There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

More than a century ago, the visionary Jules Ferry predicted a free and modern culture for girls. In a vibrant speech on the need to educate girls at a time when they were limited to church schools, where they received a rudimentary and discriminatory education, he said: “The bishops know very well that whoever controls women controls everything. Women must either belong to Science or belong to the Church.”¹

A few decades later, Freud undertook a rigorous deconstruction of what he called the religious illusion—an infantile fiction based upon the pleasure principle and man’s narcissistic omnipotence—in The Future of an Illusion and contrasted it with science and the reality principle. But, while he repeated his critique of the religious mode of thought in Moses and Monotheism, the last text he wrote, he forcefully reinstated monism in the name of patriarchal power and the absolute paternal function, not only by alluding to the biblical hero—the German title refers to “der Mann Moses,” and the French translation to “l’homme Moïse”²—but also by appealing to Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Greek democracy. As you know, Athenian democracy was founded by Athena, the motherless daughter who absolved Orestes of his matricide, drove the Erinyes, avenging goddesses, into the underworld, and silenced them by transforming them into the Eumenides. Freud hails all this as marking an essential spiritual advance for humanity. I remember that, a few years ago and before Khomeini left Neauphle-le-Château,³ Michel Foucault, writing in Le Nouvel Observateur, hailed him as the incarnation of the renewal of Islamic spirituality.

Like Greek democracy, monotheism can do without women. In Catholicism—to restrict the discussion to the religion in which I was brought up and with which I am quite familiar—the spiritual trinity is made up of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. While the Virgin Mary was later elevated to the status of a saint, she does not have the status of a divinity; man alone is God, One God, father and son.

Just as it was for Freud ninety years ago, so it is for Levinas today: Europe means “the Bible and Greece.”⁴

So let us take a look at Europe and its immediate southern periphery, at the very cradle of the three monotheisms—the Mediterranean is especially dear to me because I was born in Marseille and spent more than twenty years of my life there. We see Bosnia, in turmoil and torn apart by wars; we are told that these are not wars of religion, but the clashes between bands of brothers are more fratricidal than fraternal. The role reserved for women is that of absolute victim, as is the case further afield in Rwanda, and in Africa in general. The treatment inflicted upon women entails repression, imprisonment, torture, rape, and death. In Bosnia we see the triumph of the illusion of male omnipotence thanks to the oldest of all patriarchy’s theological and philosophical phantasms: the phantasm of generating children with no trace of a mother. The foreclosure of women’s bodies in the monist symbolic system has never been more powerful than it is among the Serbs, who say to every woman they rape and claim to “get pregnant”: “You will give birth to a Chetnik!”⁵ The theme of purity, common to all religions, is now being distorted into the theme of ethnic cleansing.

Every day we can read in the newspapers about the deadly effects the rise of fundamentalism in Algeria, our closest neighbor, has had on girls. They must hide away either behind their veils or in their homes, abandon all hope of taking the baccalaureate exams, or risk having acid thrown in their faces or even being killed. Whereas the UN designated March 8 as International Women’s Day and, in a similar spirit, adopted a Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, on March 8 of this year, in a sort of inverted symbolism, fundamentalists stabbed a fifteen-year-old girl so as to terrorize all girls still further. Hidden away in their clothes and shut up inside their homes, women are executed if they do not execute themselves. It will be argued that fundamentalisms are not the same thing as religion, but, where women are concerned, all religions are fundamentalist.⁶ It is gross hypocrisy to try to make a distinction between fundamentalism and orthodoxy on this point. Under both Islamic law and the patriarchal regime, fundamentalisms, like neuroses and psychoses, reveal the foundations of the norms of religious orthodoxy.

We have seen the effects on schoolgirls of the inequality, the apartheid to which women are structurally subjected by the monotheisms, the very effects Jules Ferry warned us about. We can also see these effects in the way mosques are laid out; as in synagogues, women—wives and daughters—are confined to a small area, while the chosen sex enjoys a monumental space. The theme of purity reappears: women are relegated to insignificance because they are impure, especially when they have their periods. They talk to us about respect for women in religion—they talked to me about it throughout my childhood. I was born into the Catholic religion, married in church, and some of my academic work was on a very Christian author, namely, Bernanos.⁷ In short, I understand this religion and I do not mock it, but one would have to be blind or have no self-respect—it would be necessary not to be a woman, in a word—not to see and resent the permanent humiliation this exclusion represents, above all its devastating effect not only on relations between mothers and sons but on all family ties. That the monotheisms are misogynist, anti-egalitarian, and discriminatory now goes without saying.⁸ When the Anglican Church seemed to be seeking, democratically, to reestablish a degree of justice by accepting women into the priesthood, most Catholics and some Anglicans declared in thunderous tones that this was transvestism: Christ had the body of a man—and we are not talking about a symbolic body here; he had a real body, and it was male—so priests must have the same male body; women cannot become part of the priesthood because that would be obscene. We can, like those who cry transvestism, also say to ourselves that, when the Anglican Church took into consideration the reality of the existence of two sexes, it nevertheless remained subject to the monist and narcissistic arbitrariness of the “Only One,” according to which there is only one God—a male God—and not simply a universal “Man.”

The wars and uprisings that are now taking place in Europe are based upon identitarian or narcissistic, nationalist, and religious demands, and women are their first victims. Women experience these demands as so many fundamentalisms. To the extent that, whatever is said about them, the wars that are now being waged in Europe are wars of religion: they are primarily wars against women, and, as I have said elsewhere, misogyny is the basis of fundamentalism.

