The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that this is a perfect exemplification of exactly that is going on in this debate, and exactly what Beauvoir was saying about the position of woman as 'other.'

Imagine turning up in a foreign culture, taking one of the founding https://twitter.com/PhilipPullman/status/1271560377273384962
texts of that culture, opening it randomly, picking one sentence out of it, and thinking you were equipped to interpret it knowing nothing about the people or the culture or their history or the *rest of the book* or EVEN THE NEXT DAMN SENTENCE.
Imagine then taking that sentence, and thinking you could tell the people who had been reading that book for the last 80 years, who had, in fact, built that entire culture on interpretations and elaborations of that book, what that sentence meant.
And imagine thinking you could tell them that what that sentence meant was not only that the culture they'd built on that book was bad and wrong, but that *they didn't even exist as a people at all.*
The fact that this keep happening like this, that men think that this is how they can treat women's culture, that this is how they can treat women's thought, that they think they have the right to randomly appropriate bits of it without knowing a damn thing about it and use it to
tell us that we are wrong and they are right is PRECISELY what Beauvoir was on about when she talked about the othering of women.

Our culture couldn't be an actual thing with its own existence that should be treated with respect and isn't just there to be taken apart at will and
appropriated to meet the needs of male people.

Because we are not actual persons with our own existence who are not there to taken apart at will and appropriated to meet the needs of male people.

And that is the whole damn point of the book.
As I've said before, Irigaray, who is probably the person in the direct tradition of Beauvoir who did the most to elaborate the idea of 'woman as other,' went so far as to say that in Western culture, women do not exist.
What she meant by that was that the patriarchal projection of 'woman' was so totalising that there was no recognition of the existence of actual female people in our culture at all.

I used to think she was talking in dramatic metaphors.

HAHAHA.

Nope.
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