On why we, the women, owe Simone de Beauvoir so much
Since the dawn of our civilization, woman has been considered an inferior being in all societies. Though women occupy more than half of the humanity, they have been prevented from enjoying the same rights and privileges as those of man.
But, no. That adagium seems a bit irrelevant in modern-day, thanks to ladies who fought for their rights since the first-wave feminism and nowadays fourth-wave.
Simone de Beauvoir was one of them who contributed in this fight with her proposal, The Second Sex in 1949. In the 800-pages book which laid the groundwork for second wave feminism, she states “humanity is male, and man defines women, not in herself, but in relation to himself”.
Where first-wave feminism was concerned with women’s suffrage and property rights, the second wave broadened these concerns to include sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, and so on.
Although third-wave feminism often critiques second-wave feminism for its focus on the struggles of white middle-class women, ignoring the plight of women of color, poor women, women in the developing world, disabled women, etc., her insight has somehow taught us of being “other” in any world where you’re constantly taught that you’re second class.
That’s going to shape what you think your life choices are — it’s going to change how you perceive your own freedom.
Generally for existentialists, as she included as one of them, one is not born anything: everything we are is the result of our choices, as we build ourselves out of our own resources and those which society gives us. We don’t only create our own value.
Sure, we already get the idea of existential maxim that ‘existence precedes essence’ (Translation: We are thrown into the world and then create our being through our actions).
So how does de Beauvoir’s ideas relate to existentialist concerns about freedom?
While there are facticity — biology and history wise — the existential goal is to take control over life, actively transcending the facts of our existence by pursuing self-chosen goals.
Meanwhile, many of us believe we don’t have free will — even as some neuroscientist’s discovery that our conscious will can override our impulse, but that doesn’t mean that we have excuse not to act. Simone called this as ‘moral fault’, that to push away responsibility is to reject existence.
Or, put it in what his amour necessaire Jean Paul Sartre called “bad faith” to point out human beings which allow themselves to be ruled by identities imposed on them from the outside. Their decisions do not reflect who they truly are.
It makes sense, then, that if someone is taught her entire life that to be a woman, she must look a certain way, act a certain way, play a subservient role within her family, and work only certain kinds of jobs, it is going to affect her sense of freedom and authenticity.
She insisted that we must take side, the problem is: it’s not always clear which side we ought to choose.
On Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947, she stated that “To be free is to be able to stretch ourselves into an open future full of responsibilities.”
This kind of freedom might be dizzying, as Soren Kierkegaard told us, but it doesn’t mean we can do whatever we like.
Unlike Sartre’s concept of ‘the look’ he brings up in Being and Nothingness, which has been called a “phenomenological proof” or an “ontological proof” of existence of other people, de Beauvoir took different approach to his concept of the otherness.
Sartre does not think two people can Look at each other in comfort and mutual recognition. For Sartre, it’s always a contest — I Look at you, you try to turn it around and Look at me (turning me into an object), and I fight back — with a winner and a loser.
According to him, human relations are defined by this conflict. It’s why he famously wrote that hell is other people.
Beauvoir takes up this being-with-others concept, and also outlines the ways in which woman is perceived as “other” in a patriarchal society, second to man, which is considered — and treated as — the “first” or default sex.
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir proposed the ideal concept of a woman-man relationship, that “to emancipate women is to refuse to confine her to the relation she bears to man, not to deny her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other and other.”
She then concluded that, the reciprocity of their relation will not do away with the miracles — desire, possession, love, dream, adventure — worked by the division of human being into two separate categories; and the term that move us: giving, conquering, uniting — will not lose their meaning.
On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of the humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that implies, then the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
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This essay was first published on Apr 23, 2018 via Medium
