Episode #089 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode’s on a lot of different things, but it’s centered most notably around Simone de Beauvoir and her revolutionary book entitled The Second Sex. I hope you love the show today.

So, whenever I make one of these things, my absolute worst nightmare is for you to come out on the other side of the episode having not learned anything, having never questioned what you already thought you knew about whatever topic we’re discussing that week. Now, this is a pretty easy task to accomplish when we’re just talking about some obscure Neoplatonist philosopher, right? I mean, short of you being somebody that scrubs toilets at a Neoplatonist museum every day, there’s probably going to be some sort of novelty you can get out of that episode.

But topics like the one we’re going to be talking about today are a little bit more difficult because, when it comes to a topic that’s as ubiquitous as feminism is, each and every person listening already has their own ideas. They already have their own snapshot of what feminism is based on all the prior experiences they’ve had with it throughout their life. And what makes it even more difficult is that there’s not many people out there that are just sort of ambivalent about the topic, excited to hear about it. Fact is, everyone listening to this right now currently has a very personal relationship with feminism. And most of the time feminism’s either your best friend in the world or one of your worst enemies.

So, for the sake of the episode today, just like when we do one of these episodes on God and I ask you to try to forget everything that you already think you know about God so we can have an openminded discussion without bringing too many biases to the table, today I’m going to ask you to take your views on feminism and think of them as, like, a hat. Let’s just take that hat off. Set it over here on the table. Don’t worry. I’m not going to steal your hat. It’s still going to be there when we get done with the episode. You can put it right back on and go about your day when it’s all over. But for the next 30 minutes or so let’s just set that hat over to the side. And let’s talk about the philosophical underpinnings of what is largely considered to be one of the most massive liberation movements in the history of the world, the second wave of feminism.

Now, real quickly, second wave. What does that mean? What’s he talking about waves? Well, the history of modern feminism in the United States, and most of the Western world for that matter, is typically broken down into things called waves, or these periods of time where progress surges forward rapidly and then slows down for a bit, periods of time where massive breakthroughs occurred. Now, most commonly, people think of feminism in terms of three big waves that have happened. Some people say we’re currently in the fourth wave of feminism. Maybe when the history books are written that’ll be the case. But, for the sake of the episode today, let’s just think of it in terms of three, alright?

Now, you can see examples of the first wave of feminism way back, really all the way back to the beginning of the 1800s in some cases. But, when people reference the first wave, most of the time they’re talking about the breakthroughs made during the women’s suffrage movement. Exact years depend on the specific country you’re talking about. But, in general, this wave in the early years secured things like women’s right to vote, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. And it continued to make progress all the way to the decades following World War II when it started to become very difficult to justify the idea that the role of woman is to just stay at home, sweeping the floor all day. I mean, it was World War II. When you’re not that far removed from a world where total war is being declared, when you’re not that far from times when practically every able-bodied woman was working tirelessly in factories every day to produce all the tanks, artillery, aircraft, ammunition, all the vital things we needed to be able to win the war, again, you can start to feel a little bit ridiculous supporting a law where women don’t have access to education or jobs.

This brings us to the beginning of the second wave of feminism. And a person considered to be one of the founding mothers of the second wave -- and, really, come on, well, maybe I’m being a little bit biased because she’s kind of a hero of mine. But there’s a case to be made that any other idea put forward during the second wave is ultimately building on the foundation that Simone de Beauvoir laid out in her book The Second Sex. Now, regardless of how much credit you want to give her, the book’s influence was undeniable. I mean, it’s not often that we see a philosopher’s work that is so relevant and so compelling during its time that the person that wrote it is actually able to see the effects that their ideas had on culture during their lifetime. This is one of those times. I mean, when does that happen? I feel like the only time you do see it happen is when there’s some sort of obvious injustice that somebody points out, and something needs to be done now. That’s a special kind of genius, I think.

Now, feminism is far from a single doctrine that can be distilled down into a single tagline. It’s incredibly nuanced. A lot of different competing schools of thought. They’re all aiming for slightly different goals. But they’re all based on what seems to be a pretty uncontroversial statement to make, that, for whatever reason, women have not had the same rights or opportunities that men have had over the course of history. Pick whatever one you want, whether it’s not having access to education; whether it’s being considered a piece of your husband’s property rather than a self; whether it’s not being able to have a political voice or the right to vote. Whatever one you want to pick, women have not had the same opportunities as men.

