"One is not born a woman; one becomes a woman."
This is the line from Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex that I read first, in Judith Butler's essays on gender performativity. It is also the line that introduced me to the idea of gender as a performance, of gender as a social constraint rather than a biological one, and today, I want to talk about the book from which this line was quoted.
There are a few parts of this book that I love most, and I'll quote them here.
First, there is the discussion on women's ability to face the world that I think explains why women are so often the receiving party of different types of anxieties regarding their abilities and looks. As de Beauvoir says, "To do great things, the woman today must forget herself; but to forget oneself one must first be solidly sure that one has found oneself." As Jefferson said: "let us live before asking us to justify existence."
The reason why women today are still so easily the victim of narratives pushed forward by media portrayals of body and image is because women have yet to be assured of themselves. While men need only to live up to the expectations already placed upon them, women must create the expectations to even begin to become "achieved." What de Beauvoir has put into words is exactly how I feel about the reason why women, despite all of the movements and revolutions that have happened since the 1970s, when the book was published, continue to remain a political minority and in subjugation to men. We have still yet to be allowed, or rather, expected, to have ourselves, to know our identity. So instead of spending our time looking for the greater picture, we spend our time trying to first find ourselves and establish our gender identity. Unlike men, we are not born with a guaranteed privilege.
The Second Sex also touches on sex education, and that is something I too have a great deal to say about. Regarding the system that encourages open discussion about sex and sexuality, de Beauvoir says this: "Objections to the system always imply respect for sexual taboos." She is right: for countries where the discussion of puberty is taboo, where talking about sex and sexual preference is taboo, upholding the system of sex education in these systems is, at its core, respecting the values that these taboos uphold.
But for both men and women, upholding systems that drape sex in a mystical veil does more harm than good. For young boys, sex is taught only through websites that perpetuate a toxic masculinity that includes equating masculinity with dominance, size, and roughness and a deep-seated misogyny where women are no more than objects of lust (considering the UK's porn laws outlaw the portrayal of things such as female ejaculation in porn, women's pleasure is very rarely allowed to be expressed in its full form in porn). What will this accomplish beyond telling men that to be a "man," they must be dominating, must take "no" as coyness and "please" as flirtatious, must treat women in the same manner that porn actresses are treated? On the other hand, what of the boys who learn not of sexuality and sex? They, instead, venture into a world where they know nothing of the correct ways to use birth control, know nothing of how to keep themselves healthy and sanitary. What of the boys who know not that being homosexual is not an illness, not a freakish thing to gawk at, when gay porn is nearly always considered a specific type of kinkish porn?
For young woman, the lack of comprehensive sex education can result in even more drastic results. For the young woman who knows not of birth contraception, what is to prevent them from getting HIV, UTIs, or any other number of STIs that they not only have no education about but also know not how to protect themselves from? Other young woman who learn about this natural process of life through porn will see themselves reflected in the "Teenage Step-Daughter" or the "Student," all of whom are seen through the judgmental eyes of the male sex. They see themselves being dominated, being submissive and rough-housed, and even when they are treated nicely, their pleasure is very rarely the end goal of porn. The end goal, when the porn video ends, is dependent on when the male has an orgasm, and whether or not the woman is satisfied is left unknown to the viewer.
The Second Sex makes no argument in terms of porn, but it is not hard to see de Beauvoir as a pro-porn feminist, solely because porn is too often the only source of sexual information for younger generations, especially in countries that are more conservative.
Gender equality, it seems, can simply be expressed, as when a woman no longer "experience[s] her femininity as a mutilation."
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