Abbie’s talk at Stony Brook.

“I hesitated for a long time before writing a book on women. … Are there even women?”

So begins Simone de Beauvoir’s culture-upending book, The Second Sex, in French Le Deuxième Sexe, published in 1949 by Gallimard. Some years later – but years before it was translated – and before “second wave” feminism burst on the American landscape, I read Beauvoir along with other Fulbright fellowship young women in my circle of friends in Paris. Her two-volume book fascinated us. We argued about it. If she won us over, if we took the fateful step and became ourselves “feminists,” would we be risking something – our femininity perhaps? We weren’t sure how to define femininity, but in those days the culture assured us that it was always at risk!

The 1963 launching of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, generally gets the credit for launching “second wave” feminism as a twentieth century American social and political movement. It went beyond women’s earlier-secured right to vote, now targeting the social assumptions, codes, values and boundaries that still affected the lives of women.

I was friends with some of the players in that movement: the late and dear Barbara Seaman, the earnest and devoted Fran Klagsbrun – and feel now honored to count Phyllis Chesler as my friend. She’s the heroine of the battle for women’s rights in psychiatric settings, author of Women and Madness, also An American Bride in Kabul and many other well-documented reports from the frontiers of women’s continued suffering. So the best of the “second wave” goes on.

But where exactly is “the woman question” to be found today? Are young women getting good advice nowadays? What do courtship patterns look like now? Does anyone know? What do women’s hopes, daydreams and disappointments look like at present? Where are women situated in the culture’s imagination – say, its courtship dance – today? 

Recently I’ve been devoting several columns to a volume of essays by philosophers, collected under the title, The Philosophy of Sex. By and large, they seem to me to write less astutely about human desire – and to take eros less seriously – than Plato did. I applaud their social courage in trying to think about it, but doubt they’ve got much deeper than the surface.

Also, now that feminism per se is no longer controversial, what recent contributions can be credited to the “public feminists” of today? 

Well, where real-life flesh and blood women are concerned, they – the majority of recent public feminists – look to me unprotective. So for example, where in many Muslim-majority countries women lack the legal and social rights taken for granted in the secular West, the typical Western feminists are not even expressing concern. (As usual, the ever-fearless Phyllis Chesler remains the exception to this generalization.) Closer to home, most public feminists haven’t tried to protect women athletes from having to compete against – and naturally losing to – biologically male competitors claiming to be women in tennis matches, foot races, wrestling matches and other such contests! Admittedly, it’s harder to articulate the problem if you’re publicly committed to the view that womanhood has nothing much to do with biology!

Similarly, if you can’t keep curious or predatory men out of women’s bathrooms because you believe that “womanhood is a social construct,” maybe you ought to revisit your belief. And that goes double for men-claiming-to-be-women being housed in prison cells with women made vulnerable to rape thereby. Or the latest horror I’ve read about: men-claiming-to-be-women allowed to strip search newly imprisoned women.

Gosh,

feminists –

if you care about women –

stop these abuses!

You can fix your concepts later!

In sum, “feminism,” in its more recent public appearances, has seemed to lack both the conceptual tools and the sympathy required for the protection of actual women who find themselves vulnerable. 

If one doesn’t fix clearly in one’s mind the biological and social vulnerability of women, one’s public “feminism” won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

A question comes to mind: What kinds of acculturation are girls and young women getting nowadays? (Alongside women, the same question goes to young men.)

If, for reasons of collective guilt, or guilt-tripping, the culture does not honor itself or celebrate its better angels, it becomes that much harder to find the plotline – the romance – in one’s own personal life story.

These concerns may have gone out of style. However, the motivating realities have not been superceded. In women’s or men’s personal stories, the romantic destiny, lived, unlived, attained or missed is – still and always –

the main event.

__________

Related Content: Is There Still a “Woman Question”? | Can a Woman Be Feminine and a Philosopher? (Video)