Review Of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand Of Darkness
Has anybody ever asked the question “does a person’s sex really matter?” Of course we have, everybody has thought about it. The book describes various aspects of how it affects cultures and a society itself. When you think about an androgynous world it brings one’s mind to many different assumptions of how it would affect their lives, but there’s more than just how it affects the lives of androgynous people. Another question has to come into mind, How does a society like that reproduce. In the book The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin gives a detailed description of just that and more.
The people of Winter are androgynous, neither female nor male. They call it being “somer.” Genly Ali is a normal person with sexual organs who goes to their world to study them. The first question everybody wants to know is “how do they reproduce?” The people do this by a thing called “Kemmer.” They are not sexually active unless they are in the cycle of kemmer. Kemmer is a process in which an individual develops sexual organs to be able to reproduce with one another. There are four phases in kemmer. The first phase turns on certain hormones that allows the individuals to feel “tremendously strong …show more content…
It shapes the basics of their families. The way they raise their children is extremely affected. The children are raised by both parents equally and in some villages they are raised by “nobody and everybody” (105). This happens because “everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make” (105). Ali points out that the mothers are not the only ones burdened with the responsibly of a child because everybody had an equal chance to become the mother. One person in kemmer could not becomes the mother for that cycle, but the very next one could. This is a positive affect on their culture. The people do not abandon each other when a child is born and everybody helps raise their
The people of Winter are androgynous, neither female nor male. They call it being “somer.” Genly Ali is a normal person with sexual organs who goes to their world to study them. The first question everybody wants to know is “how do they reproduce?” The people do this by a thing called “Kemmer.” They are not sexually active unless they are in the cycle of kemmer. Kemmer is a process in which an individual develops sexual organs to be able to reproduce with one another. There are four phases in kemmer. The first phase turns on certain hormones that allows the individuals to feel “tremendously strong …show more content…
It shapes the basics of their families. The way they raise their children is extremely affected. The children are raised by both parents equally and in some villages they are raised by “nobody and everybody” (105). This happens because “everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make” (105). Ali points out that the mothers are not the only ones burdened with the responsibly of a child because everybody had an equal chance to become the mother. One person in kemmer could not becomes the mother for that cycle, but the very next one could. This is a positive affect on their culture. The people do not abandon each other when a child is born and everybody helps raise their