Hello everyone! I’m back with a very special video today.
I must admit that I’m a bit stressed because this project means a lot to me,
I’ve been working on it for months and now it’s time to present it to you.
So I’m a bit stressed, I’ll try to relax.
Let me explain: you probably know by now that women’s rights is something that is very important to me, that means a lot to me.
So I often read books that evolve around feminism, or simply women’s literature (heroines, women with a strong personality…).
And I wanted to talk about these books in a series of videos that will be called “Fémilignes” (you can notice how amazingly creative I am).
I still don’t know how many videos I’ll do for this series, because I’m still thinking about it, so maybe three or four.
And so in each video I will talk about books in which you can find female characters, or that are about women, or written by women.
That’s it – I’m having trouble speaking, I’m sorry.
This video is the first episode of this series and it will evolve around women as they really are.
So I’ll talk about books that either are essays or informative books.
It will be a nice way to get to the heart of the subject.
I don’t know if that’s very clear, I’m a bit stressed and all, but I hope you’ll enjoy the video.
So now it’s time to start!
So you know that there are lots of essays, testimonies or informative books that were been written about women,
as it is a subject that deals with culture, sociology, psychology, History, so it is a very interesting topic to discuss.
So of course I was not able to read all of these books, but I’ve made a selection of “informative” books
– I don’t really know how to call them, because there are many different things in this selection, as you’ll see –
about women in order to learn more about the subject.
The first book is considered as a huge classic, a book that you must read when you want to read or learn things about women.
This book is Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) by Simone de Beauvoir, who was an existentialist writer and philosopher.
She is mostly known for The Second Sex, but also for her memoirs, her correspondence and her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
So The Second Sex – I must say that I’ve just read the first volume so far, I didn’t get the chance to read the rest before this video.
So I’m going to about the first volume only.
It is called “Les faits et les mythes” (Facts and Myths).
So in this book, Simone de Beauvoir introduces us to – as the title suggests it –
the facts and myths surrounding women, who are called “the second sex”.
So, it is a very, very, very interesting essay, even if I think it is not easy to read for anyone.
There are many words that are related to existentialism.
This is a philosophical school, which is very difficult to understand and to tackle.
So she speaks a lot about the Other, about the Self, the Subject and so on…
I admit that I was a bit confused, but if you put that aside, this essay is well organised in three parts.
The first part is a bit tedious; you should try not to give up,
because it introduces us to facts that are purely biological and sociological.
So it’s a bit like being at school: there is a whole part dedicated to biology, and to be honest this is not something I’m interested in.
So I had to force myself to keep reading it,
and as soon as the second part begins, the book becomes really fascinating.
She writes about the myths that surround women, female myths that go back to the early days of civilisation.
And it is really fascinating, we can see how women evolved in society to this day
– or at least to Simone de Beauvoir’s days, because things kept on changing.
So it very, very interesting, she underlines women’s roles in society,
how they gained their status and how difficult it was, as we know it.
And I’ve especially liked the third part, because Beauvoir compares writers and the way they wrote about women.
I must say that most of the writers she mentions are writers that I’ve not read yet,
but there is for example D.H Lawrence who wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover;
there also is Balzac and others.
And it is very, very interesting to see how these men, these writers tackled the subject of women in their books,
and it is very, very, very interesting.
I think that the second volume of The Second Sex is called Lived Experience,
and I think it must be even more interesting because it probably deals with her own experiences
– at least that’s what I think, as I have not read it so far.
So The Second Sex is really considered as a Bible, the “Women’s Bible”.
It was published a while ago, but it is still interesting to read because of what Simone de Beauvoir says in this book.
Let’s move on to a book that was published before The Second Sex
– I should have started with it, by the way.
This book is A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.
She is a major writer of the beginning of the twentieth century;
she wrote very famous novels such as Mrs Dalloway or Orlando
– you probably know them, or at least the title.
But she also wrote several essays, and this book is one of them.
It is an essay that is a bit subversive, a bit risky,
at least when it was published and as it was written by a woman.
This essay deals with women and literature, so of course I thought it was very, very interesting.
I especially liked the way it is written and how she uses her arguments.
