I Am NOT A Guy-What is Sexual/Sexuate Difference?

What is authentic female experience? How can we know when we must live, think and breathe in a patriarchal world that is dominated by the white male perspective? In the West white male as subject is taken as universal truth, while women are relegated to the status of other and object. Our female bodies-our breasts, our menstrual cycles, our yonis (vaginas), our ability to conceive if we so desire- our entires bodies have become the battleground for religious and political control. Virtually every female body part has been compartmentalized, eroticized, objectified, commercialized, exploited, feared, lusted after, abused.... Under patriarchy our choices around sexuality and reproduction are under constant threat, and in most cultures have long been controlled by misogynistic and tyrannical men.

The writings of Luce Irigaray discuss the need for a a reinterpretation of every discipline, experience, ideology, and system. Experiencing female as subject - as agent of her destiny rather than passive observer or victim is essential to the liberation of women AND men. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray writes, "Sexual Difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue of our age....Has a worldwide erosion of the gains won in women's struggles occurred because of the failure to lay foundations different from those on which the world of men is constructed?.....A revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place. We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Everything, beginning with the way in which the subject has always been written in the masculine form, as MAN, even when it is claimed to be neutral or universal."

Here is one example: If language influences consciousness, how does a word like guy, which is over-used by women and men to refer to boys and girls, men and women, affect our female sense of self in this world? I am NOT a guy and yet everywhere I go I hear women referring to groups of women and girls as guys. It is so disturbing to me that I have a visceral response. My body tenses and I feel a rush of blood and energy to my breasts and yoni (vagina) as if my distinctly female body parts are screaming I AM NOT A GUY!!!

I was heartened to hear, then later read Alice Walker address this very issue:

"It has been despairing to see the ease with which women, after over thirty intense years of Feminism, have chosen to erase their gender in language by calling each other, and themselves, "guys."…. Are we saying we're content to be something most of us don't respect? Conjure up an image of a guy. What attributes does it have? Is that really you? Is this a label you gave yourself?

What does being called "guys" do to young women? To little girls?

Isn't the media responsible for making it "cute" to be a guy, as if that's all the Women's Movement was about, turning us into neutered men, into guys? For guys don't have cojones, you know. They are men, but neutered, somehow. So if you've turned in your breasts and ovaries for guyness, you've really lost out.

(See Alice Walker: We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a in a Time of Darkness, "The Pause")