Can you read the words that I am typing?

[schmevil]

As I type up this post, I'm also composing an email to justacat, whose Slash Resource Site is making waves this week. I'm asking her to take down the link to my recs journal. My reasons?

1) She spelled my name wrong. Spacing counts.
2) She abbreviated my name as Mart. Mart. I'd be more likely to forgive this if my recs journal wasn't named secubus_mhc.

These may sound terribly petty, but they reflect a carelessness that I abhor.

3) She did not ask if the owners of these recs sites and journals wanted to be affiliated with her project. I'm a big fan of net liberalism and she was within her rights to link without asking. However, when one is managing a high profile project, it is generally considered polite to ask before linking. I am now affiliated with this project, whether I like it or not, and by extension, with her ideology.

4) I disagree rather profoundly with her 'methods' and ideology. Yes folks, she has one. Despite claims that recs sites in particular and fanfic in general are apolitical, they are not. Politics is nothing less than the interaction of people. Everything we do is political. Everything. Ducking into a metaphorical foxhole and pretending that the bad politicks-stuff will go away is asinine and ignorant. Everything has a deeper meaning. Everyone has an agenda. To argue otherwise is just wankery of the most obvious sort. By method, I mean that her compilation is not consistent. She has not drawn every slash link from those sites and she has linked to stories that were not reced. She has also neglected to find recs for less popular pairings - the site is dominated by H/D and Snarry. Finally, she's linked PAST the warnings in some cases.

5) None of my recs actually appear on her site. Is she linking to my recs journal for some reason other than my recs? Or has she gone live without completing the site? While I understand that sites are always in progress, I think it sloppy to add one set of links without also adding the complimentary ones.

That's enough for me to want to get free of this particular venture.

acadine expressed similar concerns and overwhelmingly the response was "Good lord, woman! Get over yourself." Essentially respondents are calling her foolish for being troubled by careless slights and for reading an agenda into the site itself. It should be clear that I don't think she's being foolish.

acadine says:

"What I mean by "dedicated slashers" are people who're basically all in it for the hot m/m action. They seem almost utterly disinterested in the world or plot of the books themselves, they never write female characters or gen (or even let them sneak into their boyslash), they're basically only readers and writers of m/m emotional porn.

I know this is a site for those kinds of people, and not for me, and I shouldn't really expect everyone who reads my stuff to read it in the same light I do, but this still creeps me out. A lot of the exclusively m/m crowd does have this weird air of misogyny and living in their own little world that I'm just plain not comfortable with."

i.e. Those who deride het and gen may be misogynist. Those who express disgust for it may be misogynist. Those who couch their adoration of slash in terms of its ability to elide gender roles may be misogynist.

She says nothing about what gets you WET (not hard, but WET, ladies), or what happens to be your kink. She is arguing about the context of slash, not the existence of male slash. She is not arguing that m/m slash is The Dumb. She is not arguing that porn is inherently misogynistic or that we should all be holding hands and writing PC genfic. She does not, in fact, ever mention the need to political sensitivity when articulating sexual fantasies.

Context.

Many slash readers refuse to read het because

1) It's disgusting.
2) It's misogynistic.

The idea is that slash, free as it is of those super-icky vaginas, is a wonderful fantasy land where cocks roam free, girls masturbate with the hand not busily scrolling down for the next thrust, and everyone is free of gender stereotypes.

The thing is, slash can't be both free of a political agenda and an agent for breaking down gender stereotypes. That is in of itself a political agenda.

Providing a vagina-free environment is a political agenda.

Saying you have no agenda? Is FUELED BY A POLITICAL AGENDA.

Acadine is disturbed by that part of fandom that is so blinded by self-hatred that they cannot bare to read about female sexuality unless it is clothed in the psuedo-masculine tropes of slash. She is disturbed by the notion that one cannot be aroused by fiction, unless there is a cock present and that sexual desire can only be expressed through cocks.

Let me also point out that writing m/m slash is not a free ticket out of the land of gender stereotyping and misogyny, since many feminized male characters embody an attitude of gross self-hatred, by their very existence. M/M slash is often worse in this sense, as many authors depend on the existence of gender roles for their salt. Their stories are hinged on gender stereotyping. Bottom/Top. Dominant/Submissive. They are written into our cultural fabric so tightly that they inform all expressions of sexuality. So many slash stories play off of this to the point that they are inherently misogynistic. Blanket denial of gender roles by excluding women is not an empowering act; it is a refusal to deal critically with one’s own sexuality.

