2 June

Sex and gender, one of the big debates of our time. And like most of those debates, I think it’s not really about sex and gender at all, but about who gets to call the shots in society, with more morally and socially conservative groups reacting strongly to a sense of losing their grip. But it’s an interesting topic anyway. The Victorian era was thought to be very prudish, but no time is ever that, desires can’t be boxed up. The Bensons, wow. Are sex and gender the same thing? Is sex itself even a clear category? “Until the early 1950s, a man could have sex with another man without thinking himself in any respect “abnormal”—as long as he steered clear of the feminine dress or behavior that marked a so-called pouf or queen.”