Now, when you’re somebody that’s hit with that reality for the first time in your life, it’s got to be a little confusing at first. I mean, the first question that must pop into your head is, “Why would anyone want to do that?” I mean, it seems clear that a culture that takes 50% of their potential brain power and immediately relegates them to a status of staying at home, vacuuming the floor, cooking hamburger helper all day -- it seems like that culture is a weaker culture for having done that. It seems like this decision wasn’t made by somebody that had the best interest of the culture in mind. Maybe they had some other interest in mind. Maybe it wasn’t a decision that somebody made at all.

This is the place where a lot of schools of feminist philosophy diverge. It’s in their answer to this question: Who or what is responsible for women not having the same rights or opportunities that men have had throughout history? And there’s tons of theories about this, right? It’s far from black and white. There’s a whole spectrum; you see feminists falling pretty much everywhere on it.

Some feminists believe that it’s not that there’s a particular person or group of people that’s responsible for it. It’s just, you know, times have changed. We used to live in very different times, hunter/gatherer times, times when it behooved us to have certain gender roles where the woman would stay at home, and she’d ensure that the next generation was going to prosper. And that by taking care of everything on the home front, that allowed her physically stronger male counterpart to spend more of his time securing some of the limited resources at their disposal, which increased her odds of surviving, which increased his odds of coming home with that particular day’s headless beaver. Point is, it was a symbiotic relationship. And, when civilization started to come along, the idea that women just stay at home and men just go out and try to impose their will on the world, we didn’t really think about it. It was just sort of a natural extension of those gender roles that we never questioned.

These feminists would say, it’s absolutely wrong that that’s the case. Women deserve equal rights and opportunities, and we should be doing everything we can to try to fix it. But maybe it wasn’t a concerted effort, leveraged upon women by some group. Now, just as a point of contrast, you have that kind of feminist, and then there’s other feminists that literally believe in some sort of, you know, like, a sexist illuminati, you know, like a cabal of men at the top, in back-room meetings, pulling the puppet strings throughout history. And they’ve passed this giant, leather-bound book down from generation to generation so that they can keep women these voiceless sex robots that clean up after them.

Now, either one of these may be the truth, but Simone de Beauvoir tends to fall somewhere in between. To put it simply, she thinks that the subjugation of women was done deliberately by men in the interest of having a monopoly over all the positions of economic or personal power. But that really doesn’t tell the whole story. And to understand the details of her position we have to talk about a couple different philosophical concepts, one of which is something called the subject/object dichotomy.

Remember when we talked about Descartes? Remember when Descartes looks out at everything that exists in the world, and he’s trying to find a way to organize it; and he arrives at the idea that things can be broken down into one of two types of things? Something is either a subject or an object, thought or extension, mind or matter. To Descartes, something is either a subject, a thinking thing, you know, the mind of an individual like your or me, or it's an object, something made of matter, something that has spatial dimensions but can’t make choices, something like a chair or a wheelbarrow, an object that becomes sort of like a monument in our subjective, thinking-thing experience of the world. A nice neat way that people like to put it is that subjects act, and objects are acted upon. Remember that? Well, that was back in the good old days, my friends, back when things were better. “Back when a man would tell you he’s either a subject or an object, and it meant something back then!”

Unfortunately, over the hundreds of years between Descartes and Simone de Beauvoir, a lot of great thinkers have taken a look at this idea of subjects and objects, people like Heidegger, Foucault. And, while we’ll probably do an entire episode on it one day, the important thing we need to understand now is that, as people thought more and more about this relationship between subjects and objects in the world, things started to get a little weird. It starts to look like there’s not such a clear-cut distinction between subjects and objects like we used to think. I mean, you look at how we interact with objects; you look at how other people that see themselves as subjects become objects in your subjective experience of the world; you look at how your subjective experience is only made possible by an object, meaning something with spatial dimensions and can’t make choices, you know, your body. You look at all this stuff, and there doesn’t seem to be a subject/object dichotomy. Subjects can’t exist without objects, and objects can’t exist without subjects. There’s an interconnectedness to it. Our existence guarantees that we are simultaneously both subject and object.

But what if you could remove the subject from someone? What would that make them? It’s a very simple math problem, folks. I mean, subject and object minus subject equals, that’s right, “and object.” I am hilarious. They’re an object. They’re an object, just an object; that’s the point, something that’s acted upon, something like a chair or a wheelbarrow, something that can be sat on or used for whatever purpose you want to use it for. This is what is called objectifying a person. Simone de Beauvoir would say that, when you look at the history of the world, any time -- whether it was a ruthless dictator, an imperialistic regime -- any time people have been enslaved, the party responsible for enslaving them has systematically removed their subjectivity. They’ve objectified this group of people so they don’t got to feel so bad about treating them like they’re a wheelbarrow.

