Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I'm wondering what my friends (including most of the normally-gendered ones) think of this. With luck, maybe I'll gain important Clue from the discussion.

joeshamo asked, in a post about Dracula to transgender, "The question that comes to my mind is, what do some of you think about the social threat of changing gender roles?"

I replied:

I know "the social threat of changing gender roles" is something that scares the [expletive] out of a lot of people, but I don't get it. Then again, there's a lot about other people's reactions to us that I just don't get.

I'd say, "Well it didn't trash society when women were finally allowed to vote, or when trousers became acceptable in public for women, or when WWII drew women into the workplace in greater numbers, and those all count as changes to our society's gender roles, so why should any coming changes -- including the ability of an individual to change his/her/hir role at will -- be more of a threat?" But then I remember that a) there are some folks who seem to think that those changes did do nastybad things to our society (no, I don't understand them, I just know they exist), and b) I remember that a lot of people who got used to those changes were pretty put out by them at the time they happened.

Maybe it's just a fear of being lost at sea while new rules are being written? A lot of men seemed to be upset more by being confused as to how they were expected to act than by anything else about the introduction of the "sensitive new-age guy" meme into our culture. I guess change itself is really disturbing to many people.

And bringing it back to the "individuals changing their roles" idea (I wasn't sure from your post which meaning of "changing gender roles" you meant), I guess that people who both a) use the gender of the person they're talking to to determine the rules/template of the interaction, and b) don't have templates for "in between"/"both"/"not sure"/"doesn't matter" and don't improvise well, feel threatened by suddenly not knowing the rules/roles in what is to them a new situation??

Or maybe there's something way more signficiant that I'm just not seeing...?

I'm turning off comments for this post 'cause I want to redirect followups to joeshamo's post instead of spltting the discussion up in two places -- much as I like having comments on my journal, I'd feel like I was stealing the thread or something.

Well yesterday's snow was pretty (still is, all over the tree in front of my house) but waaaaay slippery. Slipperiest suff I've tried to drive or walk in since ... well it's been a while. It was far more slippery than snow here usually is, and more slippery than the snow I've seen in NYC, Boston, and Toronto. I fell down on my sidewalk in the afternoon, then kept sliding away whenever I tried to scoop a shovelful later on. Somebody who didn't bother to look before pulling out of a side street in the afternoon, before it got really deep, put me into a spin in the middle of Frederick ave. ( griping about being put in a bad spot )

It wasn't all that deep here (the news said three inches at BWI) but it was slick and then some. Driving was bad enough to make me wonder whether the event Thrir Venstri Foetr had a gig at would be cancelled. It wasn't.

Apart from that spin (didn't hit anything, but I was still unhappy about it) and my car's deciding that an old kludge was no longer good enough (I had to push it to the side of the road and tinker with wires ... must remember to reconnect the second radiator fan before the weather warms up again), I made it home safely from a failed errand in the afternoon and started getting ready for the performance.

I made it to the gig and back safely, and was surprised at the degree of clue exhibited by other drivers on I695 and I97 -- they were often frustrating, especially when people doing fifteen MPH slower than I wanted to go (which is to say 35MPH slower than I'd normally drive) paced each other in adjoining lanes, but there was surprisingly little tailgating. *whew* I hope all my bandmates (and I'm including the dancers here) made it home safely as well. (The roads were much better on the way home. It had stopped snowing, and highways had been plowed/salted. Still kind of slick in places though.)

My toes got very, very soggy.

When I fell in the afternoon, I landed quite hard. I was worried about getting a bruise on my butt or injuring my SI and being uncomfortable the rest of the night, but I got lucky in that regard. Instead the problem was my right knee. Driving is upsetting that knee more and more. I'm scared that it'll get to the point where my mobility is reduced because of driving getting too difficult/painful. But I'm not going to think more about that right now because it's too uncomfortably scary for the moment.

I was already getting tired and wanting a nap before driving out to Annapolis for the gig, but I caught my second wind at the site. When I came home, I shovelled the sidewalk, unloaded the car, and was about to put things away when I rather abruptly got the "lie down or fall down" message from my body and elected to land on a bed. I didn't fall asleep right away, but I certainly wasn't getting up for a while, either. When I did fall asleep, leg cramps and other pain woke me half an hour later, so I got up to take some magnesium and a painkiller, and went back to sleep for another two and a half hours. I've been up since, but hope to get a little more sleep Real Soon Now.

Wow, what an interesting feeling ... noticing a user-icon on a LiveJournal post that looks a LOT like one of my ex-girlfriends whom I haven't heard from in many years, and having to go read that LJ user's journal and profile to try to figure out whether it's my ex-girlfriend using an unfamiliar nickname.

She's not, but I had to check right away.

Wow, I'd planned to go through some recent email to see which URLs I've gotten lately were worth posting here, but I got sidetracked in several different directions and wound up tripping over enough new links that I think I should go ahead and post this and start accumulating a new set.

• New Tolkien book discovered: "The 2000 handwritten pages include Tolkien's translation and appraisal of Beowulf, the epic 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem of bravery, friendship and monster-slaying that is thought to have inspired The Lord of the Rings." While I'm not he biggest Tolkien fan around (nor seriously anti-Tolkien), I know that some of my friends are (both). And I am something of a Beowulf fan...
• The Insecurities Project: "security personnel are now asking many travellers to take a photo to prove their camera is not a bomb. Canadian visual artist Isabelle Devos is collecting these photographs for an international art project."
• I'm not sure I really needed to know these exist, but since I do know, I'll inflict that knowledge on others. Such is my way. Erotic Animal Calendars: "In addition to his art, Tim O'Rourke also photographs wildlife, and he has a large library of erotic animal photos which he is offering in the form of limited edition wall calendars."
• New hallucinogen: "It is of particular interest that this would be the first hallucinogen of insect origin." Solely abstract scientific curiosity for me, being a) vegetarian and b) not particularly interested in hallucinogens at this time, but I found it fascinating.
• Long article in The Atlantic (September 2002) about security and how we're going about it all wrong. It draws cogent parallels between modern computer security and "homeland security" measures being implemented or discussed, and it starts off with some examples of unintended consequences of security decisions. An important aspect of the discussion is the acknowledgement that all systems fail, so we need our security procedures to fail gracefully rather than catastrophically.
• Superheroes spotted in Manchester (UK): People dressed as Batman, Superman, and The Mask for charity events got into separate altercations with real world evildoers (shoplifters in the store where Batman was the real-life security manager, and a group tried to mug Supermand and The Mask).
• Did you know that Minnesota has a state muffin?
• No wonder I haven't been feeling well....
• More info that I'm not going to use any time soon, but that I'm pretty sure some of my friends will find useful: some links to Linux-for-kids projects that I just tripped over in somebody else's journal: Debian Jr., SchoolForge, and Tux4Kids.
• Remember the announcements just before New Year's Eve about the five suspected terrorists that had just entered the US? This article in The Globe And Mail suggest that the media coverage may have been just a wee bit overblown. I especially loved the closing quote by a Mountie, which I won't spoil for you here even though I'm tempted.

My boss just emailed me a small research assignment, so after I've rested a little to get rid of my current headache, I'll be diving into that instead of back into LiveJournal...