Simone de Beauvoir's 'remarkable' letters to Violette Leduc sold at auction

> Beauvoir described meeting Fidel Castro, “a truly exceptional man of intelligence, warmth, vitality, and it is overwhelming when you walk with him to see how much the people adore him”.

Sounds like she was also attracted to despicable human beings as well.

Sounds like a pattern that may have been repeated by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

Excellent reading, I had no idea of any of this, thank you for the link.

This either calls into question 'modern standards' or the interpretation of their actions, from my point of view. They were certainly no saints, but to a couple whose writings ranged from anti-statism, skepticism of morality, and (proto-sex-positive) feminism, I'm not too keen to call them hypocritical, despite that. The intellectual dissonance is not uncommon among philosophers, who generally cannot be expected to behave any more ethically than the rest of us. Unlike moral philosophers and Spinoza, however, de Beauvoir never claimed to be fighting the moral realist's crusade - and after Nietzche, I can't blame her a bit.

But to a person like Sartre who subscribes to the maxim that 'morality [...] is but a bourgeois pretension" in the words of one of his intellectual sources, I find more sympathy for him than the grave crime of.. grooming adult students and the ambitions of a New Yorker journalist feeling like he's blowing the lid of the sordid lives of the philosophers. By these words we hang de Beauvoir in a weird game of cancel culture to own the literati because we clicked on an article from 2005 in an American paper.

Interestingly, she is also responsible for the currently fashionable idea that gender is distinct from sex, and that one is not born with a gender. This had no basis in science of course, but people repeat it now under the assumption that it has always been the case. They have always been synonymous and she literally just made it up and started telling people that gender is performative. Judith Butler latched on to this and took it to extremes with Critical Gender Theory and attacking the “patriarchy”, and started teaching it at Berkeley, which popularized it in the 90s and 2000s. Why anyone listened to these people is a mystery to me.

"National Vanguard, Facist Magazine"