A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, for
that precisely is what the Soviet Revolution promised: women raised
and
trained exactly like men were to work under the same conditions and for the
same wages. Erotic liberty was to be recognized by custom, but the sexual
act was not to be considered a "service" to be paid for; woman was to be
obliged to provide herself with other ways of earning a living; marriage
was to be based on a free agreement that the spouses could break at will;
maternity was to be voluntary, which meant that contraception and abortion
were to be authorized and that, on the other hand, all mothers and their
children were to have exactly the same rights, in or out of marriage;
pregnancy leaves were to be paid for by the State, which would assume
charge of the children, signifying not that they would be taken away from
their parents, but that they would not be abandoned to them.
But is it enough to change laws, institutions, customs, public
opinion, and the whole social context, for men and women to become truly
equal? "Women will always be women," say the sceptics. Other seers prophesy
that in casting off their femininity they will not succeed in changing
themselves into men and they will become monsters. This would be to admit
that the woman of today is a creation of nature; it must be repeated once
more that in human society nothing is natural and that woman, like much
else, is a product elaborated by civilization. The intervention of others
in her destiny is fundamental: if this action took a different direction,
it would produce a quite different result. Woman is determined not by her
hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body
and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others
than herself. The abyss that separates the adolescent boy and girl has been
deliberately opened out between them since earliest childhood; later on,
woman could not be other than what she was made, and that past was bound to
shadow her for life. If we appreciate its influence, we see clearly that
her destiny is not predetermined for all eternity.
We must not believe, certainly, that a change in woman's economic
condition alone is enough to transform her, though this factor has been and
remains the basic factor in her evolution; but until it has brought about
the moral, social, cultural, and other consequences that it promises and
requires, the new woman cannot appear. At this moment they have been
realized nowhere, in Russia no more than in France or the United States;
and this explains why the woman of today is torn between the past and the
future. She appears most often as a "true woman" disguised as a man, and
she feels herself as ill at ease in her flesh as in her masculine garb. She
must shed her old skin and cut her own new clothes. This she could do only
through a social evolution. No single educator could fashion a female human
being today who would be the exact homologue of the male human being; if
she is raised like a boy, the young girl feels she is an oddity and thereby
she is given a new kind of sex specification. Stendhal understood this when
he said: "The forest must be planted all at once." But if we imagine, on
the contrary, a society in which the equality of the sexes would be
concretely realized, this equality would find new expression in each
individual.
If the little girl were brought up from the first with the same
demands and rewards, the same severity and the same freedom, as her
brothers, taking part in the same studies, the same games, promised the
same future, surrounded with women and men who seemed to her undoubted
equals, the meanings of the castration complex and of the Oedipus complex
would be profoundly modified. Assuming on the same basis as the father the
material and moral responsibility of the couple, the mother would enjoy the
same lasting prestige; the child would perceive around her an androgynous
world and not a masculine world. Were she emotionally more attracted to her
father - which is not even sure - her love for him would be tinged with a
will to emulation and not a feeling of powerlessness; she would not be
oriented toward passivity. Authorized to test her powers in work and
sports, competing actively with the boys, she would not find the absence of
the penis - compensated by the promise of a child - enough to give rise to
an inferiority complex; correlatively, the boy would not have a superiority
complex if it were not instilled into him and if he looked up to women with
as much respect as to men. The little girl would not seek sterile
compensation in narcissism and dreaming, she would not take her fate for
granted; she would be interested in what she was doing, she would throw
herself without reserve into undertakings.
I have already pointed out how much easier the transformation of
puberty would be if she looked beyond it, like the boys, toward a free
adult future: menstruation horrifies her only because it is an abrupt
descent into femininity. She would also take her young eroticism in much
more tranquil fashion if she did not feel a frightened disgust for her
destiny as a whole; coherent sexual information would do much to help her
over this crisis. And thanks to coeducational schooling, the august mystery
of Man would have no occasion to enter her mind: it would be eliminated by
everyday familiarity and open rivalry.
