The text is a collage of excerpts from my diploma thesis, which combines the double-major study of Slovene and sociology of culture (Women’s Literary Characters in a Modern Slovenian Novel of Miha Mazzini, Faculty of Arts, 2008). It is the first part (3) of the contributions, the beginning – a predisposition to understand what it means to be a woman in today’s (male) world. An explanation of where the different patterns of behavior come from …
Sex and Gender
Biologically speaking, a man can be a man or a woman. Biological sex means the diversity of the body, its morphological forms and physiological differences. Through education in socialization and inculturation, through the recognition of social and cultural norms mediated through the family, educational systems, science, media, politics, and religion, social gender is created.
Gender is something that we do, and the way we think, that’s when we talk about masculinity and femininity. Regardless of biological differences, it is the culture of society that most influences the creation of male and female behavior. Human identity and gender are socially constructed – the result of circumstances, opportunities, and limitations.
In her book The Housekeeper (2000), Ann Oakley discusses the roles that society assigns to women. On the one hand, he sees women as a gender category, so it attributes to them traditional female roles = housewife, wife to husband, mother to child. On the other hand, society sees women as people who are capable of personal improvement. Mirra Komarovsky spoke about the modern role: The modern role is not really a gender role, because it partially erases the gender distinction. It requires a woman to have almost the same qualities, behavioral patterns, and attitudes as a man of the same age, but it prescribes typical feminine behavior, i.e., emotional and compassionate.
Since men have the most power and prestige in today’s society, the measure of individual success and self-realization is still a male criterion. Social practice transfers prestige to the role of a man, which is oriented towards success = career.
Femininity in the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan
Sigmund Freud saw human sexuality as the fundamental reason for gender inequality. In his writings on female sexuality, Female Sexuality and Femininity, he wonders how a child with a bisexual predisposition becomes a woman. Upon entering into a secondary formation or an Oedipus complex, the girl comes to terms with her own passivity in the face of her father’s activity, and as a ‘little woman,’ she also becomes a ‘prey’ to feelings of inferiority and mutilation. Freud assumes that a little girl feels like a crippled man. The girl is without a phallus, that is, without power, so she must turn to her father, who possesses this power. She submits to the passive goal of being loved – in order to achieve her own satisfaction, she needs the validation of the “subject”, i.e. the man.
Subject = someone who feels, thinks, observes, acts : object = doesn’t feel, think, is observed, something is done to him
For Lacan and his theory of sexuality, the concept of desire is essential. According to him, the woman is torn between a multitude of desires, so she is desperately looking for security and support to get at least some kind of identity – it is a search for the other. But for a woman, her own splitting over desires is alienating, because if she pretends to be a man, it will inevitably end in failure; But “if she pretends to be a woman, she will also fall into the trap: to be a woman would be to be an object, the ‘other’, and this ‘other’ becomes an object even within her renunciation.” (S. de Beauvoir)
Further, Lacan argues that the (woman’s) desire does not want to be satisfied if the satisfaction involves an end, because the function of desire is to humanize the need and enjoy it. Every desire is always focused on the other person. It’s a mirror effect: I identify with the desire I perceive in another person, with the intention that that other person would want me. Like the phallus, which passes through the female but ultimately rests in the male, so the gaze of the male goes through the female but ultimately rests in the male. (Verhaeghe, Love in a Time of Loneliness)
The other person is superfluous as a subject, so she serves only as an object. Consequently, the woman is always reduced to an object that is interchangeable, and the man to a subject through which, when confirmed, the woman experiences her satisfaction. “The evaluator of the woman in herself is a man, a woman is evaluated. In this way, she turns herself into an object – more precisely, into an object of view: a feast for the eyes. (Vidmar, Uneasy Genres: Soap Opera and Women’s Politics). When a woman accepts the play of the object, she asserts her subordination, she becomes a sexualized body, she does not think, she does not act. Constant ‘castration’ is, therefore, a prerequisite for a woman to be confirmed by a man, or by a woman’s desire.
When a woman is unable to achieve any sublime affirmation of her existence in her own activity (she is seen only as the body of a flawed and unhappy man) and passively endures her own biological destiny, she is identified with something that every culture considers devalued – that is, nature.
However, on the other hand, women began to look at men as ‘hairy women who misbehave‘. This has caused, among other things, a war between the sexes, but I will come back to that in Part Three: The Dance of Feminine and Masculine Energies.