As saeva said in IM:

“One cannot escape gender roles, whether the characters are "male", "female", or hermaphrodites. Gender roles, whether you accept or reject them, are something that are repeated to you daily, constantly, in everything around you from the minute you are born and the doctor announces whether you have a vagina or a dick.

Trying to escape gender roles is the exact opposite of the logical thing to do. Let me repeat: IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. Therefore, all you ickle slashers out there who think you're so 'enlightened' and 'aren't we great because we escape those eeebbiiill gender stereotypes? Get. A. Fucking. Clue. Your slash? Has gender stereotypes *unless* you *actively* attempt to negate the social influence of your life. Which ninety-nine percent of you don't do because if you did? You wouldn't think the fucking Minister of Magic was elected and the Malfoys might just be (or pretend to be) old school Protestant (but, hey, that's another rant all together). ”

Ok, one more time. Politics=life. Also? Opinions and lj posts are generally not social prescriptions.

Fandom is full of politics and denying its existence is just The Dumb. I could go over why the posts in this thread seem to be mostly the fault of an inability to read critically, but I’d just be boring myself. Instead, I’m just going to say this: read twice before getting your back up. Not every critical post is an attack on your Sacred Cocks.

Comments

[jennycarolyn.livejournal.com]

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! *calms down*

You've just explained two things for me. Two things I've been trying to get explained to me since I've entered the fandom.

1) Why do people like slash?

2) Why do people hate het?


Every time I would pose those questions, I'd get answers like, "Because het. is so icky" or "Because het makes me puke" or "Because Harry and Snape are SO FUCKING HOT TOGETHER" *eye roll*

*bows down to the greatness of the House Cat*

Word.

[tanzy.livejournal.com]

If I have not said it before, let me say so now, I love you! :D

Being trained in communications and rhetoric and a gay activist by choice, I've come to be someaught horrified by the homophobia and misogyny that is not only present in parts of slash fandoms, but tolerated and even defended. I will admit I was certianly guilty of things like it when I was a teenager first getting into slash and confused about my own sexuality, but I'd like to think I've grown up a bit since then.

I've always found it funny when people claim that something (not just slash) doesn't have a political agenda. Anything a person creates for the purpose of public (or semi-public) consumption, be that an informative slash site or a piece of fiction, has something it's trying to impart. By definition, that's exactly what a political agenda is, even if the author doesn't realize this or tries to dissociate from it.

[wcspegasus.livejournal.com]

She did not ask if the owners of these recs sites and journals wanted to be affiliated with her project.

While I agree with all of your reasons for wanting your site removed (and no 1 and 2 are not petty, they are your preferences and it is your right to have them), I particularly agree with this one. It's one of the main reasons that I don't have any sort of links page on my website at all. Reccommending a fic you think is good and linking to it is one thing, it's clearly a personal opinion, not an affiliation. But putting links to other sites is a different matter entirely. People visiting your site assume (be it rightly or wrongly, it still happens) that sites you link to agree with your site's philosophy. I think it was in somewhat poor taste to just go randomly collecting links and never asking if putting them on the page was okay.

[mollymoon.livejournal.com]

1) I read the whole damn thing.
2) I love you.

[bobthetrout.livejournal.com]

This is a wonderful essay. It outlines so many of the problems in slash fandom that people are blind to. Do you have any intent to post it in a more public forum?

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm not sure where I'd post it. hp_essays or badficsupport?

[bobthetrout.livejournal.com]

badficsupport I think. The essay isn't specifically about HP, and I can point out the exact same problems in any slash fandom I've ever participated in or observed.

[chaos-rose.livejournal.com]

Thank you for putting it so well.

[cursive.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can't read critically and I have sacred cocks -- that's quite a bit to impute from that thread. By inference I also do not understand that gender roles are political and that fandom is political. I'd be thrilled to see the critical analysis of my posts that justified either the direct assertions or the inferences.

Please do, go over my posts and explain why I am unable to read critically. I would be utterly fascinated by the result and am sure I would learn something. I'm not prepared to predict what.

