So what is this little italicized word that insists on flaunting itself all over Ms. De Beauvior's work? It's questions like this that keep me stuck on her essay for a moment. When Beauvoir speaks of "The Other" in terms of women and our status in society, she is basically saying that men exist as the absolute, women as their reflection. "Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him. She is not regarded as an autonomous human being". (Beavoir, xxii)
In other words, if human beings were a sentence, men would be the subject and women the object. The object cannot exist without the subject if it is going to make a complete sentence.
How did this duality manifest in our society? Here's a few quotes to refresh our memories.
" The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities...we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness" - Aristotle
" Every woman student who goes into medicine or law robs us of a job" - Male Med Student
"Went to her house to get her out of the pad
Dumb hoe says something stupid that made me mad
She said somethin' that I couldn't believe
So I grabbed the stupid bitch by her nappy ass weave" Eazy - E
Generally things are not as bad as they have been in the past. I think we can all agree on that. What is interesting to me is how women in modern, western societies have taken on this concept of The Other and embedded it into our self esteem. Somewhere in our DNA lies a subscription to the notion that we are objects needing a subject to make a complete sentence of our lives. Completely unaware that this specific context in which to view ourselves came from millenniums of oppression. We do it to ourselves and society reflects this back to us. Messages from the media, movies, and our own DNA have created this automatic reflex of defining ourselves in relativity to a man.
Consider the latest episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta. I understand that most reality TV shows are usually fake or relying on some narrative for the cast to follow. But this TV franchise is the closest I can get to a female peatrie dish of upper class American females. I understand why my brother says that it "gives him nightmares". But I can't get enough of it.
In this episode we see two examples of how our society and women themselves subscribe to the philosophy that if they don't have a man, then there is something wrong with them.
Exhibit A. Kim's Found the One. - If your not familiar with Kim, she's the only white girl on this show that chronicles the real lives of seven women living in Atlanta, Georgia. Blonde, voluptuous and not afraid to party, she has found herself domesticated this season after having a baby with the love of her life. Her father mentions how Kim and her man balance each other out. Which was pretty cool. But then he says, " Only took ya thirty three years. Better late than never." What? Thirty three!
Of course, after hearing him say this, I fretted for a moment. It's the automatic reaction of a single woman in her late thirties. Thoughts such as, " I'll never find a man", " I'm too old to find a mate, who will ever be attracted to me?" struck through my head like the beak of the bird in a cuckoo clock. It's automatic. I can't help it. But then come the other thoughts.
If you were to poll all of the other women in the show on their marital status the results would be as follows:
- Unmarried Glorified Prostitute.
- Divorced.
- Unmarried Single Mom, going through a divorce.
- Married, but having problems.
- ...and then there's the lucky one. Phaedra. She's a lawyer who is happily married to a, very hot younger, ex-con, husband. She's my hero.
All of these women are Kim's age or older and only two of them are married. So what reality is Kim's dad holding her too? Compared to the rest of her cast mates, Kim found the love of her life at a young age! We don't live in the generations where the majority of couples met and married in their twenties. We're subjects now! We've got other shit to deal with. ( Career, paying rent, raising children on our own etc., etc. etc.) Finding a man takes longer than it did when we were living under male hegemony, rapaciously searching for a husband by age twenty five so we did not end up and old maid at thirty. Society needs to catch up.
And by society I mean my own brain.
I need to stop thinking of myself as relative to men too. My world does not become any better or more complete when I find my man. It just changes. So there's no need for me, or for Kim's dad to fret. Kim found her man at the right time for her. And I for one am very happy for her.
Diane Sawyer did not marry until she was forty. Bethenny Frankel did not marry until she was thirty nine. Both women spent their lives working on building careers that made them millionare's. And they still found time to meet amazing men and fall in love. Were they "less than" before they met their mates? If this is what happens when you live your life without a husband than why are women not prescribing to THIS ideal?
Exhibit B - Marlow's fight with Sheree.
Here's a situation where Marlow (the glorified prostitute) and Sheree ( snobby divorcee with a great ass) get in a fight. Their fight is about Marlow not being invited to Sheree's friend's dinner party. What it turns into is jealousy over who has more money and how many material possessions are paid for in cash. Once Marlow becomes frustrated at the conversation, she turns to Sheree and says, " Anyway, that's why you don't have a man. Go hang with those faggots with your ugly stupid ass" ( I swear I'm not making this shit up). Sheree goes berserk and they end up having a heated conversation complete with comments regarding Aston Martin's, Marlow's eighty year old white sugar daddy, and a flurry of hand gestures and finger waves.
My point here is that Marlow used the one phrase that goes to the core of every single women's insecurities. Not being pretty enough, or funny enough, slutty enough, or chaste enough to keep a man. And even though this is sensitive ground for us, as seen by the immediate escalation of the argument, it comes from a reality that is simply not real. We all know that a woman is just as beautiful, confident and attractive whether or not they have a man on their arm. So why is this such a sensitive topic for us? It's a topic based on antiquated lies, promoted by fairy tales not reality.
Beavoir claims that , " no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over and against itself." ( Beavoir xxi) Today, men don't do this to us as much as we do it to each other. Ways that females have ingrained their former male oppression can be seen on the school yard. Little girls excluding their fellow classmates because they are not pretty or cool enough. Or at adult parties, where one woman is single and all the others are married? I can attest to feeling like a foreigner in situations like these. In fact, as a single woman in her late thirties, I have been The Other in relation to married women far more than with men.
So whether you are a momma, a stewardess, a CEO or a student, what's important is to just be aware of these very tenuous patriarchal lies. They're only as strong as we let them be. I don't mind being objectified by EAZY- E, so long as I recognize and am aware of where his ideologies come from so I don't embed them into my own self esteem. ( yes I did just use "ideologies" and "EAZY - E" in one sentence).
I don't judge those who are attached to this old stuff because I am to. It's primordial. We gotta dig deep to uncover this stuff. But that doesn't mean we can't observe these messages from within us and from the media, parcel out which one's are true and which one's are lies, and then have a laugh at the lies so we may discard them and create new realities from truth. In fact, it's crucial that we do this. If for no other reason than I would die if I heard my niece say this to her friend:
" That's why you don't have a man!". I'd be mortified.
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