Thursday 26 September 2013

Feminism killed the Nice Guy - Part I

After a long absence we are back to business, today I shall unravel the second part of the saga: "Feminism killed the Nice guy". As a recap, the first part was focused on John Stuart Mill's work "The Subjugation of Women", and the teachings of the first Women's Rights activist as I liked to call her, Mary Wollstonecraft, generally these two contributions were in my view extremely important, the leap of thought required was relatively visionary at the time and it could still be useful and practical today in countries where women are enslaved and have a lesser status than that which of men. This second part will focus on the French existentialist philosopher, whose influence in feminist theory and feminist philosophy was undoubtedly great, I am of course referring to Simone de Beauvoir.

The work to be analysed is obviously "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir, as an existentialist, her central premise was that existence precedes essence, hence, a person is not born a woman, but rather, becomes one. This can become accepted by observing the emergence of transsexuals as human beings that were ultimately born in the wrong sex, and seek to alter it by means of aesthetic medicine. 

The central core of her analysis is related to the Hegelian concept of "the Other", a key concept in continental philosophy, it opposes the "Same". In Simone's view of a male dominated culture, women are seen as the "Other", the "Other" is essentially a "minority", but a minority in the ideological sense and not the sheer numerical sense. In social sciences, the concept of "Other" has been applied to understand the processes by which society and groups exclude the "Others" in order to subordinate or ostracise them from society. 

This dissociative behaviour is linked to the artificial construction of roles in order to fit in with the machinery of society without being labelled as an "other", due to the fear of stigmatization or condemning. The use of otherness is strictly linked with nationality and patriotism, in order to mould a certain type of national identity, this can entail the active segregation of groups labelled as "others", and in extreme cases, genocide. 

In the field of gender studies, the "Other" applied by Simone, is, as I previously stated, her  belief of women as being objects of a socially constructed ideology in male dominated society, arguing that in the same way these social edifices can be constructed, they can also be changed with the course of the time and the progress/change/creation of new ideas and social paradigms.

By following Derridean deconstruction we are able to deconstruct the word woman in order to remove the need of rationally male society, in short, this deconstruction denies the existence of an intrinsic meaning and therefore impossible to achieve metaphysics of presence, a small definition of this concept is that:

"The deconstructive interpretation holds that the entire history of Western philosophy and its language and traditions has emphasized the desire for immediate access to meaning, and thus built a metaphysics or ontotheology around the privileging of presence over absence."

This prompts us back to Simone and the "Second Sex".  Part One is called "Destiny" , which has three chapters, "Biological Data", "The Psychoanalytical Point of View" and lastly, "The Point of View of Historical Materialism". 

The first chapter is related to physiology and the differences between the bodies of males and females, putting in evidence the greater muscular strength, less blood cells and lesser respiratory capacity. In the second chapter, Simone exposes the theories of Freud and Adler, and dismisses them afterwards, arguing that there is no empirical basis for a study on eroticism to be explored in the domain of psychoanalysis. The third chapter is centred on  "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" by Friedrich Engels, with no surprise she ended up dismissing yet another theory of a certain "historical defeat of women". Interesting that an ideology that supposedly defends equality between the sexes has reached a certain height of claims that were never put to evidence by any proponent of capitalism, Simone easily dismissed Engels' work due to lack of basis and reason regarding these claims, I shall induce that she utilized the same method of deconstruction applied to the other, with metaphysical presence being the core point, relativizing the "defeat of women", even though she acknowledges and propagates the idea of women as an "Other" in a society that is male-oriented.

“Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)” 
- Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex"

This concludes yet another part of the analysis.

Valete fratres.