My principal reason for not particularly reading het and femmeslash in the HP fandom is that I don't find the female characters as open as the male and therefore I'm just not as interested in them as fanfic points of focus. In the only other fandom I read in widely, I read both because the female characters are just as if not more interesting. It's spurious to assert that I am just wrong about my preferences as there's nothing whatsoever to base that claim on.

I'll also say that I don't find reading or writing f/f relationships as much fun for another reason. Is it because I find vaginas "icky"? No, it's because I have f/f relationships and my reading always tends to be dogged by a realist laughter at yeah there's an infection in the making, or really that's not going to feel good unless you're into very un-aestheticised forms of pain. Reading/writing fanfic is something I do for a spark of something different I don't get elsewhere, and my het or f/f writing or reading in fanfic are always going to be minor in comparison because what I have to explore in those regards I already do in other ways. I don't write D/s fics for the same reason.

You and acadine have very clearly asserted that (some, but presumably a significant percentage in order for the point to be worth making) slash writers claim having women in fanfic is disgusting or women having sex in fanfic is disgusting. I've never seen this except as a joke -- slash squicks you well hah hah het squicks me. I find it improbable. Maybe at the early teen writer stage I can imagine male bodies seeming safer and easier in some respects (while they're on a screen/page), but across two very large fandoms except for a small number of highschool age girls who are not writing the kind of fic being recced on the site in question and who we'd want to hesitate before condemning for their own processes of sexual knowledge, I've never had any sense that slash writers are disgusted by women. Homophobic sometimes and inclined to a distance from men as men, but not misogynist.

So, lord, I said I wouldn't but point me to some slash-writer misogyny please. I may as well see what I'm being tarred with.

[acadine.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can't read critically and I have sacred cocks -- that's quite a bit to impute from that thread.

Never once have either of us said that any of our points specifically applied to you, nor listed any criteria that would necessitate your membership in any of the categories of slashfen we were talking out.

It's evident, if one reads both of our rants critically, that we are a) speaking in generalizations and b) not applying everything we say to every single exclusivist slash fan.

You do not seem to understand this.

Ergo, you are not reading our rants critically.

Now, this does not mean you cannot read critically, I'll admit; just that you certainly don't seem to be.

No, it's because I have f/f relationships and my reading always tends to be dogged by a realist laughter at yeah there's an infection in the making, or really that's not going to feel good unless you're into very un-aestheticised forms of pain.

Wait. Okay. So you read lots and lots of m/m slash, and you aren't "dogged by realist laughter"? Or thoughts of "un-anaesthetized forms of pain"?

... ... ... I can't even begin to start, here. I think your clue gap is just too large.

And since when is there a lot of unaestheticized pain in femmeslash, anyway? Or het? I've had anal sex (never unlubed), I've been (vaginally) fisted largely without artificial lube, and I've had vaginal intercourse completely without artificial lube, and of the three, the one that came the closest to being painful was the buttsex, and that was with a whole lot of prep and lube. So would you care to elaborate on that one?

(If you're going to invoke the torn hymen thing, I'll admit that how it's handled in a lot of fic is utter BS, but then, so's most first time anal sex.)

[cursive.livejournal.com]

Wait. Okay. So you read lots and lots of m/m slash, and you aren't "dogged by realist laughter"?

Sure, but it's not everyday to me, not banal. There's a trick to thinking what would X be like or how would Y with two male bodies differ from Y with m/f or f/f.

Or thoughts of "un-anaesthetized forms of pain"?

I've never made any claims about not ignoring crappy m/m slash stories. In case you were under the impression that I was claiming *all m/m slash rules*, or something, I'm not and I have not.

... ... ... I can't even begin to start, here. I think your clue gap is just too large.

I'll give you my online Jumping to Conclusions Award for Spring 2003 without even waiting to see the other entries.

And since when is there a lot of unaestheticized pain in femmeslash, anyway? Or het?

Uh uh, I mean in exactly the same everyday banal sense discussed above I'll see uncomfortable positions or acts in scenarios that don't justify them and go, yeah, you'd just give that up as a loss and move somewhere else. With m/m slash it's an imaginative leap for me, adapting my own experiences to other forms and other lives - it makes the fanfic experience different for me.

I won't pretend for a second that's not about pornography in the technical sense. It is. I rarely read fanfic stories that don't have sexual content, there are lots of other literary forms I can access for the best forms of writing in almost every other way - but I don't have access to opportunities to interactively explore sexual lives I have never had and will never have outside of this. That said, f/f

[acadine.livejournal.com]

Wait. Before I try and sort out what precisely you're saying here, is English your first language?

