According to Jewish tradition, a sage once said that each person holds two truths, and should bring them out as the need arises. The first is "I am dust and ashes," and the second is "For my sake was the world created." Similarly, each person has two ways to view other people. We have the desire to classify people as members of a group, and we have the desire to classify people as unmembers of a group. Speciality and generalization. It is not surprising that these contradictory impulses provide us with much head-ache when we feel the need to place people in structured hierarchies.
Given the choice of articles for tomorrow, it seems reasonable to use lesbians as an example. On the one hand, there is the need to stigmatize them as 'the other.' This need manifests itself in various ways, from inventing new terms for them, to trying to figure out "how they got this way," to performing regular witch-hunts to root them out of hiding. At the same time, there is the generalization urge. We fit them nicely into slots, either the butch cigarette-smoking, leather-wearing, mean-and-nasty man-hating types, or the pink-and-frilly extra-fuzzy types. Of course, they're all feminists. Whatever that means.
The problem is that any sort of group affiliation is by its nature a loss of individuality. When people become defined by the group, that automatically makes us unable to see their aspects that conflict with the stereotypes of that group.
In a way, the idea of the male as unassailable citadel, an unbreachable wall, is just that. It is not so much that males themselves are unassaultable, but the idea of male is unassaultable. Like a marble statue of a soldier, it does nothing but stand there, an icon to itself. And this leads inevitably to an ironic stagnation and death. The attempt to preserve masculinity by making it unchangeable must always destroy it when the world has changed around it. And according to Waldby, that's not the problem. The problem is that once destroyed, the male image has no idea how to reform itself.
Changes are forced on us daily. The sun burns out, second by second. Eventually it will all be gone. The Earth hurtles on through space. The population of the world swells, nine births or more per second. The light that we see now will never be seen again, as it travels off into space, heading for distant stars. To try and stand up to it is foolish and futile. Equally, the opposite is foolish, of course. To never stand for anything is to cease to exist, to become a passing breeze. But too much wavering is not my problem.
I would like to see things change more. Change lots and lots and lots more. I'd like to see people understand that for their sake, the world was created, and yet they are still only dust and ashes. And everyone is like that. I'd like to see people stop picking stupid battles, because there's so much stuff that's really bad and crazy out there, that it's a pathetic waste to get upset with women who love women. I'd like to see scholarship about sex not have to see everything in terms of the phallus, even not needing to discuss how you're rejecting the phallus.
The other articles were cool, but I don't have much to say about them, seeing as how they were mostly how-to manuals. Still, a fun read, and an interesting mind-stretch.
For my sake was the world created. And yours, too.