She uses fiction to develop her arguments; she uses fictional elements to tell what she thinks.
So I found it very, very fascinating, especially when you know it was written in 1928,
so what she writes in this book can be considered as avant-garde.
At least, it was not the common way of thinking back then.
The main idea is to encourage women to use their talents, to use their desire to write, they need to do it.
The title, A Room of One’s Own, may sound a bit strange when you think about its content,
but it is explained at the beginning of the book.
According to Woolf, a woman needs two things in order to write:
first of all, enough money to support herself;
and secondly, a room of one’s own in which she can be alone to write.
I found it was a nice anecdote, it is explained in the first few pages of the book.
There are two things about this book that I want to mention.
The first thing is that as soon as the beginning – or at least from the 50th page –
there is a comparison between women we found in novels (and especially in novels written by men)
and women as they really were back then.
And I found it very, very interesting, to see that these writers described women who were independent, strong…
For example she mentions Mrs Bovary, Anna Karenina, and others that I’ve forgotten since I read the book.
These characters are very independent, they support themselves, they are very bold, and so on…
But in real life, the men’s wives and the women of their time were far from being free.
They could not learn how to read or write, they could not work;
they had to stay at home, so they were not really free.
So I found this contrast between these fictional characters and real-life women very interesting,
and it pinpoints a lot of interesting questions.
And the second thing that I really liked in this essay is that,
at one point, Woolf imagines that Shakespeare has a sister.
And so she writes that people at that time who thought that any woman could have Shakespeare’s talent were wrong,
because Shakespeare, as he was a boy, had the chance to go to school,
to get a good education, to learn Latin and Greek,
to study writers and so to develop his talent as a writer and a playwright.
But a woman – and she uses the fictional example of Shakespeare’s sister –
who wanted to become a poet could not have had the same luck and did not have the same capacities,
not on the mental and psychological levels, but people would not have given her the same chances to became a poet,
and this woman would probably have killed herself.
It’s a bit sad, but it is a good account of the lives of women at that time.
So this essay was very, very, very interesting, especially because – once again –
it was published at the beginning of the 1930s, no, at the end of the 1920s, and Woolf wrote differed from what was thought at the time.
So yeah, very, very interesting.
Let’s talk another essay.
Recently I’ve read a contemporary essay, which was published in 2015.
It is called La chair interdite (The Forbidden Flesh), written by Diane Ducret.
If this name sounds familiar to you, it’s because she also wrote the two volumes of Femmes of Dictateur (Dictators’ Wives)
that deal – as the title suggests it – with the wives of dictators.
I read the first volume and found it very, very, very interesting, but I wanted to talk about La chair interdite today.
If you understand the title, it is about the female sex, the physical and morphological genitals.
It’s about vaginas, wombs and the female reproductive organs.
It’s a very, very fascinating essay.
It investigates the subject through History, from the Ancient World to approximately these days.
I must say that it is not very joyful, as female genitals were ill-treated and it’s still the case today.
But it’s very interesting and I learned a lot of things.
I was especially surprised to see how the female genitals were perceived until the 1950s-1960s
as this subject was still seen as something evil, something awful and so on.
And people wanted to cure women from a variety of things,
for example women who masturbated, which was seen as a disease, hysteria, and so on.
There were lots of operations to prevent women from masturbating.
Diane Ducret also talks about the clitoris, which was seen for a long time as something strange,
people did not understand that some women could achieve orgasm thanks to the clitoris,
so it was cut or some operations were performed on women even until the 1950s-1960s.
I thought it was crazy, I did not know that genitals were demonized like this in our times,
at least in the Western world.
There are also parts devoted to periods, how they were perceived, how women and men experienced them;
she also talks about abortions and backstreet abortions.
Some parts are more difficult, for example when she talks about war rapes…
It was very interesting, but what I also liked is how Diane Ducret writes,
she writes thoughtlessly despite the facts that some of themes are very hard to talk about.
It makes it easier to read, and it does not diminish the seriousness of this book.
Once again, I found it was very interesting to talk women through their genitals,
because this subject is still taboo, and it is an original way to talk about women.
So I found this essay very, very fascinating.
Now it’s time for the last essay.
