politics

Our weird cultural commitment to the gender binary goes way beyond actual living men and women—if it didn’t, people wouldn’t freak out so badly when someone declines to choose. Masculinity and femininity are concepts we layer on top of everything from people to pens to political parties. Sometimes there’s a middle ground, but often we seem lost without our familiar patterns; it’s the confused hetero doofus asking a gay couple “which one’s the woman,” except for the entire world. Take any opposed things—Democrats and Republicans, cats and dogs, even the sun and the moon—and you’ll find one of them associated with physical strength, action, and domineering behavior, and the other associated with emotion, reticence, and calm. That’s not just descriptive; it’s prescriptive, and proscriptive too. If we could judge the moon for yelling, we would.

Jess Zimmerman on binaries.

This is from a longer, and more specific, analysis on the Democratic party in the US, specifically the fact that it’s seen as “feminized”—as (ahem) “opposed” to the masculinized Republican party—and how that results in a heavily gendered political dynamic (i.e. the GOP are allowed to whine and scream and be giant manbabies, because mantrums, while Democrats are forever play the role of the “reasonable” mother-wife).

Mostly, though, I think it’s a reminder that “smash the gender binary!” doesn’t mean “ban individual gender expression” but rather “critique and dismantle cultural constructs that assign specific traits to genders and then in turn those genders to non-human objects/concepts.”

There is simply nothing special or important about private education as an idea. It’s been around since kings hired tutors for their children. Any tin-pot dictatorship can, and does, create a highly educated elite. There is nothing difficult or clever about that. What is difficult, what requires a commitment by every member of the community – particularly, one would think, those who lead it – is a strong, well-supported, well-resourced public education system open to every child in their own right, regardless of who their parents are. That is what differentiates a civil society from one where inherited privilege trumps equality of opportunity.

Jane Caro on public citizens.

I intentionally always attended public schools, even when we could’ve afforded otherwise, as did my parents (who both came from working class families who couldn’t’ve). If I had children, I’d make the same choice myself.1

1. Admittedly, we’re somewhat fortunate in that, because of where we live, our local public schools are literally the best in the city, of both the public and private variety. The college/senior high is also the one I attended—even though it wasn’t my local school—and it was great and I have A++ nostalgic feelings about it. [↩]