The Acceptance of Other
By: Ozlem Demirel
Tags: The Second Sex, Simone De Beauvoir, Feminism, Womens Rights, Gender

The Second Sex is, Simone De Beauvoir’s scientific explanation of the pressures of women has encountered and established the milestones of modern feminism, is about the woman who represents the ‘other gender’ due to it is always defined by men. The essential point of this novel is the idea, that the woman is kept in the ‘other’ position in terms of being secondary to man. To understand this notion, it is necessary to analyse how the woman was established as the ‘other’ of the man and for what reasons it was deficient and underrepresented through this configuration. In this context, the goal of this paper is to focus on how the woman is the ‘other’ and what are the underlying reasons for accepting otherness, based on The Second Sex of Beauvoir. The starting point in Beauvoir’s analysis of how women were established as the ‘other’ of men is the anti-essentialist idea of existentialism. In other words, she thinks that the first thing is existence, not-self. To say that existence precedes essence is to say that human exists first and then becoming whoever he or she is. In this sense, the human is not a well-organized and structured mechanism according to a plan, and human personality is not made according to an example drawn before and for a specific purpose; it exists only without a predetermined being.

First, there is human, this or that comes later. Accordingly, a human essence given in The Second Sex cannot be mentioned. This view will set the ground for the question of whether women’s nature is biologically determined or socially constructed, based on women. The usual response to this question suggests that ‘’sex as biological and gender is cultural’’ (Oakley 4) Women are, as if placed in certain roles prepared for them, either naturally or biologically. In fact, such roles have no natural relationship with women. ‘’The oppression of women had its roots in male biology and psychology.’’ (Vincent 188) For this reason, the problem of women cannot be solved with a pure psychoanalyst perspective, or with biology or an economic determinist understanding, as assumed by a biology, psychology or materialist philosophy; because all of these movements or understandings move from a given human essence and pinch women into a certain frame. Besides, the human understandings offered by these approaches are always based on the assumption that there is a core that precedes existence. This condemns women to fate and puts social or economic institutions, human biological or psychological structure as insurmountable obstacles to their emancipation. For instance, in biological and historical studies, it is stated that the woman experiences certain situations such as pregnancy, breastfeeding and that this creates a difference in the structure of the woman. However, it is impossible to determine the freedom of existence by the body. These physiological formations do not require the women to be lower than the man, because the data of biology and history are not the facts detected by a neutral observer, they are data that are handled and interpreted from a particular perspective. However, all this is not enough to analyse how women are ‘other’, not just different and separate from men, but how they became inferior to them.

While trying to be understood or defined from a certain point of view, the woman becomes the object of a certain theory, it is marginalized and attributed to her. Beauvoir thinks that this is a situation or feature attributed to women by men who refuse to be ‘other’ and who see themselves as a principle or model: Male defines a woman as other and unusual, not own and can exist only in the context of his relationship with a man.

French writer, existentialist philosopher, political activist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir during the landmark Bobigny abortion trial in France in 1972. Artault Erwan — Sygma / Getty Images

Women became the representative of the ‘other’ who can confirm the identity of the man as a rational thinking entity. It can be said that the man built the woman as the other to establish himself as the subject. ‘’She is determined and differentiated concerning man, while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.’’ (Beauvoir 26) The woman is ‘’everything’’ (197) in the non-essential mode of existence only. ‘’She is an idol, a servant, source of life, power of darkness; she is the elementary silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip, and lies; she is the medicine woman and witch; she is man’s prey; she is his downfall, she is everything he is not and wants to have, his negation and his raion d’être.’’ (197) In this sense, the male point of view defining both women and men defined woman as ‘’second’’ (517) and their perceptions about themselves and ‘’the other’’ (301) In this case, women were defined as second class (or sex) and taught them to accept this view of men with them.

According to Beauvoir, it is clear that one is ‘’woman’’ (17) and she argues that this is always a cultural compulsion. What imposes this obligation is not ‘sex’ but ‘gender’. At this point, it is necessary to give the meaning relationship between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’: While sex describes biological male-female separation; gender is social expectations about behaviour that seem to be appropriate for each sex member. The concept refers not to the physical attributes that lead men and women to be different from each other, but to the socially constructed features about masculinity and femininity. That is, it refers to the socially unequal division between masculinity and femininity.

In this respect, what Beauvoir means to say with the words that ‘’One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.’’ (18), that the category of women is a series of meanings that are undertaken or attempted within the cultural field, that nobody is born with gender, and that gender is always acquired. She thinks that gender is an analytical quality of human, not a person who is not gendered, that gender validates human as a compulsory quality. However, it should be considered that, according to Beauvoir, sex does not cause gender and it should not be thought that gender reflects or expresses sex. On the contrary, sex is constantly factual, and gender is acquired; sex cannot be changed -at least Beauvoir thought so- but gender is the variable cultural construction of sex, the possibilities for countless and clear cultural meanings that a body with sex is instrumental in. Since gender is something that a person does not become a transformation, the conclusion is that gender itself is a kind of a process or an activity. In this context, the design of masculinity will be an expression of the historical thought, the expression of the determination that femininity is a social, cultural, and historical situation, ‘’ One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.’’ (18), will be an expression of the contradictory situation of the woman who has never become a subject in her relations with the man and has never become a subject in her relations with the man and has been given an object role.

