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As much as I don't necessarily agree with or feel much of a connection with what de Beauvoir is saying in "The Second Sex," her point in the Introduction that female is always defined in relation to male is a really important and interesting point. I believe a similar point was also made by another author we read, (or I'm confusing this with another class...)- that we as humans are always defined by the dominant (or percieved dominant) standard (whether that standard is the male, heterosexuality, being Caucasian, etc.), and that we cannot even concieve of ourselves as individuals without the existence of an "other." Thus, men needed and need to "other" women in order to define thier own identities as "males."

It reminded me very much of Susan Stryker's point that we will never be without "marks of gender" precisely because we need them psychologically. Who would we be if we had no "other" by which we could compare and contrast outselves with? What has been most interesting in reading all three authors is that they all point out this close relationship between the notion of "other" and "monster" that exists in people's minds. It seems that in order to be "othered" (or perhaps because of the very process of "othering") one must also be turned into a "monster" or percieved to have monstrous elements. Otherwise, than they're just as "normal" as you-in fact, they are you without this constructed notion of "otherness."

But in the case of females, de Beauvoir seems to believe that there is a clear difference between men and women, that there is something fundamentally differet about women. If that's true, then it almost seems to validate the historical process by which women have been "othered" because women are different than men. I suppose the larger issue is to "transcend" this process of "othering" altogether, which I'm not sure I can even concieve of. How would we self-identify then? What would be the mechanism by which we would "know" who and what we were?

Finally, it's so interesting too that this early feminism aspired to "become men" ( according to de Beauvoir, anyway) whereas modern feminism has moved far beyond that in embracing and even celebrating that women are not men and do not want to simply become men but remain females entitled to all the rights and privileges men have.