At 12:37 PM +0100 20/4/02, Christopher Walker wrote:
>What troubles me in both these comments? Both are _probably_ true at a class
>level. But their rhetorical stance seems wrong. At a class level, quantity
>(of *suffering*, of *violence*) supports some sort of hyper-quality
>(victimhood, gentleness) which is then allowed, like sunshine, to suffuse
>the individual members of that class.
Must say, I've never thought of women as a "class", not a "race",
since women inhabit, strangely, all classes and races. What you
write as paraphrase is not at all what I was trying to say, which is
much closer to what you want to say: that ideally each person must be
met as who they are, and must not be prejudged on categories of
humanity. I think that men and women have much more in common than
they have in different, and it is the differences that are usually
highlighted; and modern trans-gendering makes viewing the sexes, as
well as gender, a much more fluid proposition than perhaps it might
once have been. But that is not the same as saying that men and
women are identical and there is a danger of glossing this, as being
inconvenient. To me the matter of dispute is the signifance attached
to these differences.
Nevertheless, I remember talking to my midwife, a good and
interesting woman who is most certainly a witch. She delivered two
of my babies. Once she said to me: "I've delivered more than 500
babies, and it doesn't matter what people say, boys and girls are
different, and they're different when they're born."
Best
A
--
"The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
Albert Camus
Alison Croggon
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http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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