Word: beauvoirs
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THORSTEIN VEBLEN in his The Theory of the Leisure Class says that the status of women is the best index of a society's values. Simone de Beauvoir plugs the status of old people into the same thesis. On this basis she condemns all contemporary societies by virtue of the maladjustment...
...plots the coordinates of the biological and psychological axis of old age as againsts its cultural and economic axis. Her array of anthropological, historical, biographical, and artistic testimonies in support of her thesis and its conclusion is all-encompassing. Old age for Mile de Beauvoir is the natural conclusion of a lifetime of mental, physical and sexual deterioration, from the age of twenty on, which ends in death...
Freud asserted the sexuality of children, Simone de Beauvoir asserts the sexuality of the old. Sexuality, she says, is the index of energy, curiosity and life force in a human being. When sexuality falls off, the old person either has death in life or dies. Where women remain sexually capable to the end of their lives, men generally lose their ability to sustain an erection. Men, in effect, can never resolve their castration complex; castration is a reality they must expect. Old age is a defeat in sexual terms...
...known for her candid autobiography, La Bâtarde (The Bastard); of cancer; in Faucon, France. The unlovely, illegitimate daughter of a housemaid, Leduc was a black marketeer during World War II; later she was encouraged in a literary career by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet and Simone de Beauvoir. Leduc's first novels attracted only limited attention; La Bâtarde, with its explicit accounts of her gnawing loneliness and bisexual experimentation, brought her notoriety and financial success...
Simone de Beauvoir carefully weighs the few whose testimony treats old age as a period of spiritualization. Among them are senescence's biggest booster, Victor Hugo, who wrote: "Fire is seen in the eyes of the young, but it is light that we see in the old man's eyes." Miss de Beauvoir's judgment of that: "Mystical twaddle." Her heroes are not those who praise decline but the men who fight the body's disintegration, like Tolstoy, who learned to bicycle at 67, and Goethe, who at 64 could ride a horse for six hours...