Wednesday, September 9, 2009

She takes just like a woman.

Gender issues are something I find myself hesitant to write long diatribes about because I never really studied them in school and utterly lack a sense of history or the proper names for things. But I find them hella interesting, find myself thinking about them frequently, and I'm doing a lot of informal research these days for a poetry project. So in that light, I highly recommend reading this post from the folks at Jezebel.

"Just this weekend, a friend asked me what it meant that I considered myself a feminist. He wanted to know if I thought men and women were "the same." I don't.
...
It may be interesting to debate whether women are hardwired to pick up socks (I'm skeptical), but the real task of feminism is to make sure we're not forced to pick them up."

From Jezebel, "Is Margaret Atwood a Feminist? Are You?"

Recommended because:

a) Margaret Atwood does interesting work with gender in her fiction, writes beautifully cannily sharply brutally, and for me anything analyzing what she has to say about her own self-identity as a feminist is, to me, worth a gander.

And b) I think the post's writer is pretty much dead-on with how I feel, that looking for and scrutinizing gender differences (physical, mental, habitual, ecumenical, equatorial, sartorial) is mostly a waste of time and really it's more important to ensure that gender doesn't affect opportunity.

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