Mali's gone

My little dog, Mali, has been getting a little confused sometimes. Day before yesterday she wandered away, apparently looking for me. I'd retired to bed early because I'd had a tooth pulled out. Normally I'm on the computer til quite late, so she may have thought I'd gone out somewhere accidentally leaving her behind (she always accompanies me everywhere). My next-door neighbor's kid, about a kilometer away, said they'd seen a little dog fitting her description walking down the road. Heaven knows where she is. Julie and I have put leaflets in a lot of letterboxes and stuck posters up all over. She is picking up more leaflets and posters today that we are getting printed in Nambour -- these ones will have a picture of her on them. We'll spend this afternoon putting up more posters and letterboxing.

I hope someone picked her up and returns her. [sigh]

I've always felt I was kinda independent of the world, like I am behind some kind of invisible shield. Almost nothing ever moves me to tears, and few things budge me from my comfortable remoteness. But now I find myself with an unexpected achey hole where Mali was. Not a nice feeling.

How the hell do parents who lose a child cope?

gender difference

I've been trying to distract myself while waiting for the phone to ring with news of Mali.

I got to thinking about claims of difference between the minds of women and men. In the past I've witnessed hot arguments on the subject, with both sides generally insisting more or less the same thing -- that men and women think and feel differently. I'd always been uncomfortable with such arguments as nobody ever gives any evidence; they argue entirely from their own experience, with one saying to the other that "You can never know what it feels to be [insert male or female here] because you are not." It was always a confounding statement to make, because they're right, nobody can know what maleness or femaleness feels like if they are not of that gender. However I always found it unsettling because I never felt a part of my gender, so I'd always felt a little mystified at what they meant.

It suddenly hit me today that the entire argument springs from a delusion. When people assume that what they feel is shared by others of their gender, they are making an unfounded assumption. They say people of their own gender feel a particular way, and that those of the other gender don't, but how can they possibly know if either of those statements is true? Clearly they can't. Neither sex has access to telepathy. Nobody knows what another human being feels like, let alone an entire gender of humans. And the simple fact that I stand alone, feeling not particularly female or male would tend to disprove it anyway. If I feel like this, how many others do?

I've met plenty of strong, aggressive, gadget-oriented women, and gentle, touchy-feely males. It looks to me that there is far more overlap between the sexes than there are distinguishing features, meaning that many, many people (most?) are not able to be easily fitted into any simplified box of shared experience or mental traits.

Despite it being one of those commonly accepted "self-evident truths", it seems it is really just another example of sexism.