Hey. Yeah, I thought for a time that I might be gay... But yeah, the sexual feeling is different. I think I am fairly much heterosexual. Would have been happy enough being gay... But turned out that I wasn't really. I was a little disappointed in that, but there it is lol.

I think that sometimes stereotypes are there for a reason - in the sense of being based on observations of typicality. But I think that othertimes the stereotypes really are groundless. There are also issues to do with what generates the stereotypical behaviour. Is it 'naturally determined' or is it that 'people behave according to the stereotypes because they identify with the stereotypes' (where they wouldn't behave that way if we changed the stereotypes) or what?

I think there is more overlap between 'male' and 'female' and 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' than people typically think that there is. The psychology studies seem to be showing us that this is the case. That things are dimensional. That things are complex.

I'm not exactly delicate either. I'm five feet seven, which is fairly tall. And i'm fairly big boned / solid. Lots of guys are shorter than me. I don't feel particularly feminine around guys who are of slighter build and / or less height than me... Spent much of my life feeling like an overgrown elephant. That is part of my body image issue, really. I always think I'm taller and bigger than I am in fact. Tend to think I'm taller than people who are actually taller than me. Other people seem to have a more accurate estimate of my size in realation to others than I do. I seem to spend much of my life saying 'I'm heavier / bigger than I look' because I keep thinking that other people are under-estimating me out of politeness or whatever. It is hard...

My bf helps me feel feminine... Sometimes. We are still sorting things out... But I think he does find me attractive, yeah, and it helps me feel attractive. I'm also surrounded by women who are around my size or bigger now - and that helps a lot. I mean I still feel bigger than them, but I know that objectively I'm not. A kind of a reality check, I guess.

Philosophy is also traditionally a male field. Not many women... Especially in analytic philosophy. It is kind of renouned as one of the majorly 'old boys club' types of disciplines. I think that it is changing now... But that is its history at any rate. Doing philosophy isn't considered a particularly feminine thing to be doing... There are some females, to be sure... But I think they all struggle with gender identity issues a little.

I was in a seminar where a guy gave a talk and a couple of females ripped into him because... He was wrong, basically. Afterwards... People were saying that they were being mega-*****y for ripping into him... Agressive females... And I thought to myself 'if one of the guys had ripped into him the way that those females did then nobody would have batted an eyelid'. I thought it was simply gender discrimination that those women got a hard time for having done that... It would have been tolerated / accepted / approved of (even) if they were male. But... Turns out there was a little more to it than that (the guys were saying that beating a horse that is lying down already isn't really good form - and they didn't need to go on and on and on about it). I'm not sure what I think.

But I guess... There is a 'new' feminine stereotype... One that involves handling oneself well with the boys... I don't know. Times are a changing (thank god) but it is a little tricky, yeah...