Myths of femininity
Roland Barthes, in Mythology, characterizes myth as a system of memorization that naturalizes historically conditioned meanings and presents them as ‘natural’. It embodies some commonly known idea of a natural or historical phenomenon, and its primary function is to support the existing social order, conservative social values, and traditions.
A ‘real’ man is expected to be aggressive, ambitious, clear, competitive, confident, sporty, loud, strong…, while a ‘real’ woman is emotional, devoted, gentle, fragile, sensitive, warm, loves children…
The most widespread myth is about motherhood: a child needs a mother, a mother needs a child, and motherhood is the most that a woman can achieve in life, only with it can she affirm herself as a woman. In today’s Western culture, motherhood is the main occupation. If she delegates the care of her children to someone else (including her father), it brings her social disapproval, she is considered an unloving, ruthless ‘unfeminine’. If she doesn’t have a child, she is pitied, but if she doesn’t have them willingly, she is considered deviant and abnormal.
Motherhood was considered a feminine ideal, and socialization played a big role in this. According to a 1972 survey, most books for preschoolers depict a woman as a mother and wife, with only a fairy or mermaid being the other options. The other pointer is a doll, a girl-only toy. Domesticity with dolls enables anticipation and joy in relation to similar objects, and thus caring for children becomes a primary role suitable for women.
Woman in a modern society
Uncertain economic and social conditions have led men and women to learn to take a ‘use and discard’ view of the world. The same thing is happening with human relationships, which are no longer self-evident, the role of the father is questionable, there is no more security and certainty. Bonds in today’s society quickly fade and crumble, as communities and partnerships last as long as satisfaction lasts.
The main feature of modern society is its consumerism, which implies the life orientation of broad social groups. The search for pleasure, desire, lust, pleasure are driving the consumer society, and the media is an extension of this consumer culture.
To be a woman in this day and age means to be addressed all the time, carefully investigated; in movies, television, radio, online … Everyone ‘knows’ what women want, need. The media sells her desire to be desired, to be happy, to be successful. They create an identity and ideals, ‘for women’, to be beautiful, successful, happy…
The basic wheel of visual consumer culture is the body, which is at the center of social life and personal identity. The cult of physical appearance is maintained by scientific discourse, medicine, media, advertising, diet books, fitness centers, weight loss programs … It is an example of a perfect industry: it is necessary to create or maintain a problem in people, a constant dissatisfaction with the body, and offer them solutions to them. (Metka Kuhar, In the Name of Beauty)
The discipline of the body and sexuality, according to Faucault, is the central medium through which modern power operates. It does not control the body through ideology and coercion, but through external control and techniques of self-control and self-discipline. “Panopticism makes patriarchal-capitalist forces invisible, so it is very difficult to point to them and resist them. The panopticon works so effectively because of the private nature of observation, which encourages women to believe that the standards they set for themselves regarding body appearance are personal and private. They internalize the panoptic logic to the point that they claim to lose weight for themselves, not to please others. They seem to control themselves, when in fact the control comes from elsewhere.
The leading role in the ‘liberation’ of women from classical roles has been taken by the beauty myth, which continues the function of social control. The diligent housewife, who in the past was considered the ideal of successful femininity, was replaced by a slender, youthful model. But society is not really interested in the thinness and appearance of women per se, but in disciplining women, in the awareness that they are being watched. “The main feature of this culture is its ambiguous image of a woman – a modern, conscious and independent consumer who, by searching for mirror images in the fantasy world of idealized female characters, voluntarily participates in her own social subjugation … (Hrženjak, Her (Re)creation: Women’s Magazines in Slovenia)
And here, while writing this (sociological) part of my diploma, a light went on in my head. So why do I go (did) to aerobics? Five times a week??? (Torture once or twice a week would probably still get over it, but five times!) 🙂 My whole life turned in a new direction, and I threw away 10 extra pounds in a different way – without starving and jumping around the gyms.
To think about it, I wrote my diploma exactly 18 years ago, and half a year before that, the name Oneya entered my life and set the stage for a new path – so I recently came of age. 🙂 And a few months before writing, also the greatest teacher I’ve had until recently joined me and (saved) my life.
6-month-old Bartholomew/Bart (in my novel, the canine hero Odysseus/Ody) was the first to show that he didn’t agree with me going to the gym when he managed to chew three of the five books needed for the Slovenian part of my diploma during my hour and a half of absence. 🙂 After this ‘incident’, we replaced my ‘jumping on the instructions of others’ with exploring the world together, observing (devalued) nature, wandering in the forests …
