Review of Manon Garcia’s book “We Are Not Born Submissive” – Culture

The feminist discourse alienates many women because they do not find themselves in it. In other words: good parts of feminist literature are not prepared for the case that women actually love one or even several men. The French philosopher Manon Garcia, a professor at Yale, wants to be realistic and does not believe that this contradiction will resolve so quickly. So she tries to take into account in her thinking that there are now quite a few freedoms in the West, but women also subordinate themselves further: the traditional standards of attractiveness, for example, or the male requirements for a relationship or the demands of a family.

In her new book, Garcia wants to bring together two contradicting attitudes: the rebellion against patriarchal structures and the desire for submission. Submission, Garcia said, has been a profoundly immoral affair throughout the history of philosophy, from a male dominance perspective, and broad sections of feminism shamefully ignore it.

But what if the submission is intentional? Even the question sounds heretical, but it was Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous book “The Other Sex” in 1949. The title of the German edition of Garcia’s book – “We are not born submissive” – ​​is not translated entirely correctly. In the original it says: We are not born subject. The lover in Beauvoir’s “The Other Sex” only sacrifices herself because the myth of love makes her situation bearable. Manon Garcia fully understands that. But for her this does not mean that she is subjugated, but that she submits. It is not passive.

Garcia makes the rare attempt to actually think feminism for all women

Garcia believes that women are involved in maintaining the patriarchal structure of society. You don’t always have to follow it in its interpretations, least of all in its conclusions. But she makes the rare attempt to actually think feminism for all women.

Manon Garcia is a specialist in Simone de Beauvoir and she not only insists that “The Opposite Sex” is still the standard work of feminist theory and – apart from a few outdated biological details in the first part – not at all outdated; she also wants to go back to one of the original focal points of the gender equality discussion: evaluation. In other words: Garcia does not demonize a life plan. She just wants to understand and re-classify certain life plans – and create an awareness of how women themselves contribute to their social subordination. One could say: Most women first have to be clear about what kind of society they are actually creating – and what they do not want to do without.

Garcia can do little with the idea of ​​the fluidity of the sexes. A woman is a woman to Garcia. Inferring gender fluidity from Beauvoir’s books is a misunderstanding. The most famous sentence from “The opposite sex” is often quoted in isolation: You are not born as a woman, you are made into a woman. It simply means, according to Garcia, that there is no individual outside of a social situation. Everything is a social construction and thus, if the worst comes to the worst, it can be replaced by another construction designed by society.

“We are not born submissive” is largely a kind of commented reading of “The Other Sex” from the special point of view of submission, with small excursions into the present. There are, for example, economic analyzes that ask why submission can be felt with pleasure, but is still not good for the subject. Garcia works out an essential difference: not one group dominates another group here, the industrialists the workers, for example, the hierarchy is rather also established in individual relationships. And this submission is sometimes even useful.

So what is submission to them? For Garcia’s chief witness, Rousseau, all submission is a crime against human nature. Man is born in freedom, everything else opposes him. With Beauvoir, however, freedom is only potential. Why shouldn’t you want it? For example, because the social structure has ensured that freedom has high social costs for women – for example because they are rejected if they are too independent. On the other hand, there is also a power that can result from submission, if in this way the woman becomes, for example, ruler over the interior of a family. What Garcia means by this is easy to imagine if you have been the only woman to stand in line at the butcher’s on Saturdays and watch the apodictic orders with which the males of the human species are delivered to the queue (“Würschtel?” “No!”).

The female body exists in four dimensions

The reciprocity in personal relationships does not change the socio-political dimension of oppression. The female body exists in four dimensions, writes Garcia. There is the physical, the experienced, the privately objectified and the objectified by society. With men there are only two: the physical and the privately objectified. The crucial difference is: The objectification of the male body only happens in interpersonal relationships, that of the female body takes place equally through society as a whole.

Is that still true? As women choose their partners themselves, the objectification of the male body has also become an issue. In the interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir, men are already thrown into the world in exactly the same way. They too have to cope with it. They too are shaped by society, whether they like it or not.

But there is still something that no social reform will get a grip on, because we may not even want to change this part: Submission, writes Garcia, cannot be separated from eroticism: “Even if Rousseau displeases it – his Condemnation of submission seems to have forgotten the pleasure that Madame de Warens’ blows gave him – submission is not always experienced as a renunciation of freedom, but sometimes appears as a path to infinite bliss. “

This is of course a nice little trick that Garcia uses there. People are complicated and no two are really alike. Taking into account the variety of characters is infinitely arduous. Perhaps this is the reason why “The Other Sex” is still incomparable in its complexity. Analyzing people without a very, very large number of them falling through the painstakingly devised grid is not that easy.