The Battle Against the Patriarchal Order in Society

The Battle Against the Patriarchal Order in Society

By V. Lucero

Abstract

This document analyses the different ways that the philosophers Laura Mulvey and Simone DeBeauvoir see women in our society; based on their books Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and The Second Sex respectively. Mulvey focuses on how women are portrayed in the film industry for the pleasure of men while DeBeauvoir emphasizes about how women have been depicted as inferior in society as a whole.

Introduction

Borders exist between man and woman. Men are the "superior" race in human society and women the "inferior" race. Women are now trying to destroy those borders by expressing themselves through literature and feminist movements. The following is an example of the battle against the patriarchal order in society.

Laura Mulvey explains in her book "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" how the cinema influences on the audience's minds relating the content of the events in the films with real life events. Mulvey tries to understand how women are portrayed in the patriarchal order of the world.

Whereas Simone DeBeauvoir, in her book titled "The Second Sex" focuses on the different ways women have been treated for centuries as the inferior sex. Women are defined as such because of their femininity, but DeBeauvoir explains the reason why women should be defined only as human beings.

Both philosophers write about the way women have been portrayed for centuries in the world for the convenience of men.

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey mentions in her book the idea of the "paradox of phallocentrism" which is basically the absence of a penis in women and their desire to possess one. She also mentions visual pleasure experienced when women are portrayed as erotic, which is the basis of films in the world of patriarchal order to influence the subconscious minds of the viewers. Her goal is to destroy these concepts about women in society.

Mulvey explains how the cinemas are strategically designed in order to absorb the total attention of the viewers on the film's content. The darkness of the cinemas and the allusion of being watching another person's private life portrayed in the film is one way to disconnect the audience from reality; at the same time, the audience feels identified with what is being shown in the films with their own repressed desires.

In fact, the significance of the films is not the women's role or erotic appearances; what is really important at the end is the way men dominate women in the scenes, satisfying the male fantasies. Women are depicted in movies for the pleasure of men. Mulvey states: "... by means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too" (Mulvey 484). The author then explains or describes the term scopophilia, which means the erotic pleasure experienced when subjecting another person as an object, and which could become pervasive.

However, men enjoy seeing women portrayed as erotic object because women can provoke feelings of uncertainty and fear on them, not only feelings of dominance and power. Mulvey states that women remind men of the possibility of castration. Men, in order to avoid the anxiety, turn to fetishistic scopophilia, "...builds up of the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself" (Mulvey 484). Men also try to avoid the anxiety by investigating the mysteries of women.

Simone DeBeauvoir

On the other hand, Simone DeBeauvoir, in her writing "The Second Sex" focuses on how women are portrayed in the political patriarchal world. According to her way of looking at the actual situation of female humans, it seems that women need to be feminine in order to be considered as such. She does not want women to be treated as different, she wants women be treated as human beings no different than man. The author rejects the idea of women been considered "feminine" because, to her, this adjective will always be a sign of weakness.

DeBeauvoir states that women had been delegated to a lower position in the world of men. She mentions the comments of some writers such as Aristotle, who wrote: "The female is a female by virtue of certain lack of qualities; we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness." She also mentions St. Thomas, who stated that women are "an imperfect man" (DeBeauvoir 416).

According to DeBeauvoir,