The Second Sex
The classical scholar David M. Halperin writes that Beauvoir gives an idealized account of sexual relations between women in "The Second Sex", suggesting that they reveal with particular clarity the mutuality of erotic responsiveness that characterizes women's eroticism. The critic Camille Paglia praised "The Second Sex", calling it "brilliant" and "the supreme work of modern feminism." Paglia writes that most modern feminists do not realize the extent to which their work has simply repeated or qualified Beauvoir's arguments. In "Free Women, Free Men" (2017) Paglia writes that as a sixteen-year-old, she was "stunned by de Beauvoir's imperious, authoritative tone and ambitious sweep through space and time", which helped inspire her to write her work of literary criticism "Sexual Personae" (1990).