>"Hardly intolerable" like being "foreignly
>exotic"! Do you not understand that sexual harassment, just like the
>harassment of people of color, exists to regulate the work force? It's a
>mechanism of social control.
I understand the theory, yeah. Was attempting to reconcile the general with the specific, the theory with the particular things it was invoked to explain. I was obviously being more insensitive than I knew.
I've been foreignly exotic a few times myself; daily bashings at one juncture (for not being able to speak English, having salami sandwiches and a foreskin in a South Australian primary school in 1964; and for stuff like not being able to speak Afrikaans, not understanding the virtues of apartheid, and giving my school blazer to a gardener in a Namibian high school in 1970), and a stay in hospital on one occasion. Quite nasty, some of it. Those places at those times weren't used to foreigners. But mostly, people were just as awkward with me as I was with them, it always felt like they were murmuring to each other about me, and I was always well'n'truly *that* foreign boy. That stuff, I could handle okay. Which is just as well. Anyway, I admit that's in the past, and that one's gender assignment does not go away as easily as a young man learns to assimilate when finally he stays somewhere long enough to get the chance.
I just felt I was talking about something a little more specific than what we seem to be talking about now. Structuralist analyses are rather all-encompassing and static for my blood. Important, but as incomplete and, if uncritically deployed, misleading as any analytical approach.
>It isn't easy to speak from
>experience to someone so dismissive of what a) he hasn't experienced, and b)
>cannot imagine.
So I asked about it. And got a bigger picture of a life experience in which the significances I was enquiring about were altered profoundly. I no doubt played my part in making it all more traumatic than it might have been ...
Cheers, Rob.