1 result for (book:notp AND session:768 AND stemmed:women)
[... 7 paragraphs ...]
New paragraph: When racial conditions require it, it is quite possible for an individual to both father and mother a child.* In such cases, what you would call complete spontaneous sexual reverses or transformations would occur. Such processes are quite possible at microscopic levels, and inherent in the cellular structure. Even in your world, currently speaking, some individuals known as women could father their own children.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
When the process began, however, the deep power of nature had to be “controlled” so that the growing consciousness could see itself as apart from this natural source. Yet children, so necessary to the species, continued to spring from women’s wombs. Therefore the natural source was most flagrant, observable, and undeniable. For that reason the species — and not the male alone — placed so many taboos about female behavior and sexuality. In “subduing” its own female elements, the species tried to gain some psychological distance from the great natural source from which it was, for its own reasons, trying to emerge.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
In the world of your present experience, sexual differences are less apparent as you reach old age. Some women display what you think of as masculine characteristics, growing hair about their faces, speaking with heavier voices, or becoming angular; while some men speak with lighter, gentler tones than ever before, and their faces grow smoother, and the contours of their bodies soften.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
These are simple enough examples, but the man who possesses interests considered feminine by your culture, who naturally wants to enter fields of interest considered womanly, experiences drastic conflicts between his sense of personhood and identity — and his sexuality as it is culturally defined. The same, of course, applies to women.
[... 6 paragraphs ...]