conygma replied to your post: also one time my dad and his male friends were...
sTICKS LEG THRU THE ROOF i do
herateleia replied to your post: also one time my dad and his male friends were...
ME ME ME ALWAYS
horrorempathy replied to your post: also one time my dad and his male friends were...
i do
so to quickly define my terms before i go on
simone de beauvoir was the longtime partner of jean-paul sartre, and uses a lot of transcendentalist philosophical terms in her writing. that’s part of why the second sex is kind of... difficult? as a book; not only is it a work of philosophy, it was actually translated into english by (i believe) a biologist, because the american publisher wrongfully thought it was actually a book on biology (there’s a whole section about the sperm and the egg and stuff it’s neat), and obviously a biologist isn’t going to know how to translate works of french philosophy.
in the context of tss, “transcendence” and “immanence” are used to talk about two opposing positions. transcendence is about Going Beyond, Going Above; being active, creative, and in control of one’s own life. immanence? the opposite. it’s women’s situation throughout history, one of stagnation, of staying put, of not having control of one’s own destiny, a deliberate withholding of access to transcendent experience and power. immanence is also, more broadly, about the material, and about remaining at the level of the material. in religion for example, immanence is a concept which places the divine in the material world, rather than somewhere outside it. i think it’s the idea of immanence and the material that’s absolutely crucial to classical greek misogyny, and to the latter’s influence on modern-day misogyny.
imo the idea of women as immanent in greek thought is nowhere more obvious than in ancient greek ideas surrounding conception. to wit: the idea that the man provides the soul or animating life force (actually called the pneuma, or breath) via the sperm, and that what the woman contributes is the base biological matter. she provides the “stuff,” he provides the soul. in the greatest miracle of human life the woman is reduced to nothing more than the clay which is molded by the active principle of the male seed. consider:
The male provides the ‘form’ and the ‘principle of the movement’, the female provides the body, in other words, the material. Compare the coagulation of milk. Here, the milk is the body, and the fig-juice or the rennet contains the principle which causes it to set. ...
... Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male; and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition; i.e. it lacks one constituent, and one only, the principle of Soul.
An animal is a living body, a body with Soul in it. The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape; this, in our view, is the specific characteristic of each of the sexes: that is what it means to be male or female. Hence, necessity requires that the female should provide the physical part, i.e. a quantity of material, but not that the male should do so, since necessity does not require that the tools should reside in the product that is being made, nor that the agent which uses them should do so. Thus the physical part, the body, comes from the female, and the Soul from the male, since the Soul is the essence of a particular body.
-- Aristotle, from Generation of Animals, quoted in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. alcuin blamires, karen pratt, c.w. marx
this idea of women as body, and as tied inherently to their body, trickles down from and throughout classical thought. in the same anthology there is an excerpt from galen describing women as “mutilated” men. the bodily difference of women is taken in a weird essentialist way as physical evidence of defect, of deviation from the most perfect form and therefore lacking the most perfect capabilities. i think you could make a serious argument that ancient greece is where medical justification of misogyny first got its start; consider this idea from anne carson’s “putting her in her place: woman, dirt, and desire” (in before sexuality: the construction of erotic experience in the ancient greek world, ed. david m. halperin, john j. winkler, froma i. zeitlin):
Physiologically and psychologically [to the Greeks], women are wet. ... It is the consensus of Greek thought that the soundest condition for a human being is dryness, provided it is not excessive dryness. ... the dry state of mental alertness may be undermined by wine, sleep, or self-indulgence, according to Diogenes of Apollonia, who proposed in the fifth century that the conscious element in man consisted of air and that an individual’s intelligence depended on the dryness of this air ... . ... The condition of dry stability is never attained by the female physique, which presumably remains cold and wet all its life. Partly by virtue of her innate wetness, woman is more subject than man to liquefying assaults upon body and mind, especially those of emotion.
carson adds in a footnote, “We are dealing not with physical fact but with cultural and rhetorical artifact ... What is essential for our analysis is to note a clear trend in ancient interpretations of physiological data: women are presumed at home in conditions of physical and emotional extremity that discomfit male flesh and protocol ... .”
these are not just abstract ideas about women but ideas that are rooted in women’s physiology that provide, in essence, a pseudoscientific justification of misogynist discourse surrounding women’s bodies. i think you could argue that this is the very essence of misogynist immanence: men’s bodies are prime real estate for the gestation of rational thought, simply by virtue of being male; women’s bodies are a kind of gross soup that bogs down rationality and swamps Good Male Things like, idk, bromance? women are dragged down to the level of body and body only, denied access to transcendence, with this denial justified by the fact that they are at the level of the body.
this is a line of thinking that draws itself very clearly from classical greece all the way into the modern day. consider the extent to which women are treated as belonging to their hormones (”is it your time of the month?” “are you PMSing right now?”), slaves to biology in ways that men are not, trapped at the level of the immanent and subject to the whims of their cuh-raaaaazy bodies, and therefore not trustworthy (who wants a female national leader when she could have access to nuclear launch codes while she’s on her period!), not able to achieve transcendence, because of that tie to the material. men are allowed to be minds, pneuma; women are just bodies--base, biological matter. transcendence and immanence.
