Women and men

In my younger years, I never put any real thought into the issues of sex and gender. They were of no consequence to me. My parents and teachers and Sesame Street had taught me that boys and girls are equal, and I accepted it. As I understood it, the feminist revolution was something that had succeeded long ago when women were granted the vote in the United States. Like issues of race, I thought gender and sex had been solved. The deepest my thoughts or actions ever strayed on this topic were to place the scores of the girls' team before the boys in my track articles and to reason that, since girls wanted to be equal with boys, they couldn't claim, "You can't hit me because I'm a girl." (Boy does that make me sound like a jerk.)

Now (if you've been following my blog long enough I imagine you can anticipate what is coming up) college has once again forced me to reconsider my beliefs on this topic. First of all, I have Literature I where the war between the sexes lay at the heart of every work we read,from The Odyssey to Paradise Lost, and Colloquium where we were spent a couple of weeks discussing identity and stereotypes and such associated with the sexes. Then, in second semester, we have Literature II and the notion of 'gendered writing,' that how men and women use language is of a diametrically different nature (might have this idea wrong since I have yet to read Alicia Ostriker who is, apparently, a major proponent of this).

Well, after having all of this happen in my classes, I began to take more notice of it in the rest of my life, in many mediums, from many sources. In Dr. Zhivago, the good doctor realizes that Tanya has become a woman and something has fundamentally changed between him and her. In When Harry Met Sally, it's asked if men and women can simply be friends. Crud, now I'm going to go and prove how much of a nerd I am. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Kaji says that the Japanese kanji for 'she' is 'a woman far away' and suggests that the two sexes will always be separated, unable to be together.

I certainly won't suggest that I have answer for this like I did when I considered the masses (seeing how well that worked out from the comments I received), but there are some things I'd like to work out for myself and vent on. First of all, this whole 'gendered writing' thing bugs me. I must confess, I know only what I've heard and actually haven't read anything about it, so it's more than likely I'm misconstruing and misunderstanding more than a few points. Anyway, one of its components, as I understand it, is that men write to gain mastery over their surroundings, and women are merely observing or something like that. Since I haven't read the writings that promote this style of analysis, I can't attack any arguments, but I will say that the whole concept seems unnecessary, merely a grandiose, unifying statement and way to reinforce the idea that there is an inherent and uncrossable division of the sexes, something I don't agree with. Yes, there are biological differences, but we still face the same hungers and thirsts and victories and losses in our lives. How can one say that the two can never come together by ignoring or marginalizing the similarities and drawing out the very obvious differences too far? Are a few fundamental differences enough to overwhelm as many fundamental similarities?

I guess these issues go even farther. Though we all have common experiences, our perception of them and their sum total are different for all of us. Can we never connect with others because of this? Is any bond we feel with others merely built on a shallow foundation? Is empathy a big lie?

I don't believe so, but this is a fair bit deeper than I intended to go with this post. Mostly I wanted to complain about gendered writing and gender roles and wasn't prepared to talk about these things. I'll be sure, though, to give them more thought and come back to them soon.