[HANASHIR:8291] Re: Healing

[Judah Cohen <jcohen...>]

>Is it OK that one sex has the power to make all the rules that bind both sexes,
and that the >other sex has no say in that process.  For me it is that
simple, and the answer is either yes or >no. If this is not the core issue -
then what is?

It depends on how narrow you want your frame to be, or what your perspective
is.
  Case in point:  a couple years ago, there was a fascinating several-part
show on the FOX network called something like: "Magic's Greatest Secrets
Revealed for the First Time."  On the surface, it was a sexist diatribe:  an
obviously male (masked) magician performed magic tricks with a bevy of
scantily-dressed female "assistants."  Once the magic tricks were explained,
though, a much more complex relationship came to light.  In fact, the
magician and the assistants worked as *willing equals* in preparing and
performing the tricks, in some cases even trusting each other with their
lives.  (In a couple tricks, this went to an interesting extreme:  in order
to maintain the illusion, one of the female assistants actually had to dress
convincingly as the magician in order to "impersonate" him while the
magician himself was elsewhere.)  The group actually reproduced the gender
stereotypes as a way to fool with the audience's expectations, making them
think each trick was purely the magician's doing, and thus allowing the
trick to work.  
  I think a lot of societies are like that: the *performance* of gender
(i.e., in the public forum, including the creation of laws), and the way
people deal with gender outside that forum, are often two very different
things.  Often, men and women create public gender roles together, though
they may act differently in private.  (For example, husbands and wives may
pray separately in an Orthodox synagogue, but they often enter and leave the
synagogue together; and during a hassidic wedding I attended, the dancing
took place separately, but the hallway *between* the two sides of the hall
was a neutral space where young men and women could observe each other).  Of
course, many of us on this list are performers (myself included), and so it
is the conditions surrounding *performance* that concerns us.  That is a
great, and lively topic in which many of us have significant experience.  I
don't think it's particularly helpful, on the other hand, to say wholesale
that the public sphere reflects the entirety of human experience, least of
all "fundamental" "problems" between the sexes that are far simpler in the
heightened nature of performance than they are in a much murkier and more
complex reality.

Judah.