Who’s to say what makes a woman ‘womanly’? In her book The Second Sex (1949), the French existentialist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued that femininity isn’t innate, but instead foisted upon females from birth. According to de Beauvoir, by pressuring women to conform to male stereotypes of beauty, patriarchal societies have subjugated women, robbing them of their autonomy and objectifying them in ways that belittle their abilities and their intellect. De Beauvoir’s existentialism, however, offered a way out: women are free, she wrote, to reject male views on how they should look and behave, and doing so allows them to become more equal.
videoThinkers and theories
The prison abolitionist who dares to envision a world without ‘unfreedoms’
16 minutes
videoMathematics
Spiral into the ‘golden ratio’ – and separate the myths from the maths
4 minutes
videoArchitecture
A lush tour of Fallingwater – the Frank Lloyd Wright design that changed architecture
14 minutes
videoEconomics
A tour of New York’s gaudiest neighbourhood with the Marxist geographer David Harvey
13 minutes
videoPhilosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes
videoArt
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
17 minutes
videoEthics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
videoVirtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
videoBeauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes