It was probably a mistake to agree to write a piece on gender and space. I’m now getting caught up on the theory and, boy, does it suck or does it most horribly suck.
Time is male while space is female; skyscrapers are embodiments of the inflated male ego; the chaos of the city mimics “the uterine form of the female body”, and somebody shoot me right now to put me out of my misery. Bleh, bleh, and bleh some more.
Clarissa's Blog 
You should have stuck with the Spanish Civil War.
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It IS about the Spanish Civil War! I’m sneaking it in everything I write about. I’d die if there were no Spanish Civil War to veer off into from these uterine cities or whatever.
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From a male perspective, I think time is most definitely female. It seems capricious, and there’s never enough of it. (Did I really write that??)
Skyscrapers are supposed to be a reaction to the cost of real estate, not a reflection of male whatever. Except perhaps in Qatar.
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“Skyscrapers are supposed to be a reaction to the cost of real estate, not a reflection of male whatever.”
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Just got the Qatar joke. 🙂 🙂 It’s the best.
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“Just got the Qatar joke”
Did you hear about the Martha Washington Monument?
A 555 foot hole in the ground……. (okay, even I’m embarassed by that one)
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All this talk about male and female and skyscrapers inevitably reminds me of a certain tune from the rave days …
Underworld — “Mmm Skyscraper I Love You”:
This of course has absolutely nothing to do with Qatari real estate. 🙂
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Time is male while space is female; skyscrapers are embodiments of the inflated male ego; the chaos of the city mimics “the uterine form of the female body”…
This sounds like the beginning of a Camille Paglia summary but without the rapturous worship of the semiotics of Madonna that somehow references the Fountainhead while denouncing circles as politically correct tyrannic synecdoche trampling progress.
If is sounds like nonsense… it is. 🙂
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I’ve never thought of time and space as being gendered. It’s a very strange concept.
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In Russian, both words are of the neuter gender so I never saw them as gendered either.
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Are people just so obsessed with labels that they come up with these things? (Also, what is a neuter gender?)
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She talking about grammatical gender which is found in most European languages. The modern romance languages mostly have two, masculine and feminine. Latin, Greek, German, Icelandic and most (all?) Slavic languages have three, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Swedish, Danish, and some dialects of Norwegian have two, but with a different breakdown into neuter and common gender. The common gender is the result of masculine and feminine categories collapsing into a single gender.
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Yes, I only know of the purely linguistic gender of time and space. Other people, however, have a much richer fantasy life. 🙂
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I understood that it was a grammatical gender. I only know French, though, and my primary language is English, so I’ve never come across the neuter gender before. From my experience, grammatical structures are difficult to comprehend if you’ve never seen it. I have no idea what the neuter gender means. The common gender makes some sense, sort of, but my understanding is less of a collapse and more of a neutrally gendered object.
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Not sure how the Slavic or Scandinavian languages do it, but in Romanian, the way the neuter gender works gramatically is by using masculine articles and adjectives for the singular and feminine for the plural. There’s still just as much grammatical gender information as you’d get for the masculine or feminine genders.
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I do Geography and public space theory as a hobby, and I’m confused as hell by that sentence. Most of the stuff I cover mostly talks about how public/private space was unnecessarily gendered and how that perception of public space as male and domestic space as female affects the distribution of power and how it impacted the organization and strategy of feminist groups, such as the Bluestockings in England, or how that bias impacts the way people interpret the past, like assuming that early humans had similar divides when there was, in fact, no real noticeable gendered division of space or labour among them.
This sounds like masturbatory claptrap.
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Masturbatory, for sure. 🙂
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[escapes into the Zed axis, into which the dual planar reality that has been forced upon us may recede into oblivion …] 🙂
This horrible stuff ranks up there with Arthur Dent’s puffery about how some Vogon poetry would “counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor” …
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I had never entertained the idea of Time penetrating Space… Perhaps as a black hole when they blend with one another with frantic force and going beyond the point of no return 🙂
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“Have you reached the event horizon yet?”
“Do you have to ask?”
🙂
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This model is a clear exemple of male privilege. There’s three spatial dimensions (male), but only one time dimension (female).
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