Beauvoir Tentative Answer (1)

During discussion I started thinking more on the first study question and had some tentative thoughts.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I found it interesting that for other species, females can play a different role. To a male spider, a female spider must be so scary!!, since she gives birth and then eats the male. But to a dominant lion, the female takes on a more nurturing role. In nature, we see that females in different species can have different roles. The difference between us and these animals is that it's not part of our life cycles to eat each other; we are pretty much equal (other than for reproductive purposes). Not all men are stronger and not all women are weaker.... If, like Beauvoir says, man sees all these identities projected onto a woman at once, technically women can take on any role.

This also made me think about Rousseau because when he describes man in the state of nature, I thought he was talking about man as in "human," which includes both man and woman. (Because men and women would have both existed in nature, right?) Rousseau had described the ideal person in the state of nature as someone who is self-sufficient and strong because of exposure to nature and reliance on only his body - for example, his arm has to be strong if he is only relying on himself, but if he had a machine then he would not have to use as much effort, and over time he would become weaker. If both existed and woman did not die out, then this means woman was able to survive by herself as well, providing for herself through the challenges of nature and hunting food. This shows that women are able to exist by themselves without the help of men - though when the people came together into a community and formed families, they divided labour by having women stay at home taking care of kids and doing household tasks while men went out to hunt, which they did because it was more effective and they were "naturally" better suited for those roles. So there's not really much reason why women should be seen as "less" when they were originally able to survive on their own, because if anything, it shows that there are other skills women have that can compensate for any less strength women may have compared to men.

Also, I don't think there's anything bad about being "feminine" (or I don't understand why that's the cause of people looking down on "feminine" people) as long as that's what you want to be. (???)