The misrecognition of women

In her most celebrated essay “Throwing like a Girl,” Iris Marion Young revisits the obvious stereotype that is troubling the feminine body. Young observes that whenever a woman does something that involves her physical strength, she is unable to use her body to the fullest extent. Young’s essay pays attention to the remark that girls do not “bring their whole bodies into the motion as much as the boys.” She points out that a woman often “assumes and takes herself up as fragile.” In fact, whenever it is said that someone hits like a girl, one means to denigrate what a woman can actually do, almost universally ascribing human weakness to the female anatomy.

Young appeals to the phenomenological description of human experience. She writes that “every human existence is defined by its situation; the particular existence of the female person is no less defined by the historical, cultural, social, and economic limits of her situation.” She says the problem is not with female bodily movement, but in how the perception of the female body is constrained by many types of social relations, masculine norms, and oppressive aesthetic standards. The female body is imprisoned in a world that is mistakenly defined by society’s obsession with everything agile but temporary.

But the bodies of a man and a woman, according to Young, are not different. Any man’s heart is not stronger than a woman’s. They are the same when it comes to the capacity to love and find the will to live. The problem is the way society is oriented and framed, a thing that makes most women feel weaker than men. In this view, Young says that culture and society often define the female as “other, as the inessential correlate to man, as mere object and immanence.” As a result, to be a woman means to be wrongly denied of one’s “subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity that are definitive of being human and that in a patriarchal society are accorded the man.”

The failure to achieve particular things in life is not a question of sexuality. Rather, it pertains to the individual’s lack of will. Yet, millions of women in sexist societies are wrongly preordained to believe that they can’t do what a man can do, although in reality everything that is wanting in a person’s life is nothing but a question of self-determination, not of physical or bodily strength. Yet, women are unnecessarily judged as emotional. They are often arbitrarily told to inhibit from those things that men are usually tasked to accomplish.

Many women are forced to be the way most men want them to be—as objects of sheer male pleasure. By implication, a woman has to live “the constant threat of the invasion of her feminine space.” In today’s consumer culture, a woman is coerced into thinking of herself as a thing of beauty that must give instant gratification to men, rather than as an independent subject who can move things and determine how the world must be. In this regard, the female body is objectified. This is the sort of misrecognition of the female body that we find on racy billboards, posters, and TV shows that peddle the female body for entertainment.

And so, any young girl discovers herself overly handicapped by male dominance. She finds herself less educated and, hence, deprived of the basic entitlements to a decent standard of living. Society tells her that human freedom is limited, that she cannot experience or enjoy those things in which boys can easily fit. This develops a negative prejudice on what women are truly capable of achieving in their lives.

The task at hand for a society of equals is to overcome the continuing misrecognition of women. Every woman should continue to work on her dreams in this chaotic world dominated by ruthless and evil men. Indeed, there is a Malala Yousafzai in every young girl out there, incontrovertible proof that every woman owns that enormous courage and superior faith in herself.

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Christopher Ryan Maboloc is assistant professor of philosophy at Ateneo de Davao University.