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Leonidas -> RE: Men and Women (6/17/2005 8:46:44 AM)
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Like many species, we are gender specialized. We evolved in an environment where we had to be in order to succeed as a species. We are actually more different than we are alike in a great many ways. We have learned, however, to dishonor, discount, and repress those differences because they aren't percieved to have economic value. Make no mistake, the high-sounding moral arguments proceed from economics. In order to live the way that we do we must, to some degree, become "plug compatible worker/consumer units". Being neuter makes for greater fungibility of human resources, don't you know. Yes, indeed, incase you hadn't noticed, you aren't a human anymore, you are a human resource. The extent to which you are interchangable with any other human resource makes you more valuable.
quote:
When we no longer ask ‘boy or girl?’ in order to start gendering an infant, when the information is as irrelevant as the colour of a child’s eyes . . . only then will men and women be socially interchangeable and really equal. And when that happens there will no longer be any need for gender at all. --Judith Lorber
Ms. Lorber lives in a cushy economic world where she feels no particular need to celebrate the differences between men and women. She doesn't rely on the hunt to eat. She and her children (if she has any) probably have never been in danger from a predator. She's never had to rely on the fact that men are different to keep her from being lead away as a slave by the hostile tribe across the river (well, actually she has, but that fact is distant enough from her that she can choose to ignore it). If she were from such an environment, her statement would seem as absurd to her as it does to me.
I am not ready to be an interchangable unit yet. I am a man, and I will be for a little while longer. Then I will get out of the way and the neutering of our species will, I'm sure, proceed to whatever end. I think it's a shame. I think it's a gray, lifeless, pitiful kind of existance. I think we're at odds with our world, and at odds with ourselves. In short, I think it's a sad thing that you even had to ask this question. Not so long ago (relatively speaking) you woudn't have had to.
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