Now, lucky for us, and I guess lucky for any aspiring dictators out there that may be listening -- get your pen and paper, my future benefactor -- lucky for you, philosophy has created a concise field manual for all the fun, creative ways that you can objectify a person. There’s seven of them. I’m reading this from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I’ll link to it in the page that corresponds with this episode. I refuse to call it show notes. I will never call them show notes. Number one is instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier’s purposes. Number two is the denial of autonomy: treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy or self-determination. Number three is inertness: treatment of a person as lacking in agency. Number four, fungibility: treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects. Number five, violability: treatment of a person as lacking in boundary integrity. Number six, ownership -- that’s a big one -- treatment of a person as something that is owned by another, meaning that they can be bought and sold. And number seven is the denial of subjectivity: treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings of the world need not be taken into account.

So, these are the ways that you remove that subject from someone and turn them into merely an object. Now, I’m sure hearing those you guys can look back at various points throughout history where people have been enslaved, and you can spot at least one of those in the tactic that was used to objectify them. I’m sure you can even just see it in the world around you, in your everyday life, right? For example, a guy might be sitting on the couch watching TV. He sees a girl provocatively dancing in a music video. And he may look at her as though she’s just a piece of meat, as a tool for the objectifier’s purposes, right? A girl might look at a guy like he’s just a blob of muscle, you know, this forklift that’s supposed to just carry heavy objects for me. Again, a tool for the objectifier’s purposes.

Now, in the ethics of Simone de Beauvoir, freedom is something that we should be always striving for. And what that means to her is that any project we undertake, anything that we decide to do in this world -- it’s very simple. It’s either getting yourself and other people further away from freedom, or it’s getting yourself and others closer to freedom. As we talked about before, freedom is not just being able to walk down the street, go to the convenience store, and buy a bag of Oreos; it’s also about understanding why you want to walk down the street and buy a bag of Oreos. Because if you don’t understand the “why,” you may be enslaved to any number of processes: advertising, addiction, anything.

Now, one thing’s for certain about this process of becoming free. It’s not a passive process, is it? I mean, think of somebody that’s physically enslaved with a shackle around their leg. You’re not going to free yourself from those chains if you’re just sort of passively going along with your life as a slave. No, it takes action. It takes revolution. It takes you embracing and showing that subjectivity, that you know you possess, that was robbed from you by the person that objectified you. It takes you imposing your will upon the world. Now, the bad part about this, to Simone de Beauvoir, is that that whole process of being a subject, that burns a lot of calories. There’s a lot of effort involved in being a subject, a lot of reading. And who reads anymore, really? It’s hard being a subject. And, because it’s so hard, Simone would say, human beings often have this temptation to sacrifice their subjectivity and move towards just being an object. It’s easy to be an object. It’s easy to just never think about anything, never get a job that produces much value for people, never educate yourself about the political or economic climate you live in. It’s so easy to just be an object that’s enslaved because it takes away that onus that you have to strive for true freedom.

In other words, there’s tension created by the fact that we are both subject and object. Simone de Beauvoir thinks this tension is fascinating. She wanted to be able to study it, so she creates two collections of behaviors, each one of them respectively embodying one side of this tension of being subject and object. She calls these two behavior sets transcendence and immanence: transcendence embodying all the virtues that go along with being a subject in the world, and immanence embodying all the virtues that go along with being an object in the world. Transcendent and immanent. To be transcendent is to strive for freedom, to be educated in understanding freedom, to reach out into the future, to impose your will upon the world, to have a strong voice. To be immanent is to be the opposite of that. It’s to be stagnant. It’s to be passive, submissive, self-effacing, modest, voiceless.

Now, think about that for a second. Which of those would you rather be? Would you rather be more transcendent or immanent? If one of your friends asked you for advice on how to live their life, which would you tell them to be, more transcendent or more immanent? What sort of advice do you think these existentialist philosophers we’ve been talking about would give? Well, let’s think about it. They talk about, you know, living authentically. They talk about rigorously doing an inventory of your thoughts and freeing yourself from the self-imposed chains that come with the way that you look at the world. They talk a lot about freedom, don’t they? When you’re lost in the finite, you’re not free. You’re enslaved by some aspect of culture that you’re just blindly going along with. When you’re lost in the infinite, you’re not free. You’re incapable of taking action because you’re enslaved to the process of decision making. When you’re living your life based on Sartre’s bad faith, you are enslaved to some convenient story that you’re telling yourself.

