A study of feminism through some key thinkers: 1 - Simone de Beauvoir

A study of feminism through some key thinkers: 1 - Simone de Beauvoir

 

I'm not a feminist but over the last sixteen years I've been slowly groping towards an alternative that retains what's good in the movement but discards the bad. I'm married with four children, two sons and two daughters. Because I AM anti-feminist (but not in any conventional way) I get used to being told I'm a gender traitor.

Before I put forward my own gradually evolving philosophy I'll begin with a series of articles analyzing some key feminist thinkers. I'm sure that at least some feminists will say 'no woman could possibly write about philosophy or look at these kinds of ideas; they're so intellectual they must be the work of a man!'

Typical of the contempt for women that feminists have. They think we're useless, stupid and without value. To them only men have value and I've come to see over the course of the last sixteen years of my life that it's not just a totally weird and irrational prejudice; feminism is founded on a basic misunderstanding of what it IS to be a woman. That's why nearly all feminists are women who reject their womanhood and wish they were man because they believe that only masculine values have any worth in the world. Feminine values they reject as signs of weakness, incapacity and so on.

Anyway, rant over for the moment!

I'm not going to focus on the prehistory of the movement - Christine de Pisan, Mary Wollstonecraft or even the Suffragettes but I'm going to start with the writer whose book in practice launched the modern movement.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR - THE SECOND SEX

It's ironic that de Beauvoir's book 'The Second Sex,' published in 1949 and intended to assert the equality of the genders, debases women to a level beneath the most misogynistic assault on females. De Beauvoir sees women as the perpetual 'other,' outside the human world as defined by men and in a sense therefore not a person but a thing, utterly valueless. Woman is nothing but a passive victim, and men, whether they treat her with rudeness and contempt or with kindness and politeness, inevitably and through the mere fact of their interaction with her, sully and degrade her inevitably. Instead of men and women being partners, there is only the male aggressor and female victim, the male taskmaster and the female slave.

This attitude takes a purely androcentic view of the world in which the very existence of a woman, her very nature, is defined by and confined to her permanent and inescapable subjugation.

The root of the problem is 'Cartesian dualism,' the influence of the separation between the physical and mental made by the French thinker Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century. De Beauvoir and those feminists who follow her example are not just confusing equity with equality but, even worse, confusing equality with identity and sameness.

De Beauvoir insists that the differences between the genders are purely the result of cultural factors. But if sexual characteristics are determined by anything other than biology, they are purely arbitrary and faceless. We would no longer be individuals but simply chance throws of the dice or pieces on a chess-board being moved and manipulated but with neither power not identity in ourselves. Sexual sameness leads, not to the feminist utopia of liberation, but to the opposite goal, slavery and depersonalisation.

This asexual feminism is not simply factually false - given the lie by our own experience of life - but morally wrong. For the concept of the person and a specific role it substitutes an interchangeable part in a machine. All humanity is lost and slavery and dehumanization inevitably follow. To deny the biological roots of the differences between the sexes is to create a world in which human beings no longer exist. In de Beauvoir's view of the world, woman is nothing, reduced to an object. It isn't male chauvinism, but feminism, that 'objectifies' women.

It's probably no accident that for many years de Beauvoir was the mistress of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre showed in all his writing that he was incapable of seeing human relationships in any form other than on terms of ownership. He saw people, and the relations between them, as a process of objectification. Love - which requires union and mutuality - is impossible in his distorted world view. Domination and submission are the only possibly human relationships for him.

De Beauvoir declares that 'the body is not enough' and 'biology is not enough' to define woman as a female. She denies the reality or at least the importance of applying biology to human life, just as she fails to examine the psychological factors involved in womanhood and, if it comes to that, manhood.

It's understandable that de Beauvoir wants to stress the importance of upbringing, environment, culture and so on as forces moulding the development of women because undoubtedly, even in 1949 when her book was published, the general view of women was too much based on assumptions that 'biology is destiny' and being born female made you, not simply different from, but inferior to, men.

G K Chesterton once said 'every heresy represents the overvaluation of some truth,' and that's as true of feminism as it is of any other belief system. The psychologist Alfred Adler talked about masculine and feminine roles in society and certainly regarded the cultural aspects of them as more important than the biological ones. I'll quote a few of his ideas on the subject:

'In general we can distinguish two types of women in the battle against the feminine role. One type has already been indicated: the girl who develops in an active, "masculine" direction. Very often she evades all the relationships of love and marriage. This is the type that seeks to compensate for the evil of the masculine attitude with a "masculine" response. The defence attitude towards womanhood is the foundation of her whole being. Many girls go into business at an early age because the independence connected with employment seems a protection to them against the threatened necessity of marriage. Here again the driving power is the disinclination to assume the womanly role.'

