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"I’m writing in drag."
I love this October '05 interview with Joss Whedon, as just reported on Whedonesque. Especially this:
I’m super-gay, something my wife has come to accept and even enjoy.
[Wow, it's like me talking up there!]
and
But it is difficult, and these are roles that are constantly redefining themselves and re-entrenching. And you do come to a realisation, as you get older, that men and women actually do have not just cultural but biological differences, and that some of those clichés about how different they are, are actually true. And while I spend my entire career trying to subvert our notions of masculinity and femininity, I also have to have some grounding in the fact that some of them are based in reality — but some of them are also based in sociology, and those are the ones that have to be done away with, because they are nonsense.
I know we can never know what people are really like from media coverage, but am I wrong to find him adorable? The fact that he'd say the first bit aloud is just so heartening. I'm not alone--the gay heterosexual is a fact. Not my imagination.
I’m super-gay, something my wife has come to accept and even enjoy.
[Wow, it's like me talking up there!]
and
But it is difficult, and these are roles that are constantly redefining themselves and re-entrenching. And you do come to a realisation, as you get older, that men and women actually do have not just cultural but biological differences, and that some of those clichés about how different they are, are actually true. And while I spend my entire career trying to subvert our notions of masculinity and femininity, I also have to have some grounding in the fact that some of them are based in reality — but some of them are also based in sociology, and those are the ones that have to be done away with, because they are nonsense.
I know we can never know what people are really like from media coverage, but am I wrong to find him adorable? The fact that he'd say the first bit aloud is just so heartening. I'm not alone--the gay heterosexual is a fact. Not my imagination.
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He struck me as geeky rather than gay (man, that adjective has had more meanings...) in the few interviews I've seen. Now I'm curious about exactly which gender-role-ish things he thinks are valid and which he thinks are nonsense!
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True, but keep in mind this is an interview, and not edited for clarity. He's probably just using "sociology" as shorthand for the more imposed, non-biological aspects of gender. I'd be hard pressed to find a short-form definition for what he's talking about, myself. "Culturally imposed," maybe.
I think he just spoke too quickly.
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Anyway, thanks for the link, and I loved this interview. What you quoted is particularly interesting to me because I have a lot of trouble with it. Back in the day (pre-teen days, that is) I was the sort of feminist (is this even feminist? I'm not sure; it's probably just stupid) who liked to argue women weren't any different than men, not even biologically, except for the physical fact of the penis and reproductive organs. But since I've come to realize that those biological differences do make us psychologically different too, but the trouble I have with it is as far as a lot of those "cliches" go, I tend to be "masculine" (I can't mult-task; I can't ask for help; I don't cry, etc.) I hate that; it's made me feel like less of a woman in times past.
But I do think both gender and sexuality are a continuum, the way Whedon says in the interview. Sure, male is male and female is female, but there is the point where we meet, and isn't that so fascinating? And once I sort of got that, I felt a lot better about my sexuality, too. There's gay and straight and bi, but all sorts of things in between. I can be het and still find women hot. I can be het and even want to sleep with a woman. And maybe that makes me bi--but not being quite sure and not quite having a concrete definition of what I am in that sense no longer really bothers me any more.
/random confessions!
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I think it may vary depending on who's talking. I imagine that certain women or men, whose nature it is to display traits that are not in line with gendered norms (which, granted, are getting wider all the time), may have trouble. It's not like it used to be. But I think there are still pressures, from family, media, etc, to see ourselves within certain boundaries.
Some of those, as we've said, are physical. And yes, sexual differences are enjoyable; but not in the same way for all people. In the case of Buffy, Joss made a superhero who is both pretty and kick-ass, but is not an amazonian fetish object either. That's somewhat different, if you look back. Not saying the world's been changed, but I think there are still expectations laid upon us.
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When I first read that, I thought you meant that you had a problem with what Joss had said--now I realize you meant you struggle with the same thing. It confused me, for a minute.
