Susan Sontag, On Women
Susan Sontag (American feminist, Jew, homosexual; New York 1933 – New York 2004) has written reflections capable of transcending the years of which she was a direct observer. The essays today republished by Einaudi question us on the emancipation objectives not yet achieved and on the risks of regression.
Review by Claudia Mazzilli
On women (in Italy republished by Einaudi 2024, edited by David Rieff, with a preface by Benedetta Tobagi and a translation by Paolo Dilonardo) collects some famous essays by Susan Sontag, written in the years between 1972 and 1975.
It makes a certain impression to reread these writings on gender stereotypes, on female beauty with its restrictive canons, on ageing experienced by women with shame and premature anxiety as soon as they are out of adolescence, on inequalities in access to professions, on fascist and communist art and propaganda. We immerse ourselves in feminist struggles and even heated debates among feminists: think of the controversy between Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag over the evaluation of the works of Leni Riefenstahl, film director of Nazi propaganda (the judgement, for the two thinkers, involves the militant feminist posture and the methods and epistemologies of art criticism in different ways).
This immersion in the 1970s has little vintage about it. Those who read fail to have a documentary and archaeological approach; every line exudes flagrant topicality. And one wonders what and how many feminist goals have been achieved (and where), or even whether we are not facing a regression (and to what extent).
Some examples. Susan Sontag, in more than one of these writings, notes that from childhood girls are taught to give excessive importance to physical appearance, even not to crease their foreheads so as not to mark their faces with wrinkles, and in general to “preserve a beauty” that is an ideal of helpless, docile and delicate youth, submissive and suited to decorative, ancillary or caring roles, destined to be weakened year after year by the advancing age and which brings with it an inexorable and progressive devaluation of women as an object of sexual desire. “Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement.” (p. 30). On the contrary, men can enhance the body, because for them there is a double canon of beauty, the boy and the man. They must not limit themselves to preserving youth but can and indeed must grow musculature, strength, power, within an overall harmony that tolerates natural defects and accepts the signs of senescence with ease. On the other hand, women’s bodies are colonized in every part (hair, face, neck, breasts, waist, hips, buttocks, thighs, calves, ankles, feet) on the cosmetics, film and television markets, even in the professions. Because no woman, even one who has reached top positions, can be forgiven for being ugly, unkept, scruffy, old. And beauty and whiteness go together, at the intersection of class, race and gender.
Beauty is a class system, operating within the sexist code; its ruthless rating procedures and intractable encouragement to feelings of superiority and inferiority persist in spite of (and maybe because of) a striking amount of upward and downward mobility.
And if in Susan Sontag’s time the bad teacher was television, as Karl Popper put it, now the pervasiveness of oppressed and self-oppressed female bodies also travels on social media. Yet Susan Sontag’s pages were prophetic not only with respect to the most recent scenario of the network. They should be reread posthumously (Sontag died in 2004) together with the contributions that journalist Lorella Zanardo published in 2009: a documentary and a book for Feltrinelli with the explicit title, Women’s bodies. The Fininvest/Mediaset channels (later also the “Berlusconi-style” RAI) were long ago the slaughterhouse of women’s bodies, exhibited for all to see. Eyes educated little by little to a sexist look, in which what is “typical and standardized” is dissected into parts such as the cuts of meat in the butcher: firm buttocks, high and round breasts, shapely thighs, false and expressionless faces, with high cheekbones and full lips. With a background of non-ideologically neutral sexist jokes.
Those who were teenagers in the 90s, like me, either endured all this or turned off the television and read a book. How much this imagery has had an influence on our minds (and on the bodies of those who wanted to emulate showgirls and playboys…) anyone can evaluate it according to their political, fetish tastes, or according to their biographies, aspirations, etc.
Susan Sontag’s analyses of femininity, ecology, reproduction as a biological destiny or choice are also acute: reflections capable of going beyond the years of which Susan Sontag was a direct observer, to make sharp arrows offered to our bow: in more recent developments the thought of difference (think of Adriana Cavarero) recognizes in the faculty of generating not a regulated biological destiny within the institution of patriarchal motherhood, but a cognitive experience within a radical ecology.
Susan Sontag, in the same years that Elena Gianini Belotti wrote Dalla parte delle bambine (What Are Little Girls Made Of? The Roots of Feminine Stereotypes), reflects on the education that gender stereotypes perpetuate. On one page, with an urgent and programmatic rhythm, she writes:
To demand that women receive equal pay for equal work is reformist; to demand that women have access to all jobs and professions, without any exception, is radical. The demand for equal wages does not attack the system of sexual stereotyping. Paying a woman with the same wages a man gets if she holds the same job he does establishes a merely formal kind of equality. When roughly half the people doing every kind of job are women, when all forms of employment and public responsibility become fully coeducational, sexual stereotyping will end – not before.
So, Susan Sontag, as bell hooks, makes a distinction between reformist feminism and radical feminism and reflects on the relationship between feminism and politics, without putting in dogmatic terms the relationship between reformism and feminist cultural revolution (which concerns the profound transformation of what we call power, and invests language, economics and bureaucracy, the time to devote to work and creativity, the transformation of the concept of the family…).
The relationship between feminist movements, parties and revolution, with possible political practices, depends on the context of each country, but almost always, where women are co-opted (as it happened, for example, in the Italian and French Resistance), in the end men reject them in traditional domestic roles.
It is natural to think of Iranian women and sisters from all over the world who have praised “Woman, Life, Freedom” both when Susan Sontag speaks of revolution and when she writes about the geography of women’s rights, so uneven on a global scale. But even reading its pages on feminism that operates within the patriarchal and institutional system to ensure minimum objectives (such as the right to abortion, equal pay, access to contraceptives, laws against gender violence), one cannot help but think of how partial and at the same time very fragile these demands are, now that in Italy counselling centres have been opened to pro-life associations, now that the right to abortion is questioned in many Western countries, while other States are shying away from the Istanbul Convention, which is the most advanced legislative device to counter male violence against women in its various forms.
Susan Sontag writes a page still full of future when she sees in fascism not “a political aberration whose greatest plausibility was confined to Europe and the interval between the two world wars”, but “the normal condition of the modern state: the condition to which the governments of all industrially advanced countries tend”. Citing Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas , for which the liberation of women is a struggle against fascism, Susan Sontag offers us still valid interpretations in times when democracies are now “democraships” and women in top roles are much more than accomplices: they are the first responsible for the preservation of inequalities, the godmothers of regressive caesarisms, of investiture democracies in which the erotic-aesthetizing dream of the macho leader and his raped people dominates and, through rape, silenced and subdued.
Declaring that she does not feel completely liberated, Susan Sontag does not stand on the pedestal, does not make the scam of meritocracy her own, does not interrupt but re-establishes the sisterhood between women and helps us to find the point from which to start again not only to leave home to go to work and be in the world, but to transform the world.
