For the day when our sexual organs mean nothing more than that, no implication other than their ability to do what they were made to do. For the day when leaning into your own special mix of feminine and masculine is as daily as breathing and as unremarkable. Sophie asked me on the way back from seeing Barbie why is it that kids take it out on their mums - a line in the movie she was seeing for the second time because I wanted to see it. I said, okay prepare yourself for the most broad brush of gender sweeps but it’s for a couple of reasons: mothers are safer and fathers are cowards. Whoa whoa there, Harsh! I know. Sorry. I’ll put it another way, although is there another way to put it? because these roles are begun in the cradle and they are roles. Mothers are softer on their sons, they let them get off light, they don’t teach them how to be disliked. Girls are told to be dependable, they’re taught to stay at home. It sparked a conversation about the differences between men and women in which we kept having to return to that premise, limited yet necessary, that men are like this and women are like that, in order to have the conversation. It doesn’t make sense if you break it down yet without it we get side tracked into the also truth of the myriad variations and exceptions to the rule. Of course there’s no such thing as men and women, and of course there is. So I said, here comes the nonsensical broad brush again: in my experience men are more sensitive and women are tougher. And that was taught in the womb, too. So, for the day when those terms are as meaningless as the colour of our eyes, and as useful for conversations about eye-colour and nothing else. What name I give myself an annotation in the big book of what it is to be a woman. There’s a line in the novel I’ve just handed in, one character says to another every time you are yourself you widen the definition of what it is to be that thing and this gets to the heart of what I mean. To shake off these constructs, this straight jacket. I want to dive into the hysteria and say everyone relax. It doesn’t matter. Blake in the back said they’re so frightened and it comes to that, that if we stop this clinging the world will end and badgers will marry lampposts. But they won’t. And the world won’t end. Nothing will happen. That which we are will carry on as it always has minus the violence and rage and stifling and condemnation and we will be happier.
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You are a good writer and this is good writing
Yes. Happier.