sorry 'bout the wait

so, it's been a while...right now i am supposed to be doing research for a presentation that i have to give on margaret atwood on thursday, but i'm actually listening to ulca radio and playing spider solitaire, so i thought it might be a good time to revisit the cliffhanger post that i put up a week and a half ago. ooooohhh, and now they're playing waltz #2, which makes me sad, both because it's a sad song (duh) and because of the person that it reminds me of. and it's sad that elliott smith is dead...

but i'm going to shut up about that now and try and focus on the issue at hand. so. the "thinking vs. feeling" debate, as people have dubbed it...thinking has traditionally been aligned with a masculine way of approaching the world and feeling with a feminine way of same. of course, especially in these oh-so-enlightened times, this is not a strict either/or division; one can be (and should be) both a thinking and a feeling human being. but IGAOTW (which stands for In General And On The Whole, an acronym that i just made up. take note.), males are expected to value logic over emotion and females to value emotion over logic. and, since western philosophy is overwhelmingly dominated by males, logic has long since won out as the more "civilized" value. thus audre lorde, trying valiantly to counter centuries of hetero-, masculo-, euro-centric culture, champions feeling as the voice of the "black mother" (counter to descartes, a "white father"). when we remove the racial element that makes us all so uncomfortable (i know, this is unfair...but it's not the issue for today. another day, perhaps.), we still get thinking=masculine, feeling=feminine, we just have lorde insisting that the value of feeling should also be recognized. okay. let's set that aside for a moment and look at the quotes themselves. as ryan noted on my earlier post, "thinking" is presented as providing a certainty, while "feeling" makes no guarantees. the way he presents this difference (and he can feel free to correct me if i'm wrong, but i think it's probably the way that most of us look at it...the way society looks at it) is that this makes feeling a weaker force. thinking promises existence, but feeling only offers the possibility for freedom. however, i see this as being an essential and valuable attribute of emotion rather than a shortcoming. it is exactly the potential that is important. feeling does not and cannot guarantee freedom. you can even (rather easily, in fact) trap yourself in your own emotion. you must make your own freedom; feeling only gives you the possibilty. but you cannot be free if you do not value feeling. logic, for all its advantages (and it has many), is essentially and irrevocably rule-bound. logic is, in fact, a set of rules by which one progresses from one set or piece of information to another. if you live your life strictly by logic, you cannot be free; you can only do what the rules dictate. if you allow yourself to transgress these rules however, and act on emotion, it opens up whole new avenues for living. now, to return to the gender divide...i would like to posit that the idea that males follow logic more than emotion and females vice versa is nonsense. it is simply that society allows men to express certain logical and emotional patterns and women to express others. men are expected to hold to a much more absolute standard of logic, where the same rules apply to all situations; something is always advisable/right/acceptable or it is inadvisable/wrong/unacceptable. they are "allowed" to express anger and very little else. women, on the other hand, are expected to have a much more relative standard of logic, that seems to be much more conscious of social standards and each individual situation (i am not talking about "emotional logic" or anything strange or confusing like that. it is not "feeling mixed with thinking." it is abiding by a different set of logical rules that are largely based on social norms). women are allowed to express happiness, desire (but not too much, or else they're sluts), fear, sadness, but not usually anger (or else they're bitchy). now, neither of these characterizations are exhaustive, and clearly (being female) i have more to say about the female experience of the thinking/feeling dichotomy. i would not privilege one over the other. each has its function and its place - it is, as always, finding the balance that is important.

on a completely irrelevant side note, while i was writing this post, my friend's radio show ended (you should listen to it, by the way: tuesdays 10p-12a on uclaradio.com) and the next show came on. the dj is somewhat irritating to begin with, but when she started advertising the giveaway for the night, i had to turn it off. they're giving away free tickets to a shindig that a band is putting on that they have dubbed, for whatever reason, a "bacchanal." however, the way that she was pronouncing it was "back-anal." not to be snobby or elitist, but that just annoyed the hell out of me. i almost called in and corrected her (and should have, now that i've thought about it more), but i don't know if i could have done it without being rude. in any case...i had more thoughts, but they've either leaked out of my ears or retreated to the depths of my brain and will be fished out later. right now i've got to get some sleep...