The Problem with “Lived Experience”
Don’t Let Feminists like Beauvoir and Dworkin Steal Your Memories
In all of Simone de Beauvoir’s bitter treatise The Second Sex (1949), in which everything feminine is said to be pervaded by humiliation and “Otherness,” I found only a few apt anecdotes. In particular, the chapter on “The Married Woman” describes a housewife who prides herself on keeping an immaculate house and works hard at it. Her pleasure in making her home beautiful, however, is marred by her awareness of the repetitive effort that goes into the immaculate creation and its near-immediate undoing as soon as it is enjoyed. Beauvoir writes of the woman’s predicament as follows:
“The saddest thing is that this work does not even result in a lasting creation. Woman is tempted—all the more as she is so attentive to it—to consider her work as an end in itself. Contemplating the cake she takes out of the oven, she sighs: what a pity to eat it! What a pity husband and children drag their muddy feet on the waxed floor. As soon as things are used, they are dirtied and destroyed; she is tempted, as we have already seen, to withdraw them from being used” (p. 483). In a related passage, Beauvoir describes how the woman watches, horrified, as even a child’s somersault threatens to destroy all her toil (p. 476).
I know what Beauvoir was getting at, having experienced something similar whenever my husband and I have friends over for dinner, an event that always involves feverish preparatory cleaning of every nook and cranny that might be looked into by an unwary guest—a fastidious care needing to be repaired the next morning with a good deal more wiping and vacuuming and scrubbing. I can’t seem to shake my desire for everything to be “just right” at all times, and I have always recognized this obsessiveness as a character flaw, a sign of perverse perfectionism. Beauvoir, though, would have me believe I’m like this because I belong to the “second sex.”
This is what feminists mean by the popular slogan “The personal is political,” and Beauvoir’s book is filled with details purporting to show that nothing in a woman’s life is merely personal, whether it’s her play with dolls, her manner of urination, or the fraught adventure of sexuality; in what may be the weirdest part of the book, Beauvoir riffs on the outrage a woman rightly feels when her lover asks her whether she has had an orgasm, a question allegedly designed to demean her and exert his power, for he “likes the woman to feel humiliated, possessed in spite of herself” (p. 411). Feminism’s extensive focus on the alleged power relations in private behaviors and even private thoughts distinguishes it from most other political ideologies.
For Beauvoir, women’s lives were characterized by immanence rather than transcendence, by the repetitive and material necessities of life—food preparation, diapers, dishes, laundry, sex—rather than lasting pursuits. Beauvoir didn’t claim that every woman had the experience of domesticity she outlined—she herself lived much of her adult life in hotels or apartments with maid service that freed her from cleaning and cooking duties—but she did claim that her descriptions pertained to a typical femininity redolent of limited choices and imposed destiny. “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (p. 283), she stated categorically, and the becoming was made of a plethora of moments of inferiority. (That many men’s lives involved endless repetitive labor did not give her pause.)
At more than 750 pages, The Second Sex aimed at a definitive catalogue of what Beauvoir called woman’s “lived reality” (p. 48). The point of it all was to enable the woman reader to see her life anew in such a way that she could never again see it in the old (non-political) way. A later generation of women, gathering in groups to share their stories, would call it “consciousness raising” or, in Kate Millett’s phrase, “the creation of a different consciousness” (Sexual Politics, p. xi). Women learned in these groups that even their most seemingly private moments had a wider social and political meaning.
This is “lived experience” as a feminist conceptual category—an ironic term given that the meaning of the experience does not inhere in the living of it but instead in its interpretation. Only when it is seen properly, identified within a larger system of alleged sex prejudice and unequal power, can it reveal its significance. I am reminded of an article by a feminist instructor who claimed that as a result of her teachings about rape, female students in her class came to understand that they had been raped and male students came to understand that they had been rapists. What an achievement! According to feminist theory, women’s “lived reality” is different from men’s and more accurate because women, positioned at the bottom of the gender hierarchy, can perceive the effects of oppressive power in a way that those who allegedly benefit from it cannot.
