There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This text never stops being written. Ended, it remains endless. It comes off the telex machines, interminably, every day crueler than the last. It is the text of the human tragedy of the condition of women. I have written it a hundred times, and others have written it at the same time. This is not writing; at the very most it is a transcript of the daily hell in which women have lived for all eternity, all over the world.

Why so many murders, why so much hatred, why so much suffering? In these questions, which lie at the root of all racisms, we find the dark continent of human stupidity, the whole species’ refusal to take stock of the greatest genocide in the entire history of speaking beings.

“If This Is a Woman” struck me as a fitting title for this article, in an allusion to Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. In Levi’s introductory poem I found the few lines he devotes to the condition of women in Auschwitz:

In Aujourd’hui, the national edition of Le Parisien, on August 25, 1999, we learn of the existence of “breaking-in camps” in Italy where women and “girls” are turned into prostitutes. “Imported in groups of fifteen or twenty under false identities by pimps from the Yugoslavian, Russian, or Czech mafia, they are forced to turn more than a hundred tricks a day! They come away broken and submissive. Some become hooked on heroin or cocaine so they can stand it. Most of them drink …” I am certainly not confusing either this camp in Italy or the brothels that have been organized in Bosnia with the Nazi camps. And yet in all these camps the torturers’ desire to dehumanize their prisoners is the same.

This news was not picked up by any other paper. I read the so-called popular dailies assiduously because they are slightly less misogynist than the so-called quality press. They do not ignore the murders and the rapes to which women fall victim every day, even though they confine them to the “news in brief” column rather than putting the stories on the political or social pages, which are reserved for racist murders.

So women and “girls” are brutalized just as they were in the old brothels—and from time to time the question of reopening these “closed houses” in France is raised, under international pressure. At the end of this millennium, what was at the beginning of the century a craft industry—whose “charms” are now celebrated by libertine intellectuals, men and women alike—has been turned into an industry that is listed on the Stock Exchange, and the “oldest profession in the world” has been turned into a so-called career in its own right, one that can be exploited to the full. Some countries in the European Union have become pimps of an ultraliberalism that is as untrammeled as it is barbarous by getting involved in the regulation of so-called forced prostitution—what a tautology!—and profiting from the houses of torture and indignity known as eros-centers.² Prostitution reveals the truth about relations between West and East, North and South, rich and poor, and men and women. There are at least two million prostitutes in Europe. You’ll tell me that prostitution poses no threat to the majority of women; my answer is that this most complete form of sexual slavery, this commodification of thousands of millions of people because of their sex, is a threat to any women who is driven into poverty, into destitution.

As early as 1991, Amartya Sen, whom I often cite, noted that more than one hundred million women were absent from the roll call when the world population census was taken, if we apply the sex ratio of the developed countries at the international level.³ The French press sang his praises when he won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998 for his work on the Human Development Index (HDI),⁴ but not a word was said about what I call the ongoing gynocide. More than one hundred million women have disappeared because they were women. No one seems to be alarmed by this demographic deficit, which is due to feticide of female embryos, undernourishment of girl children, selective medical care, sexual mutilation, and childbirth in precarious conditions. As early as 1991, Sen took the view that this was “one of the more momentous, and neglected, problems facing the world today.”⁵ And yet nothing has changed. On the contrary, the problem meets with the same indifference. The number of female embryos that are aborted has risen steeply in India, South Korea, and China, where thousands of girl children are abandoned at birth and left to die. Every year over one million girl children are left to die somewhere in the world because they were born girls.⁶ Two million are subjected to the torture of excision and infibulation. At this very moment over sixty girl children are being mutilated somewhere in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and probably in Europe.⁷ As for incest, its devastating effects are incalculable: mutism, anorexia, depression, prostitution, suicide.⁸ And yet, in France, libertine intellectuals with high media profiles sing the praises of both incest and prostitution. In the poorest countries over six hundred women die each year, uncared for and in silence, as a result of pregnancy or childbirth.⁹

“If,” for reasons that could be analyzed, “hundreds of thousands of men were suffering and dying every year, alone and in fear and in agony, or if millions upon millions of men were being injured and disabled and humiliated … then we would all have heard about this issue long ago, and something would have been done.”¹⁰

In the armed conflicts that are devastating the world, women suffer mass rape and forced pregnancies in addition to the horrors of war. Denunciation of the rapes that occurred during the war in Bosnia did not stop the same tortures from occurring again in Rwanda, in Turkey, in Sierra Leone, or, this year, in Kosovo. Not to mention the shame and silence to which rape victims are usually condemned by their communities.¹¹ In Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Bangladesh, and Sudan, religious fundamentalists have wreaked havoc, and women are the favorite targets of their misogynist delirium. But peace does not always put an end to violence, and rape has always been a weapon of war all over the world. In our so-called advanced democracies a woman is raped every six minutes. In France one woman dies every day because she is a woman,¹² and one woman in seven is beaten. In Russia almost fifteen thousand women die every year as a result of conjugal violence; this is equivalent to the army’s losses over the ten years of war in Afghanistan.¹³ Being the wife of a singer (NTM) or being a famous singer in one’s own right (like Lio) provides no escape from the violence of lovers.¹⁴ And yet there is still no antisexist law in France to protect the lives and dignity of women. Unlike racism, misogyny is still regarded as an opinion and not a crime.

