Can a woman and a man be themselves and still love each other? All experience tells me no.
How would the human species have survived if not for the moral and intellectual subjugation of women? Humanity would have to learn new ways of relating to each other and to themselves. I see traditional gender roles and partnerships formed under traditional gender roles as suboptimal forms of existing. Gender roles are much like religions in the sense that they project ambiguity onto flatter modes of interpretation. They tell you in advance what long term goals you should strive for. They guarantee security for compliance of the soul.
The moral function of a woman in a hierarchical society is to assuage the man that he is doing well in his career. That she views herself incapable of achieving the acclaim and status he has casts him as a hero. He thinks, whatever hardship he faces in his public life, at least he is not a woman.
Earlier this year, I kept posing the question, does the abolition of gender oppression imply the abolition of gender categories? Will “woman” and “man” become superfluous descriptors when gender equality is reached in full? Certainly, gender equality ensures that “woman” and “man” become apolitical. The question is whether the concepts of “woman” and “man” are mostly political and capture little-to-no other essential qualities. A person in the bourgeois class may enjoy oil painting and philosophical discussions while another in the proletariat is concerned with more concrete or immediate needs. If the two switched families at birth, these differences in preferences may become obsolete. It is simply harder to see outside of the confines of gender, because at this point in time in human history we have not seen the dominant arrangement challenged on a large enough scale. It’s simply hard to see outside the doctrine of a fundamentalist religion when you are living inside that religion.
At the very least, the existence of matriarchal societies provides concrete evidence against the essentialism of male power. We don’t even need to look into counterfactual possible worlds. Survival of the fittest only works as a justification as long as the environmental conditions perpetuate the status quo.
The status quo, for women, has been challenged for centuries, along legal and economic lines. We’ve achieved more or less nominal parity in Western countries in that there are no legal sanctions against women running for political office or starting their own businesses, but this is where the danger comes in. It’s much harder to recognize, formalize, and testify to the harms of bias, discrimination, and corruption. It’s much harder to recognize, formalize, and testify to the fear of change that comes from insecurity and feelings of scarcity, which blocks some from recognizing the merit and potential of those who trigger the feelings. Or even if they recognize it, it is uncomfortable to act on it. It’s simply too uncomfortable to try and figure out how to have more women in _________ space. It’s perceived as simply too risky. Even if I support this, what would my peers think? It almost calls to mind, how would the human species have survived if not for the moral and intellectual subjugation of women?
Or maybe the thought is, how would I have survived if not for the moral and intellectual subjugation of women? I think that some people have a sort of bad faith view on gender equality in that they do recognize that there are harms to being a “man” but they essentially accept a society of pain, corruption, and insecurity and associate manhood with the exalted quality of being able to succeed in these conditions, while refusing to recognize how asymmetry protects them from their own feelings of low self worth.
If the bad faith barrier is overcome, then the next barrier to gender equality is an epistemic one. I realized how crucial the epistemic barrier is when I met someone this year who said, point blank, to me “I can think of so many ways in which being a dude helped make my career work out for me socially.” Moreover, he recognized that if I were to continue along the path I’d chosen, I would face many more difficulties while simultaneously not accepting that as an excuse to quit. I don’t know where I would be today without that interaction. It should not be so rare to find someone, a male, ahead of me in his career, who is able to in some way access the subjective experience of a woman in his field, empathize, and act on it in a productive way. And yet it was only through immense luck that I met such a person.
I can’t tell if bad faith or a lack of epistemic access is more the issue in general, but it’s almost certainly not worth deliberating over. I started writing by asking whether gender essentialism is true or false, but it is increasingly obvious to me that it is not worth asking that question anymore. As it is increasingly obvious to me it is not worth, as a woman, ruminating over all the hurdles that most certainly face me in the future because I am a woman. Life cannot be measured in absolute terms, contrary to what capitalism would lead us to believe. Compliance will not protect you. At best, secondhand ideologies offer numb comfort.
The other day, I was talking to a female friend in private equity who recognized that the difference in learning outcome she observed between her and a male colleague at the end of their two year program was due not to talent but to vast disparities in the quality of experience in a highly sexist environment. I think this is wonderful. Not the outcome, of course, but that she was able to, despite such hardship, recognize her own innate ability and compartmentalize it from external circumstances. It gives me so much hope to see women who are driven to their endeavors by whatever it is — autonomy, vision, the desire for achievement, self expression — even with the recognition of their disadvantages. History has been punctuated by so many women — Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Curie — this year — Kamala Harris, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier who recognized their full humanity, refused to settle, and as a consequence, pushed forward the human species.
I started by asking whether it is possible to be a woman and a human at the same time in the context of a romantic relationship. It is increasingly obvious to me that it is an irrelevant question.
