Simone de Beauvoir: Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (Pt. 2)

IV. BB and the Feminine Mystique

Four years after de Beauvoir published her fascinating little study of Bardot and the Lolita syndrome, the American feminist Betty Friedan gave us her seminal work The Feminine Mystique (1963).

In it, Friedan examines the problem that has no name - namely, the pressure exerted upon women to fulfil an ideal of femininity that is mysterious yet, nevertheless, rooted in biology and closely related to the creation and origin of life.

According to the proponents of this feminine mystique, it's a fatal mistake to think women are just like men, or can behave and become just like them. Instead, they should accept and value their own nature "which can find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love".

It is this kind of thinking that has succeeded, says Friedan, in burying millions of women alive. But it is this kind of thinking that Bardot seems to challenge. And thus whilst all men are surely drawn to her seductiveness, by no means are they kindly disposed towards her. BB simply doesn't play the game that they are used to and expect of her:

"Her flesh does not have the abundance that, in others, symbolizes passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and when she strips she is not unveiling a mystery. She is showing her body, neither more nor less, and that body rarely settles into a state of immobility. She walks, she dances, she moves about. Her eroticism is not magical, but aggressive. In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as she is a prey. The male is an object to her, just as she is to him. And that is precisely what wounds masculine pride."

In other words, BB silently asserts her equality and her dignity; she's never the victim and never anybody's slave or fool. She disturbs men by refusing to lend herself to phallocratic fantasy or idealistic sublimation, restoring and limiting sexuality to the body itself; to her breasts, her bottom, her thighs, etc.

De Beauvoir writes approvingly of the manner that Roger Vadim brings eroticism back down to earth in a society with spiritualistic pretensions. For when love has been disguised "in such falsely poetic trappings", it's refreshing to see a woman on screen who is libidinally prosaic.  

Having said that - and perhaps reminding herself that existentialism is, after all, a humanism - de Beauvoir regrets the rather dehumanising aspect of Vadim's project; i.e. the manner in which he reduces the world, things and bodies "to their immediate presence" (without history or a context of meaning).

Vadim does not seek the viewers' emotional complicity; he doesn't care if we find his films unconvincing or fail to relate to his characters. We know no more about Bardot's character (Juliette) at the end of And God Created Woman than at the beginning, despite having seen her naked. In effect, Vadim de-situates her sexuality, says de Beauvoir, turning spectators into frustrated voyeurs "unable to project themselves on the screen."

No wonder so many men describe (and condemn) Bardot as a pricktease [allumeuse].


V. Afterword on BB and Free Speech

De Beauvoir closes her little study of Bardot by expressing her hope that the bourgeois order will not find a way to silence her, or compel her to speak lying twaddle: "I hope that she will not resign herself to insignificance in order to gain popularity. I hope she will mature, but not change."

One can't help wondering what de Beauvoir, who died in 1986, would have made of the woman Bardot is today ...

Would she still declare her to be the most liberated woman in France and an engine of women's history? Would she regard her recent statements on immigration and Islam as a legitimate expression of free speech, or as an unacceptable form of hate speech?

Bardot certainly hasn't been silenced or resigned herself to insignificance in order to gain popularity - but has she matured, or simply become an elderly reactionary? She's certainly changed. But then, as Bardot herself says, only idiots refuse to do so and she doesn't give a fig about politically correct forms of feminism.  


Notes

Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, (Four Square Books / The New English Library, 1962).

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (W. W. Norton, 2001).

To read part one of this post, click here.

On the Freedom to Hate: A Review of Camille Paglia's "Free Women, Free Men"

If interested in seeing Ms Paglia speak about her new book and take questions 

on her work, then click here to watch an event at Brooklyn Public Library 

that was live-streamed on YouTube on 16 March, 2017

Self-confessed Sadean schoolmarm, Camille Paglia, has a new book out and depending on how well disposed one is towards Ms Paglia will determine how one receives this retrospective collection of articles, excerpts, lectures, interviews, and half-a-dozen photos taken in her prime that "visually transmit [her] philosophy of street-smart Amazon feminism". 

Those who can't stand her - and there are many such people - will dismiss it as little more than an exercise in nostalgia; a rather sad attempt by a woman of seventy to relive the past when, briefly, she seemed to have her finger pressed firmly on the pulse of contemporary culture. Those, however, who still find her a bold and brilliant - if sometimes bonkers - writer and critic, will doubtless accept her own assessment of the work and its value:

"I believe that my heterodox ideas and conclusions continue to have manifest resonance for many readers because they are based not on a priori theory and received opinion but on wide-ranging scholarly research and close observation of actual social behaviour in our time."

   

Quite! Only not quite quite ...

For when you start to read the book you soon discover that those heterodox ideas she refers to are often no more than a mishmash of secondhand and often highly suspect concepts and clichés borrowed from her favourite authors and TV shows and if they do continue to resonate it's only in the minds of those susceptible to her brand of messianic pop-philosophy.

Someone once compared Sexual Personae (1990) - the 700 page tome that established her name and for which she remains best known - to Mein Kampf. That's a little unfair, but you know exactly what they mean; the sweeping generalisations and violent assertions; the egomania and wild conflations of the personal and the political; the mix of vulgarity and rancour ... And then there's the bad points - ba-dum tss!

(Don't worry, Paglia loves witty one-liners like this and prides herself on her use of them "inspired by Oscar Wilde and innumerable Jewish comedians, including Joan Rivers".)

One gets the impression that Paglia, like Hitler, feels she's the victim of a conspiracy and that her entire career has been one long struggle against Lügen, Dummheit und Feigheit - or, in her case, poststructuralism, political correctness and the wrong type of feminism. Paglia argues that these forces curtail freedom of thought and expression and deny what she terms "the common sense realities of everyday life", such as gender binarism and the immutable laws of nature. 

