After making my recent post, "Arrival: Gizmos and Love," I thought a lot about reworking it. I decided against it: part of the reason for blogging is spontaneity, to write and post at a series of different moments, not to wait and publish posthumously a fully-formed life.

After the link got posted on a bunch of popular sites, I wondered again if I shouldn't edit the post. A wider-than-usual group of strangers was reading it, and would be less inclined to forgiveness than my habitual readers. I decided that this moment of exposure was not the time to update the post: I would have to be consistent toward these new readers, not to regret my words under the spotlight. Instead, I would simply have to engage the conversation, which is, after all, what I am always hoping to spark.

The post is somewhat mysogynistic, as a way of making a point. The two figures in the picture represent people in our society (real people who I've seen) who could be faulted for playing traditional gender roles, and they might be living emptier lives than they have their opportunity might allow—that's my own reading: tou can make another—and mine is pushing the facts pretty far, but it's a reading I want to make and one that I think the picture supports. Because the picture is, to me, partly about gender identity (I double-check: the man is slightly liberated, wearing a necklace; but the woman wears her uniform to a T—or to a tank-top; and the boy's toy is the center of the picture—paging Doctor Freud), I imputed some gender-essentialist characteristics to the characters. I worried about this: people would take it seriously, would understand that I think women want X and men want Y, unchangeably. I wanted to rewrite this, find a cleverer way of saying it, of getting at the gender dynamics (essential and performed); but it was too late, and I wasn't sharp enough anyway. Aside from the (minor) issue of what people think I believe, I was concerned about adding something to the historical record (as much as obscure blogs can be considered a historical record) that might lead someone to the wrong conclusions: that is, to bolster someone else's misogyny. But as it stands, with all the commentary, I feel that my own views have been clarified and lots of other people got their say, so the post doesn't stand as a monument to chauvinism—I hope not, anyway.

In the end I updated the post slightly, for personal reasons. I reordered the last couple of sentences, because I felt that in the first version they implied something incorrect about my personal life: that I've had lots of relationships involving girls cooking, ball games on TV, and gossip. In fact, all the girls I've dated have been much too sharp to indulge in gossip, I don't follow sports, and more often than not, I've done the cooking.

Of all the reactions, I was most pleased by Jason Kottke's, because he cut right to the heart of what I was trying to say, and overlooked the overstated sexism; he quoted the line, "a boy with a toy, and a girl with patience." That's the only thing I wanted to say, really.

I intend to write carefully, considering the consequences of my statements, but I also hope to write quickly, without taking forever to hone my message. That's the challenge; I'm posting today just to reaffirm those two imperatives.