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Dec. 1st, 2010
Love is a many-gendered thing
Dec. 1st, 2010 07:20 amI grew up in a world full of people who believed that white people are serious, rational, and hard-working, while black people are frivolous, emotional, and lazy. Fortunately, my parents were among the minority who noticed that this idea was utter nonsense, and they warned me against it. Today that view is unpopular. Once in a long while, one hears the view that the old stereotypes are true and prove that black people are better (in touch with nature, etc.), but basically the old idea has a deserved place on the junk heap of history.
My parents also warned me against the analogous view of the sexes, and there too they saved me from believing a lot of rubbish, but sexual dimorphism has unfortunately not been as publicly discredited as the racial kind. We still hear that the butch/fem distinction (euphemized as masculine/feminine) really exists, and really is important, and everyone should be all one or the other.
There is hope for reason, though. Three examples:
1) A mother notices that her young son is not supposed to have glitter pens because they are covered with girly cooties and might turn him into a queer or a girl or some other inferior form of being.
2) One person both studies philosophy seriously and wears heels, make-up, and trendy clothes. Idiots assume this is some sort of contradiction in terms.
3) Gay men have pretty much stopped acting campy. That could mean two good things: One is that camping was a reaction to social homophobia and as society begins to recover from that particular disease, the reaction is no longer needed. The other is that camping may have been a logically valid conclusion to bad hypotheses: that one must be a real man (butch) or a real woman (fem) and since loving men disqualifies one from the former, the only possibility is to act like the latter.
Thanx to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moschus and andrewducker twice.
My parents also warned me against the analogous view of the sexes, and there too they saved me from believing a lot of rubbish, but sexual dimorphism has unfortunately not been as publicly discredited as the racial kind. We still hear that the butch/fem distinction (euphemized as masculine/feminine) really exists, and really is important, and everyone should be all one or the other.
There is hope for reason, though. Three examples:
1) A mother notices that her young son is not supposed to have glitter pens because they are covered with girly cooties and might turn him into a queer or a girl or some other inferior form of being.
2) One person both studies philosophy seriously and wears heels, make-up, and trendy clothes. Idiots assume this is some sort of contradiction in terms.
3) Gay men have pretty much stopped acting campy. That could mean two good things: One is that camping was a reaction to social homophobia and as society begins to recover from that particular disease, the reaction is no longer needed. The other is that camping may have been a logically valid conclusion to bad hypotheses: that one must be a real man (butch) or a real woman (fem) and since loving men disqualifies one from the former, the only possibility is to act like the latter.
Thanx to
moschus and andrewducker twice.