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From: mink@cfa.UUCP (Doug Mink)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: what makes you feel feminine/masculine?
Message-ID: <144@cfa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 11-Oct-85 11:55:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: cfa.144
Posted: Fri Oct 11 11:55:33 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 15-Oct-85 05:27:34 EDT
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Organization: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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> When we lavish attention on the fact that there's a 
> large basis in reality to some of the old stereotypes,
> without paying attention to the places where those stereotypes
> have failed us, we risk losing sight of the complexity
> with which we actually live out our lives as men and women.
> If we lose sight, we limit ourselves -- and we are back where
> we started, without the freedom to make choices about our lives.
> 
> So I would vote for a cessation of the perfume/wood chopping articles
> in favor of discussing the ambiguities involved in being 
> masculine or feminine.  How do we resolve the stereotypic 
> masculine/feminine cliches to which we so obviously subscribe?
> Does sexual identify depend on these cliches? 
> 
> Nancy Werlin

As I was posting my "perfume/woodchopping"-style response, I tried to
articulate both the positive and negative sides of sex-stereotyped
traits I have observed in myself.  I've thought of myself as a feminist
since the 60's, but the influences of the earlier times in which I grew up
and my traditional mother-stays-home-while-father-brings-home-the-bread family
life left some deep expectations of How Things Should Be between men and
women which I'm still trying to exorcise.  Part of the way we act is
always going to be gender-linked; it pays to be aware of that part of our
personna, not denying it, but not letting it get in the way of being
whole individual human beings, either.

					-Doug