A radical dimension of normality: Beauvoir as diviner of masculine madness in ordinary men
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 08:04authored byHoneywill, R
Simone de Beauvoir witnessed Hitler‟s Nazis systematically murdering six million European Jews, as an unremarked second genocide excluded Woman in the Western cultural imaginary. Ever prescient she divined this eruption of masculine madness not as something exceptional but as the surface condition of masculinity, of ordinary men capable of unordinary acts. For centuries endemic patriarchy subjugated and oppressed women, but ordinary men argue that the exclusion and oppression of women, and particularly the violence inflicted on women, is not their fault: that nature or biology, reason or rationality, a beast stirring beneath their consciousness, makes them do it. Beauvoir divined this as the radical dimension of normality, men, ordinary men, doing unthinkable things.
History
Publication title
Sapere Aude
Issue
6
Pagination
29-48
ISSN
2177-6342
Department/School
School of Social Sciences
Publisher
Minas Publisher
Place of publication
online
Rights statement
Copyright 2012 Sapere Aude
Repository Status
Restricted
Socio-economic Objectives
Expanding knowledge in philosophy and religious studies