From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 09/17/00-04:09:33 PM Z
On Sat, 16 Sep 2000, Sandy King wrote:
> ....in my opinion the most essential quality of a woman is her
> potential to be a mother, and this at any stage in her life since the
> word mother can be either a biological or linguistic construct.
..... Men also ..... can even be *mothering*. Human beings, both men and
women, are capable of doing and being many things, and certainly even role
> reversal.
It seems to me you're trying to have it all ways -- to say the most
essential quality of a woman is "potential" to be a mother," but that that
could be at any stage (which it can't), while a man can also be
"mothering." (So can a hamster.) But you not only don't say that is
*man's* essential quality, you forbear mentioning any "essential" quality
of "manhood." To say that such essentialism for women and not for men is
sexist is to state the obvious (tho essentialism is itself at best a frail
reed).
Meanwhile, the "essential quality of mothering" has been used for
thousands of years to deny women (or justify denying women) full
participation in citizenship -- or full "humanity." It was not that long
ago a major rationale for denying women the vote. To say it deprives women
who can't have children, or don't, or are beyond childbearing age, their
defining function in life is to state the obvious, as is the fact that it
defines women by at most 20 years in a perhaps 80-year life span, a
dimunition men are spared.
Not to suggest for a minute that men & women aren't different, although
traits vary and overlap. (Current biological science suggests that
hormones & physique are as causative as culture.) But none of this bears
on the practice of photographing naked young ladies in ritualized poses as
"art." (Unless those men are longing for fatherhood ??)
It does however perhaps explain objections to Newton's women. The amazon
on the book cover I saw in the Soho window was fully human in her own
right, in command of herself -- a goddess, not an incubator.
Judy
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| World Journal of Post-Factory Photography > "HOW-TO and WHY"
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