. It's the structure that keeps producing them, ordinary man after ordinary man.

What Men Need to Tackle

Garcia argues that what has to be confronted is hegemonic masculinity — a concept that names the dominant, culturally exalted form of masculinity: the version organized around dominance, heterosexuality, toughness, and the suppression of vulnerability that gets to set the terms for what “being a man” means.

I agree with Garcia. I also want to note that this isn’t a new argument. From Raweynn Connell to CJ Pascoe to Susan Bordo to Jackson Katz, feminist scholars and feminist men have been making this case for decades. The diagnosis is not novel, which is exactly what makes the Pelicot trial so sobering. If anything, it reveals the scale of the work that is still left to do. The scaffolding has been named, analyzed, theorized AND it’s still standing. That’s not a reason for despair, but it is a reason to sit with the question of what confronting hegemonic masculinity actually requires not just academically, but in practice, in daily life, in the choices ordinary men make.

Of course, men are living otherwise. They have been. There are men who have heard the feminist argument, who are refusing the scripts, who are doing the work. And yet. The manosphere is growing. Rape academies exist. The Pelicot trial happened. I find myself less interested now in asking “what would masculinity look like otherwise?” (because we do have some answers to that) and more interested in asking: “how do both of these realities exist simultaneously, and what does that coexistence tell us?
That's the question I'm ending this week with.

Now your turn!

What are you making of Garcia’s argument across these three chapters? Drop your thoughts below.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re concluding Part One with “Chapter 3: The Point of View of Historical Materialism” — US Knopf 2010 Hardcover, pgs. 62-68.

First Line: “The theory of historical materialism brought to light…”

Last Line: “…it is driven by the fundamental project of the existent transcending itself toward being.”

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“The theory to historical materialism brought to light some very important truths.” (pg. 62)

She’s signaling that—unlike her treatment of biology or psychoanalysis—this is a framework she takes seriously and partially endorses.

But the tone matters: “some very important truths” is not the same as “the full truth.” So, she’s setting up a move she’ll repeat from earlier chapters: yes, this framework reveals something crucial, but it doesn’t explain everything. She’s about to show both its explanatory power and its limits.

“Humanity is not an animal species: it is a historical reality.” (pg. 62)

This is truth #1. From the perspective of historical materialism, human beings aren’t defined primarily by biological nature, but conditions they collectively create and live. She’s into this view!

“Human society is anti-physis: it does not passively submit to the presence of nature, but rather appropriates it.” (pg. 62)

First— anti-physis: in short, it means being opposed to or going beyond mere nature. So truth #2 is: human societies don’t just submit to natural conditions as givens; we actively transform and use nature to create our own ways of living.

“Thus woman cannot simply be considered a sexed organism: among biological data only those with concrete value in action have any importance; woman’s consciousness of herself is defined by her sexuality alone: it reflects a situation that depends on society’s economic structure, a structure that indicates the degree of technical evolution humanity has attained.” (pg. 62)

Sooooo, from these two truths, historical materialism we get Beauvoir’s hot take: you can’t understand woman just as a biological body; only those biological facts that matter in lived, practical life are significant. And even a woman’s awareness of herself as “sexual” isn’t purely natural; it reflects a social and economic situation shaped by the level of technological and material development in a given society.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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It’s kickoff time for the New Books Series!

We’re starting with philosopher Manon Garcia’s latest book Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial (Polity 2025)

.Here’s the reading schedule + dates for Lives!

If you’ve been following or participating in the slow read of The Second Sex, you may be aware that my weekly posts do close, line-by-line analysis of the text.

Not here! But not because this text (or any other one we’ll read) isn’t worthy of careful attention. It’s just the mood is different. Here, we’re going to read and think together about the project the book, what’s it offers us, what it doesn’t, what it makes us feel, think, aspire to do about the state of things— you get the point.

My weekly posts are going to look a little different each week, but the point is to share what I’m working through, reflecting on, and feeling, and encourage you to do the same. Maybe my notes and reflections on what I’m reading will help you.

So….

What’s on my mind?

Here’s what came up for me while reading the first three chapters:

• “Can we [the women] live with men? If so, at what cost?” (pg. 6) DAMN. What a powerful question to ask, and, as Garcia notes, one that is likely irritate and/or offend people. Let’s go. Garcia doesn’t just ask this to be provocative, she’s pointing out a disturbing fact about the reality of the trial animates: there are men who will rape, who will deny the facts even when faced with “explicit and damning videos” of their actions, who will be unashamed, who will still commit rape, it raises the question. And even if there’s ambiguity (ambivalence, even?) around “we the women” (a point Garcia makes on page 5), it’s a question that comes up and might haunt those of us positioned in the “we” whether we like it or not. At any rate, I love brave questions. This feels like one of those to me. Not to mention the way she riffs on this question as the paragraph unfolds, revealing its other iterations, is gooood.

