outlaws

My favorite line from the Craigslist missed connections today (I'm addicted): "OK I'm off to drink a Schlitz and read some Kant. Put that in your cultural category pipe and smoke it." People have been arguing about this guy who asked if any women had ever heard of/had any appreciation of Ingmar Bergman, with most people calling him pretentious and stupid for thinking he was the only one who liked Bergman. Then HE wrote back, calling them all pretentious and himself cultured and merely looking for someone equally so (or something like that). That prompted this response. I'm sure there are some excellent academic essays being written about Craigslist and online communities in general. It's fascinating.
I just finished Kate Bornstein's "Gender Outlaw" for the second time last night. It's funny how much can change in a year... Last year, I was so fucked up just by trying to think about the concept of considering oneself neither man or woman that I think I missed much of the rest of the book. (I'm still fucked up by that concept, but I've also spent a lot more time thinking about it so I was able to focus on the last 2/3 or more of the book a lot more effectively.) Bornstein has some really great thoughts, especially after the first bit which is kind of like an introduction to gender studies/gender thought/whatever. She has some decent ideas (far better than anything I could come up with) for restructuring gender activism to be transgender-inclusive without forcing people into molds, and she makes some awesome connections between things that surprised me a bit (for example, she talks about how S/M, because it deals with acting out power, also is related to acting out gender. I'm not explaining it well, but the way she did it made so much sense to me.) I like her writing because she trys to ask as many questions as possible and not necessarily answer them; I respect that because she says right out that with something that's so fluid and culturally constructed, you all-too-often find out that whatever you thought was stone-cold right is totally not. If you just keep questioning it instead of just making a decision and sticking with it, you're much more fluid and able to adapt.
Anyway, I've gone on too long. Read it sometime if you're interested, I highly recommend it.