Power of Patriarchy: No More Voluntary Submission!

How can it be that only about ten percent of women who are victims of rape in Germany and also in France file a complaint?

That every fourth woman experiences violence from her partner and that most of them stay in violent relationships?

That women in 2021, even if they are equally employed, cook and wash for their husbands and look after their children alone?

The French philosopher Manon Garcia wants to answer these questions with her book - and she does it, as the title suggests, with a reference to the patriarchal order that continues to structure our coexistence.

Garcia focuses on the question of submission, on the act with which those who are turned into women themselves contribute to maintaining this order.

And this formulation alone shows the complicated interplay of passivity and activity, of structure and action, society and the individual, which ultimately leads to individual women submitting to men without being morally responsible for it.

The pitfalls of heterosexual relationships

First, Garcia takes care of definitions of terms that she makes with references to theorists critical of domination such as Marx and Foucault: In every relationship between individual people or between groups, the degree of domination determines whether one can even speak of submission. If the rule is based on pure violence, no one submits, then there is no choice. But here and now, in France, where Garcia writes, and in other “western” countries to which she refers, there is a formal choice for most women - that makes the subject all the more interesting.

The theses that Garcia interspersed in these first chapters are also interesting, such as, for example, that the heterosexual couple relationship is the parade place for the submission of women.

In lesbian relationships there is no unequal distribution of housework.

Constructed as an object of desire

However, she quickly changes from the current phenomena to the rereading of Simone de Beauvoir's work “The Other Sex”. Because no one has written so enlighteningly about the forms of submission, the objectification of women and their bodies as Beauvoir. The statements that Garcia makes with regard to Beauvoir are all still correct, for example about the suffering of young girls, "which is caused by the experience of a body, more precisely a flesh, which has always been constructed as an object of desire", or about the attempts of women to “distinguish themselves through their physical appearance”, which plunges them into “an endless dependence on an outside gaze”.

But at the same time, by focusing on Beauvoir, the author ignores some current developments and some important references, for example to the works of younger feminist authors such as Laurie Penny or Margarete Stokowski, who also write revealingly about the objectification of those who are considered women.

With Beauvoir, Garcia explains two main reasons for the continuation of the (self-) submission of women: First, those bodies that are capable of childbearing are more clearly subordinate to the preservation of the species than those not capable of childbearing.

That seems biologically deterministic, but Garcia rejects such determinism.

Likewise with Beauvoir, she emphasizes that physical experiences can only be understood in the context of social ascriptions on the body.

Economic dependence on men

However, it then does not address those social forces and structures that maintain access to childbearing bodies, for example laws in modern states that continue to criminalize abortion, or right-wing parties and groups whose anti-feminist ideology is based precisely on childbearing bodies as a means of reproducing the people. Nor are there any references in Garcia's book to the initiatives that have been fighting for decades for the re-appropriation of those bodies that are objectified in the patriarchal chat under the slogan “my body, my choice”. Garcia does not ask about feminist movements, and people who are for example childbearing potential but are not women are also not mentioned.

The second and related aspect that Garcia and Beauvoir highlight as the reason for the continued existence of the patriarchal order is the pattern of heterosexual romantic and sexual relationships that women repeatedly suggest submission to. The economic dependence on men and especially on husbands is no longer the same for women as it was in Beauvoir's time. Yet they would still learn from an early age to be lonely, undesirable, and unloved if they did not submit to men. A revision of these social gender norms is needed: "When one understands that the woman, like the man, is a becoming, a historical being and not another, of a natural alterity and inferiority,one understands submission as a historical and not rigid attitude. "

It is depressing that in 2021 there will still be a supposedly natural inferiority of women compared to men.

Manon Garcia's book makes it clear that it is necessary.

Therefore, despite some gaps, it is important for the liberation of those people who are made into women - and for the emancipation of all people.

Manon Garcia: "We are not born submissive".

How patriarchy determines the lives of women.

Translated from the French by Andrea Hemminger.

Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 234 pp., Hardcover, € 26.