Grokking the Other (was: Re: Genderless societies)

Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Mon, 13 Sep 1999 18:13:10 +0000

At 08:19 PM 12/09/99 -0700, Spike, a curious guy, wrote:

>I do not want
>to actually *be* a woman, I just want to understand what it feels like.
>I dont want to *be* a homosexual, just want to understand what it
>feels like.

Spike, you're in luck! There's this technology called... reading fiction. Has its limitations, but some of the content seems to port across gender and related lines. (Although I still tend to fall over in a maidenly swoon when I read Chip Delany's [fictive?] accounts of swallowing amounts of piss and poo in such novels as THE MAD MAN...)

>For instance, if one could switch one's gender or orientation,
>would people *look* different? How so? How could people *not*
>look different to you, if you were to switch genders? No one knows.

Well, several of my old galfriends know, because they switched. But I haven't got far in conversations with them about it. Guess you had to be there.

Damien Broderick (a straight bloke, however maidenly)