Because if feminism becomes “moralism” it is no longer feminism, and because we – true feminists – celebrate the powerful and beautiful metaphors of “witch” and “whore”.
For some years now, I had promised myself that I would no longer express my opinion on social and political current affairs. I had made this decision for two reasons. The first, is that the crazed society reflected in social media is so full of opinion-makers, professional and casual, that people can certainly do without my testimony. In the background noise, every opinion becomes just more noise. The second reason is that devoting time to less ephemeral topics than current affairs made me feel less superficial and gave me the illusion that I was contributing more to my personal growth and – said ironically – to that of humanity. Why then make an exception now? Because this time the themes of current affairs coincide with those of a path of mine: the study of feminism. This theme interests me both from a strictly philosophical and political point of view, but also and above all in terms of how it is declined in literature and in general in anthropologically relevant facts of culture. Women writers and female characters who represent the fate of women in a world of men is one of the centres of my interests in recent years, although I am mainly interested in it declined in specific linguistic and geographical contexts (those of East Asia).
There is another reason that makes me feel the urgency to express myself on this issue. A sense of unease. I have noticed in recent decades the worrying return of moralism concerning the body and sexuality. This new moralism is disguised as progressive thinking. And like the old one, this new moralism is particularly obsessed with women’s bodies. This is nothing new, unfortunately.
It is a disturbing process, precisely because it is a form of thought that disguises itself and wants to appear as its opposite: progressive. This form is more dangerous than ‘honest’ moralism, the boorish and conservative kind that tells you how you should behave, how you should manage your sexuality because a certain deity or holy book tells you so.I recently listened to an interesting lecture by Professor Massimo Raveri, a historian of religions and a scholar of Eastern philosophy. This lecture was about the figure of women in Japanese religious thought, but, as always with Raveri, the subject was extended in a much broader sense. I will summarise some concepts briefly because I think they are also very useful for the purpose I am setting myself here, writing this article.Raveri explained that the identification of women as ‘impure’ in almost all human cultures has a specific anthropological motivation. The need to classify the world and make it rationally comprehensible has led to the identification of the norm of what is human in male corporeality and physicality. The ambiguity of the double body was not easily assimilated. If the man therefore became the norm, the woman became the other, the diversity to be controlled and brought back into order.
Thus, the two poles within which femininity is accepted are born: that of the girl child and the daughter on the one hand (hence asexual) and that of the mother on the other, where sexuality and corporeity are present, but aimed at socially and morally accepted purposes: generating children and offspring for the society of men. So far Raveri.
Myth and belief have always treated the third way, i.e. a woman as a free individual not defined solely by her mother-daughter relationships, as an extraneous, dangerous, deviant element. In myth, the underworld is filled with female figures. From the sermons of the theologians of the European Middle Ages to the terrible figures of Eastern religiosity and folklore (the Indian Kali, or, for example, the Yuki-woman of Japanese folklore), femininity is the symbol of the savage, the antithesis of ordered social living, disorder personified.Moving from ancestral myth to more ‘civilised’ moralism the free woman, the woman who was not a daughter or mother, was defined as ‘witch’ and ‘whore’. She who tempts, diverts, wreaks havoc.
Living one’s sociality in independent forms, for example as a woman not interested in motherhood or as a sexually free woman, has always been classified as a third way to be condemned.
Now you can see how the battles of political correctness about women as object bodies give me the creeps. Although I am aware of the social conditioning that can drive certain behaviours, I cannot help but notice how under the pretext of preserving women from the rediscovered or never dead patriarchy, even the new pseudo-feminism intervenes in women’s bodies and wants to control them. It tells her that she cannot use that body, exploit it, exhibit it, sell it to men. Otherwise she plays the patriarch’s game. In reality, it reinvents in a new key a revised moralism, but like ancient moralism it is always motivated by something that lies deep inside: the fear of the body and of sensuality. Especially of the female body.
Applying Schopenhauer’s lesson revisited for this occasion, the idea that human beings are characterised by a lust for desire that perpetuates the life force and drives one to want and desire the other, the body of the other, the soul of the other, what is generally other than oneself (whatever the direction of this desire, declined in all possible and imaginable tendencies) is a fact that must not only be accepted and understood, but must be appreciated in all its beauty, without fear.
I am part of the least discriminated slice of humanity in the contemporary world: a heterosexual, male, Caucasian individual. I speak, without merit, from a position of relative advantage and it is easy for me to pontificate. Moreover, my ambiguous and problematic position as a male feminist – who nonetheless feels his ‘feminine side’ with great intensity – still gives me the freedom to express an opinion like this: if I were a woman, I would proudly and courageously claim my being a ‘witch’ and my being a ‘whore’. This is the true way of being a feminist, for me. These words, used of the male gender in a deleterious, offensive sense, to control women’s behaviour and bodies, to judge women and condemn their deviance from accepted social models, are words that should be re-evaluated in their metaphorical value, which I would like here to completely strip of their negative component and of which I would rather grasp, without irony, a great poetic charge.
In conclusion, I passionately make this rhetorical appeal: do not let any kind of old or new moralism control your body, for any reason whatsoever; do not let your freedom – ethical, social and sexual – be caged in the fraudulent categories of daughter and mother, of honest woman and not. You are not (only) mothers and daughters, you are first and foremost individuals and women. Be proudly free, be proudly witches and whores.
If native English readers find any part of the text unclear, please let me know. The article has been translated from Italian.
Davide Donadio 