ME, MYSELF AND I

OR

WHAT ARE YOU?

Virgin tews by Piews Firginia

This is probably a strange title and stranger still, though it is in the first person this editorial is not about me but about you and you and yes, YOU too. It's in the first person because I'd like to stir you up into thinking about yourselves in a special way. Self iden- tity is a very important thing for hu- man beings without exception for race, creed, color or the era of their lifetime. We all have to establish some sort of concept of what we are and who

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we are. It is no problem to give our legal name, street address, and occu- pation, and on one level, the legal, that does identify us to others, but it doesn't do much for us, ourselves. What is the basic fact on which you construct your self concept? Try an experiment! Ask 10 or 20 people what they would say if you were a man from Mars and ran across them out in the country alone and asked them curiously, "What Are You?" I'll wager that among the first 5 things that all of them, male and female alike, would say would be, "I am a man (male) or woman (female)." The sex is in brackets because either word might be used but it would mean the same to the speaker in either case.

The significance of this lies in the fact that each of us builds our self concept basically and fundamentally on our sex. I wonder if this is not just our animal self showing thru. Although animals don't think and don't have conscious self concepts in the sense that hu- mans do (as far as we can tell at least) they do all know what (not

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