Nowhere in the world does the Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) show equality between the sexes.¹⁵ Poverty affects women first and foremost: 70 percent of the 1 billion, 700 million human beings living below the poverty line are women, and more than two thirds of the 840 million adults who are illiterate are women.¹⁶ Women, who carry out two-thirds of all the human labor performed in the world, receive only 10 percent of available income and only 1 percent of the world’s wealth. They are responsible for almost all the (nonmarket) production of living beings, along with most domestic labor, and most of the informal sector. None of this productive activity is included in national gross domestic product figures, and it is still part of an underground economy that is neither recognized nor remunerated.

Even in Europe, the continent where women’s rights are at their most advanced and where the principle of equality has been proclaimed, poverty is being feminized, as is shown by European Parliament reports from 1994 to 1999. And when they are economically active, women earn only three-quarters of a man’s wage for doing the same jobs. Despite the existence of an active and vigilant Committee on Women’s Rights, a clear decline was recorded during the 1994–1999 legislative session in which I served as a member of the European Parliament. The latest European directives fall into what, in 1998, I called the liberal trap: the agencies and instruments of the policy favoring equality have been devalued, credits for the fourth equal opportunities program have been cut by half, affirmative action to reduce the gap between the principle of equality and its implementation has been delegitimized by the Court of Justice, and there has been talk of abolishing the Committee on Women’s Rights.¹⁷

In France, one of the European countries in which women are most active in the workplace, their working conditions remain difficult and are becoming more and more so. When women are employed on a part-time basis, the reduction in the hours they spend at work does not give them more freedom; it burdens them with even more work in the home. Their jobs are now being taken away from them and given to men. Most of the women who opted to take the parental allowance for education have still not returned to work after their three years’ leave. There is no real child-care provision for very young children, and nothing has been done to make things easier for young mothers.¹⁸ On the contrary, and for the first time after thirty years of continuous progress, there has been a dangerous decline in women’s economic activity.¹⁹ All over the world women are being penalized because they bear children, because of their unique contribution to humanity.

As for the power to take decisions, whether economic or political, we can only speak of the powerlessness of women. Only 10 percent of the world’s parliamentarians are women.²⁰ Thanks to the voluntaristic policy of its government, which was encouraged by women’s parity movements, France has now achieved that international average, but ranks next to last in the European Union. There are now nine women in the government, but the policy on women that social justice demands has yet to be drawn up. In our country the aberrant dogma claiming that “women are men, just like other men” makes it impossible to envisage “affirmative action” where there is an absolute and urgent need for it if we are to reduce the gap between the principle of equality and real equality between men and women.²¹ And there is still no women’s commission in Parliament and no meaningful budget.

When they are not condemned to invisibility or slandered, women appear in the media only when they are being flattered as the bearers of the flame of femininity or reduced, as a second sex, next to—or to the left of or below—an athlete or a president. And even when they are leading figures in their own right, first in their own field, like Jeannie Longo,²² or like Nicole Fontaine, who has just been elected president of the European Parliament, they always take second place in the press.

Why so much misogyny everywhere? And what makes it so durable? Why is our century, so eager to denounce the evils that threaten humanity, the destruction of the earth and the seas, of animals and peoples, and every other injustice, still not concerned about the destruction of women and discrimination against women?

For the last thirty years I have not been satisfied simply to catalogue the permanent gynocide that is being perpetuated all over the planet. I have tried to analyze its causes. I think that this hatred for women, which is devastating the human race, is based upon a primordial, archaic, and universal but radically denied envy of women’s procreative capacity, of the specific role that, together with gestation, devolves upon them in the production of the human species. This envy, which is misogyny itself, is the basis for all the systems that exclude the other. It lies at the root of all racism and all exploitation.

We can see the effects of this monosexed universalism at every level—economic, sexual, political, and symbolic—and above all in the triumphant, untrammeled economic ultraliberalism that is, as we now recognize, responsible for the exclusion and the poverty of the majority, and especially of women, who are the proletariat of the human species. Men are demanding an ever greater tribute from women’s bodies and women’s production.²³ Worldwide economic growth derives mainly from levies on women and from their unrestricted exploitation. Owing to globalization, women are being used against women to promote the victory and power of ultraliberalism. That is the characteristic feature of slaves: their labor feeds into slavery. They have no choice but to be the agents of their own poverty. And we go on ignoring the genital mode of production of the living, which only women can experience, in order to force them into the industrial mode of production whether they like it or not. For ultraliberalism is not just an economy; it is also a philosophy of the freedom of the individual, the narcissistic and egocentric individual who takes the view that his freedom begins where the freedom of others ends.

