kelley wrote:
> >What nonsense.
>
> did you even bother to read what carrol wrote. he wrote that for millenia
> people *thought* that there was only one sex and that women were simply a
> deformed version of the male.
"What nonsense"? I'm not going to try to summarize closely researched and written historical scholarship in an e-mail post -- or even try to look up any of the minimal material. But note that the penis and the clitoris are the *same* organ, only differently developed. So on the basis of those two organs, there is only one sex. Same with breasts. Some of the other organs are completely different in the fetus from the beginning. So there are two sexes. Stephen Jay Gould who is not exactly biologically ignorant claims that on the basis of the *physiological* evidence the 2-sex and the 1-sex models are equally reasonable.
But do read Laqueur for yourself. You will learn a lot of history. I used it as a text the last time I taught 18th century English Literature and it made a lot of things that I'd been trying for years to get across much clearer to both me and the students. Laqueur has had a year of medical school, and is now a professor of history at Berkeley. Here is the first paragraph of his Preface:
This book began without my knowing it in 1977 when I was on
leave at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, doing research for what was
to be a history of the life cycle. I was reading seventeenth-century
midwifery manuals -- in seach of materials on how birth was organized
-- but found instead advice to women on how to become pregnant in
the first place. Midwives and doctors seemed to believe that female
orgasm was among the conditions for successful generation, and they
offered various suggestions on how it might be achieved. Orgasm was
assumed to be a routine; more or less indispensable part of conception.
This surprised me. Experience must have shown that pregnancy often
takes place without it; moreover, as a nineteenth-century historian I
was accustomed to doctors debating whether women had orgasms
at all. By the period I knew best, what had been an ordinary, if
explosive, corporeal occurrence had become a major problem of
moral physiology.
p. vii
There is still a good deal of debate around all the themes in Laqueur's book (including the history of philosophy, physiology, psychology, etc. etc. etc.) There are always debates in history. But to call it nonsense and introduce your own simple "proofs" is deliberate ignorance.
Are most people who don't already take these things for granted -- who haven't already been trained by some contact with feminist struggles -- able to read anything at all on this topic? Kelley's original subject heading is looking less and less merely rhetorical.
And any reader who is operating mostly on the basis of a negative reaction to Butler, please note that your reaction is probably no more negative than Yoshie's or mine. So please stop and think a little bit. As Engels remarked long ago, when common sense ventures into areas of specialized study it's apt to be pretty inadequate. Kelley hasn't asserted anything that isn't asserted in fairly sophisticated scholarship, bourgeois and marxist.
Carrol