DEBEAUVOIR: Many of the faults for which women are reproached – mediocrity, laziness, frivolity, servility – simply express the fact that their horizon is closed. It is said that woman is sensual, she wallows in immanence; but she has first been shut up in it. The harem slave feels no morbid passion for rose preserves and perfumed baths: she has to kill time. When woman suffocates in a dull gynaeceum – brothel or middle-class home – she is bound to take refuge in comfort and well-being; besides that, if she eagerly seeks sexual pleasure, it is very often because she is deprived of it. Sexually unsatisfied, doomed to male crudeness, "condemned to masculine ugliness," she finds consolation in creamy sauces, heady wines, velvets, the caress of water, of sunshine, of a woman friend, of a young lover. If she seems to man so "physical" a creature, it is because her situation leads her to attach extreme important to her animal nature. The call of the flesh is no louder in her than in the male, but she catches its least murmurs and amplifies them. Sexual pleasure, like rending pain, represents the stunning triumph of the immediate; in the violence of the instant, the future and the universe are denied; what lies outside the carnal flame is nothing; for the brief moment of this apotheosis, woman is no longer mutilated and frustrated. But, once again, she values these triumphs of immanence only because immanence is her lot. (603)
Okay.
So I'm going to try to summarize my criticisms of De Beauvoir's text a little. First, I think I should establish that her argument is styled something like this --
a) The problem, most basically, is a problem with the abstract category of identity that makes somebody a "woman."
b) Inherent to this category is a reactive and passive, solipsistic and narcissistic cult of self which encloses the person in what De Beauvoir establishes as a "situation" which prevents her from being free, whatever that may mean, and from being autonomous (economically, psychologically, whatev) enough to make her own place in the world.
c) The way to solve the problems associated with this category is to disengage from the situation of being a woman. Part of this disengagement would involve the understanding that this essential & abstract concept "woman" does not really bind us as a gender -- we need to distinguish, then, between "women," who have no potential to change, and "females," who can evade the necessity of the category of being a "woman."
d) Here De Beauvoir actually spends a lot of time explaining why women are unable to really establish a community between themselves and other women -- because every action they make, so long as they are women, remains determined by the expectations of the male gaze.
Right. but here is the problem:
e) Since we don't really have anywhere to begin with establishing an autonomous mit-sein composed of women without reverting to the reactive roles, to a greater or lesser extent to break free of the man's rein involves adopting the dominant values within a system that has primarily been established by men.
She seems to me to be concerned to detach herself from women in general, which is fine, but also to locate herself in a place that will allow chauvinist critics of feminism to feel some sort of common ground with her. In the meantime this will involve, in the text, long encyclopaedic descriptions of the way women fail. "She looks at herself too much to see anything; she understands in others only what she recognizes as like herself in them; whatever is not germane to her own case, her own history, remains outside her comprehension." The whole thing, ironically, reeks of misogyny -- keeping in mind her relationship with Sartre -- and as I remarked to Ben last night, reminds me of the way a father would degrade and insult his son in order to spur the son onto something higher. I'm ultimately really grateful that this text exists, as opposed to no text, but it certainly could have been done without either repeating the passive habits of behavior that allow women to become oppressed to begin with or merely appropriating the behavior of the oppressors.
Now, the issue I have with the Levinas quotation in relation to all of this -- well, first note that in every giving there is also a receiving and in every receiving there is also a giving. The problem with presuming to take that much responsibility for the Other's mortality is that it runs the risk of depriving the Other precisely of their own responsibility for it -- thusly their own ability to change it. And I think it is that feeling of unjustifiable guilt that has allowed, say, women to continue putting their own best interests aside for the sake of the men they want in their lives, Christians to put their best interests aside for the sake of God, which in turn allows for their lives to be more and more controlled. I should mention that Levinas is very religious. Anyway, to respond to what you said, about semen staining the mountaintops -- I love the conceit, right, but theoretically speaking it isn't exactly men who are doing the usurping, who historically have done it. It's white, property-owning men. All one would have to do then to be worthy of feeling this sort of idolized guilt is fall into one of those three categories (cf. Solomon's post on my wall) -- am I white? Do I own property? Am I male?
Now, we might want to think about issues with private property, and race or even gender as a social construct. But we should be able to realize that guilt in-itself, except as a bare motivation to self-criticism (which I don't think most guilt is) is not the answer. Nor is coddling the oppressed class. Ben was talking about how, when he was reading The Second Sex, he grew pretty pessimistic about the possibilities of human relationship insofar as she encyclopaedically lays out the ways in which one human being can dominate another -- noting that even the most earnest care and attention can be an insidious form of this -- Christian charity, right. So... I'm speaking really generally, and even if I were speaking more clearly, I'd eventually just start writing a dissertation, so I'm going to end it here. There's a scene in the Zizek documentary where Zizek is on a panel, and one of the people who is also on the panel stands up and says "Okay -- so I really like Zizek, and, well, he's probably got the highest I.Q. of anyone in the room -- I'd bet money on that -- still -- there are --- well, he's probably been speaking at least three times as much as any of us here."
By the way, what the hell is up with I.Q.? Srsly.
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