The Other Sex

WARNING: Long post (but worth reading :) ).

Recently I discovered French writer, existentialist philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir and her book “The second sex (Le deuxième sexe)” published in 1949. I was stunned how relevant those words still are even though 60 years have passed. A lot have changed but the philosophy of the second sex still remains. In the introduction Simone writes:

Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.’ But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. […] In truth humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.

My field is fairly male-dominated. Ever since I joined this field, there have been many incidents of discriminations, taunting etc. Whenever I share any such incident with my peer group, the usual response I get is that I should have stayed and proved them wrong. And I have often wondered, should I have? Yes, may be. But all those incidents would have involved me somehow trying to prove that I am not a woman. I am not sure how to do that? If some one asks me to prove that I am capable, intelligent, hard working enough for a certain job, I will take up that challenge. But no matter how I hard I work, no matter how much I struggle, I can never prove that I am not a woman.

My body is structured in a certain way. If at some point, my future life partner and I decide to have a baby, my body will be the one who will carry the baby. And it doesn’t stop at physical differences. Socially, I will be expected to shoulder far more responsibilities and duties than my life-partner. Socially, I need more protection and security than my male counterparts. Socially (at least in India), I couldn’t have shared room with guys in my class (I was the only girl in my class). And all these facts will remain true as long as I am a woman. So if they taunt me or discriminate against me due to these reasons, I don’t get the point of staying and proving. They want me to prove that I am not a woman, which I can’t. I have no means, or desire, of proving that. And why should I have to? Isn’t being good in your field or at your job, good enough? What does my being a woman has anything to do with my capabilities?

Here, I have to quote Apu’s post on “what if women’s stuff was the norm” that deals with how our society still treat the biological requirements of women as ‘special treatment’ and frown upon it. Apu writes:

Why “special” leave if you claim to be equal, is a question often thrown at women. This question assumes one important thing : that the norm is ‘no-maternity leave’ and therefore asking for maternity leave is a ‘deviation’, a call for ’special treatment.’ But, here’s the thing; assuming a norm of ‘no-maternity leave needed’ is a fundamentally biased one. It is a norm based on a situation where the workplace is entirely comprised of biological males who do not need maternity leave.

But, here’s the thing too : 50% of this planet’s citizens are women. What if we and our bodies were the norm? Looking at it this way, suddenly, maternity leave doesn’t seem like an aberration. Women’s bodies carry children, and those bodies need a period of rest before/after delivery, plus time off until the baby is weaned. That’s a biological fact. Workplaces have never been built taking into account the fact of women’s bodies or their lives. For e.g. transfer policies in most government departments in our country were laid down for a prototype male worker, whose non-working wife and children would simply move when he had to.

How is this thinking different from the 1940s when women were struggling for voting rights, education and such. As Simone writes:

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being ...’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting significance by itself ... Man can think of himself without woman.  […] She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’

[…]

Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam.

Why else do we still refer the humans as man-kind? Again to quote Simone:

In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.

It depresses me to observe how little the thinking of society has changed in past 60 years even though we have come far in a lot of aspects regarding feminist movement. It also depresses me to see how half of the world is still living in that era or worse, trying to return to that era. The concept of feminism is considered “western”, “corrupting” etc. while it actually is:

What they [feminist] demand today is to be recognized as [an] existent with the same right as men, and not as subordinate existence to life, [like] the human being [master] to its animality [slave].

Sixty years later, we are still fighting for that equality. Husbands and in-laws still hold the power to grant freedom to wives and DILs. What a woman is allowed or not allowed to wear depends on everyone else but her. Her career decisions are made by others. She is given duties and responsibilities, and yet no rights or liberties.

Yes, on larger scale we have achieved some major goals: woman have a right to vote, education, work without discrimination by law almost all around the world. We are horrified when these rights are revoked. But on micro level, these rights haven’t really reached to woman (at least in India). The social thinking still considers woman as liability. We are still frowned upon if we want maternity leave. Companies don’t want to employ woman of certain age-group as they might want maternity leave or might get married and leave the company.  We no longer have open discriminations and yet, at every step of the way we face a discrimination.

In a lot of ways, we are still where we were 60 years ago.  We are still the second sex, the other sex. Don’t you agree?

Edit: The Bechdel rule for movies is yet another example of how woman are regarded as the other sex in our world. IHM wrote a post about the topic.