Posts by Deborah
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Seeing that roof swinging in the air makes me very, very nervous. And David has left us in suspense for two hours now....
I hope it all goes very, very smoothly, David et al. The weather gods look as though they will be kind to you for the next few days.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Islander,
I tried The Left Hand of Darkness first and didn't care for it, but I re-read it after reading The Dispossessed and enjoyed it much more. I found it hard to perceive Winter as an androgynous society, with people only becoming one sex or the other for a few days every month, I think because for me, "he" signifies male, rather than signaling the possibility of someone being of either gender. Le Guin really needed to use a gender neutral pronoun.
One of the things I enjoy about Le Guin's Hainish books is that she imagines a whole range of possible societies, and then looks at how gender plays out in each one. And class. The people in each society are infinitely varied, no matter how "good" or how "bad" each society is.
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The social control in The Dispossesed is extraordinary. One character (I can’t recall his name, I’m sorry) puts in for a job reassignment, and the only one that is offered is some position doing manual work for which he is completely unsuited, and yet he takes it, because no one ever refuses a job allocation. And Shevek causes tumult by daring to do something different (going off planet) even though Annares is supposed to be a free society.
I dunno. I think that even in a sexual utopia, there would still be people who can’t access sex, and there will still be sexual jealousy. I suspect, ’though I don’t know for sure, that there are at least some people who enjoy the whole process of being jealous, a bit like some people seem to thrive on a cycle of conflict and reconciliation.
ETA. I used to recommend The Dispossessed to my political theory students, when they we wondering what an anarchic socie might look like.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to BenWilson,
Well, no one is obliged to provide sex, no matter how much another person may want it. So yes, even in a sexual utopia some people may be missing out because they're just not an appealing prospect. Notwithstanding my longstanding monogamous relationship, in which I only look and don't touch when it comes to people I am not married to (that would be the entire population of the world minus 1) there are some things which are a real turnoff for me, and I suspect for other people too. Like smelly clothes and greasy hair. And some things that are a real turn on (have I mentioned Eric Bana as Hector in a short leather skirt before?).
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Saying that Caitlin Moran is Teh Terrible Feminist because some of the things she says are problematic is like saying that Naomi Wolf is Teh Wonderful Feminist because some of the things she wrote are good.
I'm with Megan on this one: a lot of what Caitlin Moran says is great, but some of it makes me wince.
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Personally I blame the Catholic church for not getting any teen sex. .
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This would be worth it just for the non-hysteria over One Direction alone. Or whatever boy / girl band pops up next to titillate the young and gouge great amounts of money out of their pockets in the pursuit of facile music and sex replacement.
Seriously, this a place where I'd like to live.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Only if you elect to tax capital gains on a realized basis. If you elect to tax them on an unrealized basis (i.e. annual gains in value), then the churches, and everyone else, would be caught, whether or not they had sold their property.
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I suppose the problem is that people's sense of themselves can be deeply tied up with their beliefs, so not have any respect for the content of their beliefs is tantamount to not respecting them.
