“No woman before her had written publicly, with greater candor or less euphemism, about the most intimate secrets of her sex. One of those secrets- the hardest, perhaps, for Beauvoir to avow- is that a free woman may refuse to be owned without wanting to renounce, or being able to transcend, her yearning to be possessed” PossessionFemininityBeauvoir Author:Judith Thurman- introduction to The Second Sex