Manon Garcia - We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Womens Lives

A PHILOSOPHICAL TABOO

From Penelope patiently weaving the shroud as she waits for the return of Ulysses in the Odyssey to Anastasia reveling in the commands of Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey, from The Sexual Life of Catherine M. this phenomenon whose multiple manifestations we constantly encounter nonetheless.

Anyone who wants to study female submission is presented with a general philosophical problem: the analysis of the concept of submission repeatedly stumbles upon the commonly held idea that wanting anything other than ones freedom goes against human nature. For this reason, in the history of philosophy, submission is rarely discussed; and when it is, it is seen as either a moral vice or a pathology. Rousseau thus writes in The Social Contract: To renounce ones freedom is to renounce ones quality as a man, the rights of humanity, even its duties. There is no possible compensation for someone who renounces everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with mans nature, and to deprive his will of all freedom is to deprive his actions of all morality. addresses not the masses submission to a tyrant but what he calls masochism, the phenomenon of drawing pleasure from ones own moral or psychological pain. He conceives of masochism as the opposite of sadism. Freud easily proposes a psychoanalytic explanation of sadism, but his theory struggles with what he calls the enigma of masochism. He identifies it as a pathology but does not manage to fully explain it. In general, philosophy fails to take seriously the fact that some people might want to obey other people and take pleasure in doing so.

When focusing specifically on female submission, the problem becomes even more complex. Historically, womens submission, unlike mens, has not been thought of as being contrary to human nature. Quite the opposite, submission is prescribed as the normal, moral, and natural behavior of women. This valorization of submission goes hand in hand with the idea of an essential and natural inferiority of women compared to men: it is because women are viewed as incapable of being free in the way that men are, or that such a freedom is seen as a potential danger, that their submission is good. To consider that women submit voluntarily is, in such a context, sexist. It presupposes a difference of nature between men and women, on the basis of which women would be inferior to men. This inferiority is seen as both a weakness and an immorality: on the one hand, women submit to men because they are naturally weaker than men. They are passive in this submission. On the other hand, their weakness makes them morally inferior: women are basking in a submission that perfectly fits their nature and that they sometimes choose, whereas for men, who are authentically free subjects, submission is a moral vice.

In sum, we are at an impasse. Either we talk about female submission in its complexity, without remaining silent on the appeal that submission can have, which ostensibly places us on the side of the sexist tradition that makes submission womens natural destiny. Or we posit that men and women are equal and, in that case, womens submission, like mens, is either a moral vice or a pathology and is not really within the scope of philosophical inquiry. In the case of the latter, the only possible explanation for the valorization of female submission in cultural works is to see it as a manifestation of male domination in these passive victims that women would be. Thus, either one takes the appeal of submission for women seriously and adopts the sexist position of an immutable female nature, or one refuses the idea of a natural inferiority of women and, in that case, submissive women who are satisfied with this submission appear as passive victims or submissive beings that are guilty of not cherishing their freedom.