Abstract
In the past 20 years feminist philosophy has come to fetishize two metaphysics of gender: (1) gender reificationism, on which what it is to be a man or a woman is taken to be definable with precision, and (2) gender eliminativism, on which the notions of “man” and “woman” are understood as thoroughly political concepts. These two positions, which are not necessarily incompatible, both fail to take seriously the phenomenology of being a woman; and their popularity goes hand in hand with the increasing irrelevance of feminist philosophy in women’s lives. We find an antidote to the current state of affairs in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Beauvoir’s metaphysic of sex difference helps us to make sense of the experience of contemporary young women whose investment in their own professional success as “alpha girls” seems decidedly at odds with their apparently retrogressive roles in the current “hook-up culture.” The explanatory power of Beauvoir’s model makes attractive her insistence on the crucial grounding role that everyday experience must play in metaphysical reflection. It also suggests that to be a human being is, and always will be, to be tempted to objectify oneself.
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Notes
- 1.
See, e.g., Haslanger: “A consequence of my view is that when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race). At that point we—or more realistically, our descendents—won’t need the concepts of race and gender to describe our current situation” (11). Since I won’t have the opportunity to do so later, let me say here that it is not clear to me that the cases of gender and race are parallel in the way that Haslanger implies they are. To put the point in Haslanger’s terms: I doubt that there will ever come a time in which there will no longer be men or women, but the reasons for this doubt, which will become clearer later in this chapter, appear to me not to have analogues in the case of race.
- 2.
See Butler, Gender Trouble, especially Chapter 1. For a similar argument about the dicey political effects of deploying the concept lesbian, see Butler, “Imitations”.
- 3.
I do not mean to imply that these issues are not important. My concern is with the long-term stasis in the terms of the debate and the assumptions that guide it.
- 4.
The key concept here is fetish: my point is that what I am calling gender-eliminativism and gender-reificationism do not take the phenomenology of womanhood seriously. They treat women’s experience mainly as something to be analyzed away. As my characterization of Catharine MacKinnon’s position suggests, however, the two -isms are not mutually exclusive. You can coherently believe both the gender-reificationist view that what it is to be a woman is consistent across beings properly called “women” (namely, to be treated as an object for men’s sexual exploitation and consumption) and the gender-eliminativist claim that the world would and could be a better place without “women,” so construed, in it. Furthermore, both gender-eliminativists and gender-reificationists can endorse social constructionism. In coining the term “gender reificationism” instead of using the old term “gender essentialism,” I mean to underscore, as MacKinnon does, that you can have a definite view about what gender is and still think that gender is socially constructed. For a decisive argument against the view that gender essentialism and social constructionism are mutually exclusive, see Charlotte Witt’s forthcoming monograph.
- 5.
The original French reads: On ne sait plus bien s’ll existe encore des femmes, s’il en existera toujours, s’il faut ou non le souhaiter, quelle place elles occupent en ce monde, quelle place elles devraient y occuper (Le deuxième sexe I, 11).
- 6.
Translation modified. The original French reads: Et en vérité il suffit de se promener les yeux ouverts pour constater que l’humanité se partage en deux catégories d’individus dont les vêtements, le visage, le corps, les sourires, la démarche, les intérêts, les occupations sont manifestement différents: peut-être ces différences sont-elles superficielles, peut-être sont-elles destines à disparaître. Ce qui est certain c’est que pour l’instant elles existent avec une éclatante évidence (Le deuxième sexe I, 13).
- 7.
“If I wish to define myself, I am obliged first off to declare: ‘I am a woman’; this truth is the background against which all further assertions will stand out” (The Second Sex, xxi; translation modified). The original French reads: Si je veux me définir je suis oblige d’abord de déclarer: “Je suis une femme”; cette vérité constitue le fond sur lequel s’enlèvera toute autre affirmation (Le deuxième sexe, 14). For my interpretation of this move of Beauvoir’s, see Bauer, especially Chapters 1 and 2.
- 8.
The French reads: les hommes et femmes affirment sans équivoque leur fraternité (Le deuxième sexe II, 663).
- 9.
The French reads: Il semble à peu près certain qu’elles accéderont d’ici un temps plus ou moins long à la parfaite égalité économique et sociale (Le deuxième sexe II, 659).
- 10.
Ibid. The French reads: entraînera une métamorphose intérieure.
- 11.
Butler is actually an exception here. In her very early work in feminist philosophy she explicitly and frequently expresses her debt to Beauvoir. However, Butler’s view is that Beauvoir did not understand the implications of her views when taken to their logical limits. See, e.g., Butler, “Sex and Gender.”
- 12.
I say “in the West” rather than “at my university” or even “in the United States” because of responses I’ve gotten to this chapter from young European women.
- 13.
For an interesting discussion of Girls Gone Wild and related phenomena, see Levy.
- 14.
You could make the case, I think, that Descartes’s understanding of this split is fundamentally phenomenological as well, at least in its origins. Descartes of course postulates that the mind is radically different from the body and in fact has priority over the body when it comes to explaining how we have any experience of the world. But this postulate is a conclusion he reaches from the experience of being able to doubt the existence of his body but not his mind. In the introduction to The Second Sex, I have suggested, Beauvoir proceeds as though she is rewriting the Meditations from the point of view of someone who is investigating what a woman is and therefore cannot doubt the existence of her own body without sabotaging the project from the start. See Chapter 2 of my Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism.
- 15.
Le deuxième sexe I, 18.
- 16.
The French reads: Refuser d’être l’Autre, refuser la complicité avec l’homme, ce serait pour elles renoncer à tout les avantages que l’alliance avec la caste supérieure peut leur conférer. L’homme-suzerain protegera matériellement la femme-lige et il se chargera de justifier so existence: avec le risque économique elle esquive le risque métaphysique d’une liberté qui doit inventer ses fins sans secours…. C’est un chemin facile: on évite ainsi l’angoisse et la tension de l’existence authentiquement assumée (Le deuxième sexe I, 21).
- 17.
The French reads: au lieu de vivre l’ambiguïté de sa condition (Le deuxième sexe II, 658).
- 18.
The French reads: l’expérience érotique est une de celles qui découvrent aux êtres humains de la façon la plus poignante l’ambiguïté de leur condition; ils s’y éprouvent comme chair et comme esprit, comme l’autre et comme sujet (Le deuxième sexe II, 190).
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
The last few thoughts are expressed in similar form, but in a different context, in Bauer, “Pornutopia”.
- 21.
My thanks to Anne Barnhill, Shannon Mussett, Mark Richard, Jennifer Purvis, and Charlotte Witt for very helpful commentary. Versions of this chapter were read at the Centenaire de la Naissance de Simone de Beauvoir in Paris, a session on Beauvoir at the 2008 Central APA, and the 2008 annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existentialism. I thank the audiences at these events for stimulating discussions.
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Bauer, N. (2011). Beauvoir on the Allure of Self-Objectification. In: Witt, C. (eds) Feminist Metaphysics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3783-1_8
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