Abstract

This essay titled Are We Safe? On Violence Against Women Through Simone de Beauvoir’s Work explores Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, with the objective to con- tribute to the uncovering of the root of the normalization of male violence towards women. The contention is that we cannot understand why violence against women occurs without first undertaking the task of exploring the becoming of children born in a situation, i.e., a sexed body within a society. Therefore, the main research question which the thesis investigates is the extent to which we can use Beauvoir’s magnum opus and her theory of woman as the Other to understand this phenomenological question. The research also describes the central idea of becoming for the sexes (and becoming of the genders) and the overall pressures applied to bodies, thus encouraging them to perform because of that body. It will present the contemporary feminist philosophy that is circulating around Beauvoir’s work and its current reception. Three major chapters will be explored —The Biological Data, The Psychoanalytical Point of View, and The Historical Materialism Point of View—as well as three major concepts to understand the becoming of women as the Other to men, i. e., girlhood, sexual initiation, and heterosexual love. This idea from Beauvoir is based in a sex binary, but this be- coming is still relevant to keep in mind as social pressures apply to all genders. These chapter findings lead to the initial claim that male violence towards women — and its normalization — stem from the embodied experience that is the becoming of children.