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San Francisco, 8:42 PM
Sun Nov 8
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/29/09
-Kle.
09/28/09
I mean, even if something is developed in *reaction* to the gender binary, in a way isn't it still based on it?
Compared to say, a race with three sexes; like the ooankali from Lilith's Brood who are basically tentacle-monsters that want to tentacle-rape the world, by tasping us Niven-style.
Fundamentally, we still didn't free ourselves from thinking in "binary terms" when we're "intentionally trying to occupy the middle ground"
It's that Rousseau concept that "we can't go back into the trees, we cant return to the neutral state of nature, we're kind of stuck with our social antecedents; the real question is what to do now and how to try to deal with that"
(this message thread was longer but was cruely deleted by a login time-out...curses...)
Or say, Heinein in "Stranger in a Strange Land" had Martians with an entirely different concept of "gender" deciding that the defining aspect of humanity was that we had these two genders....then again, Heinlein said *a lot of things*......
or like that Next Generation episode where they meet a race of gender-neutral aliens, where outcasts who start identifying as male or female are forcibly brainwashed back to cultural norms?
The problem is, yes, gender concepts are subjective....then again, morality or indeed any of our major social concepts are just plain "subjective"
I study "Chivalry" as my PhD thesis topic; yes its utterly subjective, but does that mean its a bad way to live? The Doctor Who-esque knight who runs around helping and defending people?
Conversely, was Arwen "bad" for having emotional courage and support? Did we have to just turn her into XenArwen and make a carbon copy of everything else?
Crud this message was longer but it got timed-out
I really like scifi stories that don't just rehash the gender binary stuff, but try to comprehend what a race that has three or more genders would functionally act or think like; and we really CAN'T because we've never met one, it's difficult for writers to grasp.
Oh the Tenctonese in "Alien Nation" have "three sexes" but it's more like they have "two males"
the Cogenitors on Enterprise, while a third "gender" (they contribute an enzyme).....are treated as basically pets and gender-neutral (they have so little rights that they're basically blanks)
There was some short story I read god knows how long ago, where there's this alien race that has four genders.....and he actually breaks down how each one has a separate social task and sort of thinks differently (it was something like 1-birthmothers 2-hunter-gatherer 3-wise leader who makes the tools 4-tracker/fighter)....however, that short story made it a point to say that the aliens still thought in more or less "conventional" human terms, they just split up social tasks 4 ways instead of 2.
Imagine some sort of cephalapod-like, tentacle-y alien with multiple biological sexes (or even a medusa-stage like the jellyfish)...they wouldn't really think in terms of "nurturer vs hunter" at all....I mean if one of their major life tasks was...."hrooming" like the living mattress race of H2G2....how would that affect their thinking?
well my point is this is a difficult topic for me to convey in words, in a mercifully brief post, and I *do not* have the answers
I'm really kicking myself that this got timed-out:
anyway, have a fun time at your conference at the....CSC?! Wow. Good times.
Well anyway, please don't treat it as just a "wow men and women may act similar in the future...why, women might wear long pants!" thing, but seriously question things like "if we're all electronic Avatars like in Surrogates or Gamer.....what the heck is our sexuality?"
09/28/09
01/15/09
01/15/09
Very funny.