Thus, Paglia wishes to make it perfectly clear in her introduction that whilst her "dissident brand of feminism" is grounded in childhood experiences of dressing up as Robin Hood, Napoleon, and Hamlet, this "passionate identification with heroic male figures" never for one moment encouraged her to think that she was actually a boy or that "medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life".

For whilst perfectly happy to engage in youthful transvestism and to later declare herself a lesbian, Paglia doesn't have much time for transsexuals who, thanks to "ill-informed academic theorists", have been led to believe that sex and gender are "superficial, fictive phenomena" and that they can refuse their biological destiny. Such thinking has not only "sowed confusion among young people", but "seriously damaged feminism", she says - but without bothering to explain how or why, or provide any evidence for these claims.

Somewhat strangely, having just insisted on the fact that "the DNA of every cell of the human body is inflexibly coded as male or female from birth to death", Paglia then boasts of being a gender rebel who exasperated teachers with her "blundering inability to fit into the sedate, deferential girl slot" and stubborn refusal to sing along with Doris Day whom, like Debbie Reynolds, she dislikes for being a chirpy, all-American blonde. 

Her only escapes from the "suffocating conformism of the 1950s" and the "repressive homogeneity of that period", were cinema, TV and "the brash, body-based rhythms of rock 'n' roll, with its dual roots in African-American blues and working-class country music". Oh, and archaeology; for even as a nine-year-old, Camille was fascinated by the "monumentality and megalomania of Egyptian sculpture and architecture".

By her early teens, thanks to Katherine Hepburn and Amelia Earhart, Paglia had discovered a feisty model of feminism that she could make her own. Then, on her sixteenth birthday, she was given a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's classic and was stunned by the "imperious, authoritative tone and ambitious sweep through space and time". And so it transpires that The Second Sex - not Mein Kampf - is the literary source of Paglia's style and her inspiration to produce work "on the grand scale". 

Clearly, over a quarter of a century later, the "vicious attacks on Sexual Personae by academic and establishment feminists" still rankle with Paglia. It would be nice, for her sake, if she could learn from Nietzsche - one of her philosophical heroes - not simply to forgive (for that is merely Christian), but to forget all the "outlandish libels" written against her and her work. But, alas, one suspects she's a woman who never forgets anything, enjoys holding eternal grudges, and passionately desires to have revenge upon her enemies. Maybe this will to vendetta, like her fetishistic fascination with stiletto heels, is due to her Southern Italian ancestry ...

Nevertheless, to witness her continuing feuds and bitching about long dead opponents, such as Andrea Dworkin, reminds me of Johnny Rotten still slandering Malcolm and moaning over his supposed mistreatment from forty years ago. You just wish they would let it go, but, like Lydon, Paglia probably believes anger is the source of her energy - that and the "uncompromising ethnicity" of Barbara Streisand who destroyed the "genteel feminine code of the uber-WASP Doris Day-Debbie Reynolds regime", but never received due credit, according to Paglia, "for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism".

When not in awe of Funny Girl Babs and other Jewish-American women from NYC - all of whom were "politically progressive, mordantly funny, brutally blunt, and sexually free" thanks to the "harrowing experience of their grandparents' generation during the Holocaust" - Paglia was getting herself worked up over the "vivacious young women" of Swinging London, as well as the sexy Bond girls, Mrs Peel, and the lovely cave woman, Loana, from One Million Years B.C. (1966) who, like Honey Ryder, deserves to be "incorporated into the history of women's modern advance".

Not that Raquel Welch is the living person most admired by Paglia; even when wearing a "ragged hide bikini" she can't top Germaine Greer, about whom Paglia has written extensively and, for the most part, positively. It's a shame there's room in this present collection only for one piece on Greer - a review of her 1995 book, Slip-Shod Sybils - as it makes such a pleasant surprise to see Paglia saying nice things about another woman who doesn't happen to be a singer, a film star, or a member of Charlie's Angels.

Of course, we get her notorious New York Times article on Madonna from 1990, in which the Material Girl was declared the "future of feminism". And Paglia's piece written shortly afterwards on date rape, that caused "a huge backlash" at the time and remains one of Paglia's most controversial statements, although she insists that she stands by every word of it, including the claim that women "infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual encounters [and presumably this includes rape] to men or to after-the-fact grievance committees".

Paglia also happily repeats and reaffirms her recent decision to endorse "the ethical superiority of the pro-life argument in the abortion debate" and I have to admit to finding it disappointing to see a woman who at one time subscribed to chthonic feminism suddenly use cant phrases like the moral highground.    

Ultimately, one gets the impression that, like Judge Judy, Paglia has never changed her mind on anything. Indeed, the point and purpose of this book is to not only show she's right - but that she's always been right. In other words, it's a vainglorious display of the "consistency and continuity" of her libertarian ideas which reach all the way back, as noted, to a precocious childhood, thus pre-dating Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963); a work usually credited with initiating the second-wave of American feminism, rather than Paglia's letter to Newsweek protesting the "exclusion of women from the American space program", also published that year.

I fear that what I've written here makes it sound as if I don't like Ms Paglia very much, or, worse, don't take her work all that seriously. But, actually, I do feel a certain degree of affection for Camille and would hope that the fact that I continue to read her books indicates I find them interesting, important and amusing. This sentence alone, for example, makes me smile and justifies the price of the book:

"The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom to love."     


See: Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, (Pantheon Books, 2017). All the lines quoted above are taken from the the author's introduction, pp. ix-xxvi.