Jemppu's Reviews > Venus Plus X

"You cannot be objective about it because you have been indoctrinated, sermonized, drenched, imbued, inculcated and policed on the matter since first you wore blue booties. You come from a time and place in which [...] the importance of then- difference, were matters of almost total preoccupation."


An ambitious and commendably independent-thinking exploration on societal roles of gender and sex. Compelling general discussion on the theme - framed in a heartwarming comradery - but which also occasionally tended to veer into speculations on distractingly narrow, or irrelevant-seeming, culturally specific suppositions.

However, what the text most fatally suffers from - with a frustrating consistency - is the severe limitation in keeping it from ever fully comprehending, or properly conveying, the concept of social neutrality it seeks to examine: its strictly gendering language. (Fact which, however, effectively brings focus to this very problem in linguistic culture).

The text discusses with confidence social structures of supposed gender hierarchies, taboos and gendered norms tied to, or excused by, Christian values - all the usual fare on gender roles which dictate much of the Anglocentric discourses. However, with its level of debate still on trying to debunk those extensively caricaturized biases - and with the aforementioned glaringly evident linguistic obstacle - the narrative never feels quite ripe enough to adequately grasp or convey concepts beyond gender/sex evaluated societal arrangements, or individual identity removed from sex altogether.

Though, the book does arrive there in the end - to embracing the fact of individual differences without subjecting them to unnecessarily divisive gender/sex-valued categorizations -, it does so by quite a convoluted route - so as to address even those most sidetracked of principles it allows into the discourse.

That is to say, it is visionary in its own societal and linguistic cultural sphere, demystifying issues with the usual standing point of conservative US values in mind (cultural similarities and values of which are, of course, applicable in varying degrees of accuracy within and beyond national borders).

For me personally, perhaps the most absent aspect (aside the lacking language making the point of gender-neutrality null altogether) was the narrative's general inability to ever clearly enough separate sex/gender from identity.

Given the time and place of its conception, however, the text is inspiringly clear-sighted and thorough in scrutinizing the stagnant norms in the domain it habits, and perhaps more importantly: targets. And, indeed, by what ever method, it satisfyingly arrives to the most important conclusion eventually.

"Humanity has never attained its optimum ability to reason, its maximum objectivity, until now, because it has always plagued itself with its dichotomies. In us, the very concept of any but individual differences has been eliminated."




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(Further notes in the reading updates below, as per usual).

This left one rather tempted to re-edit the book's text to include the gender-neutral language its narrative most acutely requires, but fails to ever utilize - to see how that alone would work in favor of its message.