RANSVESTIA

Males on the other hand, not having breasts and consequently also not having the nurturing responsibility, did have the opportunity, which was also the obligation, of providing food and protection for the female and the young. He was free to roam about in order to do this. From this need for hunting developed the skills of the hunt which involved group activity and cooperation. Primitive animalistic re- ligion also developed which led to the idea of gods of the hunt, etc. This in turn led to religious rituals calculated to result in a successful hunt, etc. From both of these humble beginnings came modern religion and statecraft and the fact that males have been the operators of almost all human societies. Not being bound down by nurturance, men also developed mathematics, science, philosophy, logic, ethics, etc. Meanwhile the women for their part continued their nurturing functions and learned other skills that could be carried on in and around the home base such as basket making, leather tanning, ceramics, food preparation, clothing construction, etc. In the process they became not only the prisoners of their sexual obligations and abilities but also prisoners of the men who, to a very large degree, determined most aspects of how women lived.

Now at this point you are saying; "Well that's all very well and interesting but what does it have to do with the title and the par- ticular aspects of life that readers of this magazine are interested in?" Just this: All these other aspects of life for both males and females which I have mentioned above can be bound together with one in- clusive word and that word is gender. That is something we are all involved in and interested in and FPs more than anyone else. To explain this briefly the impregnative function of the male and the pregnancy, birth and lactation functions of the female are all aspects of sex and reproduction which are common to the males and females of most every other species. However, man came along with his think- ing brain and his ability to make considered decisions and upon the base of the obvious anatomical and functional sex difference he created a whole complicated structure of determining how each of the two sexes should live their lives in all ways other than their re- productive and nurturant roles. These other ways are what collective- ly comprise gender a social way of life.

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It is obvious to all of us as soon as we are old enough to observe our own genitals and as soon as we are afforded an opportunity to ob- serve an individual of the opposite sex in the nude, so that we have something to compare ourselves with, that we form a primitive form of

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