RANSVESTIA

strength for women. But for the single person in society, stores and restaurants and hotels and servants provide cooking and housekeep- ing for the single male while jobs, police and hospitals provide sustenance and protection for females. (In principle, that is. In our decadent society, crime and rape seem to exceed the ability of society to keep them in check.) But in pioneer days a lone male or a lone female in a mountain cabin had a much reduced chance of survival if one thinks of mental-emotional survival as well as mere physical survival.

Now the reason for this loss of individual adequacy can, it occurs to me as I write, be related to this right and left brain business. As males from very prehistoric times perfected left brain abilities and tech- niques and built a social structure upon them, they largely aban- doned (except for specific and individual exceptions) conscious use of their right brained potentials. Females, on the other hand, involved as they were, with child-raising-with multiple babies and children of nine to twelve-month age differentials-were not exposed to the left- brained developments and requirements as the males were but in contrast were of necessity deeply involved in right brained activities emotion, concern, "sensing" danger to their offspring-which may be the underlying structure of intuition-and similar things. As society developed and ceramics, basket making, weaving, etc. came into the hands of women (or of certain right brain-oriented "artists" who probably were not too good as warriors). Spacial relationships is one of the right brain functions as well as art and color and even today girls are more capable in these areas than boys. I guess what I want to make clear is that the differences are not due to the biological roles of male and female-both have the same potentials except in the biological-reproductive sense-but rather in the social roles that have fallen to males and females over the many millenia of human history and which have created man-masculinity and woman-femininity, which are gender terms.

If now we return to our two-hemisphere brain it is reasonable to consider that in animals while the two hemispheres (which are much smaller proportionally than in man) exist and may very well each be the focal point of some particular functions of life, they cooperate fully to make the animal "whole" and give it, whether male or female, full access to all its potentials in the battle to survive. Now comes man and because of the multiple offspring of varying ages situation, the females have to do the nurturing and the males have to hunt and protect, each develops a set of functions in which it is

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