While the critics lash away (and rightly so) at Simone de Beauvoir's new book, Force of Circumstance, let us instead consider her indisputably great accomplishments. The Second Sex, de Beauvoir's feminist manifesto (first published in 1949), will be remembered with love by millions of people when that longwinded autobiography is just a history graduate student's optional reading.

Certainly one of the nicest things about feminism, and especially Simone de Beauvoir's feminism, is that it is a marvelously amusing subject to discuss. Not only does everyone have an opinion; everyone is an expert. Let us tune in, then, on a non-directed panel discussion in which Simone de Beauvoir is key speaker:

Simone: All through history women have thought of themselves as Other, the second, the inferior, subordinate, dependent, less primary sex. We are moving only now to something different...

Yeats: Ridiculous. History is cyclical.

Samuel Johnson: Vile rubbish. Women in the eighteenth century had all the power. Madame de Stael practically made the French revolution.

Simone: Ah, Madame de Stael was wonderful. But all that salon-power was unofficial, illicit. Out in the real world, the public sphere, there were only men. Who remembers today that Madame de Stael coined the distinction between Classic and Romantic? In school you learn about Napoleon, Robespierre; who in the next generation will remember that Neitzsche's mistress prodded him into writing his greatest book? It's shameful.

Margaret Mead: But you want women to have power in just the same way as men. Don't you see women are different and their spheres of influence are different?

Erikson: Inner space. Outer space.

Simone: No, we do need certain things the same. Humanity has thus far defined itself as male and given all its highest treasures to the male world. It is self-evident that women must first have the same basic social, political, economic rights. Without them women cannot come into even minimal existence as human beings. Women in traditional societies, for instance, are practically animals. You must not rationalize all those horrible taboos, restrictions, even maltreatment. There are women who have never been allowed to step out of doors.

Dr. Graham Blaine: My dear Miss de Beauvoir, even in the modern world there are certain constants of human behavior. It is quite well known that women are by nature more jealous than men, more demanding of love and affection, more monogamous.

Simone: Monogamous! Get him. Marriage is a bourgeois institution, a way of fixing woman as man's property. Sartre and I have worked out one possible alternative: contingent loves with a certain fidelity. "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion."

Nelson Algren: Will she ever stop talking?

Jeanne Moreau: Yep. A bourgeois institution, and dull.

Arthur Miller: Yes. We'd be better off if we faced up to our own inconstancy.

Simone: I don't really mean to denigrate marriage altogether. For some people, sure. For others, with proper modifications, sure. But in the ideal society, associations between men and women will be freer than that.