The first French publication of The Second Sex sold around 22,000 copies in a week.[89] It has since been translated into 40 languages.[90] The Vatican placed the book on its List of Prohibited Books.[7] The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey was critical of The Second Sex, holding that while it was interesting as a work of literature, it was of no value to science.[91] In 1960, Beauvoir wrote that The Second Sex was an attempt to explain "why a woman's situation, still, even today, prevents her from exploring the world's basic problems."[92] In a 1974 interview, she remembered that "Camus was furious; he reacted with typical Mediterranean machismo, saying I had ridiculed the French male. Professors hurled the book across the room. People sniggered at me in restaurants. The fact [that] I had spoken about female sexuality was absolutely scandalous at the time. Men kept drawing attention to the vulgarity of the book, essentially because they were furious at what the book was suggesting—equality between the sexes".[93] The attack on psychoanalysis in The Second Sex helped to inspire subsequent feminist arguments against psychoanalysis, including those of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969), and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970).[94] Millett commented in 1989 that she did not realize the extent to which she was influenced by Beauvoir when she wrote Sexual Politics.[95]
Philosopher Judith Butler argues that Beauvoir's formulation that "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" distinguishes the terms "sex" and "gender". Borde and Malovany-Chevallier, in their complete English version, translated this formulation as "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman" because in this context (one of many different usages of "woman" in the book), the word is used by Beauvoir to mean woman as a construct or an idea, rather than woman as an individual or one of a group. Butler writes that the book suggests that "gender" is an aspect of identity which is "gradually acquired". Butler sees The Second Sex as potentially providing a radical understanding of gender.[96]
Biographer Deirdre Bair, writing in her "Introduction to the Vintage Edition" in 1989, relates that "one of the most sustained criticisms" has been that Beauvoir is "guilty of unconscious misogyny", that she separated herself from women while writing about them.[97] Bair writes that French writer Francis Jeanson and British poet Stevie Smith made similar criticisms: in Smith's words, "She has written an enormous book about women and it is soon clear that she does not like them, nor does she like being a woman."[98] Bair also quotes British scholar C. B. Radford's view that Beauvoir was "guilty of painting women in her own colors" because The Second Sex is "primarily a middle-class document, so distorted by autobiographical influences that the individual problems of the writer herself may assume an exaggerated importance in her discussion of femininity.[98]
American theorist David M. Halperin criticizes Beauvoir's idealizing portrayal of sexual relations between women in The Second Sex.[99] Critic Camille Paglia praised The Second Sex, calling it "brilliant" and "the supreme work of modern feminism." Paglia writes that most modern feminists are merely "repeating, amplifying or qualifying" The Second Sex without realising their debt to it.[100] 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).[101]
