First, I don't do Twitter, because I have come to see it as perfectly suited to a certain style of Anglo-American snark-dueling. Twitter also functions as the Anglo-American (particularly the American) id. And Freud (yes, I am invoking the Patriarchal One) knew that the id mainly just spews. Think of Twitter as Anglo-Am…
First, I don't do Twitter, because I have come to see it as perfectly suited to a certain style of Anglo-American snark-dueling. Twitter also functions as the Anglo-American (particularly the American) id. And Freud (yes, I am invoking the Patriarchal One) knew that the id mainly just spews. Think of Twitter as Anglo-American colonialism.
I discovered a while back that Facebook friendses have to be minimized and cleaned out. I was dealing with a whole bunch of Hillary Dead-Enders. When someone I knew cussed me out for questioning the competence of the Hillary Campaign (by then defeated but already engaged in Russia Russia Innuendo), I did a purge way back in 2016. I've accepted about ten friendses since.
I have many Italian friends on Facebook, and they tend to stick to the traditional Italian idea of being spiritosi (spirited, witty, ironic in a good way).
This mess would certain get me off social media: "This particular one was quite a knot: as you’ll notice, the person switches between gender and sex seamlessly and perhaps (or perhaps not) unconsciously, which is actually the key to most of the mess of gender debates."
Yes. I noticed. I also notice a mural being painted in my neighborhood with the theme of protecting transgendered people--and all of the figures are flat, with oversized legs that look like chicken thighs, no shoulders (too manly), and the usual American oversized t-shirts.
It occurs to me that much of the gender / sex anxiety on Twitter and in "woke" writing stems from U.S. hatred of the body. This hatred stems partially from monotheism and from warmed-over platonism. It also stems from years of bad food across most U.S. social classes. The extra weight that most Americans carry now covers up secondary sexual characteristics like male shoulders and men's muscled legs.
The problem with sex and gender is that if we accept Chomsky that there are structures in the brain itself that support language then we also have to accept the idea that gender is partially in-born (if tendency to language is) and much of sexuality may be in-born (somehow mainly inherent rather than socially created).
I think there is a lot going on in the United States leading to these debates and a lot of the confusion. We definitely cannot discount industrial endocrine disruptors, nor obesity (when I was severely overweight I looked much more like my mother than I did my father, and much of my gender dysphoria was linked to being obese).
But also, yes, US hatred of the body, and also shame and embarrassment about the body. Being in Europe was really eye-opening on this. Especially Germans and other related peoples are a lot more accepting of nude bodies in general and a lot less hung up on them.
On the Chomsky matter, I am pretty reluctant to ever make statements about what is inherent or isn't, though his general theory is sound. What is more interesting to me--and I think more important--is that the very problem of sex and sexuality should never have been an ideological one in the first place. It is only ideological because we have let the political invade every part of human existence, so that who you have sex with or how you manifest your desire is a matter of ideological concern that needs some sort of framework or justification, rather than just *is.*
Even the idea of there being a sort of man that is gay--rather than men who have sex with men--is a problem that arose from this politicization. Napoleon was a bit of an ass in general, but he essentially made same-sex acts legal by not including sodomy prohibitions in his legal code. That is, he de-politicized same-sex relations, and this was a lot better of a route than defining people who have such relations as a special or different class of people (which led to later the "gay identity.")
some observations:
First, I don't do Twitter, because I have come to see it as perfectly suited to a certain style of Anglo-American snark-dueling. Twitter also functions as the Anglo-American (particularly the American) id. And Freud (yes, I am invoking the Patriarchal One) knew that the id mainly just spews. Think of Twitter as Anglo-American colonialism.
I discovered a while back that Facebook friendses have to be minimized and cleaned out. I was dealing with a whole bunch of Hillary Dead-Enders. When someone I knew cussed me out for questioning the competence of the Hillary Campaign (by then defeated but already engaged in Russia Russia Innuendo), I did a purge way back in 2016. I've accepted about ten friendses since.
I have many Italian friends on Facebook, and they tend to stick to the traditional Italian idea of being spiritosi (spirited, witty, ironic in a good way).
This mess would certain get me off social media: "This particular one was quite a knot: as you’ll notice, the person switches between gender and sex seamlessly and perhaps (or perhaps not) unconsciously, which is actually the key to most of the mess of gender debates."
Yes. I noticed. I also notice a mural being painted in my neighborhood with the theme of protecting transgendered people--and all of the figures are flat, with oversized legs that look like chicken thighs, no shoulders (too manly), and the usual American oversized t-shirts.
It occurs to me that much of the gender / sex anxiety on Twitter and in "woke" writing stems from U.S. hatred of the body. This hatred stems partially from monotheism and from warmed-over platonism. It also stems from years of bad food across most U.S. social classes. The extra weight that most Americans carry now covers up secondary sexual characteristics like male shoulders and men's muscled legs.
The problem with sex and gender is that if we accept Chomsky that there are structures in the brain itself that support language then we also have to accept the idea that gender is partially in-born (if tendency to language is) and much of sexuality may be in-born (somehow mainly inherent rather than socially created).
I think there is a lot going on in the United States leading to these debates and a lot of the confusion. We definitely cannot discount industrial endocrine disruptors, nor obesity (when I was severely overweight I looked much more like my mother than I did my father, and much of my gender dysphoria was linked to being obese).
But also, yes, US hatred of the body, and also shame and embarrassment about the body. Being in Europe was really eye-opening on this. Especially Germans and other related peoples are a lot more accepting of nude bodies in general and a lot less hung up on them.
On the Chomsky matter, I am pretty reluctant to ever make statements about what is inherent or isn't, though his general theory is sound. What is more interesting to me--and I think more important--is that the very problem of sex and sexuality should never have been an ideological one in the first place. It is only ideological because we have let the political invade every part of human existence, so that who you have sex with or how you manifest your desire is a matter of ideological concern that needs some sort of framework or justification, rather than just *is.*
Even the idea of there being a sort of man that is gay--rather than men who have sex with men--is a problem that arose from this politicization. Napoleon was a bit of an ass in general, but he essentially made same-sex acts legal by not including sodomy prohibitions in his legal code. That is, he de-politicized same-sex relations, and this was a lot better of a route than defining people who have such relations as a special or different class of people (which led to later the "gay identity.")