Sexual Coercion, Gender Construction, and Responsibility for Freedom: A Beauvoirian Account of Me Too

ABSTRACT

The Me Too movement has focused mainstream attention on the pervasiveness of sexual coercion in public and private life. The fact that sexual coercion is so widespread suggests that gender hierarchy is at least partially maintained by the most intimate of human interactions. This article argues that the work of Simone de Beauvoir illuminates the operation of sexual coercion as a mainstay of gender hierarchy and the Me Too movement as an exercise of the responsibility for political freedom. To be responsible for freedom is to undertake new projects as expressions of one’s values but always with the duty to enhance the freedom of others. These projects can never be complete because humans act in a world not entirely of their own making and so must grapple with the facticity of existence. Reading Me Too through Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics reveals the potential for expansive political solidarity while acknowledging the movement’s incompleteness and potential failure. Through an appraisal of the nascent movement’s activity and broader social responses, the article concludes that a continued responsibility to work against sexual coercion is part of a collective political freedom in pursuit of gender equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Freedom
• sexual coercion
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Me Too movement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The characterization of Me Too as a movement is one I will follow here, recognizing that such a characterization is partial, given the new mechanisms of social media’s role in transforming the terms of mass mobilization. A wider consideration of whether Me Too fits in our current theories of movement emergence is beyond the scope of this article.

2. In this article I will use the term “sexual coercion” to connote the range of sexual abuses that have been made public under the banner of #MeToo. Coercion refers to the act of forcing someone to act or not act by use of manipulation, threats, or violence. It covers a range of sexual misconduct from emotional and psychological abuse and gaslighting to secure sex, workplace harassment, and sexual assault and rape. I use the term to acknowledge that #MeToo has been used to publicize the full range of sexual misconduct that includes but is not exhausted by illegal acts. Furthermore, as several commentators have noted, the experience of sexual misconduct is part of a wider culture that trains women to see sex as something to be borne and not something in which they are an active participant.

3. In reconstructing Beauvoir’s argument in The Second Sex, I will retain her focus on the binary relations of man and woman. There are obvious limitations of such a framework in thinking about sexual coercion. First, gender non-conforming and transgender people are at heightened vulnerability to all forms of sexual coercion and especially sexual violence. Second, men are vulnerable to sexual coercion at lower rates than women or gender non-conforming people, but that vulnerability is rarely acknowledged. I think Beauvoir’s framework that sees the reduction of women to her sex in the gender binary helps explain why violating gender norms increases sexual vulnerability and the dynamics of subjecting men to sexual coercion exposes similar dynamics of objectification of the less powerful as their sex. In reconstructing Beauvoir, I will retain her man/woman binary but I will gesture toward the fact that her thinking can be reconfigured to make sense of the broader dynamics of sexual coercion and gender.

4. Numerous scholars have criticized Beauvoir’s Western-centrism and a gender binary that guides much of the writing of the book. Beauvoir does make some global claims and some characterizations of non-Western women that should give us pause (Kruks 2012). But scholars have found her contention of that gender is socially constituted through relationality to serve as a resource for theorizing beyond the limits of her own thinking (Deutscher 2008).

5. Although Beauvoir is describing the constitution of women’s subordination as a class, in the context of sexual coercion, the relation of the masculine and the feminine does not have to map onto men and women so neatly.

6. At the time of publication, public sentiment seems to be turning against R. Kelly.