booky meme
Oct. 4th, 2008 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oiranTaken from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
builderjen
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Generation seems to happen without women at all, and there is no hint that blood--"that by which man is animated, and is sustained, and lives," as Isidore tells us elsewhere--could in any fashion be transmitted other than through the male.
But illegitimate descent presents a quite different biology. In his entry on the female genitalia, Isidore argued:
From Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas Laqueur. Obviously, I'm a special kind of nerd. This passage kind of sums the whole thing up, i.e., that the biology of gender and sex is of limited importance as a cultural consideration. The book is also full of anatomical diagrams that show the female reproductive organs as outside-in penises. Interestingly, there was at one time a belief (in Europe, anyway) that if you were an especially advanced woman, you would spontaneously pop out your innards and essentially evolve into a man.
builderjen* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Generation seems to happen without women at all, and there is no hint that blood--"that by which man is animated, and is sustained, and lives," as Isidore tells us elsewhere--could in any fashion be transmitted other than through the male.
But illegitimate descent presents a quite different biology. In his entry on the female genitalia, Isidore argued:
Contrary to this child [one born from a noble father and a plebian mother] is the illegitimate (spurius) child who is born from a noble mother but a plebian father. Likewise illegitimate is the child born from an unknown father, a spouseless mother, just the son of spurious parents.
From Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas Laqueur. Obviously, I'm a special kind of nerd. This passage kind of sums the whole thing up, i.e., that the biology of gender and sex is of limited importance as a cultural consideration. The book is also full of anatomical diagrams that show the female reproductive organs as outside-in penises. Interestingly, there was at one time a belief (in Europe, anyway) that if you were an especially advanced woman, you would spontaneously pop out your innards and essentially evolve into a man.
