Chris Vo
Professor Jordan Dopkins
PHIL 11
27 April 2022
Writing Exercise 3
Simone de Beauvoir:
In the introduction for The Second Sex, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir aims to
introduce a woman’s unequal standing in society and how it became so. The first section
illustrates how, in order to achieve status equal to a man, the modern woman denounces
her femininity and fights to prove that she has the same qualities as a man. The second
section explains the overarching “basic” trait of women: that they are the Other, in a
world where the One is the man. She then explains in the third section why that has
become the status quo — specifically that men have built the world around the narrative
that men are naturally superior and women are naturally inferior. Beauvoir states that
women are inferior, but only because men have made it so, limiting their opportunities
and resources. In the final section, Beauvoir begins to outline the rest of her book: why
we should change the status quo, how we should do it, and delivers the organizational
statement of her book.
Frantz Fanon:
In the excerpt of Black Skin. White Masks, Fanon discusses how the experience
of a black man is always in relation to that of the white man, namely the black man’s
reduction to an object in the eyes of the white man. Fanon starts off the first section by
introducing the aforementioned overarching thesis. The second section details the
dissonance between Fanon thinking to himself or with other black men on the injustices
and inequalities placed upon him, and those thoughts in the presence of a white man.
Specifically, how aware Fanon becomes of his body, and how heavy and uncertain he
begins to feel. The third section furthers the discussion of how the external appearance
of the black man has become something undesirable, and talks of the stories that the
white man has created about the black man’s character. Essentially, the white man has
created the narrative of what it means to be black, in a white man’s world. At the end of
the excerpt, Fanon details what his heritage and blackness have been replaced with in
the white man’s world: stories of defects, inferiority, and cannibalism.