Point is, all of these different ways of becoming a true self rather than a passenger, they all involve these transcendent virtues -- don’t they? -- not immanent ones. Again, if you have a shackle around your ankle, freeing yourself from those chains involves you being transcendent, actively going out there and imposing yourself upon the world, certainly not immanent, sitting back passive, submissive, voiceless, right?

Now, here’s the key point. Simone de Beauvoir would say, how convenient that transcendent qualities are all the qualities that we see as masculine qualities, and the immanent qualities are all the ones we see as feminine. She looked around her at the women of her time and realized that practically every one of them is relegated to this status of not having an education, not having a job. No, the woman’s role is to stay at home and clean stuff. The woman’s role is to be passive and to always yield to the man of the house who has the final say, to submit to the will of the man. It’s not ladylike to be loud and opinionated or to argue politics at the dinner table. It’s not ladylike to not be modest, you know.

“These are some great cookies you made here, Mrs. Johnson.” “Oh, no, no, you’re too, you’re too nice. I just threw them together. It’s really nothing. It’s nothing.” Not ladylike to say, “Yeah, damn right, those are some good cookies. Third place at the county fair, thank you very much. I got a ribbon. They gave me a ribbon for my cookies. You know what I do sometimes when I’m at home alone? I like to wear that ribbon around the house. Just, it’s what I do.” Not very ladylike.

And, in this world where it’s the role of the woman in a relationship to stay at home and just keep quiet, in that world the woman embodies all of these immanent characteristics. And, if she doesn’t have the choice of whether or not to be less immanent, she’s essentially forced into a relationship with a really lopsided balance of power. I mean, think about it. If one day the guy decides he wants to start sleeping around with his secretary, what can the woman really do about that? She doesn’t have an education. She doesn’t have financial independence. She is completely at his mercy. What choice does she really have? She has to decide whether she’s satisfied with her husband sleeping around or, or what, really? What, she leaves him? Moves back in with her parents? I mean, finds some other guy to be dependent on? Where’s her subjectivity? Where’s her ability to impose herself upon the world? Where’s her ability to transcend?

Simone de Beauvoir would say that what we commonly think of as feminine qualities are a social construct, a social construct created in a calculated way to ensure that women stay enslaved. To remove their subjectivity and make them into an object, a doll. Simone says that we often give little girls dolls to play with, and it’s kind of funny because it sort of foreshadows what their role is going to be when they get older. Your job is to get dressed up, comb your hair just so, and keep quiet over there in the corner while bending to the will of whatever wants to play with you at that moment. She says, you’re not born a woman; you’re made to become one. She says, women are the byproduct of two different histories. One is the history that we talk about in history books, you know, the cultural context she was born into, the expectations about the role of woman that have been laid out so far. And the second history is her own personal history, her childhood, her upbringing where all these feminine qualities, these expectations about how she should be behaving are force-fed into her by her parents, friends, family, teachers, everyone.

Simone talks about studies that they’ve done. Scientists look at the way that parents interact with little boys versus little girls, and it seems like there’s a clear difference between the way that people interact with boys versus girls. Apparently, people are much more likely to be firm and aggressive when they’re disciplining a boy. They’re much more likely to run around with the little boy and play with him, you know, momma’s little monkey. Whereas with girls, parents are much more likely to give her something like a coloring book, you know, something quiet that passes the time. They’re much more likely, when she does anything good, to tell her that she’s a beautiful little girl, giving her this repetitive cue that her worth and the way that people view her is directly connected to how good she looks. There’s tons of examples of these differences. And Simone’s saying, don’t underestimate the effect that this has on the behavior of these kids when they become adults.

Now, it gets crazier than that. I mean, think about this for a second. It’s not like the parents that are giving these kids these cues are bad people that are trying to actively marginalize women. No, they’re just doing it how their parents did it. In their eyes, this is just how you treat little girls. This is how girls behave in our culture, and this is how boys behave. But where did that come from? Who created this standard of how people are supposed to be behaving? And, if Simone’s right that this is some sort of organized operation to make women into these submissive objects, where did men organize this? I mean, did they have some sort of constitutional convention one day where they figured all this stuff out? Simone de Beauvoir would say that the root cause, what made it even possible for men to create this standard of what being feminine is, happened a long, long time ago in a completely different world. We talked a bit about that world earlier.

