Beged Eisha

"After years of stiling conservatism, men face a dizzying array of clothing options... unisex collections that blur the distinction between the genders. French designer Jean Paul Gaultier¹ is largely to thank for these advances" - Joelle Diderich, Associated Press, Published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution 7/16/06.

Given that gender is a social construct, it makes sense to challenge it - it's not as though there is some god-given difference between the sexes. In fact, saying that they are equal is not enough, since separate is necessarily inherently unequal. So any person interested in analyzing art as a rebellion must ask what it is that drives this conservative obsession with gender roles. The fact that it has worked for millennia is an artifact of our primitive, primate derived notions of how society works. If we let nature dictate our society, we would still be picking bugs out of each others hair.

Progress entails challenging every possible previous notion of how society should be structured, the more obviously true, the more important to challenge. We live in a universe where everything is relative, and as Alan Sokal has pointed out, new (and liberal) universal topological approaches have supplanted our previous niave notions of our ability to understand reality based on our local, parochial understanding. "Today both men and women reject the constricting and unequal sex roles of past generations..."⁽²⁾ The basis of our society is fundamentally unequal, and should be completely rethought.

Of course, starting from gender roles clearly does not fully eliminate the irrational biases that we hold. The real solution is to go back to our intolerant, dogmatic assumptions, and eliminate them. To build a fair society, one that truly reflects only what is progressive and modern, we must eliminate all that is based on our parochial assumptions, all of our biased technology, the engineering we have mistakenly built over the graves of so many minorities, and go back to the modernity and progressivism that we enjoyed in primitive society.




¹⁾Gaultier, posibly better known as the designer who made Madonna's outrageous 90's costumes (and the costume designer for 5th Element as well, if you thought there was some redeeming value in Madonnas ridiculous fashions,) is known for "playing with traditional gender roles," according to the Wikipedia article. Additonally, he is known as one of the co-founders and original hosts of Eurotrash, the most outré show on British television. According to the Guardian, it is "demented genius," mocking Europe by displaying the British appetite for the absurd. Who else would have conceived of features such as "Naked Germans of the Week."
²⁾Hate and Marriage, by Richard Thompson Ford, http://www.slate.com/id/2145620/ (The rest of the quote, of course, reflects narrow bias, and should not be considered.)