>OK, I understand that we're grownups now and can see shades of gray. The
>question that remains is whether role playing, or lesbians trying out a
>multiplicity of roles, is liberating.
first, I don't think they're playing roles as if they're playing a role in a play. i don't think they are sniffing scented toilet paper and fondling 2 ply, 1 ply, recycled, sears catalogs, fruit tissues, etc toilet paper and mistaking it for an essential toilet paper that exists outside of scented, colored, 2 ply, 1 ply, recycled, sears catalogs, fruit tissues.
second, i don't think that was the question.
>Yes, thank you, that was good, but I still don't understand how liberation
>is connected with what you call something/someone.
it's not.
>I've had male lovers, I've had female lovers: why do I have to call myself
>a particular thing? How I act towards a lover has to do with how I relate
>to that particular person, not with acting out a pre-set script.
the bois aren't either.
>In fact, I think female sexuality and gender is much more fluid than male
>sexuality/gender.
Is this natural?
>The reaction against socially defined roles is just that, a reaction, not
>the end of the story....and not in itself liberating until it is seen as a
>reaction. At a certain point adolescents do stuff for the simple reasons
>that their parents hate it. When they actually grow up, assuming they ever
>do, they manage to do things that have nothing to do with their parents:
>neither identifying, introjecting, or reacting.
Apparently, Adrinne Rich hasn't grown up yet.
>Well, but since you're complaining about essentialism, the above sounds
>essentialist to me. There is the fact of sexual attraction. Then there is
>the mental operation that interprets that attraction, that labels it,
>categorizes it, proclaims that there are two genders, one gender, five
>genders, etc. Why is that mental operation necessary? Why can we not love
>or even simply desire and then do what we will?
because we're human. Humans label and categorize. If we didn't, life would be a dizzying whirlwind of information coming at us. We'd be so busy processing it every minute, never able to rely on prior experience, that nothing would ever get done. It's unavoidable. It's not that the boxes are wrong. What's wrong is putting people in them so we can get _enjoyment_ out of fucking their skeleton and get _enjoyment_ out of a smoke afterward.
Sometimes Miles explains this stuff far more succinctly and better than I.
>OK. But it's not enough to say that. I mean you go to the supermarket and
>you find out that toilet paper now comes in colors, but it's still toilet
>paper. OK. not a great example. I guess I'm saying that having more roles
>to choose from doesn't really make that much difference. Each role sets up
>a "me" and a "not me" -- it just puts a different spin on it.
Again, no one has said that this gender diversity IS liberation.
I think your example of toilet paper is interesting. Who gets to define what colorless, non-lotioned, non-plyed, unscented toilet paper is?
I only every buy white Scottissue by the way! (or the store brand knock offs of same!)
>But here you're talking about mutually desiring playing subjects. The
>"objectification" is metaphoric.
disagree.
>The attraction is already there <...>
Is it? When Justin imagined you were beautiful because of your onlist persona, was the fact that you aren't necessarily attracted to him mean that you were NOT flattered by his attentions, his fantasy of your beauty?
Is it only possible to be flattered by the words, "I imagine you are beautiful" if you are also attracted to that person? If it came from someone who lurks, who you don't "know," would you not be flattered because you don't feel the same toward the lurker? Would you be not flattered because the person doesn't really know you and vice versa?
there was a scene in Sex and the City where Charlotte reveals to Harry something like, "You should be lucky that someone like me wants you."
and Harry says, "I know I'm lucky. I know what everyone else thinks, that I'm lucky to be with you, a guy like me. But I never thought you thought like everyone else." (can't recall the exact words they used.)
Charlotte is quite aware that her greater physical beauty, poise, charm, grace means that society looks on their relationship as one where she is giving Harry a gift for which he ought to be grateful. But, it's not just that, Charlotte feels desirous toward Harry not because of some brute fact of attraction, but also because she feels she's giving him a gift, and has just made manifest her expectation that she be recognized for giving the gift==the gift of her desire--which makes her actually desire him.
(Which may be why Charlotte is so popular with hetmen! She is the fantasy of a beautiful woman giving the gift of desiring a less attractive man.)
>As for M, the stripper. What she finds liberating isn't the stripping
didn't say that. I brought it up because we were talking about strippes. If I'd wanted to say that stripping was, in and off itself libeating, I wouldn't have started my post with the assertion that it wasn't. I brought it up to raise another issue entirely.
>Well, OK. I did say it was a crappy scene, but that was in response to the
>claim that it was "liberating."
Again, no one actually claimed that.
Kelley