"You may not be an old fashioned girl, but you're still gonna get dated."

Trapnel has some backtalk on Albanian "sworn virgins":

I don't really see the argument here. The Sworn Virgins are a great example of how social practices evolve in ways that can rarely be *justified* by their *explanations*; their very existence calls into question the entire presumption of a necessary gender binary. You claim, basically, that they see better than we do that What Is, Must Be; but not only is this question-begging, it's in the face of the counter-example they present.

Finally, the celibacy thing. How would your theory handle activity groups dominated by same-sex attracted folks?

An alternate possibility is simply that a lot of male homosocial behavior is, at heart, petty and cruel, and the inclusion of women makes this harder to mask to the participants...

First of all: the fact that a lot of male homosocial behavior is "petty and cruel" is half the attraction! I won't deny that girls can be cruel, but I will say that female relationships don't really have scripts for "tough love." (Compare, for instance, the way Michael treats Harold in The Boys in the Band and the way Martha treats Honey in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)

He's right to say that the Virgjineshe don't prove that the "gender binary" is necessary or inevitable, but the question that interests me is not "Can/should we get rid of gender?" but "Can we have gender equality without getting rid of gender?" There are feminists who say "No, but getting rid of gender is fine by me." I don't have much to say to advocates of a genderless universe, so my arguments are meant to address those feminists who think that we can have gender equality without eliminating the gender binary altogether.

Those feminists and I are both interested in justice--we agree that a woman who likes arguing about philosophy and drinking shouldn't be prevented from doing either simply because she is a woman. However, I have some concerns about their solution. Let's stick with the Yale Political Union as our example: if the YPU achieved a fifty-fifty gender split and stopped having the cutthroat culture of a "boy's club," all of the barriers to women's success would be eliminated. On the other hand, the presence of all those women would change the nature of the organization, feminizing it. I should be clear that I'm not saying that any given woman will necessarily bring these things to the table, only that a critical mass of women always will.

The thing that's interesting about the Virgjineshe, then, is that it allows women who envy the masculine lifestyle to go out and have it while keeping the overall structure of gender roles intact. If I want hard-drinking and fast-talking women to be able to chase public lives but am skeptical about the effect that eliminating gender barriers will have (that is, if I'm not sure a middle ground of "gender matters except when it doesn't" is sustainable), then the Albanian solution proves that I can have my cake and eat it, albeit under weird circumstances.

With regards to Patti Smith, Noah points out that she makes reference to Joan of Arc in "Kimberly." I think this only proves that Patti Smith sees a difference between (1) wanting the freedom to adopt some masculine characteristics and (2) wanting to be a man, because the Joan of Arc story is all about the rejecting the former in favor of the latter. Thoughts?