Beauvoir on the allure of self-objectification
pp. 117-129
in: Charlotte Witt (ed), Feminist metaphysics, Berlin, Springer, 2011Abstract
In the past 20 years feminist philosophy has come to fetishize two metaphysics of gender: (1) gender reificationism, on which what it is to be a man or a woman is taken to be definable with precision, and (2) gender eliminativism, on which the notions of "man" and "woman" are understood as thoroughly political concepts. These two positions, which are not necessarily incompatible, both fail to take seriously the phenomenology of being a woman; and their popularity goes hand in hand with the increasing irrelevance of feminist philosophy in women's lives. We find an antidote to the current state of affairs in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Beauvoir's metaphysic of sex difference helps us to make sense of the experience of contemporary young women whose investment in their own professional success as "alpha girls" seems decidedly at odds with their apparently retrogressive roles in the current "hook-up culture." The explanatory power of Beauvoir's model makes attractive her insistence on the crucial grounding role that everyday experience must play in metaphysical reflection. It also suggests that to be a human being is, and always will be, to be tempted to objectify oneself.