WE ARE NOT BORN SUBMISSIVE

A feminist scholar’s analysis of why even the most independent women don’t always resist being dominated by men.

In her first book, Garcia, a junior fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, considers a question inherent in pop-cultural hits like Fifty Shades of Grey, whose heroine relishes obeying a man’s sexual commands: Is submission natural for women? Defining submission broadly enough to include actions such as allowing men to do less than their share of housework and going on a starvation diet to reach size 0, the author argues that feminist theorists avoid the topic for fear that they might look “right wing, antifeminist, or even misogynistic” if they suggested that in certain situations, women enjoy men’s domination. Undeterred by such risks, Garcia works diligently to refute the myth of the “eternal feminine,” or that women are submissive by nature, and the contrasting view that female submission is “either a moral vice or a pathology.” Garcia compares theories by Rousseau, Freud, and Catharine MacKinnon, but she focuses on a sympathetic close reading of the ideas expressed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, including that in many cases, “women’s decision to submit is not, strictly speaking, a choice” given the social, economic, and other realities of their “situation” in life. The author hopes to rehabilitate de Beauvoir among feminist theorists who see her stance as outdated, and her effort may well succeed. But de Beauvoir writes so clearly and vigorously in The Second Sex that this narrowly focused analysis may put off the uninitiated with arguments that are often less lucid than those of the original text. For all her admiration for de Beauvoir, Garcia conveys little of intellectual force of a feminist bible that has become “likely the most read and best-selling philosophical text of the 20th century—maybe even in the history of philosophy.”

A tome for seasoned feminist theorists but not general readers.