I was around twenty years old when I realized, for the first time, that the male writers and artists and filmmakers I idolized did not see me, a woman, as a person the way they were. I spoke to my male friends about the things we always spoke about—music, politics, theory—and I realized that they didn’t see my thoughts on the matter as significant the way theirs were. I saw the way male politicians, thought leaders, and substack writers talked about women and I realized that they didn’t see women as real the way they were. I began to think that learning this, realizing it, seeing it in the world and accepting it as reality, was a fundamental sexual trauma, one that every woman I know had gone through. The reasons I am a lesbian are too complex for me to imagine, but all else being equal I could never be truly intimate with a man because I would not feel like he saw me as human the way he is human. Sometimes I am afraid I can never be truly intimate with a woman because we have both been raised to see ourselves as slightly less than human. Slightly less real.

This realization came when, as a sophomore in college, I got really into Foucault. I respected him and fell in love with the way he wrapped history around his arguments, which got at so many of the parts of life I found the most fascinating. He writes about madness, power, surveillance, sexuality: things which are so tied together in the modern world but which we rarely talk about. We shy away from them like we shy away from looking at the sun. I read a biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller, which was outstanding. Foucault takes shape as a real person: someone with interests and desires, someone with a burning need to understand the world. He is illustrated as a flawed person, yes, but one worthy of admiration and accolade, because he claimed to see the world as it was in its entirety.

He is obsessed with the idea of limit-experience, of the thing which lies right beyond the edge of what we can imagine experiencing on earth. It is something outside of your mind, which you cannot even imagine once you come down. Orgasm is a limit-experience. LSD and extreme pain are both limit-experiences. Serious meditative practices can bring limit-experiences. Death is the ultimate limit-experience. Foucault chased these limit-experiences through the Marquis de Sade and BDSM in the later years of his life, eventually all the way to the San Francisco bathhouses in 1984. He writes about how, before AIDS, men were silent in the bathhouses but, once the threat of death was present and forcibly embraced, once the choice between a life of safety and a death of pleasure was made, everyone spoke to each other. They were facing the same limit-experience and that gave them intimacy.

This reminds me of the way tantric sex practitioners (like Margot Anand and Christa Schulte) talk about the female orgasm, especially deeper orgasmic experiences like cervical or multi-g-spot orgasms. They speak of female sexuality as something which can bring women past the edge of life, out toward something indescribable. It reminds me of how domestic abuse survivors speak of the edge of madness you toe when someone you are intimate with hurts you, or how sexual assault victims talk about the nightmares and bodily alienation. They talk about seeing the edge, sometimes falling over it, seeing something beyond what your mind has ever been. It reminds me of how the women in my family talk about unmedicated ("natural") births—the other side of the death limit-experience, the experience of seeing new life through tremendous pain. I was born to my mother and when I was born, she knew that one day I would die. This is a mother’s experience, one of the vastest and most fascinating parts of the human condition that I can imagine.

And yet, none of these connections are mentioned in Foucault’s writing, or Miller’s interpretation of his thought. All the limit-experiences which are discussed are men’s experiences. For all that Foucault wondered about life and death, rationality and madness, sex and sadism, he never wondered what it was like for women. When he talks about birth, he talks about the male child being born. He never wonders what it’s like for a mother.

In volume two of The History of Sexuality, when Foucault examines ancient Greek dictates for sexual behavior, almost no time is spent on the expectations on female sexuality. Even less (i.e. none) is spent on how the Greek good life relied on male subjugation of their wives. He writes about how the Greeks, these great western philosophers, thought life should be lived, but he instructs only men. I read this, eager for insight into how to live my life, and I found none. I thought what about women? what about me? and I imagined what Foucault would say. I knew, with the instant imagination of something which is self-evident, that he would dismiss my question. Women are irrelevant to real philosophy, he would tell me, although not in so many words. Men need to know how to live, how to be ethical, how the world spins around them. Women? Well—this was where my imagination failed me. It seemed possible Foucault had never considered the question. Research confirms this, with source after source connecting post-structuralism to feminism meekly admitting that Foucault makes few references to women or femininity. His message, made unintentionally through gross neglect, is clear. The pursuit of the good life, of limit-experiences, and of knowledge, is a man’s game and it only cares about men’s rules and men’s lives.

