Hooked on a Feeling

Excerpt from Hooked on a Feeling: Is Gender Just a State of Mind by Regis Nicoll

. . .

In the early Greek tradition, everything possessed an essence—an intrinsic nature defined by its purposeful end. For example, the nature of an acorn was to become an oak tree, and the nature of an egg was to become a bird. Likewise, human beings had a nature that, if properly followed, would result in the “good life.”

That notion held sway for nearly two and a half millennia, right up until Jean-Paul Sartre announced that “existence precedes essence.” According to Sartre, the essence of humanness was not innate and fixed; it was emergent and malleable, shaped by the culmination of our life experiences. And since each of us experiences life differently, our natures are as varied as our DNA.

Sartre’s simple jingle turned the wisdom of the ancients on its head, becoming the wrecking ball for a generation of coffee-house dreamers intent on leveling the foundations of good and evil, virtue and vice, and beauty and ugliness. But perhaps no change in the last forty years has been as disorienting as the leveling of gender.

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This article is from the second issue of Salvo. I will be updating the website with many more articles from our past issues, so be sure to check back often.

Also by Regis Nicoll: Gimme that Spacetime Religion in Salvo 9

Comments

[garasanin]

more recently...
http://www.thelocal.se/20232/20090623/

[Jerry]

Thanks for posting that link. Wow. It's one thing to be against stereotypes (boys like blue, girls like pink), but this is the extreme.

[RS]

Great Article. I posted a link to it on the facebook group, "Day of Truth" under the discussion board "Is Gender Just a State of Mind?"