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This book is a memoir exploration into gender identity. It's told from a male perspective (and is quite sexually graphic) but I think it provides a very interesting invitation to talk about some very relevant topics. When we're talking about gender equality, we're also talking about an equality that doesn't have anything to do with gender. What we're more talking about is stepping away from letting gender define who we are.
Here's an excerpt from the book:
"In recent years, my sense of what a man is feels a lot less fixed. “We are process, not reality,” Loren Eiseley says, which is the closest thing to true I can say about what it's been like to live in the clothes of a pink or blue system. Being a man is created in the space between my body and its adornments (and gestures are also adornments). The relationship between my body and the clothes I put on it is live, immediate. The great literary love of my life, John Berger, says “reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of cliches. Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to consolidate its own power.” Men and women are these cliched habits. We've forgotten that men in plaid shirts and ill-fitting Wranglers reference an idea. We don't see the screen as a simple convention. As with metaphor, when gender is a cliche, it's dead... we've created a shorthand to help us know someone better, but the language has become so binary we've stopped reading the intricacies of that code."
