I think that Rachel posed some great ideas about the differences between sex and gender and how these distinct ideas permeate all aspects of our society. We as individuals have no choice in the biological matter of our sex. This clearly poses a problem as to whether we can accept or deny this gender specificity that is pre-determined for us. A denial of this biological role would be a denial of who we are as a person, but it seems that this idea can not be thought of this way any longer because the idea of gender and it’s role is becoming more and more of a topic of conversation. I too believe that our society as a whole needs to find a way to not pigeonhole people into their specific gender roles that should match up with their sex. We need to see a give and take between sex and gender rather than a set categorization that forces people to fulfill certain roles. If our society can muster up the courage to finally accept that gender and sex can be distinct from one another, many more people will have the courage to live their lives as they see fit.
As I read Myhre’s ideas about the public perceptions others have when they see a male or a female, and how expectations need to be met in order to be accepted. We don’t realize how often we judge people based on their external appearance. If something is off about someone, such as Rachel said, an apparent man with a beard in a dress, heels, and makeup, the public would see this as an unsound makeup of a person. This gender distortion seems to be unacceptable in today’s society, but how can we as a whole population determine how someone should dress and look if they don’t feel deep down that they are that specific gender? It’s like a person in a cage and telling them that they can only come out and see the world unless they dress/act/look the part of their biological sex.
Ariel Levy’s chapter, “From Womyn To Bois”, really opened my eyes to a whole new realm of lesbianism and gender roles that I had honestly never known existed. I agree with Julia, in that I too found the definitions of such words like “womyn”, “femme”, “bois”, & “butch”, difficult to not confuse. I realized that if I am confusing them all when the definitions are plainly right in front of me, then that means that there is some sort of an arbitrary overlap between each role. This became even clearer to me as I read on and realized that there is a lot of personal interpretation when it comes to these ideas, as women accept what part of a gender role works for them, and what doesn’t. A boi, Lissa Doty, said, “I think it’s cool that a label can be so flexible. I like it as a spectrum instead of one specific model” (Levy, 125). This just shows how important it is that we begin to understand the split between sex and gender and how there is such a wide range of interpretations of how one should act, look, and feel. This fluidity of being a boi is very important to people.
I thought Levy’s interview with Sarah, a female who does not like to call herself butch, or the newer term, boi, because of the implications of the word. She states that she doesn’t “understand the faggot culture” and that she doesn’t “understand the appeal or the sense of two faggot dykes riding each other” (Levy 131). Sarah also says, “Femme-on-femme is stupid to me, too. It’s air. It’s air on air” (Levy, 131). It was at this point that I realized that even women that are a part of this boi culture feel that they too need to define who they are in terms of their gender but have no way to do so without saying they are, or that they like, something they are not.
Just like we read over the past few weeks about the roles that men place upon women and how they are all socially constructed, so to is gender a social construct. We can seek ways to deviate from the socially constructed boundaries placed on us, but our society on a whole seems to have not reached a level of acceptability that will let us reevaluate the specificity of the terms “male” and “female”, or even “boi” and “femme”. “Dissolving the ‘gender binary’” is what needs to happen, but how can we get individuals to become more comfortable with this re-defining of roles?
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