The same social class that a century ago established institutions like Deep Springs and the Citadel to reinvent maleness in accordance with the new structures of power that were emerging is today accepting that maleness and power are going to part ways as they move into the 21st Century.

Levinas says that recognition of the arbitrariness of power and its existence beyond the subject leads to an elevation of the Other and its contributions. Is this the source of the hypothesized parallelism of the feminine power-structure? Being at the wrong end of power-relations for generations has made woman-culture aware of the arbitrariness and transpersonal autonomy of these relations, allowing women to intuitively develop models of parallel power in their thought-patterns? [see education 14: Noddings, "An Ethic of Caring and its implications for instructional arrangements" pp. 218-19]

5. Those with power are frequently least aware of ‹ or least willing to acknowledge ‹ its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence.
[education14ŠThe Silenced Dialogue: "Power and Pedagogy in raising other people's children", from Facing Racism in Education 1990: Harvard Educational Review, p. 86]

Maryse Condé:
Then somehow her hatred and jealousy had given way to pity, solidarity, and affection. Sira's fate might well have been her own. The violence of men, the whim of one of them, might easily have snatched her too from her father's house and her mother's arms, and made her into an object of barter. So to everyone's surprise she began to take her former rival under her wing. [Segu, p. 11]

Levinas:

My effort consists in showing that knowledge is in reality an immanence, and that there is no rupture of the isolation of bein in knowledge; and on the other hand, that in the communication of knowledge one is found beside the other, not confronted with him, not in the rectitude of the in-front-of him. But in being in direct relation with the other is not to thematize the Other and consider him in the same manner one considers a known object nor to communicate a knowledge to him. In reality, the fact of being is what is most privat; existence is the sole thing I cannot communicate. I can tell about it, but I cannot share my existence (EI, 57).

What makes our relation amoung 'ourselves' different from relations amoung selves and objects is the intuition that there can be no knowing of another person. Another person who senses her own being cannot "communicate a knowledge" and cannot "share [her] existence" with anyone. There is a moral compunction against relating to people as objects because they are essentially different. We cannot know them as we say that we can know a rock, a piece of paper, a car, computer, or couch. Knowing that we cannot know the essence of another person (her existence), we cannot treat her as one treats "a known object."

Yet this construction of an ethics runs into the obstacle of recent theories of consciousness that make the distinction between the self-aware and the self-unaware difficult or impossible to make. If what we are is encompassed in our biology and life-experience, what distinguishes us from the other objects of the world? Daniel C. Dennett comes around to this question in his meandering Consciousness Explained. He suggests the exercise of prosthetically extending one's tactile sensations with a pencil. With practice, one can learn to quite accurately determine the texture of surfaces contacted only by the pencil's rubber tip. But a pencil is only the most simple and limited of prosthetic sense-extensions. It is an example that helps one realize that the objects of the world are all extensions of our bodies' senses. The wind carries smell to us just as a pencil carries vibrations from its movement over things. It also carries the pressure-waves that let us hear. There can be no clear distinction between what we 'ourselves' sense and what we 'the-objects-of-the-entire-universe' sense. We experience ourselves as being in the limited sphere of our own bodies only because our bodies' senses and their particular impact on how we sense ‹ such as where we turn our eyes at a given time ‹ are most obvious to us and overwhelm any sense we might have of our sensations depending on the causal chain that brought them from the world 'out there' to within reach of the five senses 'in here.' If our sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste are a part of ourselves because they structure our experience and our experience structures who we are, then every object that exists is also a part of us, because it equally functions not only as the object experienced, but as aspect of the sense through which we experience other things as well. We know that our companions are making sound because the air between us vibrates; we know that there is wind beyond a window-pain not because of any of our bodily senses, but by the help of leaves, twigs, and branches in trees, which are equally our senses.
Dennett's explanation of consciousness prompts another important challenge to Levinas' ethics. It makes difficult the distinction between things that have a sense of being to communicate and things that do not. By all appearances, the evolution of human thinking did not traverse a sharp boundary between unaware and aware. Borrowing from Chomsky's 'society of mind' theory, Dennett's theory of consciousness ultimately reduces our intentions to an aesthetics that developed out of the evolutionary need for survival. Our consciousness, Dennett claims, has no center. It is rather the aggregate of inumerable sub-agents, each in turn the aggregate of sub-sub-agents down to simple aggregates of nerve-cells called neurons. These agents exert influence over and/or contribute to the substance of our thoughts. Many of them constantly offer 'thought-candididates' and many of them work to reinforce or undermine the strength of those candidtates. At any given moment, these agents may have constructed many thoughts simultaneously, but only one set of words is uttered, and we only experience one or several possible things that could have escaped our mouths but did not. We have no control over the development of these agents, and thus no control over the dominant aesthetic that they yield in aggregate.
Lower life-forms such as other primates may be presumed to have similar agents at work in their brains, only their brains are not capable of producing agents complicated enough to yield words, sentences, and thoughts recognizable to us.
What gives us the sense of being distinguished from other animals, plants, and objects in general is our sense that we know that we exist. What do 'we' really know? Our sense of being is actually the sense that our not-being would be different. Yet what in us is different when we are dead? The same world that influences everything our body does when we are 'alive' influences them equally when we are 'dead.' The world is no different; it loses no 'being' when we lose 'consciousness.' Nothing changes.

Psychoanalytic feminism approaches this problem and acknowledges the problem of 'being' or subjectivity. When Doane discusses the process of masquerade to which women turn as a position of identification, she quotes someone, saying, ["People will claim that I allow for no distinction between characteristics of femininity and the mask of the masquerade. Indeed, there is no distinction, for the mask of the masquerade is the mask of femininity"]. The obliteration distinction between mask and essence applies for all would-be subjects. According to some feminists, what allows men to act in accordance with patriarchy is the illusion of their own subjectivity. The illusion would be impossible were there no Other against which to measure male transcendence of historical-cultural form. Thus, the illusion of male subjectivity is maintained only when women, or some Other, is demonstrably beholden precisely historical-cultural form. Men believe that they are the un-implicated and free creators of the Law. As men see it, they make the Law, but are not influenced by its presence.
Because they are moment-by-moment subjected to the abuses of this illusion, women are far more likely to recognize themselves as constituted by the workings of Law, not as free subjects. Women know that any subject-position they take is just that, taken, and not 'given.' Power becomes meaningless when its only effect is a working out of the grander dictates of the trans-human 'order of things.' Yet women's experience of the 'order of things' is more unpleasant than men's. What can we do about it?