»Should I light up?« Anna Cornelia Ploug asks, pointing to her pipe, which I have asked her to take with her for our photo shoot.

»Please do,« I reply, it would actually look cool.

»I don’t have any regular tobacco,« she then concludes, and without going into the meaning of that, we agree to keep the pipe unlit.

Anna Cornelia Ploug is a postdoc at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics (NorS), University of Copenhagen (UCPH), where she is doing research on how the humanities address the major challenges facing society.

However, that is not what I have come to talk to her about today. We are to talk about someone who you sense is the young researcher’s professional idol: the French writer, feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, whose main work The Second Sex turns 75 this year.

A misunderstood one-liner

The idea for the work was not Beauvoir’s own at all, it turns out:

»It was her friend Colette Audry, who for many years had been talking about writing a great work about womanhood,« says Anna Cornelia Ploug.

»But Colette didn’t have time for it because she was so politically active in the women’s struggle herself,« she laughs.

Beauvoir wasn’t.

»Beauvoir wrote this tome about the question of being a woman, but she had never herself felt to be the object of discrimination on the basis of her gender, or experienced it as a problem in any way,« says Anna Cornelia Ploug.

»She actually wanted to avoid talking about it. But she didn’t quite succeed in avoiding it.«

Feminism has become so mainstream that almost everyone is now a feminist

Anna Cornelia Ploug, postdoc at NorS

The Second Sex is a work which is associated with many stories, myths and opinions. The Pope condemned it, Franco banned it, and it was the cause of a big stir and outcry wherever it became available.

It can even infuriate people nowadays, says Anna Cornelia Ploug, citing as an example the two centre-right pundits Eva and Rune Selsing, who in their book Den Borgerlige Orden [The Bourgeois Order] from 2022 call The Second Sex »a blowtorch directed against bourgeois society«.

Anna Cornelia Ploug somewhat ironically calls it ‘the bible of modern feminism’.

»Yes, and that’s a terrible cliché. A real platitude.«

But she will defend it, she says:

»Because it is also the case with the Bible that many have it on their shelves, but how many have actually read it? People think they know what it says, and there are a lot of rumours about what it says. Great conflicts, wars and battles are fought over it. But in many ways, it’s also just a symbol.«

It is the same with The Second Sex. There is disagreement about the interpretation of the book, and its arguments are often oversimplified.

Most people will be familiar with the idea that »you are not born a woman, you become one.« It is often cited as the book’s most important sentence and as a one-liner about gender being the result of a series of performative actions.

But according to Anna Cornelia Ploug, this is a misunderstanding of the sentence itself, and is actually not the book’s main point at all.

»I don’t believe the sentence is just about an individual’s gradual gendering process, as it is often interpreted,« she says.

»What it actually expresses is that becoming a ‘woman’ means taking on a logical position where your autonomy as a free human being is in opposition to being a gendered being.«

The lived experience

As the book’s title also indicates, Beauvoir’s analysis is that while the man is the norm, the woman is the other. The woman becomes the object that enables the man to create himself as a subject.

In this way, the woman is never something in her own right, but only by virtue of her relationship with the man. And it is precisely this idea of ‘otherness’ that would be of great importance to later thinkers.

»The book helps establish what we now know as Women’s Studies, which becomes Gender Studies, and then related subjects like Critical Race Studies, and later Queer Studies and Disability Studies. In a way, it lays the foundation for a whole new way of thinking,« says Ploug.

Beauvoir reaches her conclusions by reviewing the view of what a woman is in biology, religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature. But one of the things she also does is include women’s lived experience in her analysis.

In this way, the book contributes to a ‘turn towards concrete experience’ – where philosophy begins to take an interest in precisely the lived experience of people.

»This along with another important book actually written by Beauvoir’s personal friend, Frantz Fanon,« says Ploug.

The book she mentions here is the postcolonial thinker and revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks, which was written in 1952 and at the same time as The Second Sex.

It is about Fanon’s experience of being racialized in Paris after traveling to France from the French colony of Martinique.

»Instead of the woman, in Fanon ‘the other’ is the Black, it is the otherness of the Colonized and the Racialized that he shines a light on. But the dialectical way of thinking is the same, and they both form the cornerstones of the critical disciplines,« says Ploug.

»It’s great that this book is finally in Danish,« she adds, referring to its recent first-time Danish-language publication.

It’s all about critique

A key question in Gender Studies and in similar theoretical approaches is which methodological approach is politically useful. Should we fight for equality, or for liberation, inclusion and overthrow of the system itself?

And here Beauvoir’s work reminds us of the critique as a method, Anna Cornelia Ploug reckons.

»Feminism has become so mainstream that almost everyone is now a feminist« says Anna Cornelia Ploug.

Feminist thinking is a critique in itself, in its essence. It is not that women should have more board positions

Anna Cornelia Ploug, postdoc at NorS

»And we’re happy about that — that’s what we work for — but of course there is a downside to this.«

The downside is that the concept risks being watered down and we forget what feminist practice actually consists of: Namely, to analyse and break down the structures in society that keep people stuck in unfreedom.

»It is important to remember. Feminist thought is its essence critique. It is not that women should have more board positions.«

The Second Sex is not a political manifesto, Anna Cornelia Ploug says. A manifesto is a positive programme that presents a vision of how something should be: For example, that women should be paid the same as men.

»Instead of asking how women can access certain funds in the economic system, you should criticize the economy at its very root. Radically, fundamentally.«

[Danish writer] Emma Holten is a good contemporary example, according to Ploug. In May, she published a book called Underskud [Deficit], which criticizes the current economic system for not taking the value of caregiving into account.

Another example could be the discussion of canonic lists in different disciplines. That is, whether there should be more women or other underrepresented groups in the literary or cultural canon, for example.

»But why do we even have a canon at all? Is it set in stone or what’s going on? We have to break that order,« Ploug says.

Beauvoir does not say anything concrete about how things should be. She provides a tool for analysing and conducting an ideological critique of society as it actually appears. It is not about giving directions, but about giving a correct description of the current system.

»And it is then up to the acting political subject to act against it.«

Gender is and will remain a problem

It is therefore not the answers that Beauvoir offers herself in her work, but rather the method by which she reaches them, that continues to make the work relevant today.

»It’s not so much about the woman per se. It’s about the woman as a prism to point to gender as a problem in the first place.«

Will people be provoked by this nowadays — when many people speak of multiple genders — that precisely women should be the prism?

»Yes, yes. And she probably isn’t a prism nowadays. But she was – as that’s where the zeitgeist was at the time. And we couldn’t have done without this contribution.«

You shouldn’t grab and open The Second Sex, take the book’s concept of woman and go out and make a new women’s movement for 2024 on that basis, according to Ploug. The book should be used as a philosophical-critical toolbox instead.

Being a gendered being – whether you call yourself a woman, non-binary or something else – still contains inherent conflicts that we will continue to have to deal with. And Beauvoir helps us see that.

»We need to insist on the unfinished project. Instead of believing that the problem will be solved if only we adopt the liberal stance that everyone is free to choose his or her own identity. This is not taking gender seriously as a problem.«

And that’s why we should read The Second Sex now?

»Yes. Among other reasons. There are many reasons to read it!,« the Beauvoir fan laughs.

»But you have to remember that what we can use the book for these days, is not for its ‘results’, if you can put it that way. It is for its method.«