Reading both books was interesting, but reading A billion wicked thoughts made me somewhat uncomfortable. The book is easy to read, however I feel that Ogas and Gaddam presentation of the human sex desire is based solely on their personal beliefs. While reading the book I imagined that us, humans, have no control over our sexual desire. Now, what I believe is that if we really live in a world where both males and females have no control over desire, then this world will turn into a jungle and we will be just animals.
Fausto-Sterling on the other hand made very good and strong points in her book. Her writing is based on logic and science which made me comfortable understanding her message. She says in her book that the Euro-American ways of understanding how the world works depends heavily on the use of dualisms. I agree with Fausto-Sterling because this is how the human brain works in general. We always need to compare and contrast two things in order to reach an understanding. I also agree that the idea of human sexuality comes to us containing pre-existing ideas about sexual differences. For example, from childhood we learn the difference between males and females. We know that males are more muscular and have physical ability and strength that females do not have. Also, our ideas about the sexuality of gays is shaped by our personal beliefs, family, culture or religious beliefs.
I would like to say that I like your point about dualisms in Fausto-Sterlings writing, and I wish I would have touched on that more since it is essential to our understanding of gender and sex. I completely agree that more often than not our minds need things to compare and contrast; binaries and dualisms. This makes me see my argument about changing gender politics in a different light. I now consider that it might be difficult for anyone's mind to perceive gender outside of the traditional male/female system simply because it might mean that we are forced to perceive a gender that might not have a counterpart, or might not be part of a binary that our minds can easily process. Maybe then it is also essential to the rupture of gender politics to think outside of binaries in general, and to free the mind of dependency on dualisms in order to look forward to new, more open gender politics.
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