I read a very, very small book that I wanted to present to you:
this book is Nous sommes tous des féministes (We should all be feminists) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
who I’ve already presented on my channel when I read her novel Americanah.
I’ve talked about it in one of my Point Lecture recently, because I read it in April, May or June – I don’t remember.
So I bought this small book, which is less than 100 pages long
I must say – but it is a personal feeling – that I was a bit disappointed,
I felt a bit ripped off because – even if it costs just 2 euros -
most of the book is a transcript of her lecture that is quite famous by the way, you can look for it on Google.
She did a lecture for the TEDx Talks, which are series of lectures with a large audience and many different topics.
And so she did a very interesting lecture on feminism.
And I think that the title was not well translated in French, because the English title “We should all be feminists”
not "We are all feminists", so there’s a difference between “should” and “be”.
So I think the French title is not a good translation, it does not correspond to the original meaning.
However, the lecture that we can find in this book is very fascinating because she brings a new point of view.
She comes from Nigeria, so she talks about the way she grew up,
how women are perceived in Nigeria, especially the ones who are westernized.
And she gives many examples using her childhood friends, and it extremely interesting.
I highly recommend this book, but I advise you to watch the lecture directly – I’ll post the link down below –
because I think it is different to watch her and to listen to her.
There are French subtitles so if you don’t speak English it does not matter.
So I think it’s more meaningful to watch her than to read the book
but I wanted to talk about it because I really liked the lecture
and because I’ve listened to it several times as I really like the way she talks and what she says.
Then I wanted to show you a few more books, because if you want to learn about women
you can read books that are not essays.
So I still have a few books to talk about, and they are very different from the others.
The first one is a book that is among my all-time favourites,
I recommend it all the time and I haven’t talked about it on this channel yet because I read it before I started this channel –
I talked about it on my blog, so I’ll post the link to it down below -:
it is the novel Le choeur des femmes by Martin Winckler.
Martin Winckler is a French or Belgian doctor and writer – maybe he’s Canadian;
at least he is from a French speaking country.
And through this book, he talks about something that is extremely important:
how women are informed and treated in the medical world, and especially regarding gynaecology.
It is a novel, so the story is a fiction, with fictional characters but it’s very realistic.
It depicts things that happen in real life, and that are sadly part of the lives of many women.
And it’s a book that made me realise a lot of things about gynaecology
and I share a lot of personal convictions about it with this book.
The story is the one of Jean, who is an intern in gynaecology in a hospital in Paris
and she works in a small team with a doctor – I forgot his name.
This team is specialised in women, and Jean wonders why she’s here,
she thinks that she won’t learn a thing, she’s a bit arrogant,
and finally she finds herself working with an extraordinary doctor –
I think that any woman who reads this book will want such a doctor because he is wonderful.
She works for six months with this doctor as his assistant;
she meets his patients and discovers his vision of gynaecology, which is different and modern.
And what we learn in this book is that there are many things that we ignore,
there are many things that we have the right to ask when we’re having an examination.
It underlines the fact that women are not informed enough and that they are sometimes not treated correctly.
I really found this book interesting.
Well, I’m not saying that all doctors are treating their patients in the wrong way or that they do not inform them correctly, it’s not true.
But what is true is that it’s often the case.
I’ve talked about it with several of my friends or with some of my relatives,
because it is an interesting subject to discuss, and it raises a lot of personal questions.
It pinpoints that kind of difficulties.
Anyway, it is a really good novel, it’s a bit big but I read it quite quickly.
It’s very, very, very interesting.
You may or may not agree with what is exposed in the book, but it’s a way to question the subject.
So I think that every woman should read it because it makes us realise a lot of things,
but I think that men should read it too because it’s very interesting.
It could be a way for them to see how we experience it on our side.
Another book that I really like and that I consider as a classic
– it’s very, very famous - : Les Monologues du Vagin (The Vagina Monologues).
It is very famous but I don’t know if many of you have read it.
It is a play written by Eve Ensler, it was published in 1994 or 1997 – at least at the end of the 1990s –
and it involves several women talking about their relation to their vagina, their uterus…
So it’s close to the subject of La chair interdite, that I talked about a few minutes ago.
