I can't find definitively which sentence in this article I disagree with, but somehow the direction of the critique feels inverted.
Our current cultural stupidity feels less like a misguided attempt to categorize the ambiguous, but rather an attempt to make unnecessarily ambiguous what is utterly clear and easily categorizable. Your point is will taken: category boundaries remain stubbornly fuzzy. But even taking the vanishingly rare intersex case into account, male and female as categories are about as certain as it's possible to imagine. Even masculinity and femininity, which are orders of magnitude more malleable than that, are still remarkably and meaningfully distinct.
It's not that it's impossible to be over-rigid in our mental models of these things. But we'd have to march a long way in that direction before I would be worried about our having overcorrected.
You describe the current culturally problem accurately. The inversion you find within the article is because art allows for and even delights in paradoxes and impossibilities, leaving the door open for these surface-level misreadings made by political activists. Time for our own "media literacy" campaign!
I can't find definitively which sentence in this article I disagree with, but somehow the direction of the critique feels inverted.
Our current cultural stupidity feels less like a misguided attempt to categorize the ambiguous, but rather an attempt to make unnecessarily ambiguous what is utterly clear and easily categorizable. Your point is will taken: category boundaries remain stubbornly fuzzy. But even taking the vanishingly rare intersex case into account, male and female as categories are about as certain as it's possible to imagine. Even masculinity and femininity, which are orders of magnitude more malleable than that, are still remarkably and meaningfully distinct.
It's not that it's impossible to be over-rigid in our mental models of these things. But we'd have to march a long way in that direction before I would be worried about our having overcorrected.
You describe the current culturally problem accurately. The inversion you find within the article is because art allows for and even delights in paradoxes and impossibilities, leaving the door open for these surface-level misreadings made by political activists. Time for our own "media literacy" campaign!