Adler goes on to point out that 'the division of labour' between the sexes is the problem. He points out that masculinity and femininity should NOT be defined by the cultural ROLES of man and women.

Of course he's right. Almost everything a man does can be done just as easily and well by a woman. The same is true of men. Other than pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding I can't think of any PURELY female role and I can't think of a SINGLE purely male role.

But science shows that we ARE born with a certain basic character arising from our genes. Being born a woman simply DOES have certain consequences which ARE rooted in biology rather than culture. Personality develops through social interaction while character is what we are born with.

There is NO reason why a man can't bring up children (I know several single fathers who do a great job). There's no reason why women can't work as engineers, plumbers, building labourers and so on. (Again, I know quite a few who do).

But the ROLE of a man or woman is NOT something that defines their masculinity or femininity. A single Dad is as much of a man as anyone else.

The heart of the non-problem against which de Beauvoir and her disciples are rebelling is their confusion between ROLE and NATURE. I've had a lot of flak from feminists because they look at me, a mother of four, with horror.

'You're ONLY a wife and mother?' they gasp. 'But - what do you DO?'

Well, when I find the time I like to write - usually stories or poems but sometimes articles like this one.

Of all the things that drive me mad about feminism I find its contempt for motherhood - and fatherhood - the most despicable. I believe it's all down to the fact that, as Adler said, 'often she evades the responsibilities of love and marriage.'

What feminists - at least, the radical feminist variety - hate above everything else is love. One of them - not de Beauvoir, to be fair to her, but it could just as easily have been her as it fits in exactly with her thinking - described love as 'a trick of the patriarchy.'

What? So to care about another human being, to feel affection for them, to want to share your life with them, is simply a case of being brainwashed by 'the patriarchy?' And if a man loves a woman - is THAT some kind of devious attempt to oppress her by stealth?

This is so typical of feminist 'thinking' and their complete failure to comprehend ANY relationship that ISN'T based on some kind of 'power trip.'

Love is a union between people where EACH, though retaining their own identity and remaining separate selves, come together to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Love isn't something technical that you can design and operate with a blueprint. It's messy, scary, irrational and completely beyond your control. You can't 'decide' to love another person; you can't force anyone to love you any more than you can force yourself to love them. Love is something you either feel or you don't. You don't have to THINK about it or to analyze it; you just love or you don't.

And in the case of de Beauvoir and almost every feminist I've ever met or read, love is a totally alien concept to them. All they can see is that love means surrender, submission, becoming a slave.

What a sad and perverted way of looking at the world!

Here we come to the heart of the feminist fear. It isn't just de Beauvoir or her disciples who fear love; it's everyone - man or woman - who can't see that human relations are based on emotion rather than logic and on trust and caring rather than some desire to oppress or some masochistic desire to BE oppressed.

Back in the 1930s the psychologist Ian Suttie identified what he called 'a taboo on tenderness.' Feminist thinkers are shot through with this taboo, terrified that if they show love rather than hate, empathy rather than condemnation, moderation rather than extremism, calmness rather than aggression, fluidity rather than a perpetual desire to be in control - hell, they think if they go down that softer, subtler road they'll dissolve into weakness and become helpless victims!

Isn't it strange how feminists show such total contempt for women? Isn't it odd that they diss the 'feminine' virtues (in reality, HUMAN virtues) and only praise 'male' virtues and demand that women should follow them and renounce femininity?

In the twisted world view of de Beauvoir and her ilk, women have NO value unless they become like men. This idea isn't just bizarre and insulting to women; if every woman DID transform herself into an imitation of a man, wouldn't that make her every bit as much of a 'patriarchal oppressor' as she claims men are?

And of course this weird gender-fixated prejudice has distorted feminist thinking ever since.

Only since about the 1990s have some feminists started to refuse to accept this demand to be 'masculinised,' as if only by imitating male characteristics could they achieve any value. (I'll deal with some of the 1990s feminists in later articles).

