Friday, February 3, 2012

What's Up With This 'Kemmering' Thing?


While I was reading the book called The Left Hand of Darkness, which has a planet with genderless people. The author, Ursula Le Guin, finally started talking about how these people change into a certain gender and make babies. And they do that through a process called ‘Kemmering’. Now, here is where things started getting deep. These people don’t have any sexual frustration, there’s no rape, no sexual assaults, and one’s mind doesn’t wonder off throughout the day because they are thinking about sex. There just isn’t a need for that on their planet!

That got me wondering about what if humans went through kemmering, how would that make our world different. I found a website which has all of the reported rapes from all around the world.http://www.rape.co.za/index2.php?do_pdf=1&id=875&option=com_content For an example about how scary rape statistics are in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, somewhere in America a woman is raped every 2 minutes. Only 2 minutes! That’s only 120 seconds. That’s shorter than it takes a bag of popcorn to pop in the microwave (for me atleast)! Just imagine if we went through kemmering, all those rapes and sexual assaults would be 0%. For me, that’s crazy to think about the world wouldn’t have any sexual violence. However, everybody being genderless is even crazier to think about. But, I think I could get over people being genderless for no more rapes and sexual assaults.

1 comment:

  1. For LeGuin, the Genthians don't lack gender in the personality quality ways -- think of them as having both masculine and feminine traits since they are both. If qualities weren't gendered, what might we be?

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