How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boringe, she would not have felt men’s misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh’s sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painter’s kind of life – the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Gogh’s art by feeding his sensibility – would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognised the anguish of Man driven from paradise.

How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boringe, she would not have felt men’s misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh’s sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painter’s kind of life – the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Gogh’s art by feeding his sensibility – would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognised the anguish of Man driven from paradise.

– Simone de Beauvoir –

The Second Sex

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