This week, while preparing for a talk on what it means to be human, I revisited the work of the brilliant and influential feminist Shulamith Firestone. In her 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, she offered a fusion of Marxism, second-wave feminism, and a philosophy of technology that must have appeared completely insane at the time but has since come to have the ring of prophetic truth. For example, she envisaged a world where technology would eliminate not only the division of labor between men and women in the workplace (Marx and Engels had mentioned that in The Communist Manifesto) but in the matter of reproduction too. This was eight years before the first baby born through IVF and decades before the right to answer the question “What is a woman?” came to be a monopoly reserved for inarticulate cultural theorists and piously progressive politicians. She did make some catastrophically bad predictions: For example, she thought that technology would eliminate work altogether. But on the issue of the demolition of the male-female binary she seems to have been correct, at least at the level of politicized public language—the only kind of language that today seems to count.
Reproduction was one of the central targets of Firestone’s polemic, and understandably so. Once one accepts the underlying philosophy of the body that lies behind, for example, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, then natural bodily differences between men and women take on a sinister significance to the extent that they appear to favor the former in industrial and post-industrial society. Pregnancy is thus a problem, one that can be obviated via contraception or eliminated via abortion. The “natural” function of the female body is only deemed natural by a patriarchal society where such a designation serves to justify the status quo. Only by shattering the notion of motherhood as a normative state could true women’s liberation be achieved. Or, to recast that notion, only by shattering the concept of “woman” could true liberation be achieved for the whole of humanity.
Firestone’s mantle was assumed by cyborg feminist Donna Haraway in the 1980s and has found a vigorous new voice in Sophie Lewis today. In part, this is because the questions Firestone was raising about modern technology’s ability to transform what it means to be human at the deepest level were prescient. Lewis in particular has raised some significant issues that need to be addressed, particularly those regarding the status of women who act as reproductive surrogates and the children born to them, even if her answers (e.g., the abolition of the family and the comprehensive normalization of surrogacy) are as unhinged as they come. But it is worth noting that the problems in Firestone’s thinking go well beyond the topics of reproduction and biological sex differences. Indeed, her philosophy ultimately dissolves the human being to a disembodied will limited only by the technological tools available to it.
The problem with such a view is that it is ultimately dehumanizing in its rejection of any notion of natural limits, limits that it typically treats as problems to be overcome. It is true that our bodies certainly limit all of us, sometimes in manners that we find troubling. For example, I have commented before on the fact that physical mortality provides an obvious limit to self-identity: Anyone who identifies as immune to physical death will be disabused of that fantasy at some point. But physicality not only binds us to mortality. It also allows for truly human interaction. We speak to each other face-face and thereby communicate in deep ways that go beyond words on a page or pixels on a monitor. Most, if not all of us, prefer to be in the actual, physical presence of a loved one rather than merely hear their voice on the telephone or see their face on a screen. We hold the hands of those we love and we kiss their lips. We smile at each other. We hug someone in need of comfort. That moment in the 1980s when Diana, Princess of Wales, held the hand of a man dying of AIDS was powerful not because her body touched his body but because she touched him. Our bodies are not mere instruments attached to immaterial wills, despite what modern progressive thinking might assume. They are constitutive of who we are. And so once we begin seeing our bodies primarily as obstructions to our humanity, we run the risk of losing our humanity. Firestone’s brand of feminism had this tendency, effectively viewing the female body as an instrument of oppression. As such, it was dehumanizing.
The tragic irony of Firestone was the manner of her death. She died in 2012 in an apartment in New York. Nobody noticed until the smell of her rotting corpse alerted neighbors that something was amiss. It is estimated that she had lain there, unmissed and unmourned, for about a month. To die in such loneliness is terrifying, especially after years of what appeared to be serious mental illness. But in an odd way it reflected a logical outcome of her philosophy. Indeed, it is hard to see where Firestone would be able to fit normal human experiences such as parental love, filial affection, and even friendship into her philosophy. When human beings are reduced to wills, when bodies are problems to be overcome, and when human relationships are reduced to manipulative power relations to be transcended through technology, all those things that make us human—dependencies, obligations, and those things that flow from them, like kindness, gratitude, altruism—disappear too. Firestone thought she was pointing the way forward to Utopia. Sadly she lived her “truth” to the very end.
Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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