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Week10 : The Left Hand of Darkness(5pt)

 11/14/2020

This week I read The Left Hand of Darkness. Well, I didn’t expect this book is about a group of very special humans living on a distant, cold planet. I would not know about that just by looking at the name of the book. They have five or so days each month when they are in heat, and the rest of the days are really just  bisexual people, or to be more precise, asexual people. That is to say, except for those days when no matter how beautiful a woman is, no matter how seductive she is, no matter how beautiful or naked a woman is walking down the street, no one will bother to look at her. They become temporarily male or female only during the rut, and it is random. The setting of this concept is so interesting, I have never seen such a concept. This month you may be a woman, the next month you may be a man, and once the rut is over, their bodies quickly revert back to the intersex state.

But it's hard for them to understand what "gender" is, or why one can call themselves a " man" or a "woman". On our planet, gender is the number one factor to identify our social identity. A man might think "I'm a man, so I'm going to...", and a woman might think "I'm a woman, so I should..." These thoughts follow us forever, even in the most tiny part of our lives.So even though there is no law forcing us, we will find that the men around us are always more dignified, and the women are always more willing to show their weakness, even if the original character is not like this at all. That’s why human from earth will need explains to this group of amazing humans what men and women are and, unlike them, on earth, gender is the primary and most important element that determines the way we live our lives

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