Walking in Simone de Beauvoir’s Footsteps
What the Existentialist Author Can Teach Us About Body Acceptance
This essay originally appeared in Medium in September 2019. This is a lightly edited version of the piece. An academic spinoff, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Feminist Art of Living,” has also appeared in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.
Most photographs of Simone de Beauvoir show her seated, typically in a café, often writing or enjoying a conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre or other figures of the time.
What’s less well known is that the twentieth-century philosopher and novelist, best known for her groundbreaking feminist book The Second Sex, was also an avid hiker.
Her walking habits, like those of other philosophers (think Thoreau or Nietzsche), are well worth discussing since they reveal an important part of how we can cultivate healthier relationships with our bodies.
Beauvoir began hiking in 1931, at the age of 23, when she received a position as a philosophy teacher at a high school in Marseille. The Prime of Life, the second volume of her memoirs, describes the excitement she experienced as she hiked long hours on her days off. She relished the feeling of physical exertion at the end of the day.
Beauvoir says:
“I had never practiced any sport, and therefore took all the more pleasure in driving my body the very limit of its endurance.”
When I read Beauvoir’s descriptions of her treks, I’m struck by how deeply she became attuned to her body and how attentive she was to her surroundings. She fell in love with the sights, sounds, and smells of the landscapes she discovered. Among the many rich descriptions of her hikes, she writes, “there came a day in spring, on the Valensole plateau, when I found almond trees in blossom for the first time. I walked along red-and-ocher lanes in the flat country, and recognized many of Cézanne’s canvases.”
When Beauvoir walked, she wasn’t “in her head,” but “in her body” and “in the world.”
This sensual relationship to her body and the world is what’s distinctive about Beauvoir’s walking style, and it stands in contrast with one of the central observations of The Second Sex, published in 1949. There, Beauvoir describes how society led girls and women of her time to conceive of themselves as sexual and aesthetic objects. For instance, playing with dolls taught girls that their appearance was paramount, and at puberty, they were encouraged to see themselves through the eyes of potential male partners.
But The Second Sex is not all about criticizing women’s over-investment in their appearance. The book also implicitly advocates Beauvoir’s philosophy of walking. Beauvoir condemns her contemporaries’ attitudes towards girls and sports, and implies that athletic activities would allow them to embody an active relationship to their bodies. According to her, athleticism would teach them to value their bodies’ strength and the pleasure that can be derived from using it.
Sadly, Beauvoir’s analysis remains all too relevant.
It’s clear from the onslaught of advertisements and articles focused on women’s beauty that girls and women are still pressured to value their bodies for their appearance. It’s also evident that the focus on our bodies is rarely positive, as girls and women are led to compare their bodies with those of models or actresses, whose photos are nearly always airbrushed and whose body types are often unachievable.
Body image issues abound: Psychology Today reports that in 2017, 56% of women described being dissatisfied with their overall appearance, and 89% want to lose weight. And according to The Body Image Center, 70% of teenage girls “don’t like their bodies.” Worse yet, the pressure to achieve the perfect body is increasingly affecting boys and men.
But there is luckily growing resistance to oppressive beauty standards. The recent rise in body-positive ads and activism has pushed many of us to reconsider what beauty looks like. We’re told that “beauty is in every body,” or that “Mermaid Thighs are the new body positive trend you should know about.” Now, there is a lot of value in expanding beauty standards. Thanks to the body positivity movement, more of us can find representations of beauty that match our body size or shape, our gender expression, our race, or our bodily abilities. Still, I worry that too much of the movement is dedicated to external beauty, and not enough to the inner “joys” of the body.
This is why we should all take note of Beauvoir’s philosophy of walking: it promises a powerful solution to the seductions of self-objectification. Rather than viewing your body from the outside, through the hidden lens of the mirror or the gaze of a potential lover, you can enjoy it from within. You could appreciate the soreness that comes from dancing, rather than focusing on the shape of your derrière. You could displace the focus of your gaze from your body to the outer world and appreciate its beauty. This world doesn’t need to be the natural world, as was the case for Beauvoir. It could be the space of your dance studio, for instance.
Beauvoir’s treks through the Alps and philosophical writings show that an important component of well-being lies in an inner appreciation of the body, rather than an objectifying attitude towards it. They should inspire us to cultivate new and empowering ways of celebrating our bodies.