In philosopher and ethicist Eleanor Gordon-Smith’s advice column on The Guardian, one reader powerfully lamented: “There are two wolves inside me. One is a feminist. The other wants to be thin and beautiful. I am so tired of being caught between them” (Gordon-Smith 2021).
This sentiment is not uncommon to women who subscribe to mainstream standards of beauty and social attractiveness and find them deeply problematic. I am one of them (my curated profile pictures say it all). I delight in keeping up with appearances that are pleasing to others. I indulge in the praise of my perfectly lined eye and rouged lips. I enjoy dressing up and I spend a lot of time primping in front of the mirror. I squander my hard-earned money on beautiful, overpriced, and often useless things. Naturally, the pleasure I get from my beauty and self-care habits puzzles me. Why do I put myself on display like a mannequin, when the point of feminism is to smash the manicured store front? Why do I decorate myself and lap up all the likes my photo gets, when I should be helping undermine the patriarchal industry that treats women like objects instead? Am I less of a feminist for taking pleasure in what many regard as frivolous and superficial, and for perpetuating the standards that gnaw at the self-confidence of women like me everywhere?
Put differently: why do I submit, and why do I like it?
Reading Manon Garcia’s We Are Not Born Submissive (2021b) has been helpful for philosophical and personal reflection on this matter. Recently translated from French, Garcia’s exciting book—a tribute and a strong reminder to re-read the great Simone de Beauvoir—engages the topic of women’s submission through philosophy. Heeding Beauvoir’s observations about women’s seeming complicity to their own oppression, Garcia explains that our submission to the patriarchy can be framed as rational and pleasurable to women. To submit in this context means to acquiesce, to neither resist nor fight the patriarchal norms, standards, and interests that are antagonistic or detrimental to one’s own interests in virtue of one’s subordinated position.
But this submission is not passive or disengaged; when women consent to the insidious demands and designs of the modern patriarchy—say, when they find themselves desiring and adopting socially endorsed standards of beauty and body size, even at the expense of their physical health or the risk of being objectified by men—they exhibit agency and engage in a way of life that promotes their oppression. But painting women as morally blameworthy for their submission, and framing their compliance as a free and active choice, fails to capture the character of the oppressive gender dynamics at work. Garcia maintains that women’s habits of submission exhibit the dearth of good choices and opportunities for the self-flourishing of women in contemporary patriarchal societies. As Clare Chambers rightly points out:
We can only act within the options that are available to, and cast as appropriate for, us. And we want to act in ways that situate us happily within a social context, as deserving of social approval. Moreover, it is rational for us to make choices that are compatible with the options open to us and the expectations placed on us, for such choices enable us to succeed within our context. So highlighting the constraints in which we all choose does not entail that we are poor choosers. (Chambers 2013, 575)
When mothers tell their daughters to tolerate their husband’s infidelity, or to give up their own ambitions for the sake of their children, or to watch their figure, they endorse views that are detrimental to their daughters’ personal interests. But they may also sincerely believe that these are the best choices their daughters have, since they deter other harms and cruelties tendered by a sexist society that pities the fate of single or childless or heavyset women. From this perspective, the social existence of women in modern patriarchal societies is conditioned by limited and substandard options for pursuing happiness or self-fulfilment. Their choices today remain determined by the superiority of men’s interests and constrained by their subordinated position. As Garcia puts it in her essay on submission: “women do not actively choose submission, but they consent to the submission that is prescribed to them by social norms, even though this submission can seriously harm them” (Garcia 2021a).
Interestingly, Garcia also points out that submission to the patriarchy is not just reasonable for women. It can also be a source of pleasure and power for them. In the pioneering book The Second Sex, first published as Le Deuxième Sexe in 1949, Beauvoir argues that a woman can derive “satisfaction from her role as the Other” (Beauvoir 2010, 10), and that (particularly upper class and bourgeois) women can act as “willing accomplices to their masters because they stand to profit from the benefits they are guaranteed” (Beauvoir 2010, 752). But where might this pleasure from submission come from? Not from women’s essential nature, of course. Garcia interprets Beauvoir as arguing that the patriarchy is responsible for imposing a social meaning on women’s bodies, one that is fundamentally based on (sexual) objectification. Defined in various ways as an object of male desire, love, use, and ownership, the social body of a woman exists prior to her actual existence, representing and inscribing the norms and practices that define what a woman is in the world. Simply put, the journey from girlhood to womanhood is a narrative of women relating to their bodies as objects, a process that represents “the transformation of the oppressed into an other that is irreducibly different from the self” (Garcia 2021b, 85).
Women are thus alienated from themselves because they are socially conditioned to view themselves as sexual objects, a mere reflection of what Laura Mulvey calls the male gaze, instead of knowing and understanding themselves fundamentally as free and equal subjects (as men do). Women thus come to desire to be desired and to adopt patriarchal norms and practices before they even get the chance to experience their own bodies as fully their own; as Beauvoir famously puts it, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes [a] woman” (Beauvoir 2010, 293). Worse, living and moving in a patriarchal society constantly reinforces this alienated existence for women, rewarding them when they keep relating to their bodies as objects and punishing them when they refuse. The inescapability and power of the patriarchal gaze can explain how submission can remain a source of gratification and ironic self-esteem for women. But we must also acknowledge that this gaze is not monolithic and unchanging; the patriarchy shifts and bends its norms and expectations of women in view of its multifarious intersections with the realities of race, class, and history. I was surprised and horrified to discover my own gullibility in this regard. Growing up in the Philippines where milkiness is prized, I scrubbed my morena skin raw every single day to appear more like a Chinese mestiza; when I moved to Australia in my mid-twenties, I bizarrely began oiling my skin for the perfect dark golden tan, the colonial recipe for escape and exoticism. Indeed, our patriarchy-laced desires can take on various forms. While pernicious, some of them can be strange and unexpectedly funny (for more on the Global Filipina Body, see Velasco 2020).
Garcia’s Beauvoirian analysis of submission helps make sense of the guilt that feminists and socially progressive women feel for enjoying the pleasure they derive from submitting, that is, from enjoying, aiming, and vying for male attention. It certainly explains why, even when you know that you are a healthy and empowered feminist, and that you should love your own body whatever shape or size it is, you still find yourself buckling by instinct at the sight of a new wrinkle forming on your forehead or the realization that your favorite skirt from five years ago does not fit you anymore. It also rationalizes how submission to the patriarchy could serve as a source of power over men and others. For example, the more beautiful a woman is, the more valuable a sexual object she is, and thus the more social advantages she has in patriarchal societies. But pandering to the male gaze, as many feminists have argued at length, comes at a big cost.
It is the awareness of this big cost that should accompany reflections about the ambivalence and friction in our lived experiences of submission as women. It is a conversation we have to have with ourselves and other women who, without a doubt, will go on to live under conditions of alienation. The work is never over.
References
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2010. The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Chambers, Clare. 2013. Feminism. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears. Oxford University Press.
Garcia, Manon. 2021a. “It’s Time to Talk about Women’s Submission.” Blog of the American Philosophical Association (APA), Apr 28. https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/04/28/submission-is-womens-destiny-but-we-can-change-that/
Garcia, Manon. 2021b. We Are Not Born Submissive. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Gordon-Smith, Eleanor. 2021. “There are two wolves inside me. One is a feminist. The other wants to be thin and beautiful. Leading Questions.” The Guardian, May 26. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/may/27/there-are-two-wolves-inside-me-one-is-a-feminist-the-other-wants-to-be-thin-and-beautiful
Velasco, Gina. 2020. Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora. University of Illinois Press.