[cursive.livejournal.com]

Hah! You can also have Disingenuous Question Award for September. I've 36 years of speaking it and several degrees in it so yeah I think you can take me on assuming I'm meant to have command of the basic skills, yes.

[acadine.livejournal.com]

It wasn't disengenuous, just brought on by something outside the thread. Your post that referenced my "axiomatically on crack" phrase did so in a way that it seemed - to me - like you a) missed the point and b) missed the humor, and generally when people miss humor but are otherwise coherent and grammatically correct I assume they're non-native speakers, because my personal brand of humor tends to be based on a lot of really idiomatic language.

So, no, not disengenuous at all, I was just wondering how far I was going to have to tone down the idiomaticness (idiomacy?), humor, etc, etc and how dry and point-by-point I was going to have to get.

[cursive.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for minutes spent on proofreading though, or attention to details like how long LJ posts are allowed to be, or yeah whether I already covered this in a previous clause as I write. Multi-tasking is hell on the refinements of writing.

Did I get that it was meant to be funny? Probably.

I think "idiom" is the only noun without looking it up, but as an American you can probably coin idiomaticness and no one will notice.

[cursive.livejournal.com]

[]stupid cut thing again, msut remember that] That said, f/f and f/m don't offer me the same opportunities. I can't remember what else I wrote, but something about pain or not pain not really being the issue because it's about what offers me the chance to imaginatively occupy a quite new phenomenological position.

Oh and I've no argument with your last point at all. I rank first time anal sex very high on my suspicion meter, though it can be done well. Interestingly I've not seen any femmeslash that does first time vaginal fisting and I know lots of women for whom that was their first time lesbian sex, just as there are lots of guys for whom anal sex was their first time gay sex. It's about how well that's done of course.

No, really can't remember the rest, it was mostly came down to saying that there was an explicit reference to me in the link to my journal.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

See, this will teach me not to post and run. *facepalm* I just got in, checked my email and noticed the below exchange between you and acadine. First of all I'd like to make it clear that my comments were not directed to you. The discussion that bothered me took place in a thread on your journal in which you expressed confusion about Acadine's anger. I couldn't seem to concisely articulate my issues with some of those resultant comments in the thread, so I wrote up this instead.

So yeah, not you, not you. ^_-

Regarding f/f slash and your other points -
I was, as Acadine suggested, speaking generally about trends in fandom as a whole (beyond HP even), using that thread in your journal and this issue as a jumping off point. I'm not targeting you, or even the posters in the thread as bad-misogynist-fans-who-need-to-smarten-up-or-die.

The best example of misogyny in slash? Star Trek TOS or The Sentinel fandom. For years, a faction of shippers have insisted that the characters weren't fucking fags, they were just having sex with each other because women are evil and well, they're friends, so it's ok, right? Right? That's a really obvious example of homophobia and misogyny in older writers but it exists in lesser degrees in all fandom. When writers, adult writers, set out to bash female characters that's often motivated by a certain measure of misogyny.

Hmm. Think of stories where suddenly Hermione is either a horrible bitch, or a caricature of herself, in order to make it easier for Harry and Draco (or Ron) to get together. Or stories where Narcissa is a whiny, clingy, manipulative child, making it so much more plausible that Lucius and Severus have something going on. Hell, who wouldn't cheat when they're married to that?

Every time I read one of these stories I wince. This is a female author, writing that women aren't good enough for men. That men are inherently superior to women. That women are weak and disgusting creatures who have no right to exist.

I have seen women seriously argue that they can't stand to read erotica with females in it because female genitals squick them. I've seen it on lists, boards and in lj communities. It might take me a while to dig a post up but this attitude does exist.

[cursive.livejournal.com]

Hi.

Okay, I won't dispute that people have said this, because people say all kinds of crap and I don't know either of the fandoms you're specifically referencing. I read my first ST slash less than a month ago, and I was going by ellen_fremedon's recs list and read no discussion I probably didn't hit anything like that. I have, however, read academic dismissals of slash as veiled/naive misogyny, which I thought were not only patronising but wrong with references to the examples they used. And they were using ST.

