Submission, A Thought Experiment

On the Meaning of Woman

Consider this a thought experiment. What if being a woman means being submissive to a man? What might we discover about ourselves and each other if we were to grant this proposition without resentment, competition, or pain? What if we were to see the power dynamic of sexual difference, in all its inegalitarian offensiveness, as something true, and delectable? What if we take our bodies as instructive, not just our wills, and consider what it means to be yielding, receptive, and hospitable, an instrument for others’ use? What if the feminine stereotypes we’ve worked so tirelessly to eradicate we were to embrace instead? Would we see something new, a blind spot revealed?

The question “what is a woman?” is one that has been asked at least since Simone De Beauvoir’s magisterial work The Second Sex. The answer that De Beauvoir gives is that a woman is someone who should be like a man. De Beauvoir’s work, for all its brilliance, appears motivated primarily by resentment and competition: competition with men for men’s independence, and resentment against motherhood for its resulting loss of freedom. The problem is, of course, that women are not men. This is followed by a second problem: does being a woman inherently mean not wanting to be a woman? That is, is the desire to have what men have, independence, assertiveness, authority – what De Beauvoir terms “transcendence” – and the desire not to be like a woman, dependent and embodied – “immanent,” in De Beauvoir’s terms – its own form of misogyny? Is the last eighty years of feminist thought based on the one simple idea that women hate womanhood? What might it look like to love womanhood instead?

The first thing we may discover is that to be a woman or a man is relational, and so it is personal. We define each other. Through each other we become a woman and a man. Contemporary culture may aim for egalitarian androgyny, but it is a lonely condition. We may next notice that what we are conditioned to think of as vices might, from a different angle, appear as virtues. We may see the grit required for submission, the strength of will it requires. We may see that there is freedom in surrender, and beauty in obedience. We may discover that freedom means submitting willingly to nature’s limits rather than indulging unrestrained human will. As women, we may discover that joy comes of being made an instrument for others’ use. And that humility might be elevating. We may begin to valorize qualities that we commonly view with suspicion and begin to see our culture’s virtues as shallow by comparison.   

The answers this substack might find will no doubt make us uncomfortable, not least of all because there is much truth to the feminist accusations of men’s oppression of women. We will have to grapple with what it means to be a man, too. The difficult part for us is to do this without anger and a righteous desire to correct men, which is our contemporary default position. How might sexual difference, especially for a woman, be aspirational rather than something to overcome? The premise of these posts is that the wisdom of submission is one we may want to recover if we are to value women as women rather than as the second sex.

These posts are unapologetically sexist. They will look at sexual difference and consider what these differences might mean, existentially. The essays here will do something other than describe the sexuality of women as a product of evolutionary history (as though our preferences became fixed in the Pleistocene savannahs), nor will they offer guidance on how to live one’s best life. Here instead we may suggest a way of thinking about purpose and meaning in a way that goes beyond mere biology and mere happiness. The ideas will be inescapably old-fashioned, indeed ancient, in their effort to find meaning in our embodied and sexed existence. The posts will pursue the idea that there is something good, beautiful, and true about the order of creation. To take this thought experiment seriously, we are going to have to temporarily suspend our faith in progress. We will address the meaning-crisis of our modern era. If we are going to find meaning in creation we will inevitably have to posit the idea of a Creator. Illuminating the entirety of this book is the idea that there is a God who wants good things for us.

If we are going to attempt earnestly and seriously to see the conditions of women and men from a new perspective, unresentful though unequal, we are going to need help. Shakespeare will be our guide. The most human of humans, Shakespeare was somehow able to suspend judgement when he looked at humanity; this is what Keats called Shakespeare’s negative capability. Shakespeare is content to give us the full scope of our potential for good and for evil. He is able to comfortably hold contractions, tensions, uncertainties and paradoxes without trivializing them. Shakespeare, too, is interested in meaning more than happiness. He sees us as we are. Shakespeare is a realist, often brutally so. But he is also untiringly hopeful and has a deep affection for humanity in all our tainted glory.

In these posts we will look at different aspects of submission, its relation to duty, to surrender, and to freedom. Ultimately this thought experiment aims toward joy. It is my contention that submission opens us up to more of ourselves. Further, it is my contention the female submission allows women to experience their bodies as a joy for others, an act of self-giving which I have found to be the most delicious, the most joyous, and the sexiest thing I have ever known. The goodness of life is not to be found in the unfettered exercise of will, but in joy; not in diligent surveillance and control of one’s body, but in a blissful lack of self-consciousnesses about it; not in guarding self-respect against humiliations, but in a wellspring of confidence in one’s unshakable dignity.