I know that this is not true. I have lived my entire life as a woman (albeit as a lesbian), and I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by women for most of it: my friends, lovers, my mother, my grandmother. Each of these women has had something to tell me about the world. Some of these things are things which men talk about too: my girlfriend talks to me about South American colonialism, and my grandmother talks about the news. I talk about philosophy with the other women at my HWC, and I talk about technocracy and surveillance with my best friend. Women tell me things about democracy, about Nietzsche and Baudrillard, about power and logic, which I had never thought of before. They talk about things men don’t talk about: my mother talks to me about my birth, about urethral orgasms. My friends talk about feminism and reproductive rights, about the trauma of not having autonomy over your body. My girlfriend and my mother tell me about the years they spent sick, in pain and afraid of what was happening to them, going to doctors who told them they were crazy.

Foucault was not thinking about any of this when he wrote his books about madness, he was not thinking about this when he wrote his books about power, and he was not thinking about this when he wrote his books about sexuality. He was thinking about men, because he saw men as having the only real experiences in the world. He was a gay man, and his life revolved around men: men who were sexually marginalized, who met in dark bars and in bathhouses, who had sex with each other and had no need for women. He lived a life that women weren’t central to. To disregard them in his philosophy, however, is far more telling, especially when he spoke as if that philosophy applied to all of the western world. It is clear that the experiences of a woman would have no relevance to Foucault's view of the things. He was writing about men and for men, because to him men were the only humans. He was not writing to me, and the idea that I would be reading his books, that thousands of female grad students and professors and undergrads have read his books starting from their release, would have been somewhere between alien and irrelevant to him.

Seeing that Foucault’s world had no place for me was jarring. I wanted that limit-experience, I wanted his insights into my life, I wanted him to tell me who I was and where I stood. And he did not even consider me, or my mother or my friends, worth writing to. If we could fit ourselves into the male mold he was outlining, we could find value in him. Otherwise, we were adrift at sea, on his ship of fools with no place to dock.

Wishing for something different, something which might see me, I reached for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and fell into the existentialists hard. Sartre, her contemporary and lover, tells us that there are no gods and no masters. We have to make our lives for ourselves, which comes with great freedom and greater responsibility. Like Foucault and the rest of the canon, Sartre was writing to men. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s largest contribution to existentialism, she is bold enough to say no. She says that existentialist theory does not account for women's lives and so it is wrong, or at least inadequate. Women are not free to live their lives how they please, slipping in and out of labels as they wish and deciding how to behave based on what is right. Instead, they are born women, and must play the role of a woman or they will be castigated, abused, raped, or abandoned. The experience of being the second sex is a woman’s experience, and it is essential to a philosophical theory which claims to describe the world as it is. Fanon, in Wretched of the Earth, does the same with colonized peoples.

If we look at the things around us from Beauvoir’s lens, a feminist lens which says that women must be accounted for in the world, we see failures constantly. We don’t live in a world that is made with women in mind, a fact that every woman lives through again and again. The world that men make is for men. When we look at this clearly, it is ridiculous. It would be unimaginable to live in such close contact with women and disallow them from education, from politics, from law, from filmmaking, if you truly saw them as people—but men only see men as people. Women, in contrast, are not real humans: they are like vessels for what men might imagine they think. They might be the Virgin Mary, they might be the seducing whore, they might be a worshipable and photographable muse. Since men are the only real ones, they can imagine anything. They rarely bother imagining that women might be something they don't already know—unless that thing is simply an incomprehensible mystery.

We can see this same mechanism at work in the parallel world of American racial subjugation. Slaveowners called enslaved men "boys." If they were men, it would be wrong to keep them in bondage. If they are kept as children, lumped in with women, they can be subjugated the same way as a man's family, who are less human than he is. This is why Mr. Garner, in Toni Morrison's Beloved, calling the Sweet Home boys "men" is so insidious. He calls them men and still enslaves them. As Angela Davis points out in Women, Race, and Class, this double subjugation on racial and sexual borders creates a unique black woman’s experience. Black men may be freed from slavery and, if they play the white man’s game, may become men, may become human. Black women will always be women: moreover, they will always be the inhumanity which Black men must run from.