Many people criticize ultraliberalism at the economic level, but no one talks about its libertine ethics. That ethics is the pinnacle, roof, or foundation of the ultraliberal economy. Ultraliberalism as an excess of capitalism in the economy and libertinage as sexual free trade come together in a pincer movement to block any process of liberation and to introduce, moreover, the additional bodily slavery known as the trade in women. That is why the sex industry, which is bound up with organized crime, is booming. At the same time, Sade and other libertines are returning in strength with their disemboweled mothers and their daughters subjected to incest, while transsexuals are being turned into models for a third sex: a woman without a uterus but with a penis is the old dream of men who fear women. Ultraliberalism means, finally, the rule of secondary differences, of differences between languages, cultures, and genders that not only do not challenge the phallic order but actually reinforce it. The difference between the sexes, which is the principal, primal difference, goes on being denied all the more.

Quite apart from the traditional misogyny of the advocates of maternity, with which we are all familiar, what makes it so difficult to think through the question of women is the fact that we are faced with a modern and supposedly progressive misogyny that is much more difficult to identify, because it throws the baby out with the bathwater and abolishes the difference between the sexes along with discrimination. I have endlessly tried to demonstrate the perverse effects of this logic by showing that they lead to the invisibility, nonexistence, and powerlessness of women and, quite simply, to their disappearance; they lead to a symbolic gynocide that reproduces the real gynocide.

And yet this logic of sameness is still promoted by the many nondifferentialist feminists who would like women to be men and who reduce procreation to nature, when it is in fact the human experience par excellence. I have been—and still am—met with violent opposition in France for trying to advance beyond the fence of uni(sex)versalism and to develop a “beyond feminism” in both thought and action. To assert that there are two sexes, while never forgetting that nothing that is human is natural, is not “differentialism”; it is a way of abolishing the foreclosure of women’s genitality.

A just society can neither overlook biological determinations nor exploit them because what it refuses to think through becomes a symptom. The denial of human production in its indispensable function and its necessary values is an alienating prescription, an absolute prohibition or a penalization of women. So long as the dissymmetry between the sexes with regard to procreation is not recognized and reconsidered at every level of society—economic, social, juridical, political, and symbolic—it will be an obstacle in the path of concrete equality.

“So long as one woman remains a slave, I too remain a slave; my freedom begins with the freedom of the other”; that is what we said at the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement. We did so in order to rebalance a universal history that was supposedly neutral, but that was in reality hommosexed and entirely based upon women’s enslavement and a system of apartheid;²⁴ in order to assert our existence, we had no option but to come together. The freedom and responsibility of women lies in the brave assertion of women’s solidarity with other women and their special competence and not in a denial of the fact that they are women. Equality and difference must go hand in hand; one cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the other. If we sacrifice equality on the altar of difference, we revert to the reactionary stance of traditional societies, and if we sacrifice the difference between the sexes, with the wealth of life it brings, on the altar of equality, we sterilize women and impoverish the whole of humanity.

As the procreators of living-speaking-thinking beings and as the anthropocultivators of the species, women are the source of human wealth, even though, all over the world, the vital task of reproducing the generations and renewing the labor force continues to be excluded from registration in any social, economic, professional, political, or cultural domain. We must ensure that the genesic function is recognized as vitally necessary to the human species and acquires political responsibilities. This is the right and duty of every female citizen, and it symbolizes the female libido proper to all women. Uterus envy might be sublimated into gratitude, the vital bond might be sublimated into the matricial, the maternal, and renewed, and the repression of what is foreclosed might be removed.

Once thought through, the experience of gestation will allow us to leave behind the passion for the One and advance toward knowledge of the two. A place of memory and a moment of becoming, a model for loving our neighbor and thinking of the other, this experience endows women with the genius of the living (génie du vivant) at the level of the real, with a democratic and xenophilic personality at the level of the imaginary and an ethical dimension at the level of the symbolic.

Thirty years ago, my MLF, and the theoretical practice of Psychanalyse et Politique in particular,²⁵ proclaimed themselves, not without a certain provocative intent, to be a civilizational movement that went beyond economic and social issues and proposed to bring about a novel and radical revolution: a revolution of the symbolic. That revolution is on the march. Without ever ceasing to be procreators, memories of the future handed down from mother to daughter and from one generation to the next, many women have also become creators in every domain—economic, social, environmental, scientific, political, and artistic. To mark the World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, women from all five continents asserted their radiant, diverse, colorful existence and their conception of a world for the third millennium, a world in which egocentrism and envy will be replaced by generosity and gratitudes a world that will reconcile the human species—men and women—with life. Thinking-living in the plural: that is our future.