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From: crs@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: what makes you feel feminine/masculine?
Message-ID: <31661@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 9-Oct-85 12:42:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: lanl.31661
Posted: Wed Oct  9 12:42:59 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Oct-85 18:57:39 EDT
References: <754@ttidcc.UUCP>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 63

> Subject: Re: what makes you feel feminine/masculine?
> >
> >     I find this amazing, though not necessarily bad.  Here in 1985,
> >on a newsgroup devoted to women's issues, women are still talking
> >about pampering themselves, wearing traditionally women's things,
> >and being irrationally emotional as the things which make them feel
> >feminine.
> >--Jamie
> 
> I found this question and the responding postings interesting as well.
> My response (which you did not note above) answered what I *thought*
> was the real question:  What makes me feel feminine and what makes
> me feel masculine.  I am surprised to discover that the interpretation
> others placed on the question excluded one side of the issue.

I wasn't sure which way to take the original posting, though I leaned
toward the two sided view.

> After all, we have both masculine and feminine sides, don't we?  We all
> feel both masculine at times and feminine at times, don't we?  I'm curious
> why the men answered only about feeling masculine, and the women only about
> feeling feminine, but no one else answered about feeling both, until Jamie
> brought up the subject with his posting (filled with some vague sense of
> disquiet about feeling feminine at times).
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Adrienne Regard

I tried to answer this in my own mind with little success.  I think
the issue is so hopelessly entangled with cultural definitions that no
two of us are talking about the same thing.  At best, what each of us
could talk about is what *we* as individuals believe to be feminine or
masculine.  And *that* is where cultural bias *must* come in.  None of
us can completely escape the effects of, for lack of a better term,
a lifetime of brainwashing.  No matter how hard we try, won't we after
all be talking about what we have been *taught* is feminine or
masculine?  Feminine and masculine are merely names that we have been
taught for certain types of behavior, certain characteristics.

Much of the misunderstanding that occurs on the net (and elsewhere) is
a direct result of the fact that no two of us have exactly the same
definition for anything.  A lifetime of cultural conditioning will, it
seems to me, *always* take precedence over the dictionary.

As someone posted recently, I believe it was Trudy, I feel most *,
where * is the name/identity of the person speaking may have some
meaning.  As soon as we try to separate the meaning of
feminine/masculine from what we have learned throughout our lives so
we can say  I feel most ... , and we stop to think ... we haven't done
so at all.  It becomes "I feel most (what I have been taught is)
feminine/masculine.

Should we be surprised, then, that the majority of posters end up
describing "what we always *knew* was feminine/masculine?"

Sorry for rambling...
-- 
All opinions are mine alone...

Charlie Sorsby
...!{cmcl2,ihnp4,...}!lanl!crs
crs@lanl.arpa