闺蜜 Salon

There has been a silence. My apologies. This has a been a period of transition for all of us: Graduation. Finals. Job searches.  All at once, I found myself going through major life changes with little grounding of how to think of myself. All at once, I was a woman, a graduate, a daughter, a best friend moving away, an employee.  I came across recently a book by a woman attempting to write a historical, but also a somewhat autobiographical account of what it meant in the middle of the 20th century to be a woman.  Although Simone De Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (1952) is context specific, deeply intertwined with the radical philosophical thought of the time, it also carries the simple voice of woman searching for the universal truths that make us think and speak of ourselves as women (a self-reflexive process rarely taken up as vigoursly by our male counterparts).   De Beeauvoir writes:

“At the present time, when women are beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men–they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any.  To decline to be the Other, to refsue to be a party to the deal–this would be for women to renounce all the advantges conferred up ton them by thier alliance with the superior caste.  Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her extence,; thus she can evade at once both risk and the metaphiscal rsik of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assitance.  Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each indivdiaul to affirm his subjetcitve existence, there is also the tempetation to forgo liberty and become a thing.  This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it–passive, lost, ruined–beocmes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frastrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value.  But it is an easy raod; on it one avoids the strain invovled in undertaking an authentic extence.  When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect her to manifest deep-seated tendencies towards complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necesary bond that ties her to man regarldess of reciprocity, and beacuse she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.”

This is only an excerpt from the introductory chapter.  With some 700 pages left to read my impressions and understanding of what De Beauvoirs is getting at will surely change. Although she was writing over 50 years ago, I can only wonder how much has changed?  It is true that women now have the capacity to challenge patriarchal institutions and systems of thought, but De Beauvoir raises the serious (and frightening) question of complicity in performing to this role of the Other, simply because it  suits one’s lot in life.

In the coming weeks I’m going to continue thinking about how this might, or might not, look in the United States. As I do this, I’d like to hear back from people with thoughts and critiques, especially from Taiwan or China as the role and power of women are drastically changing.