alana@mhuxm.UUCP (whipple) (07/12/84)
I'm not sure what prompted this article, but I will respond anyway, according to standard USENET behaviour. :-) As I understand Eirikur's article, the point is that sex roles are not easily changed. This is true. One cannot simply decide to become another person. Eirikur discusses the difficulty of phasing them (or them phasing) out of existence over generations. > Culture abhors a vacuum. Courtship, (or a replacement protocol) has > to happen. Kids have to be born, and wear designer jeans, watch too > much tv, eat junk food, etc, (or your local period/regional variants) > and then raise kids themselves. This *has* to happen. Sure, kids will be born. No matter how much having children goes out of style, there will always tend to be an abundance of them, because heterosexuals reproduce themselves. (Why do you think they're called 'breeders'? :-) But they don't '*have*' to participate in all the little rituals of their respective societies. All of the mind sets and biases and mores that people grow up to believe as gospel is just so much mental baggage. Life can be very simple under all those assumptions, but it seems pretty boring to me. For everyone to believe alike makes a tedious world for everyone. We should free ourselves from the constant pressure to conform. ("Goodbye, 'all this'") But wouldn't this sort of thing destroy our cultural heritage and lead to chaos? In some cases, good riddance. In other areas, we must be careful to preserve what is worth preserving. We certainly are in no danger of vacuum. The world will change. The world will change not so much by things disappearing as by things being replaced. There is a struggle of ideas (memes, if you will). Just consider the abundance of viewpoints on the net :-). It *is* difficult to transcend one's sexist upbringing. What is the first question asked about a newborn child? 'What is the gender?' Why does this matter? > I haven't ever seen a gay or lesbian relationship that did not *most of > the time* exhibit differential 'sex roles.' They may swap or submerge, > but from what I've seen, they surface daily. I don't doubt that even relationships between the most liberated souls of the same gender continue to have vestiges of the sex roles that are pounded into us from birth. But I don't see how one could be more free of these sex roles than by being other than heterosexual. Gays go the farthest in getting rid of these imposed roles. I have the impression that gay relationships have traditionally been modelled on marriage. I mean, *in the past*. This results in all sorts of butch/femme, active/passive roles. Nowadays people are aware enough not to fall into this trap. Gee, this letter sounds very didactic. I don't have any answers to It All; I can just give my impressions. I also don't mean to sound as if there is a big Society out there that peeks thru our windows. Darren Damman mhuxm!alana