Is the submission of women a natural fact?
I was a little girl and yet I understood respect for the rules. I have always been submissive to human laws. There were prohibitions everywhere, at home with my family, at the table in front of my favorite dish, at school when I had to be careful to talk about impetus because I had to remember to raise my hand. It has always been a duty to ask permission, apologize, perhaps even redeem the sin of being in the world.
And one day, in the strange July of my ten years, in a scout field away from home, the first menstruation arrived. I did not know anything about how my body worked, I just thought I got spoiled, even if a part of me in the innocent silence of the bathroom of the females felt that sooner or later it had to happen: I was also submissive from nature, now the world had me completely.
I have always felt like this, a low body, in the sense as close as possible to defeat, to oppression. Everything contributed to making me feel a submissive female. I could never do the rules, never. All that remained remained to obey.
I tried to find, in more disagreement than pleasantly unconscious years, a role for submission. A role that for a few moments could overturn the game, in which the spectator could for a few minutes become the protagonist, say his joke on an enlightened and prestigious stage and then return to the shade from which he had come out.
That role for me had the desire. Sordid, liquefied, tortuous, scripted, random, my desire as a young woman tenth between nameless bodies, feelings without definitions, evenings without gathering. Until I found it there, that pulsating and aberrant sensation, which from the devil became Angelo and as a map was made map: the feeling of the pleasure that invades the body. Procured by submitting me.
This is how my inner journey started looking for the origin of my submission. Submission of a child, a young woman, girl, adult. Submission of daughter, student, friend, worker, girlfriend. Submission to the system, to society, to the culture that I have not chosen.
It is for this hypochondriac innocence of my soul, that he wants to give a name to the things he feels, that I wanted to read 'submissive, you do not arise, you become it of Manon García. I had also read about her 'what we talk about when we talk about consent' and had given me good ideas on which my reflections can be erect.
I understood that that submission I speak of, that just above I define innate, I see being ancestral, almost pure or ontological, meanly definitive, is the submission that all the socially -social people feel.
The cause is in the patriarchal system that has now continued to define our existences from time immemorial, creating imbalances of power between genres, inserting those customs that I today feel like an belonging.
Manon García wonders: are we women submitted by nature? In other words: Is the inclination to the submission?
To demonstrate his thesis García uses all the main western philosophical theories and the 'second sex' by Simone de Beauvoir, here considered a philosophical text with an unprecedented quality of thought for the times when it was written. The ultimate purpose is only to analyze the submission of women to men (with a limitation to women who live in the West and in the United States) to understand the way in which generous hierarchies have modeled and continue to model women's experiences.
García comes to demonstrate, as De Beauvoir had previously done, that the woman is located in a certain context where it is prescribed of the rules to be respected, including her submission to predominant (male) power and logics.
Analyze the submission is complex because it is necessary to combine the personal and collective sphere. Furthermore, understanding submission as a consequence of widespread culture also allows to rethink the question of consent, even in the sexual field.
To date, we know that we have all agreed to submission in different areas of our life and we can admit in serenity that it is a contradictory situation, not easy to recognize, to deconstruct. We also know that having submissive attitudes does not mean giving up freedom but having a passive reaction, which could be transformed into its opposite.
Today I know that the submission I feel is generated, that my mind and body are prisoner of an invisible cage against which I lash ax every day, hoping to break it.
A few days I sit down and observe the invisible: those chains that anchor me on the ground, who take the forms of voices in my head and stagnant emotions, tell me: you can't, you don't have to, stay in your place.
Other days I sober my desire: what I want and how I want it: strength, answer. In no possible human life I will never want to feel like this, guilty for a body, guilty for a desire, guilty for being a little girl without rules and an adult woman without constructions.
Submissive you are not born, you become it: it is lucky to be able to practice the way on the contrary. Turn and know how to recognize the landscape, this time the road will be less long.
There were women and women before me, some dying some living, and I will not look at geography change: I will change first. Then you. Then all together until the return. Marching as resistant partisans. Our April will come.
Clara Marziale
