Late one night, I found myself at the tail end of a party engaged in a deep discussion about womanhood. This discussion had gone on so long that everyone had left, except for the host, because she lived there, and one other guest, who had fallen asleep in a chair. At about 3:30 a.m., my friend and host decided to drop the bomb: “How can you say anything at all about women? You don’t know about us, because you’re not one of us.” That’s what you call a conversation stopper.
Though I regarded her assertion as an overstatement, it definitely made me think. How much can a man know about being a woman? We are told that each of us has a masculine and feminine “side.” This sidewise understanding has so entered the vernacular that a character on a cop show can say, “I don’t have a feminine side. Where my feminine side would be, there’s just another masculine side.” He’s probably not aware that gender is just a mental construct.
When we talk about having a “side” that is masculine or feminine or some combo perhaps, where is this side and what’s it made of? We seem to associate…
