Philosophy of Gaga

Lady Power by Nancy Bauer is an article from The NY Times' "The Stone" series which features the writings of contemporary philosophers.  It touches on the way that young women are using their sexuality as a form of power using Lady Gaga as an example.  She first uses Jean-Paul Sartre's argument that we experience ourselves as metaphysically divided and we deal with this by acting in "bad faith" and contrasts it with Simone de Beauvoir.

Beauvoir repeatedly stresses that our chances for happiness often turn on our capacity for canny self-objectification.  Women are — still — heavily rewarded for pleasing men.  When we make ourselves into what men want, we are more likely to get what we want, or at least thought we wanted.  Unlike Sartre, Beauvoir believed in the possibility of human beings’ encountering each other simultaneously as subjects and as objects.  In fact, she thought that truly successful erotic encounters positively demand that we be “in-itself-for-itself” with one another, mutually recognizing ourselves and our partners as both subjects and objects.  The problem is that we are inclined to deal with the discomfort of our metaphysical ambiguity by splitting the difference:  men, we imagine, will relentlessly play the role of subjects; women, of objects.  Thus our age-old investment in norms of femininity and masculinity. The few times that Beauvoir uses the term “bad faith” she’s almost always lamenting our cleaving to gender roles as a way of dealing with what metaphysically ails us, rather than, à la Sartre, scolding women for doing the best they can in an unjust world.

Interesting, no?