It’s a breath of fresh air.
It’s true that sometimes they talk about more serious subjects:
they talk about rape, they talk abortion, or miscarriages and other difficult experiences like this.
But it’s part of reality, because we are sadly not shielded against that.
However, there are parts that are lighter, funnier, women talking about their vaginas and about their relationship with it.
It’s an ode to the female genitals.
I remember when I finished the book that I thought that I was happy to be a girl,
because even if it’s annoying and hard, I like being a girl, I like my body and my vagina.
We’re all at peace and in harmony.
It’s very, very, very interesting, and it’s a small play so you can read it quickly.
I highly recommend it and I think that Denoël re-published it recently
– I know that because some of my fellow bloggers and booktubers have received it for a partnership.
So take advantage of this book being republished to read because it’s really interesting.
There are two more books that I want to show you.
Aside from essays, novels and plays, there are also comics (bandes-dessinées in French)
that are informative, feminist and so on.
So I have two of them to show you.
I’ve already mentioned the Projet Crocodile in one of the episodes of my BDs du mois (Comics of the month) videos,
but I don’t remember which one, so I’m not going to talk about it again.
Instead I’m going to show you two books that I really liked.
The first one is Hé! Mademoiselle: it’s a book by the blogger Yatuu.
She owns a blog, she used to publish strips on it and she finally published a book.
I got it for my birthday and I’m happy to have read it because it’s really nice.
As the title suggests, it gathers different situations of street harassment.
We’ve all experienced that, the annoying guys in the street that call you “Hey girl, what’s your phone number?”.
So it’s gathered in this book.
It’s a serious matter that happens a lot in real life, it must not be taken lightly,
but in this book, even if it’s humorous, it’s based on real experiences.
Even if it can make you laugh, it’s still very serious.
So here you can see how the drawings look like, it’s a nice style, very modern and even feminine if you want.
I’ve really liked this book because, sadly, I understood some of the situations;
I don’t know a lot of girls who did not suffer from street harassment.
But the subject is explored through humour and through Absurdism.
So when you read the book you can’t stop thinking, “it’s so real, I’ve met guys like this, they are such douchebags”.
So I think it’s a good book to read whether you’re a woman or a man,
it does not take men at task as Projet Crocodile did. It’s very funny and nice.
The other book that I want to take about is a book that I do no longer have, as I borrowed it from the library.
It is Journal d’une Femen (A Femen’s Diary) by Michel Dufranne, I think.
It is a about a girl who’s fed up with sexism, street harassment and so on,
and so to go against that decided to join the Femen.
I don’t want to start a debate about the Femen, people think what they want about them,
and it is a very controversial group so I won’t go deeper into the subject as it is a bit touchy.
But I found this book very interesting.
First it takes place at the heart of this group: the girl that we follow in this book goes to meetings;
she takes part in the training camp and to some actions too.
And so I found it interesting to discover how this group works,
because aside from the mediatised actions, we don’t know much about how it works.
I liked to see how it works from the inside.
And what I especially liked is the fact that it is not a propaganda book,
it is an exterior and objective point of view on this group.
The book does not tell you “Femen are good” or “Femen are evil”, it is purely informative.
I won’t tell you how it ends and what happens to the main character
but I found that the point of view is very original and interesting
because it is purely objective, informative, the writer does not take a side here.
I can’t show you the drawings, as I no longer have the book with me,
but they are really nice, I really liked it.
So there are of course many, many other books on the subject,
but I can’t read everything and the video would last two hours.
Again, my aim is not to make you fall asleep.
I hope you enjoyed this video, that maybe it gave you the wish to discover this subject a bit more,
to learn more or read some of the books that I talked about or others.
So the first episode is over, I feel like I’m perspiring from the inside, I’m a bit stressed,
I’m trying not to stammer and to present all this in a good way.
In short, I hope you enjoyed it, don’t hesitate to tell me what you think about this project,
about the books that I presented or to suggest me other books on that subject.
So I will see you for another episode in August or September, depending on my schedule.
I’m going on vacation, so I will see you in 10 days.
In the meantime, I hope your vacation will be good, if you’re on vacation, work well if you’re not; and read well.
