This clip from Parks and Recreation plays on stereotypes of femininity and can be used to explore the concept of the Other in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.” The scene is from season 2, episode 10, “Hunting Trip.”
In this episode, Leslie (Amy Poehler) is covering for someone else so that person does not get in trouble for shooting their other friend, Ron, in the head while they were quail hunting. (Don’t worry Ron is fine, although he is very, very angry.) In this scene, she is being interviewed about what happened by a Park Ranger (Jay Johnston). The Park Ranger wants an explanation for what happened, and only starts to believe Leslie’s story when she deploys increasingly-outlandish stereotypes about femininity.
In the “Introduction” to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues that man is considered to be the neutral sex, while woman is the “Other.” de Beauvoir uses a combination of personal experiences, historical examples, and societal stereotypes to explain what this means, and her tone is often sarcastic or sardonic. When teaching The Second Sex in my introductory course, I assign the students to watch this video clip and then complete a pre-writing journal assignment. This is due on the day I plan to introduce the text to students. I grade journal entries pass/fail based on a minimum word count, and I use them in my class when I want students to explore ideas that they will encounter in a philosophical text before reading it. The purpose of these journals is to prepare them for the discussion I will use to begin class. In asynchronous online sections, these journal entries are pre-writing for discussion board engagement.
The prompt for the journal entry guides the students though analyzing the clip by first describing it. They are asked to list at least three stereotypes Leslie deploys, and comment on where they think each of the stereotypes comes from. They are then asked to describe the demeanor of the Park Ranger, paying attention to how his manner and behavior contrast to the personas that Leslie takes on.
Having described the scene, they are prompted to analyze it first through their own understanding of the gender binary and then through an engagement with a quote from the text. In the prompt, I note that there is a social belief in the world that women and men are opposites, and ask students to name some stereotypical binary oppositions. For example, if women are “bad at math,” then men are the opposite which is, “good at math” or “analytical/logical.” I then ask them to address why Leslie would use these stereotypes to try to convince the Ranger that she was the one who shot Ron, and explain that they may need to address what is funny about their interaction in order to get at this.
Finally, I share a quote from de Beauvoir’s text “Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it” (Beauvoir 2011, 5).
The final question in the journal entry prompt is:
Having watched this scene, what do you think that de Beauvoir means that “man” or “masculinity” is the neutral sex?
In the class discussion of this journal entry, after we get to this last point I usually segue into an overview of the context of de Beauvoir’s work and its themes.
We thus use this comedic parody of sexism as a way to motivate a discussion of sexist stereotypes. Students have already practiced the conversation that we will have in the first ten or fifteen minutes of class. I find this very helpful in breaking the ice around a sensitive topic. We read de Beauvoir in my course directly after the first chapter of DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and through both of these texts we are exploring the way that social identity affects both social justice and the structure of subjective experience.
Our questions include, how do power dynamics in the world affect the make-up of our minds?
And, what are the epistemological limits of trying to communicate experiences to other people who do not share them?
This journal entry and the discussions that it sparks offers us a lower-stakes point of entry into the topic of the gender binary. It is helpful to have examples to hand of social stereotypes that we can point at so that here is a common object of analysis. It also helps us explore the kind of frankness necessary to discuss social norms around the gender binary. Through the discussion of this scene, I demonstrate how it is possible to talk about stereotypes which can be offensive in ways that are appropriate to an academic classroom. The humor of this clip is also helpful in greasing the wheels of this discussion, as it puts us generally in a good mood to recall Leslie putting on lipstick and squealing “I thought there was going to be chocolate!” We giggle, and that sets a good tone for moving into an exploration of the social construction of gendered identities in de Beauvoir’s text.
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. 1st edition. New York: Vintage.
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Jana McAuliffe
Jana McAuliffe is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, specializing in social-political philosophy and critical philosophies of gender, race, and class. Her current research is focused on everyday politics as exemplified in taste.
