Sex And Gender

[poliphilo]

People get pulled up on the feminist site I frequent for using "sex" and "gender" interchangeably. The distinction is useful. If I've understood it right, "sex" is about physical characteristics and "gender" is about what goes on in your head.

Someone proposed that if you enjoy the cut and thrust of the work-place your gender is male and if you like staying home knitting bootees your gender is female.

I expect they got jumped on. But here's the problem. Sooner or later you stumble over the stereotypes. "Sex" is easily determined (in most cases) but "gender" is a social construct.

I'm confused. I've just written a book in which my tomboyish heroine keeps dodging in and out of drag. She is, of course, a version of myself.

I'm a man. And I'm heterosexual. But when I put myself in a book it's as a girl who goes running about with a sword in her fist having wild adventures.

I think there are probably quite a lot of us with this cast of mind- we are the male fans of Buffy and Xena and Uma Thurman's Bride- but I don't believe there's a word for us...

...Yet.

Comments

[kaysho.livejournal.com]

I remember reading a chapter in some sociology book or other about sex vs. gender roles, and how different cultures assigned various tasks to the sexes. While some tasks obviously had a strong bias toward one sex or the other (in most cultures the men hunt and the women rear the children, for example), there was no task that every single culture on earth assigned universally to one sex or the other, bar one. In no culture were women primarily responsible for hunting marine mammals.

Be a man. Kill a whale.