Gender dies hard (Repost)

Gender is such a tiresome social construct. Yesterday I did behold that Simone de Beauvoir, the feminist herself, was of the opinion that Herman Melville wrote with better breadth and depth than Emily Brontë. I must say that I’m not of the same opinion, and you can almost sense a certain amount of masculinist elitism seeping through de Beauvoir’s utterances in The Second Sex.
You often find such semi-clad protuberances in the attitudes of certain types of feminist. Now, I am in no way a thinker who considers personal experience anything other than a field of question marks to be decoded. Personal experience is not in itself and for itself, because of the hideous accretions of the question marks which always seem to envelop one’s ‘pure experiences’. Due to this realisation, my approach to life has been both subjective AND extremely analytical. Yet one wouldn’t know this if one failed to engage me in a conversation. The ultimate key would be to ask.
De Beauvoir’s view of the women of her time is that they weren’t objective enough. They were unable to affect an attitude that was disinterested and analytical . Her diligence in pointing this out is commendable. Yet, today, we have altogether a different problem, I think. The naive realism that underlies de Beauvoir’s critique of the women of her time had given way to a much more vicious and insidious form of political warfare. Whereas de Beauvoir felt it sufficed to point out that women ought to aim to be more analytical, these days one can actually be more analytical, and it is still not seen that one is more analytical.
This brings me back to the issue of feminists who do not see other women for what they are — for it is women who fail here as well as men. When I was attempting my Dip. Ed., I had to write a little essay on my personal philosophy of pedagogy. Not knowing where to start, I took a stab, and I will have to say that my 800 words or so were oh so abstract.
The female teacher of this course announced in due course how fascinated she was to find that all the female students wrote in highly personal ways, whereas the male students wrote abstractly, philosophically.
And hereby lies a tail for a wily cat.  Gender ideologies die hard, and it is rarely enough to read what somebody is saying, try to take it in, without relying on an invidious interpretive mechanism of a gender ideology.
I do my best to avoid being mangled by the social system. When my views are being misrepresented — as they often are — my analytical mind detects a false note. Call my contentions with the system of gender all too personal, if you like — but in doing so, you will only succeed in proving my point.