[LMB] Gender roles (was Predators vs. Protectors)

[Azalais Aranxta]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Elizabeth Holden wrote:

> --- Thad Coons <tocoons at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Persuading men to excise the dangly bits is going to be a REAL hard sell.
>
> Well, I think it would be a hard sell to women, too.

Of course it would.  It's just...everybody has dangly bits.
And if you're obviously male or female from birth on, then there
is nothing terribly rare and special about yours.  They do not
and should not entitle you to special privileges or consign you
unwilling to a role the meat in your HEAD is entirely unsuited
for.

> > It's not just masculinity and fatherhood that get devalued by
> > ideas of this type.
>
> Well, motherhood gets a lot of debasing these days and I'd
> defend that, too.

Fatherhood, motherhood, masculinity, femininity:  these are all
cultural constructs that vary widely from place to place and time
to time.  I'm not very interested in any of them, but Being a
Whole Person and Good Parenting/Nurturing are all entirely
valuable skill sets.

> > But if it has anything to do with "Don't have sex unless
> > you're ready to stick around and help civilize the junior
> > barbarians who just might come along after a while"...I can
> > go for that.
>
> Sounds absurdly sensible, doesn't it?

Um, no, not really.  I could go with "don't have unprotected
heterosexual intercourse unless you're willing to do your best at
it," but nobody's ever ready, and I abhor the notion that consent
to sex must equal consent to parenthood and the notion that
sex which isn't potentially procreative isn't real sex.

Part of the reason I object to this whole Gender Role thing is
that it leaves a lot of people out, such as the person who's born
with dangly naughty bits and brainmeats that are unequivocally
female, or the person who by inclination or felicity falls madly
in love with someone of the same biological sex and possibly the
same emotional/spiritual gender as well.  When we tell men that
their only choice is to be Provider-Protector or Ravening Wolf
and tell women that they are not allowed to grow all the way up,
the ones that don't or can't pair off along those lines are
generally even more screwed than the ones who can.  Appalling
behaviour ensues, society blames homosexuality or transgenderism
for the appalling behaviour and not the fact that if you tell men
they would act like ravening beasts were it not for the
restraining influence of the feminine soul, and people are
surprised that an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases and
broken hearts ensues, while women are moving in together on the
second date and only later figuring out that they're
incompatible?  (I was a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s.
I remember this well and I am relieved to see the queer teens I
know through fandom today NOT DOING THIS.)  There are few things
more heartbreaking than realising you can't be all that angry
with a fifteen year old girl in a forty year old body because she
wasn't allowed to BE a girl when she was 15 so no, she really
isn't a woman yet.  And even if this is only 1-5% of the
population, with six billion people, those are not insignificant
numbers.


~malfoy :/

****************************************************************
Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy)
ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness

"I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it
think we all bow down." --Christopher Morley