[culturehandy]

I pitched this in the Community Forum and it was well recieved.

This thread is all about the politics and cross cultural and societal views on gender.

I started thinking increasingly about gender when the media frenzy about Caster Semenya emerged. It is my opinion that the only reason people questioned Ms. Semenya's gender is because she appeared to be "masculine". That is, she looked masculine according to the ideas of society at large. Had she had softer, more "feminine" features, questions of her gender would not have come up.

So, what is gender? We know that there is sex, your biological sex, but gender is a social construct.

[koffeewitch]

GT- That's really intriguing; I like the idea of different stages that seem to serve conflicting purposes, sometimes demonizing a given minority population and sometimes romanticizing aspects of them. I'll have to think that over for a few days and apply it to our populations that have gained more acceptance in the last 30 years or so to practice identifying the different stages you described.

BTW, I noticed several of you mentioning having anthropology majors in college (I also started out as an anthro major). I remember being furious over the male bias in interpretting primate behavior. I remember a big deal being made out of the "prostitution" theory. (I wish I remembered if this occured in orangotans or chimps, etc). Anyway, a scientist observed a male and female primate finding the same piece of food. The primates had sex, and the female took the food. This was interpretted as her bartering with sex/prostituting herself. Now wait a minute, here. IF the male had taken the food first after sex, we all know that it would be interpretted as him displaying dominance over her. Fucking her. He wouldn't be whoring himself for her pleasure he'd be showing her who's boss. And these people call themselves impartial scientists?