Category: language

First (and last) Contact

Women have a long tradition of being diplomats.  “Historically… marriage has been the major alliance mechanism of every society, and little girls are trained for roles as intervillage family diplomats…the married woman straddles two kin networks, two villages, sometimes two cultures” (The Underside of History, Elise Boulding, p.53-54).

Many women have decades of experience, settling …

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Sex and Gender Conflated

I recently spent some time at another blog (someone had linked to one of my posts and invited me to the discussion), and I discovered that several of the discussants conflated gender and sex.  I was shocked.  (And in fact, that possibility so didn’t occur to me that I continued the surreal discussion for some …

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On “hitting on”

I bet a man came up with that term as well.

But what most intrigues me here is how?  I mean, what exactly made the first man to introduce the term think that approaching a woman for, what, a date? sex? was like hitting (on) her???

It does not bode well when the very initiation …

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Women’s Fiction

I finished a novel by J. D. Robb the other day and also happened to read the back inside cover blurb: “Nora Roberts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than one hundred novels.  She is also the author of the bestselling futuristic suspense series written under the pen name J. D. …

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Mr. and Ms.

I’m in this world, okay, and the people identify each other by sex.  All the time.  It’s like ‘Female Person Smith’ and ‘Male Person Brown’ or ‘Person-with-Uterus Smith’ and ‘Person-with-Penis Brown’ – I don’t know the exact translation.  But sex-identity is a mandatory prefix.  They distinguish males from females.  Before they do everything else.  Before …

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