Status Updates From Gender

the part of the show where dr favale assigns everything i read over the summer but explains it so i actually know what's happening this time

"in the rural Mexico I know so well, a woman would rather die of embarrassment than let a man cook the beans"

I have to put this book down every few pages and wrap my imagination around a suggested reality SO DIFFERENT than mine that I can't quite believe in it. The paragraph on marriage becoming reworked as the occasion when a couple becomes a new taxable unit was one of those moments. I don't think of marriages as threads tying together families in a complex relational web - I think more individually and economically.

Illich points out the obvious that has stopped being obvious because it's the water we swim in - that we don't see any deeper meaning to gender because we've reduced humanity to genderless "worker units," which happen to have male or female biology on top of a fundamentally interchangeable foundation. This assumption is usually in place long before any downstream disagreements.

fascinating