As the only female who seems to write (semi) regularly on this blog, I find it my duty to respond to Steve's questions on the complex sidewalk writing: "Dear America: Women are not the enemy." I just so happen to be studying feminist literary theory this week and have decided to let the feminists explain for themselves. In Gayle Rubin's essay "Traffic in Women," she writes in order to determine "whether or not it is realistic to hope for a sexually egalitarian society." She determines that it is our relationships alone that oppress us, or make us seem as an enemy of sorts: "A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain relations." When a woman fights against such roles she is placed in from her relations, she is seen as an enemy of the sex/gender system established in America (and most other places for that matter). Get it?

Rubin takes this a bit further to propose a dream of "an androgynous and genderless society, in which one's sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love." This may or may not have been the message attempting to be conveyed through the sidewalk chalk scribblings. As I think of my predominantly male audience reading this, anyone see a problem? Just trying to stir up some discussion.