In France, the media—and the Observatoire de la misogynie that I created five years ago can provide numerous examples ⁹—have noted that the condition of women, especially girls of North African origin, is moving in two contradictory directions. The first direction shows women and girls being both physically and verbally abused, frustrated and repressed in their freedoms, and insulted in the name of a tradition to which they themselves say they must submit, rather than attributing their subordination to the brothers who force the tradition on them, though the young men often fail to respect it themselves. Girls are usually absent from the picture, though, whereas the young men of the banlieues are depicted either as angry hooligans or as nice kids who are looked after by sports and cultural associations. Tagging, rap, and street art are activities from which girls are essentially excluded, because, as everyone knows, girls are not supposed to “hang out” on street corners. A couple of weeks ago, I went to see a street art exhibit at La Villette,¹⁰ and it was obvious that the girls had been invited to watch and not to create something. The emblematic and best-known group of this integrational street art goes, as I have often mentioned, by the name of Nique ta mère, “Fuck your mother.” I am ashamed to pronounce the name because, in my city on the shores of the Mediterranean, this is an insult that no decent boy, and certainly no girl, would ever dare to use.

When Salman Rushdie is the object of a fatwa, progressive intellectuals, Muslims as well as Westerners, rise up and mobilize; when Taslima Nasrin, a thirty-one-year-old Bengali doctor and feminist writer, writes against the oppression to which she and her sisters are subjected, she too becomes the victim of a fatwa, but only a few voices are raised to prevent her from being killed in the house in which she has had to shut herself away, with her mother.¹¹

Both here and in Bangladesh women are being brought back into line by the repercussions of what is happening in Algeria and elsewhere. Last month one of my students had to abandon her plans to marry a European Frenchman and continue her graduate studies. Women are brave, but they are also lucid and they are afraid. Yesterday evening, we went to a “Nana beurs” meeting,¹² and the women told us they no longer felt completely safe here, in our country, in their country. They too are well aware that the difference between fundamentalism and orthodoxy is quantitative and not qualitative and that they are in danger.

The second direction revealed by the media emerges from Baudelot and Establet’s book Allez les filles ! (Come on, girls!).¹³ Now that they have been given equal opportunities and equality of access to knowledge, girls are performing very well in all areas and are much better integrated than their brothers, both in school and in civic life. The authors say “Come on, girls!”; however, it is not really the girls but secularism that has to make an extra effort, because, while girls are now doing very well and while more of them are passing the baccalaureate exams and going on to university-level studies, a sort of numerus clausus is being introduced in higher education, especially at the postgraduate level, for example, in law or biology: girls are being refused the right to pursue advanced degrees on the grounds that there are supposedly too many of them.

The aim of this roundtable discussion would seem to be to ensure that secularism will adopt and adapt (and adapt to) certain religious specificities in its relationship with Islam. Yet in today’s France secularism, which is seriously afflicted by its oldest enemy—Christianity—has been seriously undermined and may even be in great danger. Some would like to go back to the era of the loi Falloux¹⁴ and abolish the separation of church and state, the very Church that the state had to fight for a hundred years in order to guarantee girls a full right to learning on equal terms with boys. Catholicism is returning in force in Europe, thanks to a papist morality which, having opposed painless childbirth until 1956, is now violently opposed to abortion and anti-AIDS contraception.

Christian democracy has not laid down its arms,¹⁵ and it can now rely on the support of what Alain Finkielkraut calls the “Holy Alliance of Clergies.”¹⁶ Precisely because girls are excelling at what Jules Ferry offered them, they are victims of new forms of discrimination. The patriarchal alliance converges with the alliance of monotheisms to block the pursuit of their emancipation. Certain devout democrats are now prepared, following the example of the Constitutional Council, to accept discriminatory practices on the grounds that they are based on differences at a time when public life, more homosexed and more undifferentiated than ever, is putting itself on display and exhibiting itself without women.

To the extent that it states that girls cannot be granted French nationality until they are eighteen, the latest legislation on nationality puts them at risk by leaving them—as is the norm under French law—under the jurisdiction of the national laws of their parents’ country of origin, and this considerably undermines the role these girls can play in public life. When the same government outlines “an ambitious family policy” and suggests that the role of fathers should be strengthened while women should go back to the home, as the draft framework law on which we will be voting in a few days proposes, one might say that it is contravening the principle of parental equality, which is one of the latest secular and social rights women have won in recent years. While there has been a lot of talk in recent days about the CIP,¹⁷ which most young people see as a sort of SMIC for youth,¹⁸ very little has been said about the suggestion that a parental allowance should replace the maternal wage equivalent to half the SMIC paid to women when they have a second child. The suggestion is not designed to allow women to get an education but to allow them to give up their jobs without any welfare protection either now or in the future. Not only should women give up their jobs, become dependent on their husbands or the state, and look forward to a future living on the RMI;¹⁹ they should also be making children and taking responsibility for their education because fertility rates are supposedly falling.²⁰

On March 8 a committee on the French language was created by the minister for culture; it is made up of forty men and not a single woman. At the same time everyone now knows that, as well as being excluded from social life, women are being excluded from political life and from symbolic life; they are even being excluded from knowledge, because it is well known that women will put off having their first child until they have completed their education. Now, if women are supposed to have children at a very young age, some would like to encourage them to interrupt their education to hasten the arrival of the first child.

Unlike Freud, I will not contrast science with religion or the reality principle with the pleasure principle. On the contrary, I am willing to bet that they can coexist if they both acknowledge the primacy of reality. There are indeed two sexes, and in a republic such as ours the two sexes are born free and with equal rights. This reality should encourage the monist narcissism to which our religions are still clinging to mature a little more quickly.