But what about the woman who reads through The Second Sex and fails to recognize her life in any of it? There is a special scornful disparagement for her in the feminist lexicon. Such a woman operates, it is sometimes said in Marxian lingo, under a “false consciousness.” She is a “male-identified woman” who has internalized her own oppression; she thinks she is free because she doesn’t understand her situation. Beauvoir admitted that “men encounter more complicity in their woman companions than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed” (p. 757) because from childhood, a girl is conditioned to comply. As a woman, she “cheerfully accepts […] lies” instead of struggling for (feminist) truth. Andrea Dworkin said of such women, “When those who dominate you get you to take the initiative in your own human destruction, you have lost more than any oppressed people yet has ever gotten back” (Intercourse, p. 181).
Dworkin was the heir of Beauvoir, having said that feminist theory helped her “understand my own life.” She pointed to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) as the master text: “I learned from this book what they were doing to me: see, said Millett, here he does this and this and this to her” (“Loving Books,” p. 63). One is struck by Dworkin’s remarkable assertion of an allegedly society-wide oppression that one is unaware of until one has been argued into seeing it. Millett outlined the pattern that illuminated Dworkin’s “lived reality.” Millett had taken the pattern at least partially from Beauvoir, acknowledging The Second Sex at key moments in her book (see, for example, p. 239).
Beauvoir in turn had taken the pattern from Virginia Woolf, the English novelist who made up a story in her 1928 A Room Of One’s Own (factually inaccurate in many essentials, as I explain here) about why there were few great female writers, concluding that women were not great because their society convinced them that they couldn’t be great; this became, with elaborations, Beauvoir’s argument about women’s inferiority (see The Second Sex, p. 121), then Millett’s, then Dworkin’s. Stretching back over many decades is a chain of angry female authors re-telling essentially the same story about women’s conditioning.
So it remains today. No matter how many programs are created to support women’s academic and professional advancement, no matter how many slogans tell us that the Future is Female and that women make better leaders, many feminists still describe women as unfairly “second.”
I don’t suppose there is a pure experience of life, separate from cultural frames of meaning. Religious doctrines, sacred stories, folk tales, moral philosophies, and popular culture have always influenced the patterns we find in our lives and the meanings we make. But something is wrong when the predominant story, the feminist story, continues to provoke so much anger and self-pity over so many decades. Feminism is a jealously totalitarian ideology, insisting on the inadequacy of other sense-making philosophies and subsuming everything under its mantra of grievance.
Learning to think in the manner outlined by Woolf, Beauvoir, Millett, and Dworkin results in a remarkable stunting of the moral imagination. Personal experience is appropriated and transformed into assumed powerlessness and resentment while gratitude, empathy, stoicism, and responsibility fall away. Boys and men are no longer perceived as fellow human beings with their own life struggles but as antagonists who demean, objectify, and assault.
One of feminism’s untruths is that feminism is a reform movement with specific “equality” goals. “There is nothing that feminists want more than to become irrelevant,” Andrea Dworkin once claimed, implausibly, in “Feminism: An Agenda” (p. 152). This was a woman who kept a “Dead men don’t rape” poster above her writing desk and claimed that all men and boys must bear the stigma of men’s sexual crime. What would she have written about if not her defiant victimology, her conviction of female moral superiority, her fanatical anger? Like most feminists, Dworkin and Beauvoir denied but could not renounce the heady satisfactions of righteousness and rage. Though claiming to free women, their feminism instead traps them in a mindset so totalizing that even one’s most private memories are made to fall in line.
The Problem with “Lived Experience”
Oh Geez, why do I keep working these 60 hour weeks. As soon as I make the money, my wife and kids use it up!
Great stuff Janice!
This sort of feminism is the distilled essence of borderline personality disorder.
Inappropriately angry, chronically empty, self-harming, and a destroyer of relationships.