Beauvoir makes estimates that the woman’s identity and fundamental alienation from the other partly originate from her own body -especially the woman’s production capacity- and partly from the prehistoric division of labour, which is determined by the child she carries and feeds: it finds the woman’s body inherited from alienation, and it takes so much energy for a woman to experience physical conditions such as pregnancy, a birth that binds herself to her own body and immanence, which collapses their potential to deal with creative activities. ‘’Male reproductive consciousness is a consciousness of discontinuity… [because] the alienation of his seed separates him from natural genetic continuity’’ (Donovan 241) This situation, which Beauvoir explained with the woman’s biological maternity duty, was responsible for the woman’s motherhood duty, kept inside at home, and made it the guardian of the inner space and limited it to the private space. Thus, the woman’s life is one-dimensional compared to the man’s multi-dimensional life. In other words, the man went out and realized himself as a ‘Homo Faber’ and attempted to dominate the world. While the woman is reproducing life with a constantly repeating activity inside: man has always created new things outside and shaped the world for himself. In this case, for Beauvoir, male domination or domination of women is a result of being the subject in action, rather than the physical power he has. At this point, the advantage of a man that makes him feel from childhood is that human engagement in no way contradicts his fate as a man. In return, the woman is asked to turn herself into an object and a victim so that she can perform her femininity. This means that the woman leaves her efforts to be the dominant subject aside. Women should not accept this situation because, according to Beauvoir, this secondary role that is imposed on women is not one that destiny imposes. But in the name of a so-called ‘creation of women’, for thousands of years, women, half of humanity, have been held in a secondary position.

It is a strange experience for an individual recognizing himself as subject, autonomy, and transcendence, as an absolute, to discover inferiority -as a given essence- in his self: it is a strange experience for one who posits himself for himself as One to be revealed to himself as alterity. That is what happens to the little girl when, learning about the world, she grasps herself as a woman in it. The sphere she belongs to is closed everywhere, limited, dominated by the male universe’’ (359)

Simone de Beauvoir in her studio, rue Schoelcher 12 bis, Montparnasse, Paris, March 1986.

And to remain the other is to be the negative of the man, and therefore to be passive rather than active; because it is always wanted to be turned into an object and frozen, and to be closed to immanence, as its transcendence will be constantly overcome by an essential and imperious consciousness outside of itself. The tragedy of women is the conflict between the fundamental right of every subject who always reveals herself as an ‘’essential’’ (26) being and the demands of a situation that considers it a ‘’inessential’’ (26) being. Beauvoir reveals the pressure it brings with this future, which seems to be an obvious truth. The pressure on women is not like race and class pressure. It is not an incidentally reversible phenomenon. For this reason, women’s freedom is not independent of ‘oppression’ and ‘exclusion’. Considering that freedom is socially conditional, Beauvoir emphasizes that freedom is impossible in oppressed situations. In this sense, ontological freedom is not enough by itself because freedoms are interdependent. According to Beauvoir, who emphasizes the practical dimension of freedom beyond the ontological dimension, if one’s freedom is related to the freedom of another and dependent on their freedom, it is also open to the intervention and attack of the other. The existence of oppression is that liberties are in a mutual dependency relationship. The pressure is therefore bad and the life of the oppressed is reduced only to maintaining life. Life in this situation is just ‘not to die’ and the existence of such a person is indistinguishable from that of a plant.

Beauvoir made some concrete demands, which were mandatory for the woman to be liberated and to prove oneself again. The most important of these is, despite all the risks, dangers and uncertainties it may involve, it is necessary to allow it to surpass itself through its own free choice. Therefore, although it is said that the woman will achieve freedom only by giving up her personal rights, this does not matter much for the woman when compared with what she gives up. The woman, in other words, wants to conquer a new world by giving up the world, and as long as the world she is in remains men, the woman can only overcome her current situation by comparing herself to men. The world of thought of the woman who is currently working, producing, writing is man’s or not separate from man’s world. Although it is not yet known what happens when a woman is fully liberated, how much the woman’s world of thought differs from that of a man, how important these separations will be, according to Beauvoir, it is necessary to make extremely intriguing attempts to predict them now. On the day when gender discrimination disappears and the value of man gets from free production, the woman will be able to count that of humanity with her own story, problems, doubts, and hopes. Only then will she be able to uncover not only herself but all reality in her works and what she did.

As soon as the woman begins to exist for herself, she will continue to exist for the man: The two sexes will both accept each other as subjects and remain ‘other’ for the entity opposite them. Although the reciprocity in their relationship will not destroy the consequences of the division of human beings into two separate categories, the slavery of half of humanity will disappear, and only then will the true meaning of the so-called beings.