Publisher's Synopsis
Are men and women still the same after 25 years of feminism? Change has been slow because sexual stereotypes are hard to change. Part of the difficulty, contends Helen Haste, is that we think about men and women in terms of the polarity of masculine-feminine. She argues that polarity, or duality, is a major metaphor of western thought. We map it on to gender, so that changing ideas about gender is an enormous challenge to our thinking. As long as masculinity is defined by one pole, feminity is defined by its negation.;In this book, Haste shows how the assault on traditional conceptions of gender is in fact a confrontation with some of the deeply-rooted metaphors, as well as models of rationality and control, that underlie western culture.
