Not everything is about sex - nor even gender

Among the odd ideas The Guardian presents for our delectation:

As far back as 1977, an American poet and professor of architecture named Dolores Hayden wrote an article with the explosive headline “Skyscraper seduction, skyscraper rape”. Hayden tore into the male power fantasies embodied in this celebrated urban form. The office tower, she wrote, is one more addition “to the procession of phallic monuments in history – including poles, obelisks, spires, columns and watchtowers”, where architects un-ironically use the language of “base, shaft and tip” while drawing upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating light into the night sky.

Despite the manner in which some do think that everything is about sex - or, to be more modern, gender - it ain’t. Building up in an urban environment is a reaction to expensive land, not a reference to gamete application systems. Building as a tower rather than a block is about gaining natural light, not male vigour.

But let us leave those who think everything is about sex - or gender - to their fantasies and address something that is simply wrong:

The consequences have proved deadly as Covid-19 rampages through our cities. Take the crisis in long-term care homes. Care for elderly and disabled people has been largely privatised in many countries, ...

No, that care of the elderly hasn’t been privatised it has been socialised. That’s why it is taking place in homes, not at home. Private care of the ill, the halt, lame and elderly, is something that was, at one time, done within the familial structure and dwelling. It is now done on that social basis, it has thus been socialised into communal efforts and buildings.

We are entirely fine with it having done so too, we are not about to argue that each household must deal with its own instances of Alzheimer’s alone and unspecialised - we are the true believers in the division and specialisation of labour of course. But we do insist on a certain clarity in the description of what has happened.

The communal care of these groups is not privatisation, it is socialisation.