Morality, Justice & Freedom After the War

Poli 110DA 19The laborious glory of free existence

History & Future• These attitudes influence each succeeding generation,

until they become understood as what it means to be a man or woman.• Example: Soviet women encouraged to behave femininely.

• This has always been bad faith, but the current moment is one in which social, economic, and technological changes enable new kinds of liberty for women.– Will they accept it? Will men acknowledge it? Or will they

continue to act in bad faith?– Will women be acknowledged, and acknowledge

themselves, as existents beyond the biological, ceasing to be defined by men?

• Civil liberties are only symbolic until economic independence is achieved– “A woman supported by a man—wife or

courtesan—is not emancipated from the male because she has a ballot in her hand” (679)

• The female worker “is fated for gallantry by the fact that her wages are minimal while the standard of living expected of her by society is very high. If she is content to get along on he wages, she is a pariah: ill lodged, ill dressed, she will be denied all amusement and even love.”– “She will therefore accept assistance, and this is

what her employer cynically counts on in giving her starvation wages.” (681)

• Yet, “the woman who is economically emancipated from man is not for all that in a moral, social, and psychological situation identical with that of man.” (682)– What is important is the lived experience of material

conditions– Men are undivided, and success endows them with

prestige• Masculinity is a unity

– “It is required of a woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject.” (682)

• Women not taken seriously if “feminine,” but mocked if they don’t behave in a “feminine” way. (682)– To be a complete human, a woman must have

access to men as men do to women, but the demands of each are not symmetrical.• To have “feminine charm” it is “necessary to be

spontaneously offered prey.” (685)

• The active/passive dynamic affects all aspects of heterosexual sexual activity– Active seduction is problematic

• “A woman who is not afraid of men frightens them”• “Woman... can take only when she makes herself prey: she

must become a passive thing, a promise of submission.” (689)– “Even when the seduction succeeds, the victory is still

ambiguous; the fact is that in common opinion it is the man who conquers, who has the woman. It is not admitted that she, like a man, can have desires of her own: she is the prey of desire.” (690)

• Sluts and studs

• But passive masochism is no less problematic– “deep submissive pleasure in masculine arms” (691)– But “when a woman begins to doubt men’s

superiority, their pretensions serve only to decrease her esteem for them... she would fain have to do with an adult who is living out a real moment in his own life, not with a little boy telling himself stories. The masochist is especially disappointed: a maternal compliance, annoyed or indulgent, is not the abdication she dreams of. She, too, will have to content herself with ridiculous games, pretending to believe herself enslaved or dominated...” (692)

• This hinders equal relationships between men and women (692-693):– Men can forgive women their faults

• She’s a victim of her situation• She could have been so much more• She has so much potential

– But it’s harder for women to do the same• Adult men are what they have made for themselves• The myth of the powerful man makes it hard for men to be

accepted with their flaws– “The problem is to find a man whom she can regard

as an equal without his considering himself a superior.”

• “For a woman to love as a man does—that is to say, in liberty, without putting her very being in question—she must believe herself his equal and be so in concrete fact; she must engage in her enterprises with the same decisiveness.” (696)

• One hindrance to this is biology:– Reproductive control– Maternity leave– Psychological focus on discomfort of menstruation

• Give women the chance for professional equality, and they will become equal

• Social forces condition women to be dependent, whereas men are compelled to will their own lives– Men must, of necessity, fend for themselves, thus

realizing their own transcendence– Women are constantly tempted to a life of easy,

objectified dependence

• Women are made to feel that they are outside their element in work, education, and art:– “Overwhelmed by respect for authorities and the

weight of erudition, her view restricted by pedantic blinders, the over-conscientious student deadens her critical sense and her very intelligence.” (700)• Grateful just to be there and having diminished sense of

worth, women become unwilling to risk their all• “But worth is not a given essence, it is the outcome of a

successful development.” (701)– projects

• Even in art, the sphere of work most open to women, “she is on her best behavior; she is afraid to disarrange, to investigate, to explode; she feels she should seek pardon for her literary pretensions though her modesty and good taste.” – They either “orchestrate the grand mystification

intended to persuade women to ‘stay womanly’”– Or they “have had to expend so much energy

negatively in order to free themselves from outward restraints that they arrive somewhat out of breath at the stage from which masculine writers of great scope take their departure” (709)

• “Women do not contest the human situation because they have hardly begun to assume it.”– Most men don’t either; it is only with “great men”

that women of achievement seem mediocre

• “Art, literature, philosophy, are attempts to found the world anew on a human liberty: that of the individual creator; to entertain such a pretension, one must first unequivocally assume the status of a being who has liberty.” (711)

• This is true even in everyday life. The street is hostile to a woman, “with eyes and hands lying in wait everywhere; if she walks carelessly, her mind drifting, if she lights a cigarette in front of a cafe, if she goes alone to the movies, a disagreeable incident is soon bound to happen. She must inspire respect by her costume and manners. But this preoccupation rivets her to the ground and to herself. ‘Your wings droop.’” (712)– TE Lawrence could ride by himself exploring France,

but could a woman?

• “To regard the universe as one’s own, to consider oneself to blame for its faults and to glory in its progress, one must belong to the caste of the privileged; it is for those alone who are in command to to justify the universe by changing it, by thinking about it, by revealing it; they alone can recognize themselves in it and endeavor to make their mark upon it.” (713)– “Hitherto woman’s possibilities have been suppressed

and lost to humanity... And it is high time she be permitted take her chances in her own interest and in the interest of all.” (715)

The chain binds at both ends

• “Man is concerned with the effort to appear male, important, superior; he pretends so as to get pretense in return; he, too, is aggressive, uneasy; he feels hostility for women because he is afraid of them, he is afraid of them because of the personage, the image, with which he identifies himself... He would be liberated himself in their liberation.” (720)

• “It is not a question of abolishing in woman the contingencies and miseries of the human condition, but of giving her the means to transcend them.

Woman is the victim of no mysterious fatality; the peculiarities that identify her as specifically a woman get their importance from the significance placed upon them. They can be surmounted, in the future, when the are regarded in new perspectives.” (727)

• “The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: ‘virtue,’ as the ancients called it, is defined at the level of ‘that which depends on us.’” (728)

• “In sexuality will always be materialized the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence. To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. (731)– Note emphasis– Recognition of freedom, as humans

• “To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.” (732)