Women were burned as witches simply because they were beautiful.
That’s Simone de Beauvoir - an icon of feminism
and one of the great philosophers of the 20th Century -
talking about how women have been punished for their sexuality,
kept in line and objectified.
So what would de Beauvoir have thought of the Me Too movement?
Her book The Second Sex was a founding text of modern feminism.
It caused a scandal when it came out in France in 1949.
In it, de Beauvoir scorned the idea that inequality and abuse
were women’s fault.
She insisted that what was then called “the woman problem”
was “always the problem of man”.
The Second Sex was published only four years
after French women got the vote.
President de Gaulle had just launched a campaign to repopulate
the war-ravaged republic,
telling women to stay at home and make babies pour la France!
De Beauvoir argued that this was
exactly the cause of women’s disadvantage -
as mothers, they did the bulk of parenting and domestic labour.
When they returned to work it would be part time and poorly paid
and they’d still have to do all the housework.
The Second World War had transformed the balance of power between nations.
But not between sexes.
De Beauvoir delved into history, the economy, and - of course - sex,
to try to find out why everything was so skewed.
“Woman is always judged, she is always the Object,” said de Beauvoir.
She lives under men’s sexual surveillance.
This male-centred culture holds, she said,
that “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself,
but in relation to himself”. And for himself.
The persecution of witches was part of this -
women being burned or buried or drowned for not conforming,
for being too alluring or not attractive enough,
and for being, one way or another, too sexually threatening.
So, what would de Beauvoir have made of Me Too?
Ignited by multiple allegations across the film industry,
including most notoriously,
those surrounding movie mogul Harvey Weinstein,
women said j’accuse, as they exposed the predatory world of Hollywood.
They invoked a slogan coined in 2006 by Tarana Burke,
an African-American civil rights activist.
For her, it had been a way of organising solidarity
against sexual abuse.
Within 24 hours of the first tweet on the 15th of October 2017,
an estimated five million people used #MeToo to share their experiences.
De Beauvoir would have seen Me Too as a leap forward,
and she would have been disappointed that after all this time
we still have so far to go.
De Beauvoir said...
Victories - like getting the vote - can come to seem like defeats
if they don’t truly push things on.
Take rape. A recent survey in the UK found that a third of people
still think that rape is only rape if it’s violent, blood and bruises.
And it’s not rape if a woman flirts on a date.
Women are still walking over the proverbial flaming coals to prove
that they weren’t somehow asking for it.
De Beauvoir would see Me Too as just the catalyst.
She would say men can take charge of their own change.
“Customs cannot be deduced from biology,” she wrote.
This is no longer the “woman’s problem”, it’s everyone’s problem.
Yet for all its hope, #MeToo showed
that women are still routinely treated as sexual objects.
Equality seems far away.
The World Economic Forum estimates that women won’t get
workplace equality for at least 200 years. If ever.
De Beauvoir would ask, what about justice?
For me too, you too.
Will women still be blazing for justice when we’re all dead?
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