The world used to be organized in such a way that how economically prosperous you were was directly related to how physically strong you were. It really was that simple. I mean, look, you could be 4’8” tall. You could be the best rock thrower in the world. You could be the best in the world at throwing rocks at bunnies and just stockpiling a ton of food, but if some 6’11” dude shows up on your front porch, those are his bunnies now. Now, biologically, men have a huge advantage over women in the area of physical strength. Resources are limited, and this forced women to have to be economically dependent on men. Time went on. Men controlled the resources, so naturally they control the government. Naturally, they’re the ones who write the laws about what women are able to do. Naturally, they’re the ones that write the books that depict women. They’re the ones that talk about what it means to behave as a woman behaves.

Maybe there was never an organized constitutional convention for it, but men were born into a similar world of two histories, one where they were told what the role of women is, one where they enjoy having the fruits of all this political and economic power. I mean, let’s be real. What survival-oriented creature doesn’t enjoy controlling certain aspects about their existence? Now, finding themselves born into this position, men, at first through physical strength and then systemically through laws and culture, kept women in this place where their role is to be dependent objects.

One thing that makes Simone unique among feminist philosophers is that she talks a lot about the “why” of all this. She gives a few really interesting reasons for why men would do this to women. She says -- well, I mean, here’s how she sets it up. She says, in the sense that men are capable of being transcendent, they personify this concept that we often talk about in philosophy called the self, but what does that make women? They aren’t capable of being transcendent. They’re sentenced to this status of being an object. Women aren’t selves, really, in a philosophical sense. They’re sort of this other thing. She says, woman is the other. She says, being a human being seems to mean being a man because being a woman is being this other thing, being this collection of characteristics that’s everything that the self rejects: passivity, submissiveness, voicelessness, etc.

This sets her up to make a pretty interesting point, I think. She said that one of the main reasons why men might have done this to women is because deep down their biggest fear is that they become what they’ve engineered for women to become: passive, submissive slaves to the world around them with no voice to really change it. Maybe by making women embody this immanence, when men have control over women, maybe they feel like they have control over that thing that they fear the most.

Now, some of you may be saying, “Okay, I get it. I get where you’re coming from, Simone. Feminine traits are a social construct, but isn’t this a little bit of a chicken-or-the-egg thing, Simone? What I mean is, certainly men wrote all the books. But did men write books about passive, submissive women and engineer these feminine qualities, or did men just write books about the way that women naturally behave? In other words, is life imitating art, or is art imitating life? Couldn’t it be that women are just naturally less competitive than guys are? Couldn’t it be that women just like staying at home more, tending to the nest, buying decorative totes at Target? Couldn’t it be that women just care a lot more about raising a child than they do about changing the world?”

This is a key question that’s at the heart of the issue. It’s the question of gender essentialism. And, by the way, real quick, it’s not like the only people that would ask a question like that are people that believe women are weaker than men. No, feminist thinkers fall on that side of it too. There are differentialist feminists, and they’d be the kind of person that would say something like, you know, “Why do we gotta pretend like everyone’s the same all the time? Why do we gotta pretend like men and women are exactly the same thing?” No, it’s not a crazy belief. It’s not a sexist belief to think that maybe men and women are born with different essences, different predispositions that account for the vast differences between male and female behavior. Differentialist feminists might say that we should embrace these differences, separate but equal under the eyes of the law, right?

So, when you look at one of those studies that talk about how only 1% of CEOs are women, and what are we going to do to fix it? Some feminists would say, that’s not a very reasonable way to go about identifying sexism. After all, men and women are, by their very nature, different. You can’t gauge equality based on how many women are just doing what guys want to do. Maybe, for whatever reason, when women have all the options available to them, they just choose different career paths than men do.

Now, Simone de Beauvoir would fall more on the side of egalitarian feminists, or people that think, yes, we do have certain biological differences. And, yes, those differences account for a certain variance in behavior. But they certainly don’t explain the massive chasm that separates how a culture expects men and women to behave. Femininity is a social construct, not something imbued into women at conception. That’s a key point. Remember, Simone de Beauvoir is an existentialist. She believes that existence precedes essence. She doesn’t believe in some sort of preordained set of personality traits or essential properties that make you you.

