random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
  Some years ago I read a technophilic book in which the author speculated delightedly about how many sex organs human beings might acquire during surgery. The writer was, of course (and I mean that "of course"), male. He was even "daring" enough (his own word) to propose that men be given female organs and women male organs. The male friend of mine who had recommended the book (another technophile) thought this was an excellent idea; in this way men and women would understand one another better, he said. Now to believe that the misunderstandings that occur between men and women occur because men's penises and women's clitorises are shaped differently or because fucking feels different for each sex is the grossest kind of mystification. It is certainly clear to me (and any other feminist) that men's and women's misunderstandings of one another, far from being due to the differences in their sexual organs or their experiences in sexual intercourse per se, are carefully cultivated in the service of sex-caste positions in a very nasty hierarchy, and that one cannot dissolve the hierarchy by giving people double and triple sexual equipment, even if we could get over the anatomical problem of where to place the extra goodies. Tinkering with the genitalia when the social structure is the problem is like the common science-fictional device of "solving" the quality of life by giving people immortality ....

tagged: sexism, sex differences, futurism
  —Joanna Russ, "SF and Technology as Mystification" in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995). .

Archive for July, 2009

Sotomayor, Al Franken, the First Amendment, and information law

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Some interesting commentary on Sotomayor and the First Amendment from Paul Levinson: * http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/search/label/Sonia%20Sotomayor * http://paullev.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=497539 * http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/search/label/Sonia%20Sotomayor I haven’t had time yet to dig into Sotomayor on intellectual property, telecomm, and other information law issues, but this is discouraging. Franken of course I have hopes for: After Fox News sued him for trademark infringement [...]