Women were burned as witches
simply because they were beautiful.
That’s Simone de Beauvoir -
an icon of feminism
and one of the great philosophers
of the 20th Century -
talking about how women have been
punished for their sexuality,
kept in line and objectified.
So what would de Beauvoir have
thought of the Me Too movement?
Her book The Second Sex was a
founding text of modern feminism.
It caused a scandal when it
came out in France in 1949.
In it, de Beauvoir scorned the idea
that inequality and abuse
were women’s fault.
She insisted that what was
then called “the woman problem”
was “always the problem of man”.
The Second Sex was
published only four years
after French women got the vote.
President de Gaulle had just launched
a campaign to repopulate
the war-ravaged republic,
telling women to stay at home
and make babies pour la France!
De Beauvoir argued that this was
exactly the cause of women’s
disadvantage -
as mothers, they did the bulk
of parenting and domestic labour.
When they returned to work
it would be part time and poorly paid
and they’d still have to do
all the housework.
The Second World War had transformed
the balance of power between nations.
But not between sexes.
De Beauvoir delved into history, the
economy, and - of course - sex,
to try to find out
why everything was so skewed.
“Woman is always judged, she is
always the Object,” said de Beauvoir.
She lives under men’s
sexual surveillance.
This male-centred culture
holds, she said,
that “humanity is male and man
defines woman not in herself,
but in relation to himself”.
And for himself.
The persecution of witches
was part of this -
women being burned or buried or
drowned for not conforming,
for being too alluring or not
attractive enough,
and for being, one way or another,
too sexually threatening.
So, what would de Beauvoir
have made of Me Too?
Ignited by multiple allegations
across the film industry,
including most notoriously,
those surrounding movie mogul
Harvey Weinstein,
women said j’accuse, as they exposed
the predatory world of Hollywood.
They invoked a slogan coined
in 2006 by Tarana Burke,
an African-American
civil rights activist.
For her, it had been a way of
organising solidarity
against sexual abuse.
Within 24 hours of the first tweet
on the 15th of October 2017,
an estimated five million people used
#MeToo to share their experiences.
De Beauvoir would have seen Me Too
as a leap forward,
and she would have been disappointed
that after all this time
we still have so far to go.
De Beauvoir said...
Victories - like getting the vote -
can come to seem like defeats
if they don’t truly push things on.
Take rape. A recent survey in the UK
found that a third of people
still think that rape is only rape if
it’s violent, blood and bruises.
And it’s not rape
if a woman flirts on a date.
Women are still walking over the
proverbial flaming coals to prove
that they weren’t somehow
asking for it.
De Beauvoir would see Me Too
as just the catalyst.
She would say men can
take charge of their own change.
“Customs cannot be deduced from
biology,” she wrote.
This is no longer the “woman’s
problem”, it’s everyone’s problem.
Yet for all its hope, #MeToo showed
that women are still routinely
treated as sexual objects.
Equality seems far away.
The World Economic Forum estimates
that women won’t get
workplace equality
for at least 200 years. If ever.
De Beauvoir would ask,
what about justice?
For me too, you too.
Will women still be blazing for
justice when we’re all dead?
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