In the middle of a maelstrom of disagreements about the repercussions of #MeToo, feminist activists and watchers circled the definitions of several important terms, like rape, harassing, assault, and consent. The concept of “pleasure” has been dissected, while the range of behaviors considered “wrong” has been expanded. We have covered the topics of victimization, authority, empowerment, and solidarity. Sexist aggressors have been informed that they can no longer operate freely in society. It seems that #MeToo campaigners have come to an unconscious understanding that there is an issue. This problem shows itself for women in the form of harassment, assault, and violence daily; the issue is men’s control over women, particularly in the professional realm.
The causes and the permanent solutions to the issue need to be more evident. The biggest win for the movement so far has been temporary fixes. Offenders have been publicly shamed after being removed from influential positions. They have publicly apologized, which has helped the movement’s credibility, even if the apologies have often been wrong and inadequate. More and more women are discovering a voice to come out against their attackers, especially those who have unfettered access to the press.
As we have seen, if the campaign is to have a lasting influence on how Americans conceive about sexual matters. It must widen its reach, including not just a variety of actions that are not precisely fit into “yes means yes” explanations of an accident (Leffingwell, 2018).
Arguments in favor of acculturation are not novel or unprecedented within the movement. Many activists and feminist thinkers have voiced their disapproval of the unrealistic sexual expectations created by pornography, the spontaneous portrayal of sexual rage in media, and the hypersexualization of women’s bodies in the media.
A wave of feminism is also formulating ideas about where this sexualized society came from and where it is going. In the wake of this current wave of feminist reckoning, it is natural to wonder which previous feminist efforts have been abandoned and which are still being worked on.
One way to start addressing these issues is to reflect on the inherited feminism inherited from our moms. Lindy West of the NY Times said, “the view of affirmative consent did not drop from the universe in October 2017 to startle well-intentioned but inept males. It was developed loudly, carefully, and publicly at tremendous personal danger to its proponents over decades.” Feminists have been fighting and challenging the norms of male sexual autonomy that they are currently contesting for centuries, if not centuries.
There are several perspectives to examine this genealogy, but Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” is an appropriate starting point. Beauvoir’s 800-page feminist essay, first published in French in 1949 and then in English in 1953, is now considered a foundational work of modern feminism. Not only are the ideas it includes now regarded as ancient, but what it says about the socialization of genders is still relevant and applicable today. Its significance to the feminist movement today helps explain the feeling of both continuations together with the crack I talked about before, the gap between 1949 and 2018, and the startling similarities across the two years.
As a reader and potential commentator on Beauvoir’s work, I would not feel qualified to begin without explaining my position on the issue or my “situation,” as Beauvoir put it. I am 25 years old, Caucasian, and from a middle-class family in the United States. Although I am a native American, I studied history in France. Despite its brevity, this overview already gives us a sense of how far we have come since publishing “The Second Sex.”
If it were the case, neither “cis-gender” nor “queer” would have been part of the description. White is not a label I would have ever applied to myself. If pressed to describe my sexual orientation, I would have responded something like “gay” or “lesbian.” Without a doubt, I would have introduced myself as a female American. To suggest that much progress has been made since the release of The Second Sex would be an understatement. This continuity is even more surprising.
Once I began reading, I kept waiting for Beauvoir’s epigram, “One is not made, but rather develops, woman,” to appear. To my surprise, this witty phrase only appeared far into the story (around three hundred pages). Instead, she begins by describing why she hesitates to write a feminist philosophy. Could it be that feminism is becoming less popular?
Given the impending sexual revolution that erupted during the May 1968 riots and the subsequent dramatic changes in law throughout much of the Western world, this remark seems almost comical. The feminist war may have been “won,” but many of today’s viewers of Second Sex disagree. All French women could now vote, run for administration, and then be given full legal equality with men.
In this narrow sense, feminism was a populist party whose raison d’etre looked to have withered when women won the right to vote. Beauvoir’s focus shifted from disproving the premise that women’s participation in politics inevitably grants them “freedom” to challenging the political system itself.
In the present day, feminists still hold up to this ideal. Changing harassment practices in the work area will take more than anti-discrimination laws, as the #metoo campaign has proven. Women’s integration into political, social, and economic spheres has only sometimes led to the more excellent representation of women at all levels of those institutions.
Beauvoir calls for a rethinking and reconstruction of traditional gender roles in her book The Second Sex. These are the responsibilities that society places on individuals depending on their biological or socially determined gender. According to Beauvoir, men’s superiority in the workplace, in the arts, and the bedroom has kept women from realizing their full potential as human beings.
References
Leffingwell, H. (2018, March 5). Reading the second sex in the age of #MeToo. Public Seminar. https://publicseminar.org/2018/03/reading-the-second-sex-in-the-age-of-metoo/