A much earlier book, Joanna Field's 'A Life of One's Own,' published in 1934, was written by a woman who had spent most of her life denying her feminine side. She did marry but, as she said herself, 'did not feel particularly feminine.' Field identified femininity with surrender, just as de Beauvoir and Sartre identify it with submission. Field had a terror of 'surrendering' and instead adoplted a masculine approach to life.

Pondering on why she felt unhappy, Field embarked on extensive self-analysis and tried various techniques of relaxation. At first she found the experience of relaxing terrifying and felt that she was losing her sense of self when she did so.

She began to try and evolve a compromise position in which, rather than thinking of 'masculine' and 'feminine' characteristics, she though of them as being active or passive. For a time this satisfied her but as she began to 'let go' more often and more deeply she started to reconsider this idea.

Biology gave her a clue and she came to understand that even in the plant world, still more so the animal kingdom (to which humans also belong!), it is always the lot of the female to be receptive and of the male to be penetrative. Field discovered that this was true on every level of nature, not simply in terms of sexuality. She quotes the psychologist T J Faithful on the subject:

'The egg cell or female gamete, slow-moving, placid, enduring, receptive, occupies itself with accumulation of food and libido for the ultimate purpose of creation - in a word, introverted; and the male gamete, active, impetuous, courageously self-sacrificing, with no reserves, resistive in the extreme, bent on forcing its personality and its body substance on the waiting ovum, possessing all those characteristics of the amoeba which are for action upon the outside world - in a word, extraverted.'

To return to de Beauvoir, whose attitude is what some psychologists have described as being 'a masculine woman' or 'a phallic woman.' She seems unable to distinguish between softness and weakness, selfhood and self-centredness, individuality and narcissism, union and abasement. Field, analyzing her own inner struggles, makes a comment that, fifteen years before 'The Second Sex' was published, seems an entirely fair and accurate criticism of de Beauvoir.

Field writes: 'was it that to my blind thinking, with its inability to see more than one thing at once, the satisfaction of the female meant the wiping out of the male for ever? To satisfy the feminine to the full without the loss of one's individuality, perhaps this was an idea beyond the powers of blind thinking to grasp, since for it things must be either one or the other. And in its terror of losing the male in the female it had in fact lost both. I quite failed to realize that the bi-polarity of attitude shown in the characteristics of the spermatazoid and the ovum might permeate the whole of life.'

De Beauvoir and those who follow her views cannot love or even possess empathy. They believe that power and capability are things that only men possess, and that only by imitating men can women avoid failure and achieve power. Of course their 'imitation' doesn't turn them into men any more than transvestites become women when they change clothing.

The 'phallic woman' is a caricature of maleness, lacking true masculinity and in its place setting up hatred, aggression and a desire to dominate and to oppress. Phallic women don't become like men; they just end up as vindictive, callous sadists.

It's no accident that de Beauvoir admires and praises the Marquis de Sade and wrote an essay on him. In her preface to de Sade's novel 'Justine,' she wrote that he 'posed the problem of the other in its most extreme terms.' She believes that his work puts forward a philosophy of rebellion, anti-patriarchy and freedom. In her eyes he was 'a great moralist' even though 'he endorsed an unsatisfactory ethics.'

Now there's a lot I could say about de Sade but the basic criticism that I'd make of him is one that de Beauvoir never makes - which is that the type of 'freedom' he stands for is the 'freedom' of a complete egocentric person. He stands for the domination of the weak and innocent by the strong, cruel and corrupt. She does finally get around to admitting that she finds his view of freedom 'unsatisfactory' and even at one point seems to dimly understand that love DOES mean giving up a self-centred view but she soon loses sight of that and goes off on a tangent about 'the other' and nonsense like that.

Rebellion for its own sake, freedom without responsibility, all that kind of thing is just the expression of a narcissistic personality. De Sade certainly WAS a narcissist and de Beauvoir can't seem to see that it's his narcissism that was the root of his problems and his way of looking at the world.

Like de Sade, de Beauvoir stands for a view of life that to most of us is just morally wrong. Like him, she is self-centred, indifferent to the suffering of others and fundamentally anti-life,

She is one of the starkest possible refutations of the claim 'feminism is the radical claim that a woman is a human being.' In fact, feminism - particularly in the form that de Beauvoir and her followers present it - is quite the opposite. It is the radical claim that women are NOT human beings and that only MEN can be human beings.

What fundamentally distinguishes de Beauvoir's 'philosophy' of women is, ironically, its totally misogyny.