Objections raised against this system always imply respect for sexual
taboos; but the effort to inhibit all sex curiosity and pleasure in the
child is quite useless; one succeeds only in creating repressions,
obsessions, neuroses. The excessive sentimentality, homosexual fervors, and
platonic crushes of adolescent girls, with all their train of silliness and
frivolity, are much more injurious than a little childish sex play and a
few definite sex experiences. It would be beneficial above all for the
young girl not to be influenced against taking charge herself of her own
existence, for then she would not seek a demigod in the male - merely a
comrade, a friend, a partner. Eroticism and love would take on the nature
of free transcendence and not that of resignation; she could experience
them as a relation between equals. There is no intention, of course, to
remove by a stroke of the pen all the difficulties that the child has to
overcome in changing into an adult; the most intelligent, the most tolerant
education could not relieve the child of experiencing things for herself;
what could be asked is that obstacles should not be piled gratuitously in
her path. Progress is already shown by the fact that "vicious" little girls
are no longer cauterized with a red hot iron. Psychoanalysis has given
parents some instruction, but the conditions under which, at the present
time, the sexual training and initiation of woman are accomplished are so
deplorable that none of the objections advanced against the idea of a
radical change could be considered valid. It is not a question of
abolishing in woman the contingencies and miseries of the human condition,
but of giving her the means for transcending them.
Woman is the victim of no mysterious fatality; the peculiarities that
identify her as specifically a woman get their importance from the
significance placed upon them. They can be surmounted, in the future, when
they are regarded in new perspectives. Thus, as we have seen, through her
erotic experience woman feels - and often detests - the domination of the
male; but this is no reason to conclude that her ovaries condemn her to
live forever on her knees. Virile aggressiveness seems like a lordly
privilege only within a system that in its entirety conspires to affirm
masculine sovereignty; and woman feels herself profoundly passive in the
sexual act only because she already thinks of herself as such. Many modern
women who lay claim to their dignity as human beings still envisage their
erotic life from the standpoint of a tradition of slavery: since it seems
to them humiliating to lie beneath the man, to be penetrated by him, they
grow tense in frigidity. But if the reality were different, the meaning
expressed symbolically in amorous gestures and postures would be different,
too: a woman who pays and dominates her lover can, for example, take pride
in her superb idleness and consider that she is enslaving, the male who is
actively exerting himself. And here and now there are many sexually well
balanced couples whose notions of victory and defeat are giving place to
the idea of an exchange.
As a matter of fact, man, like woman, is flesh, therefore passive,
the plaything of his hormones and of the species, the restless prey of his
desires. And she, like him, in the midst of the carnal fever, is a
consenting, a voluntary gift, an activity; they live out in their several
fashions the strange ambiguity of existence made body. In those combats
where they think they confront one another, it is really against the self
that each one struggles, projecting into the partner that part of the self
which is repudiated; instead of living out the ambiguities of their
situation, each tries to make the other bear the abjection and tries to
reserve the honor for the self. If, however, both should assume the
ambiguity with a clear sighted modesty, correlative of an authentic pride,
they would see each other as equals and would live out their erotic drama
in amity. The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important
than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another;
it is never the given that confers superiorities: "virtue", as the ancients
called it, is defined at the level of "that which depends on us". In both
sexes is played out the same drama of the flesh and the spirit, of finitude
and transcendence; both are gnawed away by time and laid in wait for by
death, they have the same essential need for one another; and they can gain
from their liberty the same glory. If they were to taste it, they would no
longer be tempted to dispute fallacious privileges, and fraternity between
them could then come into existence.
I shall be told that all this is utopian fancy, because woman cannot
be "made over" unless society has first made her really the equal of man.
Conservatives have never failed in such circumstances to refer to that
vicious circle; history, however, does not revolve. If a caste is kept in a
state of inferiority, no doubt it remains inferior; but liberty can break
the circle. Let the Negroes vote and they become worthy of having the vote:
let woman be given responsibilities and she is able to assume them. The
fact is that oppressors cannot be expected to make a move of gratuitous
generosity; but at one time the revolt of the oppressed, at another time
even the very evolution of the privileged caste itself, creates new
situations; thus men have been led, in their own interest, to give partial
emancipation to women: it remains only for women to continue their ascent,
and the successes they are obtaining are an encouragement for them to do
so. It seems almost certain that sooner or later they will arrive at
complete economic and social equality, which will bring about an inner
metamorphosis.
However this may be, there will be some to object that if such a
world is possible it is not desirable. When woman is "the same" as her
male, life will lose its salt and spice. This argument, also, has lost its
novelty: those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in
tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having
so much as a smile for the young future. It is quite true that doing away
with the slave trade, meant death to the great plantations, magnificent
with azaleas and camellias, it meant ruin to the whole refined Southern
civilization. The attics of time have received its rare old laces along
with the clear pure voices of the Sistine castrati, and there is a certain
"feminine charm" that is also on the way to the same dusty repository. I
agree that he would be a barbarian indeed who failed to appreciate
exquisite flowers, rare lace, the crystal clear voice of the eunuch, and
feminine charm.
