Gender Update & pH-Balanced Shopping

No, not mine. That is not going to be updated, no matter what Afghan visa officials say (see former blog posting about how my second Afghan visa identified me as a business woman).

The gender to be updated (or: "sex," if we're going to be rigorous about it) it that of the Serious Law Student writer I mentioned, yesterday. He's totally a chick. I was thrown off by the Kenneth Cole thing, but I think the following quote (in addition to blog references where she refers to herself as a woman) kind of tips the balance from Ricky Martin to Martina Navratilova: "What we need is for the entire first year class to sit down, shut up, and all watch Fight Club."

Back to Kenneth Cole (the bag, by the way, she replaces when she realizes that she can't fit her law text books and her laptop in one messenger bag...): It's interesting, because when I imagined her as a gay man it made perfect sense that he'd be fashion conscious/feminized enough to carry the designer messenger, and then when I had to add boobs and long hair to the picture (you know, because my understanding of sex and gender doesn't extend far beyond the simple signs on most MacDonald's bathrooms) it made EQUALLY perfect sense for her to be butched-up by carrying the masculine black leather black bag.

Odd. It's like men and women, in my mind, are like acids and bases and their accessories alter their pH so as to move them either closer together or farther away from the basic level of concentration you'd assign to the typical man or woman. In this case, the Kenneth Cole bag is like water, because it makes both more neutral. It's like a ph of 7.

I bet in a place like Egypt you could totally make a killing off of assigning pH balances to clothing such that closeted men could buy all the tight, frilly t-shirts with weird slogans like "Pull you out from the inside" (I have seriously seen that one) that they want, as long as they never crossed a femininity line that, because we associate gender and sexuality, here, would make them gay. It's like risk-free shopping. You could even have a clever marketing campaign to the effect of: "Put this in your closet so you can stay in yours."

VC