Jemppu’s Reviews > Venus Plus X > Status Update

"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."

Throughout, the book has used 'he' as if a universal pronoun for hypothetical individuals, and a neutral for gender-unrelated persons. Fine otherwise, but of course it isn't neither universal nor neutral at all, when it still also carries it's gendered value and when the females are separately called 'she' in contrast.

"For Philos had told his story in the Ledom tongue, and he had always used the Ledom pronoun which is not masculine nor feminine but which also is not “it”; it was he, Charlie himself, who had translated it “he.”

*rolls eyes in gender-neutral*

"We are raising children who will emulate neither mother-images nor father-images, but parents."

"Central Europeans were startled and very much amused to see American farmers milking cows and feeding chickens, for never in their lives had they seen that done by any but women."

While explaining how the idea of gendered roles are tied to culture, the text seems to fail to notice or address the gendered role it assumes on the 'American farmers'.

"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 maleness of the male, and the femaleness of the female, and the importance of then- difference, were matters of almost total preoccupation."

How much more convincing - and how far less oxymoronic - these anecdotes on "history and historical ‘motivations with never a mention of sex" would be, if the language used wasn't perceivably gendered.

I feel sorry for Philos, to be a being unrelated to this gendered nonsense, but conceived by a mind limited in language to fully convey them as they should manifest.

"Charlie realized that things are, after all, comparative; the Ledom genuinely were less preoccupied with sexual matters than he was, just as he was less preoccupied than, say, a Victorian housewife who would refer to the "limbs" of a piano, and who would not put a book by a male author on a shelf next to one by a female author unless the two authors happened to be married."

"We worship the child because it is inconceivable that we would ever obey one."

As usual, there's this specific mix of frustration and hilarity to read about ideas of sex-/gender-neutrality in language, which on every utterance perpetuates the gendered difference between sexes - whether at all relevant or not. And fails to demonstrate any neutral regard - discussing the sexless/genderless beings in same gendered terms.

Exhausting, the linguistic shackles limiting both concept and conveyance.