You know, it’s interesting to think about all the different places people might fall in answering these questions, right? I mean, I often run into people that agree with the notion that there is no preordained essence to what they are. They agree that existence precedes essence. But in that same conversation they’ll reference gender, and they’ll say something like, “That’s just how girls are. That’s just how guys are.” It’s interesting. Reminds me of how people often talk about human nature, right? They’ll say things like, “Look at history. Look at our bloody past. It is obviously just human nature to be selfish and warlike and to not care about your fellow man and to conquer as much land as you possibly can.” But think about that for a second. What’s interesting to think about is, imagine human history where instead of men being predominantly at the helm of society, imagine it was all women now. How different would the history of the world be? Would there be as much war if we had these passive, modest, submissive people in all the positions of power?

When we say something like “human nature,” aren’t women half of whatever that human nature thing is? So, is it just the nature of men to be warlike? Also, can women really take credit for being so much less warlike. I mean, haven’t they just been conditioned to be passive and submissive? Would women be just as warlike as men if they were fed the same cues from birth that boys are? Or is there some essence to their being that would have made it different? Is there some essence to their being that just makes them like cinnamon candles from Bath & Body Works? Is there something there? Just some questions to think about.

Now, the echoes of Simone de Beauvoir still ring out to this day, and the world is a very different place now than it was before she wrote The Second Sex. Really is a testament to her greatness. Now, certainly there’s been tons of progress made in terms of women having equal rights and opportunities. The question that sort of pervades the modern dialog is, how much more progress still needs to be made? I mean, sure it’s great how far we’ve come, but how much further do we have to go? Or, I guess the better question is, how can you accurately quantify one instance of sexism? Because the world’s a very different place now than it was in the time of Simone de Beauvoir, right? I mean, back then you could easily identify and point at what was a very obvious forced lifestyle of being disenfranchised. I mean, it was very clear back then that women were being marginalized.

In today’s world -- and of course I’m talking about the Western world, here, right? Shout out to all my ladies out there holding it down in places that the second wave hasn’t reached yet. In today’s world, it's not as obvious as it was back then. The problem in today’s world, if there is one, is much more insidious. It’s covert. It exists in the minds of the voters. It exists in the minds of people that are at the head of industry or hiring for these fields that allow someone to impose their will upon the world. For example, if you’re a woman and you want to be a scientist, and you want to be in one of these fields where you can exercise your transcendence. And you’re really smart, and you have a great employment history and letters of recommendation, PhD, the whole thing. And you go in for an interview, and you pass the initial interview. And they narrow it down to four applicants. You wait around for weeks, and after weeks of waiting they tell you that, sorry, you didn’t get the job. We’re going to have to go in another direction. You find out on Facebook in two weeks, it was given to a man.

Here’s the insidious nature of sexism in our modern society. The guy making that hiring decision, he could be sexist, no question. It could have come down to your application and the other guy’s application, and he could have looked at them both and said, “You know what, boys? I don’t want somebody crying all the time around here. If I wanted somebody crying, I could go home to my wife, am I right? [harrumphing laugh]” He could have went up to the other guy and said, “You know what, man. You got a great resume, great work history, but I think we both know why you’re getting this job, brother. Semper Fi. Semper Fi, brother. [Fist bump]” He could have done all that stuff.

But, on the other hand, maybe the other guy was just a better fit. Maybe he was just more qualified than you were. This creates a dynamic where you can assume for the rest of your life that the only reason you didn’t get that job was because somebody else was more qualified than you, when in reality it was just that the guy doing the hiring was a covert sexist. But the inverse is also true, right? It creates a dynamic where you can go the rest of your life thinking the only reason you didn’t get that job was because you’re a woman, when the guy may have just thought that the other applicant was more qualified.

Now, in both these scenarios, a la William James, nothing changes about your conscious experience of what actually occurred. The only thing that changes is what you’re inferring is going on inside of that guy’s head. This is the plight of the modern feminist, I think. How do you reliably quantify one bout of sexism when it usually relies on you inferring somebody else’s motives? I honestly think this is why it’s so common in our society when somebody says something, and if it even comes close to resembling something that you could even interpret as sexist, then the witch hunt begins, then the burden of proof is on that person. They’re called a sexist, thought of as a sexist, and now it’s their job to convince everybody of why they’re not a sexist.

But, anyway, there’s many more episodes we can do on this subject, obviously. It just comes down really to what you people want from me. Send me an email requesting what you want to hear about. Think of it as one vote in a democratic process that will create what the next episode is.

Maybe I can sum it up like this. What seems clear is that the future of feminism has its own unique challenges. But I think the genius of Simone de Beauvoir and her impact on the world -- I think that remains unchallenged, whether you think it’s more insidious and difficult to quantify than ever before or whether you think the problem is better than it ever has been. I guess, in the mind of this humble observer that still has tons more to learn in his life, maybe it's both.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.