🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2mlk26$19k@magic.erg.sri.com> zwicky@magic.erg.sri.com (Elizabeth Zwicky) writes:

>Many women - particularly women who hang out in women-only places -
>find the entire notion of femininity a troublesome patriarchal ideal.

I do, and I'm not a separatist by any means.

>They don't dislike masculinity; they dislike the entire
>masculine/feminine paradigm. I don't think that TS's are beings that
>are drawn to being feminine, but certainly a feminist group is not the
>ideal place to be if you are drawn to being feminine, regardless of
>the configuration of your chromosomes.  There is so much baggage
>associated with being feminine in our culture - it has to do with
>passivity, eagerness to please, helplessness - that truly deeply
>wanting to be feminine, as opposed to wanting to wear outrageous
>clothes or to be female or to wear makeup, is not a good sign about
>one's mental health.

I do not understand why anybody would want to be passive, waste their
life away pleasing others, and be helpless.  I've certainly done all
of that, but I don't see it as a virtue.  This kind of "femininity" 
makes me miserable.  I am much happier when I'm active, kind and
decent to others without catering to their every whim, and when I'm
competent at life tasks.  I think these are important virtues for any human 
being, male, female, or whatever.

>Furthermore, a lot of the point of woman-only space is setting up a
>space free of people who have been acculturated the way men are in our
>society. It's not just about reduced testosterone living, or a lack of
>male genitals; it's much more complex than that. The TS that I know
>best, at the time when I knew her, believed in a vision of what it
>meant to be female that was not about femininity as such, but that
>still struck me as dangerously oversimplified, and she believed that
>she was more like a woman than like a man, while behaving like a man
>in most of the ways that annoy me most. (Leaving the toilet seat up
>never bothered me that much, but being unable to find anything gets to
>me.)  

"Honeeeeeeyyyyy, where are the scissors????"   

>	Elizabeth D. Zwicky
>	zwicky@erg.sri.com

Thanks for the post.



-- 

- Heather Blair       h431@midway.uchicago.edu