• About the chapter on consent: “The trial did its job: the judges demonstrated a clear and precising understanding of what sexual consent is…at no point did the court presume that Gisèle Pelicot had consented.” (pg. 20). This changes a lot. In contrast to feminist critiques that the law does poorly with consent, that it presumes it, suggests the problem is in how the law and courts understand consent. But not here. So where does that leave us? What is the issue with consent? Garcia’s answer is this: “”the men examined in the trial had not understood what consent is and had assumed that they could do without it as long as they did not get caught.” (pg. 20). So, the problem is “a social problem.” In one sense, I’m like yeah. Obviously. But the reframe is still poignant. It pushes us to really sit with WTF is going on with men and consent. I question that “not understanding” that is revealed in the trial, according to Garcia’s observations, and so does Garcia (see pg. 18). “In short, there can be no doubt they knew they were doing something wrong.” But whatever they said the knew or didn’t about consent, it’s what they said and that reveals a problem.

• Related point: in the Introduction Garcia says that “what makes the Mazan rape trial an important historical trial is that it marks the end of the idea that we can place our hopes exclusively in the legal system” (pg. 5). I think many of us gave up that hope a long time ago! And, I know she’s emphasizing it to point out that we must make sure we place our hopes (and work) elsewhere (but again, there are point who have been doing that, so I think that’s a call to a different reader and audience. Very much still needed.)

• Some meta stuff: Right out of the gate I’m like damn, I love engaged philosophy. Rather than just applying philosophy to the world, (what people often called Applied this or that), this is philosophical think that is engaged with the world. And what Garcia’s showing right away is that we can know the facts of the trial, and thus have some understanding of the event, but to think about, to reflect on the meanings it reveals and makes about our reality is different kind of work.

Now your turn! What got you?

Leave a comment

p.s. These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create community reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot!

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We start on April 29th! You’re welcome to join in at anytime.

What’s The New Book Series? Feel free to check out this announcement post for more details!

Oh yeah, and don’t forget!!

Paid subscribers have access to 3 Lives on Wednesday May 6th, Wednesday May 20th, Wednesday June 3rd (12pm pst)

Author Meets Reader Session: Wednesday, June 10th at 11am PST I go live with Manon Garcia. This is open to everyone!

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create community reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot!

Upgrade to Paid

Reading Schedule

Week 1: Wednesday April 29^th – Tuesday May 5^th

Chapters: Introduction, Consent, The Old Lady and the Gynaecologist

Week 2: Wednesday May 6^th – Tuesday May 12^th

Chapters: Incest, Ordinary Men, Masculinity/Masculinities

Week 3: Wednesday May 13^th – Tuesday May 19^th

Chapters: ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby?’, To Subdue a Unsubmissive Woman, Anger, The Trial

Week 4: Wednesday May 20^th – Tuesday May 26^th

Chapters: The Videos, Writing Mazan, The Normal and the Pathological, The Judge in Us

Week 5: Wednesday May 27^th – Tuesday June 3^rd

Chapters: A Good Victim, Lemaire, Dominique P.’s Final Act, 14 December

Week 5: Wednesday June 4^th – Wednesday June 10^th

Chapters: Rapeable, What Remains for Our Love?, You Have To Be a Little Bit Fond of Women

This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re finishing “Chapter 2: The Psychoanalytic Point of View” — US Knopf 2010 Hardcover: pgs. middle of 58-61.

First Line: “Likewise, woman can no more be defined by…”

Last Line: “…we will study her from an existential point of view, taking into account her total situation.”

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“Likewise, woman can be no more defined by the consciousness of her own femininity than by merely saying that woman is a female: she finds this consciousness within the society of which she is a member.” (pg. 58)

Remember where we left off. Beauvoir’s just asserted that whatever psychoanalysis explains only makes sense once it is placed within the sociohistorical context in which it is lived and emerges.

So now we find her refusing the move that a woman is defined by being conscious of her femininity (as a defect). Just like we can’t say a woman is a female, we can’t give into psychoanalytic explanation of women’s femininity. If a woman does have “penis envy,” if she does experience herself as defective, she has that consciousness in a society. That interior life doesn’t just happen. It comes from somewhere. This is why, just a few lines down, Beauvoir says, “But a life is a relation with the world; the individual defines himself by choosing himself through the world; we must turn to the world to answer the questions that preoccupy us.” (pg. 58)

“Without wholly rejecting the contributions of psychoanalysis, some of which are productive, we will nevertheless not accept its method.” (pg. 58)

She’s not rejecting psychoanalysis outright. But how it proceeds? We’re rejecting that.

“First of all, we will not limit ourselves to taking sexuality as a given…” (pg. 58)

We definitely reject that and how it takes sexuality as a thing that just is. In this same paragraph Beauvoir goes on to say that we can’t just name “women’s anxiety before male genitalia as an inversion of frustrated desire” as a “behavior.” They are attitudes she claims— this is a key concept! So check out the key concepts guide!

