Sexual initiation! Not to be mentioned in our house! . . . I hunted in books, but wore myself out without finding the road. . . . For my schoolteacher the question did not seem to exist. . . . A book finally showed me the truth, and my overexcitement disappeared; but I was most unhappy, and it took me a long time to understand that eroticism and sexuality alone constitute real love.
— French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex: Woman’s Life Today (pg. 302), a book being studied this spring in the second-semester Core Social Sciences, CC204: Inequality. Prof. Maureen Sullivan will deliver a lecture addressing empirical evidences for gender inequality in the United States, on Thursday February 17.