Where I still don't get the debate here is the general tenor of the claim that this is a major attitude in HPslash, and I sincerely did think that's what acadine was claiming. The only thing I've seen close to this last vaginas-squick-me attitude comes from young girls and as I said somewhere else in this topic, growing up with a woman's body in a patriarchal society has enough fucked up shit attached to it without us pointing and jeering as they try to get their heads around it. But, all right, there's tons of stuff I avoid because it's generally crap, and not all of it is written by girls in the process of coping with body issues (although I'd probably sign up for an argument that said it's pretty hard to escape those at any point you can expect more complex responses to emerge). So, fine, there's some out there and maybe it's bigger than I think.

But... the examples you give strike me as homophobia rather than misogyny. I read those plot lines (and especially the first one - where they're just friends) as very strikingly homophobic, as a narrative that can't conscience or admit the possibiliy of homosexual desire or pleasure, and the horrid bitch seems like a narrative convenience in that regard. With Angel and Spike centred slash I see this in the "they're not gay, they're vampires" (and of course it's natural for vampires and involves no gross bodily functions etc) position. I don't think the abjection is principally about female bodies, I think it's about the body and sex and how comfortable relations to both are called into question but many ideas about homosexual sex, especially anal sex.

Ah. Work calls and I've got a full inbox. Later.

[verstehen.livejournal.com]

Argh! Why do I always get distracted and then see people steal my rants!

Oh well, you did it better than I probably would have. Though I still need to sit down and do the critical analysis of male/female characters and reader response.

[endofhistory.livejournal.com]

That is the best put together rant I've ever read. I hope you feel a lot better now.

Also, you bring up some good points. A few of those things were brought up at Nimbus on the slash panel.

*Huggles the MHC*

[dphearson.livejournal.com]

Wow- you went and got all Derrida on us, dear. But yes, if for the sake of NEttiquette alone, you should ask to have the links to justacats site taken down. I always ask Snaples if I can take her art for my personal use, even though no one else will see it, because it is the polite thing to do.
On your view of slash and political ramifications: Yes. Much of slash does misogynitcs undertones; vibes that make me stop reading after the third paragraph. I happen to like women's bodies, and men's bodies, and find beauty and sexiness in a wide variety of shapes,colors and ages- thus Dana's AD/SS ficxation. I am also very much ineterested in the emotion and motivations behind characters and any encounters they have , erotic or not. And teh Eros stuff can fade to black, anyways.
And please, let s us not get started on the feminised Snapes/Remus'(Remii?)/Harrys that we have, okay?

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

I think when people claim they have no political agenda what they mean is they have not consciously formulated an agenda and have not consciously applied it to their interactions. Certainly, until a discussion on a mailing list about a year ago, I had not stopped and examined my own agenda in writing/reading/discussing slash. No one had ever asked me about my agenda, no one had ever accused me of having one, so I had never been forced to realize that I did indeed have one, and that it might be a good idea to consciously ferret out what it was.

Agenda is a laden word, particularly when paired with political, so even as logic dictates that we all have one (or more than one), the gut reaction is denial and defense. Unsurprisingly, this means a lot of people get their backs up when the term is referenced, and some make pre-emptive strikes with mission statements or manifestos declaring that they have no agenda and therefore their project is agenda-free. Of course they mean they didn't intentionally set up the project with an agenda, but that doesn't mean it's not there, and that doesn't mean that others won't see it and react to it.

[pauraque]

Saying you have no agenda? Is FUELED BY A POLITICAL AGENDA.
[...]
Politics=life.

Both of these statements puzzle me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be saying that everything we as fans (or human beings in a society, full stop?) do and say is "political", and that there is nothing that I could ever do or say that would not be political, no matter what I was thinking when I did or said it. If this is so, then the very concept of "politics" becomes meaningless, does it not? Or maybe you're saying that the usual definition of "politics" is also your definition of human nature.

I could be way off. Please enlighten me.

[guntar.livejournal.com]

I don't want to put words in blackfall mouth, so I fully admit I may be misinterpreting blackfall, but let me give you the interpretation

First, we use a definition of the word: "the often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society" (Excerpted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company).

