David: It will become harder and harder for them [women] to blame their failings on "male oppression", given that men have bent over backwards to give women every possible freedom for many decades now.
kissaki: For all of the follies of woman, her physical form still commands attention; nature has seen to that.
These two quotes stand in fatal relationship to one another. "Giving" women access to education, free movement, freer selection of their own destinies, a larger role in policy-making, increased mobility in professional fields - in short, any and all of the signs of
advancement in transcendent activities will remain the grudging concessions that they are, as long as her 'true' value and power rests in kissaki's (and most men's) preeminent belief in her
immanence value alone.
As long as one is not able to think of her/treat and consider her as potential transcendent human subjectivity, too (including the woman herself), no amount of these concessions will mask this conditioning attitude. She will enter the universities, move in the boardrooms and the world at large in half-life still. She will see again and again that no matter the loose respect accorded her for her contributions to the affairs at hand, her real power with you resides in her immanent use-value alone. For if you are not concerned with her bodily, you are not concerned with her at all.
I have seen over and over in 'professional' settings the serious work and ideas proffered by women completely devalued by one
deadly reminder or body-joke that drags everything back down to immanence-value alone. You make
your problem with her - your
incapacity to see her as anything but flesh, as anything but potential transcendent humanity -
her problem - with every corner she turns, anywhere near you, every place you 'let' her in.
Men have been here before saying just exactly that - that no matter what, they cannot help seeing women as sexual potential and sexual potential alone (or, mother-matter). If this is not there, you do not
see her at all; she is
nothing else.
You (still rhetorical you) have
given her these things you say you have given her, like you might hand the keys to the car over to a child. Okay, little man, you want to play grown-up? Go ahead - let's see what you can accomplish
without being taught how to drive. Drive all you want, in fact,
you will never be more than a child. When the child wrecks the car, you say, See? - we've given them all they want and they still
blame us for their accidents!
But that's okay. I agree with Simone de Beauvoir that it's pretty stupid to wait around for your captors (and by this I mean women held captive in immanent-use-value alone for/by most all position-of-power men, and by women themselves) to be the self-same source of your eventual freedom. Women
know they are potentially transcendent humanity; they are moving there
in spite of you. They are laughing with you at your body jokes, at your body-fixations, whilst they make their impresses into transcendent things, because this is the kind of power you give them. The only kind.
And (unfortunately), because they know your
incapacity to consider them anything else, they are swiping great chunks of the world right out from under you because you are so easy to
immanently use. Woman have gotten by on
men's weaknesses for centuries, just like all masters' weaknesses are located and exploited by any slave. These are the limits possible in any master/slave dynamic. For anything better to come - anything
more reasonable - the power exchange has to morph into another form. Myself, I am fond of power residing in any and all human excellence alone,
and none by dint of embedded social structure.
Nothing will happen in this sick and out-of-kilter power loop until you shed these scales from your eyes. Until you expect-from and accept-from her every consideration of rational excellence (i.e. transcendent-being) that you do for your fellow men. When you stand before a man, you assume of him all of his transcendent subjectivity. Your refusal to see this of women, too, (and women to see this of themselves, in spite of
heavy social conditioning), is to the downfall of both.
Men
still oppress. None of your jobs or education or pseudo-freedom are the true mechanisms of your oppression. You withhold acknowledgment of the
real value, the
one thing that has any hope of tampering with this over-conditioned cycle - a truly threatening thing to you - that is, to move your considerations of women as
pure immanence to the considerations of them as
potentially transcendent human beings. You will truly have to treat them
differently if you do! You still don't see that in doing this, you un-oppress yourselves. In fact, you perhaps don't see in the first place that
not doing this has built the shape of your own oppression. At the bottom of it, you don't understand exactly
what the nature of this oppression really is!
Instead, you just toss them the keys without teaching them how it works; and without
expecting them to have any capacity for it in the first place. Really
winning and reasonable address to the problem, isn't it [/sarcasm].
Here is the bad faith in it all: Not being able to think of women as more than flesh (unconsciousness) is not a statement of truth. It is a statement of
what you are not able to think.
.
