From: joelp@cs.man.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore || Pharos Project)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Challenging Gender Roles (was 2 straight 2 B gay)
Keywords: sex, gender, dogma, gay rights
Date: 29 Aug 92 18:19:20 GMT

Suzanne (Morine) (smorine@nyx.cs.du.edu) writes:

    >joelp@cs.man.ac.uk (that's Me) writes:

        >>Well, hmm, I think sex *should* be held in awe.  I think
        >>it is held in awe for good reason:  the drives behind it seem
        >>central to our definition of human....

    >Yes, of course, you're right.  "Overawe" would have been a better word.

Erm, I don't like ``overawe'', either.  :- )

    >When I said "awe", I was thinking of an awe of the fact of sex.

I think I grok, but the facts of sex probably awe me (or ``overawe'' me) as
much as the emotional experience of it.  They intertwine.

    >Like the way AIDS awareness commercials talk about "protect yourself" but
    >puzzlingly omit the information about just *how* to do that; they're
    >trying to save lives, but only use vague terms.

Surely this is out of group fidgetiness and insecurity more than awe?  (I'm
aware that we're using ``awe'' in slightly different ways.)

    >Also in the sense that, the way sex was handled on TV, the schoolyard,
    >etc., I got the impression as a kid/ teenager that only sex was going to
    >change my life and my identity (things I happened to feel I needed).

Hmm, sounds like you may also have gotten the ``we're all okay; *you're* the
one with the problem'' treatment.

Sex seems forever to be talked about (soap operas, dreadful pop love ballads,
supermarket tabloids) and never *talked* about (the lack of awareness of safer
sex, the plight of gay teenagers). The awe-inspiring Reality gets substituted
with something we can handle more easily, feel in control of: Love is
substited by love, Sensuality with sensuality.  Anything that hearkens back to
the truly *awesome* Reality is going to make people uncomfortable.

We create structures to contain (confine) things that cannot be contained in
structures. But without structures, we could never understand anything at
all....  Form is useful.  Form is necessary.  Form breaks down.

Ever wonder about the people who talk about their ``awful'' childhoods, and
express great gratitude that they're over?

Sex -- or rather, the feelings and motions that found their expression in sex
-- *did* change my life and my identity.  I remember a January in Hamburg in
which I felt no purpose in living, when I felt that if I went through another
week like the last, I would find some way of hanging life up.  In the last
couple days of that week, on a Saturday afternoon in my lonely room in the
Franziskus Kolleg on the Sedanstrasse, something *did* happen, and probably
changed my life forever (or however long it lasts!).

    >That overawe was what I was trying to convey: a sort of
    >brain-damaged awe of the facts with an accompanying aversion to them.

To me this is willful ignorance masquerading as awe.  From the religious
perspective:  what God in Her right mind would want the mindless obedience
promised by religious folk from lots of faiths?  (Funny how God then ends up
saying the things people want Her to say.)  It pisses me off when my home
denomination (``Churches of God, General Conference''; headquarters Findlay,
Ohio) passes a resolution condemning homosexuality in blissful ignorance of
what homosexuality is in the first place.  If you're going to call it a sin,
at least get your *facts* right, hmm?

So why do Christians keep wanting to put God somewhere ``out there''? --
safely out of reach.  Why are people so bad at finding God in each other?
(And I can't stand the ``my buddy Jesus'' stuff that people come up with,
either.  ``Well I was just chatting with him, and he said....'')

My gut reaction to anything I hold in awe is to want to embrace it, and try
with everything I have to *understand* it, knowing that ultimately I will
fail....

....

    >After all, can a person totally understand another person? No.

Thankfully.  Otherwise we'd run out of things to do, at which point we might
as well close shop and die.

    >Yet even the most "traditional" of "family values" require that
    >people form relationships: that people have a long-lasting aim to keep
    >some sort of understanding between them!

My experience of ``traditional family values'' suggests that they require
maintaining an active level of ignorance between people, and of course,
careful maintenance of the image:  reality substitutes for Reality.

My mother once told me something to the effect that you're not *supposed* to
know the person you're married to....  (She and Dad have been married 38
years.)

        >>I'm not sure gender roles are entirely a bad thing either:
        >>once they stop being prescriptive and become descriptive....

    >The problem is they are way *too* descriptive.

We fit people to roles rather than roles to people.  The descriptions you
provide aren't, as you observe, descriptive at all -- because they're fixed,
because they're used for fitting people into, because they imply a certain way
that things *should* be.

    >... Woman... is passive, has no opinions, and she is, um,
    >dumb - why else would she love man? !

Why, because Adam couldn't handle Lilith and asked God for someone he could
push around instead.  Or at least *think* he was pushing around.... :- )

    >... As for redefining them, I object if you mean to make new
    >big descriptive definitions.

I object to your objection :- ), though I don't think I fully grok where
``big'' comes in.

    >I can't imagine any large descriptive pair of roles for men
    >and women that could actually work for a majority - even a
    >narrow majority - of the people.

Again, I don't exactly follow your use of ``large''.

One of my fascinating experiences of living in another culture (Germany,
England) is the discovery that something like ``national character'' does seem
to exist.  (And yes:  the stereotypical American really *does* exist.  Blaah.)
Observations can be made about groups of people that simply do not apply at
the individual level.  Groups and individual members of groups can be highly
independent entities.

OTOH, the division of ``male'' and ``female'', for the very reason that it is
much more basic  (nationality is much more obviously a ``purely'' human
construct), is also much more abstract, making any tenatively firm conclusions
ridiculous.  However....

    >If we imagine the data points for the traits of every man
    >and every woman, they would form two largely intersecting sets of human
    >traits.  There are large women and small men, smart women and dumb men,
    >compassionate men and heartless women, et cetera, and vice versa.

Agreed.

Women and men are, at some level, biologically different.  These differences
are pathetically understood, yet conclusions drawn from them result in the
gross parodies we call gender roles.  But somewhere, we are biologically
different, and because of that I think people will always tend toward some
*descriptive* understanding of gender roles.  We are not a race of androgenes,
nor do I see any reason to aspire to be.  What I mean is, men and women (but
not, ``a man'' and ``a woman'') will find ways of being different in a social
sense...

When gender roles become fluid entities; when society is self-accepting enough
to adapt them, create them, dispose them; when individuals are given *freedom*
from the group identities to forge their own personal identities, taking what
they find appropriate from all and sundry roles -- when gender roles become
means for understanding women and men rather than obscuring them -- then they
will be something useful, and good.

        >>I liked your article.

    >Thanks!  I wanted to post my idea of reality to see if it
    >was missing some major point(s)!

We all hold but one or two of the pieces.  We all, hopefully, are mirrors to
one another.  We all, hopefully, are ultimately idealists at heart.

        >>Joel, listening to Peter mangle his Smalltalk program

    >I'm listening to the carpet of the apartment above me
    >get torn out. :-(  :-(

Joel,
        thinking about Ursula K. LeGuin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
        (excellent), about a world where everyone is biologically male
        and female, and sexually active only once a month....

>--Suzanne Morine          smorine@nyx.cs.du.edu
--Joel Parthemore          hecateae@cs.man.ac.uk

``When they ask you if you knew me, remember that you were a friend of mine.
And the shadows shall be lifted from my eyes....'' -- Alan Parsons Project