Simone de Beauvoir — "To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing fr…"
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"She has been taught that she is a plaything, and she has learned to play."
"The meaning of life is to be found in the project of becoming oneself."
"Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains hormones and testicles."
"There is no way to be a woman. There are only ways of being a woman."
"A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day when he should not. But we do not choose the day for the sea. She chooses it for us."
About Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) is the foundational text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Albert Camus (existentialist contemporary in Paris). For an intellectual contrast, see Camille Paglia, American cultural critic and Sexual Personae author — Paglia argues for biological-essentialist roots of gender that Beauvoir's social-construction view — 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — explicitly rejects. The two are the cleanest constructed-vs-essentialist poles in feminist theory.
The standard scholarly entry points to Simone de Beauvoir's work: Toril Moi (Duke, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor) — Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); Margaret A. Simons (Southern Illinois University, Emerita) — Beauvoir and The Second Sex (1999); Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford, Regent's Park College) — Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (2019). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Simone de Beauvoir.