When the "charming woman" shows herself in all her splendor, she is a
much more exalting object than the "idiotic paintings, overdoors, scenery,
showman's garish signs, popular chromos", that excited Rimbaud; adorned
with the most modern artifices, beautified according to the newest
techniques, she comes down from the remoteness of the ages, from Thebes,
from Crete, from Chichén Itz nd she is also s a thought, and words
issue from her breasts. Men stretch forth avid hands toward the marvel, but
when they grasp it it is gone; the wife, the mistress, speak like everybody
else through their mouths: their words are worth just what they are worth;
their breasts also. Does such a fugitive miracle - and one so rare -
justify us in perpetuating a situation that is baneful for both sexes? One
can appreciate the beauty of flowers, the charm of women, and appreciate
them at their true values; if these treasures cost blood or misery, they
must be sacrificed.
But in truth this sacrifice seems to men a peculiarly heavy one; few
of them really wish in their hearts for woman to succeed in making it;
those among them who hold woman in contempt see in the sacrifice nothing
for them to gain, those who cherish her see too much that they would lose.
And it is true that the evolution now in progress threatens more than
feminine charm alone: in beginning to exist for herself, woman will
relinquish the function as double and mediator to which she owes her
privileged place in the masculine universe; to man, caught between the
silence of nature and the demanding presence of other free beings, a
creature who is at once his like and a passive thing seems a great
treasure. The guise in which he conceives his companion may be mythical,
but the experiences for which she is the source or the pretext are none the
less real: there are hardly any more precious, more intimate, more ardent.
There is no denying that feminine dependence, inferiority, woe, give women
their special character; assuredly woman's autonomy, if it spares men many
troubles, will also deny them many conveniences; assuredly there are
certain forms of the sexual adventure which will be lost in the world of
tomorrow. But this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry, dream, will
be banished from it.
Let us not forget that our lack of imagination always depopulates the
future; for us it is only an abstraction; each of us secretly deplores the
absence there of the one who was himself. But the humanity of tomorrow will
be living in its flesh and in its conscious liberty; that time will be its
present and it will in turn prefer it. New relations of flesh and sentiment
of which we have no conception will arise between the sexes; already,
indeed, there have appeared between men and women friendships, rivalries,
complicities, comradeships - chaste or sensual - which past centuries could
not have conceived. To mention one point, nothing could seem to me more
debatable than the opinion that dooms the new world to uniformity and hence
to boredom. I fail to see that this present world is free from boredom or
that liberty ever creates uniformity.
To begin with, there will always be certain differences between man
and woman; her eroticism, and therefore her sexual world, have a special
form of their own and therefore cannot fail to engender a sensuality, a
sensitivity, of a special nature. This means that her relations to her own
body, to that of the male, to the child, will never be identical with those
the male bears to his own body, to that of the female, and to the child;
those who make much of "equality in difference" could not with good grace
refuse to grant me the possible existence of differences in equality. Then
again, it is institutions that create uniformity. Young and pretty, the
slaves of the harem are always the same in the sultan's embrace;
Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the
human female with a soul; if society restores her sovereign individuality
to woman, it will not thereby destroy the power of love's embrace to move
the heart.
It is nonsense to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would
become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters; the
contradictions that put the flesh in opposition to the spirit, the instant
to time, the swoon of immanence to the challenge of transcendence, the
absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of forgetting, will never be
resolved; in sexuality will always be materialized the tension, the
anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence. To
emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to
man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and
she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognizing
each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The
reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles - desire,
possession, love, dream, adventure - worked by the division of human beings
into two separate categories; and the words that move us - giving,
conquering, uniting - will not lose their meaning. On the contrary when we
abolish the slavery of half of humanity, then the "division" of humanity
will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its
true form. "The direct, natural, necessary relation of human creatures is
the relation of man to woman,'' Marx has said. "The nature of this
relation determines to what point man himself is to be considered as a
generic being, as mankind; the relation of man to woman is the most natural
relation of human being to human being. By it is shown, therefore, to what
point the natural behavior of man has become human or to what point the
human being has become his natural being, to what point his human nature
has become his nature."
The case could not be better stated. It is for man to establish the reign
of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To the supreme victory,
it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural
differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.