The discovery is inescapable: We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.Īndrea was very clear that the system of male supremacy is enforced over and against a political class called “women” in order to delineate and reify a sex class called “men”-and she was eloquent in her analysis of how cultural practices such as rape, battery, prostitution, and pornography institutionalize that class-based oppression. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both.
As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As she wrote in her 1974 book Woman Hating: One was that she repudiated the sex binary-and the biological essentialism upon which belief in it is based. During those thirty-one years, she changed my life, and at first it was hard to go on.įrom long before I met her, Andrea held strong radical views, as people who have read her or heard her speak know well. The invidious ideology of biological sex essentialism inflames a bigotry that would have appalled Andrea.Īndrea and I began living together on August 1, 1974, in New York City, and she died in our home in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 2005.
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