🚦SIMONE

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21/1 08.35] Diposting WA oleh: UI. Bambang Intojo-mBin AdiwidjojoFISIKA80:

"THE SECOND SEX" 

In 1929, a 21-year-old woman walked out of the Sorbonne with a philosophy degree then wrote one sentence that would shatter the way the world sees gender forever.

Her name was Simone de Beauvoir, and everything about her existence was an act of rebellion.

At a time when French women couldn't even open a bank account without their husband's permission, when universities whispered that women's brains were too delicate for serious philosophy, Simone sat for the agrégation the most brutal competitive exam in French academia.

She placed second in the entire nation.

The man who placed first? Jean-Paul Sartre, who would become her lifelong partner. But here's what matters: it was Sartre's second attempt. It was Simone's first. And the examiners later admitted that her performance was so exceptional, they had debated giving her the top score instead.

She was twenty-one years old, and she had just proven that women could not only enter the world of philosophy—they could dominate it.

But Simone didn't just want to join the conversation. She wanted to burn down the walls around it.

She and Sartre became the beating heart of existentialism in Paris, spending their days writing in cafés, their nights debating the meaning of freedom. But while Sartre theorized about human existence in the abstract, Simone asked a question no male philosopher had dared to seriously consider:

Why are women treated as the "second sex"?

For twenty years, she observed, questioned, and analyzed. She studied history, biology, literature, and mythology. She interviewed women from every walk of life. And in 1949, she published a book that would ignite a revolution.

The Second Sex opened with a single devastating sentence: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

Seven words that dismantled centuries of assumptions.

She wasn't talking about biology. She was talking about the invisible cage society builds around girls from the moment they're born—the lessons that teach them to be quiet, to be pleasing, to make themselves smaller so men can feel larger. She showed that femininity wasn't natural or inevitable. It was constructed, enforced, and designed to keep half of humanity in chains.

The book caused an immediate scandal. The Vatican placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books. Critics called her dangerous, immoral, a threat to civilization itself. Male intellectuals dismissed her. She received hate mail by the hundreds.

She didn't apologize. She didn't soften her message. She kept writing.

Because Simone de Beauvoir understood something that terrified the establishment: existentialism wasn't just a philosophy—it was a weapon. If human beings create their own meaning, if we are radically free to choose who we become, then women don't have to accept the roles society assigns them.

They can choose themselves.

She wrote novels about women trapped in marriages, struggling with identity, fighting for autonomy. She wrote essays about aging, about female sexuality, about the violence hidden beneath "traditional values." She traveled the world, spoke to thousands, mentored the next generation of feminist thinkers.

And she lived exactly as she preached.

She never married Sartre, though they remained partners for fifty-one years. She refused to have children, rejecting the expectation that motherhood was a woman's destiny. She had other relationships, traveled constantly, wrote prolifically, and never once apologized for choosing intellectual freedom over domestic comfort.

She didn't wait for permission to live the life she wanted. She simply took it.

When critics accused her of being cold, selfish, or unwomanly, she responded with the only answer that mattered: she was living as a free human being, exactly as any man would be praised for doing.

Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986, and thousands gathered at her funeral in Paris. But her legacy didn't die with her. The Second Sex has never gone out of print. It's been translated into dozens of languages. Every wave of feminism since 1949 has built on her foundation.

Because she gave the world something it desperately needed: proof that the way things are is not the way things have to be.

She showed us that gender roles are not destiny. That marriage is not mandatory. That motherhood is not the only path to meaning. That women are not supporting characters in men's stories—they are the authors of their own.

Her existentialist truth still echoes today: life is not something that happens to you. It is something you create, one choice at a time.

So when the world tries to tell you who you should be, what you should want, how you should live—remember the woman who walked out of the Sorbonne in 1929 and refused to accept any of it.

Do not accept the life society hands you.

Create your own.

{PS}

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Kemudian saya merespon

[21/1 09.57] 👍

Great and inspiring post. Thank you, Sam mBin.

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From Simone de Beauvoir's Story... :

1) Of course, she herself was great, as was the examiner who passed her into the philosophy department. She can be an example to all examiners that passing even the most radical student ideas (no matter how radical) is a good thing and can potentially lead to intellectual progress for many people.

2) It's just a pity and overkill. Why didn't Simone want to have children?

3) Ibu kita Kartini (in my opinion), also argued similarly to Simone, only Kartini had children.

4) Simone's argument has become the foundation for the thinking and arguments of all feminists to this day, including contemporary Indonesian Muslim women's emancipation activists like *Prof. Dr. Zaitunah Subhan*, whose biography I wrote (permission to share the book cover)

🙏⬇️