Category: Commonplace

Quotes, art, questions, videos, podcasts, music, and whatever else inspires.

The Biology of Sex

We know the science of gender is complicated and ever changing. Wherever you go on the internet, there are studies and anecdotes to define and debate the presentation of identification and expression of a person’s gender, but around the concept of biological sex there only ever seems to be potent feelings, hard lines, and outdated information.

This episode of the TED Radio Hour was the most interesting, informative, and open-minded introduction to the spectrum, yes, spectrum, of the ways a person’s biological sex can exist outside of the old male/female dichotomy.

This is a must listen!

My Mother’s Body

“My Mother’s Body” from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time // Marie Howe

Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,

grew louder. From inside her body I heard almost every word she said.
Within that girl I drove to the store and back, her feet pressing

the pedals of the blue car, her voice, first gate to the cold sunny mornings,
rain, moonlight, snow fall, dogs . . .

Her kidneys failed, the womb where I once lived is gone.
Her young astonished body pushed me down that long corridor,

and my body hurt her, I know that—24 years old. I’m old enough
to be that girl’s mother, to smooth her hair, to look into her exultant frightened eyes,

her bedsheets stained with chocolate, her heart in constant failure.
It’s a girl, someone must have said. She must have kissed me

with her mouth, first grief, first air,
and soon I was drinking her, first food, I was eating my mother,

slumped in her wheelchair, one of my brothers pushing it,
across the snowy lawn, her eyes fixed, her face averted.

Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers,
our voice in my throat speaking to you now.

The Radicals

The radicals taking over feminism, many of whom were active in the civil-rights and antiwar movements, wanted to overthrow patriarchy, which would require transforming almost every aspect of society: child rearing, entertainment, housework, academics, romance, business, art, politics, sex.”

— Ariel Levy, Lift And Separate