i'm new to the list and thought i'd weigh in here.
i think it would be helpful to talk away from generalities of "men" "women"
"femaleness" "maleness." phrases like "women in Australia" or "the male way
of thinking." this is too general to mean anything. what to do with all
the exceptions?
better to talk about SPECIFIC women in Australia? to talk about ONE WAY OF
THINKING and how that way is generative or not, liberating or not etc.
it would also be helpful, IMHO, to talk about WHEN specific men or women act
or think in a specific way. in what context? when a man is at work with
mainly men (or mainly women?) when a woman is hanging out with her writing
group which may have more women than men? these are rough examples, but i
think you get the point. i believe that our thoughts and actions are
influenced, but not totally determined by, specific times and contexts.
let's say there is a way of thinking, a "meaning filter" that keeps me or
Douglas from recognizing the "good" in a poem. (whether written by a man or
woman or multi-gendered Martian) lets say that me and Douglas are part of
the 97 percent of the men in the world that have this filter. how about the
other 3 percent of men? it would seem they need to be discussed to see how
it is that they have escaped this. and there may be a certain percentage of
women who have this filter, at times, perhaps because they've been "trained"
by those 97 percent men in schools and society. would we call this filter
"male" because most men in the world think in such a way? what if the
percentage was 78? what if the percentage was 51? would you still say
"men"? "male"?
my point, (ok, ok, my axe to grind) is that generalities such as "male"
"female" keep us locked-in to a blaming/defensive dualism which guarantees
that crippling practices and restrictive meaning-filters stay unexamined and
therefore unchanged.
Randy Prunty
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