The female body, from the moment of its creation, embodies the “other”. It symbolises the inferior “second” Sex, pitted against the universal standard of perfect male body.

So, the proclamation “One is not born a woman but becomes one” stood in direct contradiction to the Zeitgeist of biological determinism. Through this, Simone de Beauvoir drew attention to one integral process associated with the development of an individual: socialisation that forms the basis of who we are and how we identify the self and the other.

Here, the distinction between sex and gender takes primacy. Sex-the identity solely ascribed through anatomy- comes to be associated with a societal standard of expressing it. This social construct is gender. Being a woman is then about playing the part of what the society expects someone with a female body to act like. Subtle and not so subtle cues indoctrinate the ideal of womanhood: she is subservient, compassionate, emotional, dependent and so on. Then, being born a woman is a reality that never comes to be, for it is the influence of those around us that one becomes a woman. This holds relevance in the contemporary patriarchal society as well.