It is not possible to pull down the master's house without using the master's tools. The master's house is, of course, langue; the master's tools are parole.
Who is the master?
"It seems we're all set down here," an old woman said to me recently, "and no one knows why." — Annie Dillard
I do not understand who this master you say feminists "must" be fighting is, unless of course you mean the tyranny of our mortal, limited bodies and minds, in which case the master is nature. Surely you cannot mean the male of the human species, who suffers from an inability to procreate, a basic function of life, without outside help?
Currently transgenderism and such related phenomena as SRS are much in the news. It is much easier to create a passable, but infertile, female from a male than the reverse. Who benefits from this inequality? Who suffers?
Could it be just the working out of thousand independent variables at random?
white, male, heterosexual, middle-class, American, Christian
Right now you are privileged. A few hundred years ago, had you lived in southeastern Europe, you might have been enslaved, castrated and shipped to the Ottoman Empire.
Western women, and more and more women of every culture, are walking the same path that the males only preceded them on. They are bumping against the limits of biology and economics (crude matter) on the one hand and the straining of civilization to keep up, to rewrite the rules as the seeming constants of all human history are swept away.
Thirty-eight years ago, the first creatures from Earth, aside from some few stray bacteria, stood on another planet. An entire constant of four billion years was swept away in a few years of preparation (on our part, at least) and three or four days of travel. It was replaced by a mere conditional: anyone you meet is probably an Earthling.
Nowadays, anyone you meet might be not a Terran but a Moon person. Maybe not now, but in a few years as history reckons, a colony might be set up there. 128 years separated Columbus from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and they had air, water game and dirt to look forward to. Having to take all that with us, but being wiser and stronger, it will probably take us half that time to colonize the Moon.
From unuttered Truth to unjustified assumption in three or four days. All it took was a crazy German scientist, a few hundred thousand tons of rocket fuel and a few thousand metric assloads of money.
Ah, money. What a wonderful thing. Reading Alan Greenspan's memoirs reminds me of something very important: government intervention is the very last, worst resort. Markets (i.e., people) are flexible and resilient. How wonderful to think that if we keep on fostering growth, new forms of atomic power and ideas that we will soon be rich enough to buy our way out of almost all our problems and on our way to discovering even bigger, weirder problems.
Thank God I am a man, because men were first on this path and we don't waste our days blaming women for every tripping rock and branch on the path. And thank God I read Camille Paglia before I ever exposed myself to you or the people who ruined you, because I am now immune to bogus-Romantic, self-pitying whinging.
Good advice. (http://bukucomics.com/loserz/index.php?comicID=468)
The hope that we could avoid using the master's tools is a fundamentally liberal (i.e., non-radical) one: it is the hope that the problem does not really lie as deep as all that, that there is a "nature"--a real, a purity, an uncorrupted innocence, a ding-an-sich--which lies outside the master's influence for feminist to access.
No. There is no special reality. There is nothing beyond this. Innocence is nothing more than the shiny metal back of a brand new iPod: you'll be happier once you put a scratch in it as you'll stop worrying about "protecting" it all the time.
We are all in it. Always. We only see deeper, more clearly. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity)
"The farther in you go, the bigger it gets." — John Crowley
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Date: 2007-10-14 08:47 am (UTC)Who is the master?I do not understand who this master you say feminists "must" be fighting is, unless of course you mean the tyranny of our mortal, limited bodies and minds, in which case the master is nature. Surely you cannot mean the male of the human species, who suffers from an inability to procreate, a basic function of life, without outside help?
Currently transgenderism and such related phenomena as SRS are much in the news. It is much easier to create a passable, but infertile, female from a male than the reverse. Who benefits from this inequality? Who suffers?
Could it be just the working out of thousand independent variables at random?
white, male, heterosexual, middle-class, American, Christian
Right now you are privileged. A few hundred years ago, had you lived in southeastern Europe, you might have been enslaved, castrated and shipped to the Ottoman Empire.
Western women, and more and more women of every culture, are walking the same path that the males only preceded them on. They are bumping against the limits of biology and economics (crude matter) on the one hand and the straining of civilization to keep up, to rewrite the rules as the seeming constants of all human history are swept away.
Thirty-eight years ago, the first creatures from Earth, aside from some few stray bacteria, stood on another planet. An entire constant of four billion years was swept away in a few years of preparation (on our part, at least) and three or four days of travel. It was replaced by a mere conditional: anyone you meet is probably an Earthling.
Nowadays, anyone you meet might be not a Terran but a Moon person. Maybe not now, but in a few years as history reckons, a colony might be set up there. 128 years separated Columbus from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and they had air, water game and dirt to look forward to. Having to take all that with us, but being wiser and stronger, it will probably take us half that time to colonize the Moon.
From unuttered Truth to unjustified assumption in three or four days. All it took was a crazy German scientist, a few hundred thousand tons of rocket fuel and a few thousand metric assloads of money.
Ah, money. What a wonderful thing. Reading Alan Greenspan's memoirs reminds me of something very important: government intervention is the very last, worst resort. Markets (i.e., people) are flexible and resilient. How wonderful to think that if we keep on fostering growth, new forms of atomic power and ideas that we will soon be rich enough to buy our way out of almost all our problems and on our way to discovering even bigger, weirder problems.
Thank God I am a man, because men were first on this path and we don't waste our days blaming women for every tripping rock and branch on the path. And thank God I read Camille Paglia before I ever exposed myself to you or the people who ruined you, because I am now immune to bogus-Romantic, self-pitying whinging.
Good advice. (http://bukucomics.com/loserz/index.php?comicID=468)
The hope that we could avoid using the master's tools is a fundamentally liberal (i.e., non-radical) one: it is the hope that the problem does not really lie as deep as all that, that there is a "nature"--a real, a purity, an uncorrupted innocence, a ding-an-sich--which lies outside the master's influence for feminist to access.
No. There is no special reality. There is nothing beyond this. Innocence is nothing more than the shiny metal back of a brand new iPod: you'll be happier once you put a scratch in it as you'll stop worrying about "protecting" it all the time.
We are all in it. Always. We only see deeper, more clearly. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity)