Does patriarchy force women to live in bad faith? What might this mean? What would it look like? How does one then resist it? Or is Sartre’s analysis of bad faith too blunt to capture the considerations and complications that arise when we shift the emphasis from the privileged (i.e., male/masculine) to the oppressed (i.e., female/feminine) subject? If so, how might we refine Sartre’s theory of bad faith to account for subjects with different relations to privilege?
Bad faith as Sartre describes it, has the following components: It is to hide an unpleasant truth, or to present as truth a pleasing untruth. It is similar in nature to the idea of cognitive dissonance, where one is caught in the position of holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. One does this when they try to convince that a desired object beyond their reach is in fact not as desirable as once thought. One option is (from my understanding) the holding of an apparent truth; whereas contrariwise, there is the truth that we wish was the truth. Steven Colbert describes that as “Truthiness”, or the preference of truths that one wishes were true over that which is actually true. Sartre says that the person living in bad faith is both the crafty deceiver, and the gullible decievee (that's a word, right? Because it fits, and I'm not changing it). What I find interesting, is that the deceivers, in Sartre's perspective, MUST know the truth very accurately in order to be any successful at being believed by themselves.
Sartre tells of a woman who is out with a particular man for the first time. “She knows very well his intentions, and that she will soon have to make a decision” (Sartre pg 89). He argues that she wants to delay this decision as much as possible, and as such convinces herself that the man's advances, and suggestive flirty words and gestures are little more than that. Despite how hypersexual his thoughts may be, to her he is built up as the perfect gentleman. And for what? To hide the fact that sooner rather than later she will have to address his desires with her own. This woman is said to be exhibiting bad faith.
On the issue of women and bad faith, it could be argued that a woman's mental self-image in a patriarchal society is an example of that sort of cognitive dissonance. Iris Young investigated the complexity of female body comportment and self-image in “Throwing Like A Girl”. In it, it was explained that the woman in a patriarchal society lives a contradiction; seeing herself as someone (else). The issue with this is that it does not necessarily allow her to believe that she can accomplish whatever task she envisions before her. She may be convinced therefore that a task is beyond her capabilities, without even attempting it. This presents her body as a burden, and that it is faced with these challenges of which she has no great influence or determination
I don't see this necessarily as a imposition of bad faith. For if the deceiver must know of the exact truth in order to deceive the decievee, then that would imply that in order for the woman living her contradiction in a patriarchy to deceive herself, then she must know on some level that she is capable of that which she thinks she is not capable of. Capable she may be, the fact remains that if she has no knowledge of this truth, then the rules of deception do not apply to her anymore than they apply to “the man who is ignorant of what he is perceived to be lying about (Sartre pg 87). If the woman is not in possession of the truth of her capabilities, then she can not be in bad faith for having presented as truth that untruth. To answer the question of whether or not a patriarchal society forces women to live in bad faith, I believe the following until proven otherwise; that if the society as a whole hides that truth from the the group, then that group is by no means living in bad faith.
However, as with the woman on the date with the closet freak mentioned above, in order for women convinced of an untrue incapability within themselves to overcome this, then a realization must occur that hurries the decision making process. For the woman on her night out, it was the man holding her hand. For women in a patriarchy, this is the perhaps the point when they witness the testimonials of other women who have overcome this obstacle. Whenever one is presented with knowledge, they are also presented with both the tools for a decision, and the decision itself. This may have been the point of action rallies in the feminist movement, and the work of activists like Gloria Steinem. Not particularly for the acts themselves to bring trouble, but to shake the individual with this truth, and stir the individual to the point where the would be deceiver and the would be decievee would maintain the same true truth (despite the fact that some may hold on to the untrue truth). Perhaps the feminist movement gave women the capability to live in bad faith? From this I draw that it is possible and highly likely that bad faith itself may be a bad thing, but the capacity to have it is good.
No comments:
Post a Comment