Unisex sex appeal

My goodness, I've never seen such a smirk! I don't even dare ask to wipe it off.

Ha, ha, ha, it's because I am going to talk about mother tongue today.

Have you ever noticed that nobody has complained about this word? Why not father tongue, or father earth for that matter?

I know. Women don't complain about being called "guys," but men are deeply offended when they are called "girls."

It's not that one is always good and the other bad. It reminds me of our talk on black and white.

"Sissy" is negative, but "macho" isn't always so.

"Effeminate" is negative.

"Unmanful," "unmanlike," "unmanly," "emasculate" ... We can go on forever. The basic meaning, "like a woman" or "unlike a man," itself is not judgmental, except that it assumes qualities unique to each sex.

Isn't that a big offense already, to define people by sex?

I agree. We should not think all women think and act similarly and so do men, but I do think the two groups are distinctively different from one another. The largest difference is in the reproductive capabilities, which cannot be altered. There are also other biological differences, such as the muscle-to-fat ratio.

I think it is only the functions related to reproduction that cannot be changed. Although odds are stacked against them, women can be more muscle laden than the average man and run faster than the average man.

Why do we find it odd when a woman thinks and acts like a man and when a man thinks and acts like a woman?

Be careful! When you say "thinks and acts like a man," you are endorsing the view that all men are alike.

This is tricky. Let me rephrase the question; why do we want people to act according to their sex?

An answer to that question should give an explanation to homophobia.

I'm afraid we have to go back to biology.

Biological programming again?

Yes. The ultimate reason why we live is to pass on our genes.

Sounds bad, but I reckon it's true!

"I guess all the excitement in bed had more to do with excitement about keeping the human race going than anybody ever imagined.'' Remember this one?

"Cat's Cradle"... by Kurt Vonnegut.

Correct. That means the most important contacts we can have as homo sapiens are the heterosexual ones with intercourse in mind.

Sounds worse!

The first step to make such contacts successful is to approach a person of the right sex.

I want to think that it is one of the bad wirings that we are wired to overcome.

We are moving in that direction. Take clothing, for example. There are remarkably more unisex items than, say 50 years ago.

More men are into skin care, too. I can't think of any sport off hand that is still for men only.

I have a dream.

Not a nightmare?

I have a dream that one day sex appeal would be more about attraction as a person.

Life as an atheist butterfly

Happy new year! It looks like you're still suffering from hangover. Tell me, how much champagne did you have?

I wish it were the bubbly stuff. I'm simply trying to wake up from a nightmare.

Was it so bad?

Yes, you know that one...

Let me guess. It was raining, you were alone in a Versailles-like garden, desperately trying to locate a loo, but all you could find was a pond after pond overflowing with rainwater. I knew you drank too much!

Only if it were something like that.

Oh no, was it worse?

Yes, considerably. It's this familiar nightmare called life.

I was hoping to start the new year much less gloomily.

Okay, I shouldn't have called it a nightmare. Let's rename it a dream.

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the streeeeaaaammmm. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dreaaaaaammmmm.

Sorry, no applause for the singing performance. By the way, do you know this story? "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly."

He is a Chinese philosopher.

"But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi."

In your case, it would be more like a cockroach, rather than a butterfly.

Applause for the first insult of the year! If you are thinking about Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," that was not a dream, but a true transformation. Anyway, Zhuangzi implies that we may swap the status of reality and dream, because we can never be sure which is which.

Isn't that called denial?

In some cases it could be. Again, we need to use this manner of looking at life in a way that would benefit us. All things good can be abused, you know. Let me change the tack a bit, and ask how can we all be certain that what we see does exist as we see it?

Dogs and cats see things differently from us, but we all agree which are water bowls and litter boxes. What matters is the correspondence between the object and the perception.

It only needs to be consistent. For many abstract notions, they don't even have to be very consistent. I am for anti-realism.

I am, too. Think about all the lovers around the world. It cannot be, but the perception that matters.

Indeed. How is it that one woman can make one man happy and crazy, just by standing in front of him, but not another arbitrary man? It is his perception of her that is important. We could say that it is a matter of taste, but I think both explanations are basically the same.

When you are in love, you get up everyday with the feeling that the world is such a wonderful place. But somewhere in the world, hundreds of people continue to be killed each day because of political, economic, or religious conflicts. That reminds me---I saw you skipping like a fool in front of the café. Are you...?

A dog with bowel problems happened to be walking a step ahead of me, that's all.

I'm glad you didn't trip. Getting back to the perception issue, although I am an anti-realist, I have the urge to find "the truths" and "the facts."

As long as you believe that the truths are the truths and the facts are the facts, you don't have to engage yourself in any inquiry. It's the desire to have something that you can rely on without questioning. They become some kind of axioms in your thought system.

If you are an anti-realist, axioms tend to be formed by what you perceive.

As anti-realists, we must be conscious of our thought systems if we wish to communicate our ideas to others, because perception tends to differ from person to person.

Here is where religions come to the rescue. They spare some of us the pain and the trouble of going through self-analyses and give us explanations for most of the worldly events.

At religious gatherings, you know that the person sitting next to you is thinking the same, or can give you a convincing and comforting explanation to anything.

Whatever it may be, God wished it so.

And you are assured that both of you have the same god in mind!