(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

Sometimes talking & writing feels like a necessity, and sometimes everything just seems so banal and barely worth mentioning.

Tired, mentally more than physically, working six days/week (although not always eight hours/day, so the tiredness probably isn't really justified) what with R. being on vacation. Checking on the horse Wednesday mornings before work. Two morning runs this week. Additional drama at work, because M.'s brother-in-law is seriously ill & was stupid enough to trust one of those idiots who claim that cancer can be cured solely by resolving some inner conflict, until it was almost too late. Drama, tears, guilt-trips, constant phone-calls from various members of the family, M.'s boyfriend annoyed because he wasn't told. Me, trying to convince M., who has a penchant for this kind of pseudo-medicine thing too, that doctors are not evil per se, bent on torturing people, but most of the time actually try to do their best and help their patients. All this ever since I came back from vacation, with no end in sight yet.

Reading Josef Winkler's Domra. Am Ufer des Ganges, which is certainly one of the stranger books I've read. Intriguing, though. Proof-read half of R.'s MA-thesis.


Strange dream tonight about being back in the apartment I grew up in, as a kind of baby-sitter/nanny for the family who lived there now. I ended up shouting at them that they ought to appreciate the place, because it had been my home, after all. Even more weird, because I don't remember ever feeling so strongly about it...


Vague thoughts about gender-stereotypes and identification, after M.said she found Effi Briest intolerable to read, because of Effi's death, and the fact that she forgives her husband in the end. It didn't bother me, for whatever reason, although at other times gender-related stereotypes have irritated and annoyed me. This made me think that I, as a woman (does the bisexuality/asexuality matter?), have no problem identifying with male characters (books, tv, movies...), in fact I often find them more interesting, because they tend to be less defined - confined - by gender/sex. On the other hand, do men identify with female characters at all?

Comments

[watergarden.livejournal.com]

In the U.S. they've done studies on this sort of thing with children. Female children will identify with both male and female characters and enjoy reading books with either as the protagonist. Male children will only identify with male characters and will only read books with male protagonists.

(Statistically speaking, of course; individuals vary.)

It's one of those things that's very interesting but makes me want to beat my head against a wall; it's now socially acceptable for women to want to be men, but still not okay for men to want to be women.

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

Don't even get me started on this... it has always annoyed me that it's so much more ok for a woman to adopt male traits - and if men are intimidated it's partly because at the very least it signals strength and power they're afraid of - than for a man to adopt anything traditionally female, where the main association is almost always weakness.

(I wonder if the whole metrosexuality thing is perhaps a sign that things are beginning to change, or just another fad...)

t's kind of scary when even children already react that way... even with women being allegedly more emphatic, this can't be genetic, it must be the result of all kinds of little things, attitudes, picked up from adults... sad, really.