Existentialist feminism 2

• Myths about women: Her duty so to sacrifice herself for her man
• Men have the power to force women into a myth
• Many women internalize the myth.

• Social roles are the mechanism that the Self uses to control the Other: Women are socialized to accept their otherness.

• Role of wife blocks freedom
• Marriage perverts love
• Trades love for duty
• Trades freedom for happiness
• Trades boundless nature for limited home

• Role of mother blocks freedom
• Pregnancy is no joy;
• alienation from self;
• diminishes freedom
• Distortion of mother-child relationship
• Child can be other to woman’s self
• But the child will eventually objectify the mother

• Role of career woman blocks freedom
• If she neglects her appearance she falls short of the standards of beautiful woman
• If she spends lots of time on her appearances she falls shorts of the standards of her career.

• Prostitute; High-end call girl
• She is a paradigm object but,
• She is a self who has power over the men who use her services
• She makes them pay homage to her otherness
• She uses her otherness to her advantage

o Narcissist

• Since women are hindered from engaging in self-defining activity she makes her reality in her own body.
• She focuses on herself as an object and makes herself beauty
• Hurts her in the end because her beauty is determined by the judgments of others and not herself.

• Mystic
• Seeker of divine love, be that of a man or a god
• Mixes up men and gods
• She seeks their gaze
• Wants to be possessed and to be made into the best object

• Problem with these roles
• Women don’t make them up
• They are constructed by men, by his social structures and institutions

Escaping the roles that women fulfill:

• Woman has no essence and so she ought to be able to create herself in outside of these roles
• Women can get out of the bad faith position of being ruled by a role and can become a subject
• There is no definition of what it means to be a woman and so each woman has the freedom (in the scary existential sense of the word) to create herself.
• Patriarchy is a social position that is holding women back from this, but times, they are a changing
• We need to make ourselves and men realize that we are being for itself

• OK so we ought to be able to do this, but what can I do to actually make it happen?

• Here are four ways to transcend the role:
• Go to work
• She knows about Marx, and the double work day,
• but she still thinks that going to work creates opportunities. It puts her’ in the drivers seat.’

• Become an intellectual
• To be an intellectual is to be active not passive
• do the thinking, not to be thought about
• It makes you take yourself seriously, and treat yourself like a conscious being not an animal being.

• Work towards social change
• Sartre à Marxist revolution
• De Beauvoir à work to create a society where women have the material goods they need to become Selves, to escape their roles.

• Women can refuse to internalize our otherness
• Don’t look at yourselves through patriarchy’s glasses
• This is difficult because:
• We are public as objects, our subjective selves hide inside of us and some times we can’t even find them
• Cat calls: Either hurt us or we separate our selves from our bodies (we hide our subjective selves and only show our bodies, but at the same time we say that our bodies aren’t the real person)
• Fashion beauty complex: focuses our attention on trivial and impossible and functions to alienate us from our minds.