LightningBolt, 4/28

The exercise we did in class today was supposed to reverse the gender roles of our culture. After reading Getting Off in cmc 200 I know that the activity we did today only increased the existence of gender roles. Getting Off explains that in order to eliminate sexism we must view everyone as humans, ignoring their sex. This way the “amount” of a person’s masculinity or femininity will be judged. It will simply be the way the person is. Today in class we did not see everyone as humans, but instead we saw males and females and drew distinctions between them. Obviously this exercise was only to prove a point.
The problem I see with eliminating masculinity and femininity to creates a group of humans where sexism does not exist, is that this would never happen. As we discussed in class men and women are biologically different and these difference cause distinctions between the genders. Most men have the ability to gain a greater amount of muscle mass than women. For this reason men and women will never be able to be seen as one entity. While this is the main point of the book Getting Off I do not think that Cixous or Butler see eliminating gender necessary to eliminate sexism. If we could simply eliminate gender connotations to oppositional words, men and women would not have different linguistics, and could be seen as equals