Women see this lack of regard for their humanity from men every day. When men grope women, when they value them only for how they look or present themselves, or when they talk about women as if they were objects, they are admitting that they see them as less than human. When they don't bother asking a woman for her opinion at the dinner party’s table, when they mansplain, or when they dismiss women’s theories about the world, they're admitting that they don't believe women think the way they do. When they don't care if their girlfriend enjoys sex, or don't believe that a woman is in chronic pain, or dismiss bipolar disorder or female depression and personality disorders, it's because they don't believe women really feel things. Men make choices for women constantly: choices from boyfriends and husbands about when to have sex and how, choices from doctors and psychologists about who is sick and how they can get better, choices from politicians and lawyers about who has been assaulted and who can get an abortion. They believe can make these choices for women because they believe they know better than we do.

Women grow up in this world. We grow up listening to male psychologists, male scientists and doctors, male politicians, speak on the female condition. We watch rom coms and dramas about women written by men—not to mention action movies, fantasy moves, and superhero movies where women are simply not present. We read male authors and philosophers. We speak with men, we are taught by them and raised by them. And from each of these sources, girls slowly learn that they are a little less human than the people talking to them.

If we believe that we are less human than men, and we are told that men are humans, we believe we aren't human. Instead, we are another species, a second sex, with our own abilities and responsibilities. Those responsibilities often boil down to the enabling of men’s thought: their humanity. Of course we should parent our husbands and cater to men's needs; of course the only validation which matters comes from a man. It seems natural that women would devote their lives to typing their husband’s novels or furthering their father’s careers.

This hierarchy, where women’s lives are inferior and revolve around men, creates a traumatic block in the center of women’s lives. We can't be intimate with men because why would they bother being intimate with something less than them. We can't be intimate with women because why would we bother being intimate with something less than a man. We can’t be intimate with ourselves, cannot take the time to listen to what we know and trust it, because why would we bother being intimate with something less than human?

I think I was older than most women are when they realize this, so maybe I have a clearer view of it than many. I have known I was a lesbian since I was young, and I spent my adolescence without much care for respect from my male peers. It was only as I got to college and found myself attempting to dialogue with the thinkers who talked about my passions that I realized I was asking them to respect me and they were not responding. However, I also saw that while this was the first time I had realized it, it was not the first time I had learned it. I had internalized it throughout my life, and I had spent years wrestling with the same mental blocks the women I loved did: an inability to see each other, and ourselves, as just as human as the men we knew and loved.

I knew that this blockage, however, is founded on something untrue. I have never met a woman who I found to be intellectually or spiritually or ontologically inferior to men. Through casual relationships and deep conversations with them, through telling them that their thoughts are relevant and their personhood is essential, I have found myself surrounded by women who are truly human. By seeking out female philosophers, female authors, and female filmmakers, I have found myself spoken to as a woman and so as a human. This shift in my thinking, from centering men to seeing, speaking to, and listening to women, has been transformational in my life.

When I speak to my mother, my experiences are reflected back in her speech and they become real. When I say that my girlfriend is beautiful, beauty becomes something dynamic: something that describes her mind, her way of walking and dancing, her way of speaking to me. She becomes less of an object in a museum and more of a human. I become less of an object and more of a human. When I read about female-centered tantric sexual practices, or Black feminist political and ethical theory, or the theoretical promise of riot grrrl, I see role models that live the same sort of lives I do, who face the same pressures and quandaries. These are shown to me as women’s questions, but also human questions. When me and my friends eat together and we talk about our lives and our ideas and the way we see the world, that lens begins to matter on the same scale that men’s philosophy does. My friends see the world as it is: they see it from the perspective of a human.

If they are human, I am human. It doesn’t matter what Foucault said or didn’t say. We are worthy of being known. Long live relationships, sexual and familial and romantic and platonic, between women.