“Reality would be better delineated if, instead of defining the libido in vague terms of ‘energy,’ the significance of sexuality were juxtaposed with that of other human attitudes: taking, catching, eating, doing, undergoing, and so on; for sexuality is one of the singular modes of apprehending an object…” (pg. 59)

Here we get an existentialist account of sexuality. It’s not a behavior, but a way of having and disclosing a relation to an object, to others, and to the world. It’s relational through and through.

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re starting “Chapter 2: The Psychoanalytic Point of View” — US Knopf 2010 Hardcover: pgs. 49- middle of 58

First Line: “The enormous advance psychoanalysis made…”

Last Line: “Psychoanalysis could only find its truth within a historical context.”

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“The enormous advance psychoanalysis made is in its consideration that no factor intervenes in psychic life without having taken on human meaning; it is not the body-object described by scientists that exists concretely but the body lived by the subject” (pg. 49)

Well, we’re starting off the chapter with something good about psychoanalysis. Beauvoir’s asserting that it made an important breakthrough by recognizing that nothing in our inner lives affects us in a purely mechanical or biological way (as a body-object); what matters, what is, exists because we interpret it and give it human meaning.

“The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such.” (pg.49)

A female is not a woman because she lives herself as such, not because she is biologically determined to be a woman.

“Nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.” (pg.49)

A woman becomes herself (a woman) by actively taking up and interpreting “nature” through lived experience.

“An entire system has been erected based on this outlook: we do not intend to criticize it here as a whole, but only to examine its contributions to the study of woman. Discussing psychoanalysis as such as not an easy undertaking. Like all religions...it displays an unsettling flexibility against a background of rigid concepts.” (pg. 49)

Okay, what’s up with psychoanalysis? How are we going to consider it? Well, Beauvoir isn’t going to critique psychoanalysis wholesale. She’s also claiming that psychoanalysis is difficult to criticize because it’s become like a religion and adapts and reshapes itself to fit new cases while still relying on some fixed core ideas. To put it another way, the flexibility in interpretation and rigidity in underlying concepts makes psychoanalysis powerful but also hard to pin down or evaluate.

“…to use his [Freud’s] language is to adopt a philosophy. It is this very confusion that, while making criticism awkward demands it.” (pg. 50)

Freud isn’t describing what is. His explanatory framework carries philosophical commitments about what human beings are. So even as psychoanalysis presents itself as a science, Freud assumes a lot about human nature and his assumptions need to be interrogated. (p.s. not to mention that even if he acknowledged aspects of women’s sexuality, he didn’t really care about the situation of women.)

She’s now going to describe what Freud says about women’s eroticism and sexual development (pgs. 50-52)

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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This is a weekly post for the 2026 year-long slow read of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This week we’re finishing “Chapter 1: Biological Data” — US Knopf 2010 Hardcover: pgs. 38-48.

First Line: “In human species as in most others…”

Last Line: “…the question is what humanity has made of the human female.”

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“In human species as in most others, almost as many individuals of both sexes are born (100 girls for 104 boys); embryonic evolution is analogous; however, the original epithelium remains neuter longer in the female fetus…but these tentative beginnings of fetal life are not yet well enough understood for them to be assigned a meaning” (pg. 38-9)

Beauvoir is basically saying that, in humans, males and females are born in roughly equal numbers and start off developing in pretty similar ways. But in female fetuses, the early reproductive tissue stays “neutral” for longer, which means hormones have more time to shape what it becomes—sometimes in ways that don’t fit neatly into male/female categories. Because of that, some scientists have argued that female development looks less fixed or immediate than male development. Still, Beauvoir points out that the science here isn’t settled enough to say what any of this really means. She’s setting up her bigger point: you can’t reduce “woman” to biological facts about females.

“Neither their formula nor their anatomical singularities define the human female as such. Her functional evolution is what distinguishes her from the male.” (pg. 39)

This is a curious move! She’s just stated that there are many aspects of human males and females that are the same or similar. So, you can’t define a human female just by chromosomes or anatomy. But now Beauvoir is affirming a difference. What really sets a human female apart is how her body functions and develops over time.

We know she’s trying to undermine biological essentialism, so why is she’s marking a distinction here?

“Woman’s history is much more complex…At the moment of birth the species has taken possession of her and seeks to affirm itself…But at puberty the species reasserts its rights…It is worth noting that this event has all the characteristics of a crisis; the woman’s body does not accept the species’ installation in her without a fight; and this fight weakens and endangers her” (pg. 39)

More interesting moves here!

These days, I’m an independent scholar. That means there’s no institution, or job!, behind me. So reader support makes this work viable for me. The more support I have, the more freely I can write and create slow reads, and the more accessible I can make this space. Your support means a lot.

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