So, by this definition, politics is everything we do with another person, basically. So, yes, it is a part of human nature, but that is it--a part. Just like we see a tree, and think "leaves, bark, sap, roots, crown," we can see human nature and think "politics." Everything we do may be political, but that doesn't mean that everything we are is political. Just like a tree cannot survive without sap--it doesn't mean that "sap" and "tree" are synonyms. Politics is an aspect of human nature. Everything we do is political because we are political beings--everything we do involves other people. Even deciding to live as a hermit away from everyone is a political decision, because you're doing it because (and often to spite) the existing relationships.

[pauraque]

Politics is an aspect of human nature. Everything we do is political because we are political beings--everything we do involves other people.

These two sentences appear to contradict each other. If everything I do is political, then what are the otehr, non-political aspects of my nature?

I do see more or less what you're saying. But it still seems a bit perverse to use the word this way, when that's not the way it's usually used pertaining to fandom. If I say, "I don't have a political agenda", and I mean that I'm not trying to wrangle power for myself in the fandom or let everyone know my views on controversial issues -- and you *know* that's what I mean -- and you respond, "Everything you do is political because you're a human being!", then are you really responding to my statement?

I can be as anal about word definitions as anyone, but the purpose of language, at a fundamental level, is to communicate meaning. It's acquired countless other uses too, of course -- social, symbolic, artistic, etc. If I'm using language to make a good-faith attempt at communicating with you, and then you turn around and use language as a symbol of the intellectual superiority you feel you have over me, because you find that I've used a word too sloppily... Then what have we accomplished by having the conversation?

Don't get me wrong -- it can be productive to point out that a word may carry a different meaning than the speaker intended. But if you don't *also* respond to the intended meaning, then you get bogged down in metalinguistics, and you're not communicating anything meaningful anymore.

Of course, this is assuming that your primary point in having a fannish conversation *is* to communicate meaning, and not to assert your own status over others, or some other purpose that I haven't even considered.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

I say life is politics because at it's most basic level, politics is the interaction of humans to aggregate/distribute power and then to use it. It's how your family fights over things and sometimes a child sides with one parent over another. It's how village women shun a girl because she's getting more attention from the men. It's how people sit down and discuss who's going to be in charge of a project.

In groups, everything is political. It's inescapable. Consequently, everything we post online is political. Everything we write is political, though it may not be intended as political.

Political agendas need not be conscious, hell, American politics should be proof enough of this: I think something about an issue, but I'm not sure exactly what that is, or why I think that. When you act on that vague feeling, you've got yourself a political agenda, no matter how badly constructed.

I'm using the term 'political' because fandom doesn't usually use it this way. I'm trying to point out something that a lot of people disregard or fail to notice.

[swanswan.livejournal.com]

I am taking partial credit for this rant, you should know. I stoked the fires!!

And seriously, some of the people in this thread need to see a podiatrist.

[guntar.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to say thank you for expressing this rant so perfectly.

This paragraph almost made me scream with glee:

Let me also point out that writing m/m slash is not a free ticket out of the land of gender stereotyping and misogyny, since many feminized male characters embody an attitude of gross self-hatred, by their very existence. M/M slash is often worse in this sense, as many authors depend on the existence of gender roles for their salt. Their stories are hinged on gender stereotyping. Bottom/Top. Dominant/Submissive. They are written into our cultural fabric so tightly that they inform all expressions of sexuality. So many slash stories play off of this to the point that they are inherently misogynistic. Blanket denial of gender roles by excluding women is not an empowering act; it is a refusal to deal critically with one’s own sexuality.

It is not easy to deal with gender roles in a story. You can't just create characters who somehow go against the majority opinion. If a man acts like a woman, he is not going against gender roles: he's acting in them, just against majority opinion. He is acting in a way that society prescribes.

Which brings us to an interesting point in terms of gender relations. Who is going against society more? Is Adrienne Rich subversive because of her emphasis on feminity, expressly attempting to create a female poetry? Or is she just buying into that patriarchical idea that men and women are different? Is The Color Purple better, because, when the gender roles are far apart, everyone is unhappy, but, when the genders become more androgynous, people become happier? Are men and women different, or does society make them so? If men and women's personalities are essentially the same, and we want real equality, will it have to be like Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, where woman have to give up the right to pregnancy, because it gave them a power men didn't have? (in Woman on the Edge of Time, all babies are born in vats, and artificially created so that neither gender can have power over the other. Sexuality is also more fluid because of this, though there certainly are distinct preferences and exclusivity in some people)

All these questions have to be dealt with when a person is denying stereotpyical gender roles.