I'm pretty much a "girl" on the continuum, but I'd said maybe a 3.5 or 4 on a scale of 1-10, 1 being femme. Of course, it depends on what aspects you're talking about: I look feminine (if immature), dress just a little cute, no makeup, can read maps/orient myself well, don't get on with "femmes", but don't like "manly" men either. So I've also dealt with these questions my whole life. As a teen, I refused to wear skirts or the color pink. Now I've tried to introduce these things back in a little at a time, though I've pretty much stopped because I'm far too active and unladylike to properly wear a skirt. But I've come to terms with my body a lot more than in the past, and I don't bother so much with gender anyway.
As to sexuality, you're mirroring me there, too. As a "straight" woman in a het marriage who is (possibly because she is with a guy and has that already) is increasingly interested in women, definitions are distracting and seem beside the point to me. The label seems to imply something beyond what I'm actually feeling--I don't feel "straight", but what would it mean to introduce myself as "bi"? Mr. A thinks I'm "mostly" lesbian, though other friends assume that's him being proud of "taming the lesbian" or whatever. Guess I'm queer. But it doesn't bother me so much, anymore, either.
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And I'm talking about the girls.
Obviously expectations like "You're a girl; you can't study engineering" are burdensome. But so is, "You're a girl, take AP physics instead of home ec because it's better for 'success.'" The movie "Mona Lisa Smile" dealt with that whole question in an interesting way.
To me, the whole point is to raise and support people who can find out what it is they want, what they like, what will make them happy in all regards (culture, work, sex, etc.) Even if that means they do the "unexpected."
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I too went through a "phase" (in my case it was early college) where I remember arguing vehemently with several men about "how sexual differences were culturally determined." (We were talking about secondary ones like strength, visual/spatial awareness, not the obvious "what's under the tail" stuff.) Shulamith Firestone's "Dialectic of Sex" had just come out some years before, and people were seriously talking about the eventual hormonal / surgical elimination of sex differences. "The Story of X" was really taken seriously. Just a little later, Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time" shocked with its portrayal of the lactating man. Now to me it seems mostly silly.
I have been told I have a very "male brain" too. Neurologically there probably *is* a continuum of differences (as you point out.) The key is to use what you have as best you can.
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To get back to the gender thing, I think we've come a long way and a lot of the more overt pressures have let up. But I don't think that means they've disappeared.
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On the other hand, since "cultural gaiety" is frequently perceived as feminine, you may just be a woman.
It's so confusing!
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But is there another set of terms for it?
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(Anonymous) 2006-05-26 05:59 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
I think many of the behavioral traits are pretty mutabile. The business of tears, for instance. My husband ranks far over on the "masculine" scale but he tears up whenever the situation calls for it. He's far more emotionally sensitive than I.
However, just as Whedon concedes that there are biological differences, IMO most of those biological differences are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, against which our current very recent emphasis on equality is so small as to be almost unmeasurable.
I read a book recently by a Swedish neurologist (or was it endocrinologist?) named Moberg, about oxytocin. Apparently there are sex-specific hormone pathways that mediate bonding and emotional closeness in men vs. women, with vasopressin being the primary (but not sole) hormone in men, and oxytocin (but not 100%) in women. She calls oxytocin the 'bonding hormone' because of its role not only in lactation and bonding to the infant, but in sexual bonding as well.
Men tend to be more territorial and aggressive in expressing their "bonds," whereas women tend to just want to be close, to be held, to cuddle.
I'm not sure how many guys really do "motherhood." I've seen a lot of men caring for their children, sometimes even very intensively (like the father who cares for a young child when Mom goes back to work), but it's my observation that they do it very differently than the mother would. Not worse - in some cases the kids have more fun, because Dad isn't riding herd over them like Mom would. In some ways the kids probably have more freedom to explore, get dirty, make mistakes, track in sand, eat the bubbles in the bath, whatever. It's just different.
Of course men do fashion, haute cuisine, the whole culture of "beauty" very well - they invented it. (Camille Paglia has a lot to say about this in Sexual Personae.) Don Anslett writes books on how to keep house; women still do the scrubbing, mostly.
Both genius and mental deficiency are far more common in men than women, too, especially musical/mathematical genius. (I'm thinking of John Nash - his wife was employed for 20-30 years, who solidly and competently managed a house, a child, a fulltime career as a computer programmer, as well as John Nash himself and his bouts of madness - but he was the one who did the work that led to the Nobel, and I don't think it was just "sexism" or "discrimination."