Shall we bring the kettle off the fire, for now? Write not in affect now what you can thresh out, mill and bake into something sharper later, as my aunt never said.
Nonetheless, here comes a few loafs now.
On matters of biology and roles, I am unsure; I simply do not know. Although I am rather inclined to believe nurture over nature. While there are many things about me that is dictated by my flesh, I doubt that my reflex to take a woman's luggage is in my blood, as much as in my mind. The coils in my flesh is not why I reflexively pay the bill when I take a sweet-heart out for dinner. Nor indeed why I am inclined to hear the horn of the White Knight on occasion. Nor that when I am about to do something I do not like, I rally myself with the words 'be a man!' At least, I do not think so. It is a complicated matter, but I would say that it is insufficiently certain to claim biological fact to what is human mannerism. At their better, it hardly needs to be.
There are always certain facts of biology, but they do not need to mean what we presently think, and more to the point, they must be considered along with the environment in which we live.
As a man, I suppose I may have a 'head-start' on musculature, but being a man of a plentiful and relatively peaceful age, my ability to kill a lion with a spear remains woeful. I doubt that a woman, if we assume similar circumstance to mine, would be particularly worse at it than me. What differences we may have in predisposition to the task of spearing poor Mr Whiskers are likely to be nuture, as opposed to nature.
On the matter of censorship. I shall say that a discussion is not censorship. It is well fair to have a grievance, formulate it and bring it up.
Of course, some 'discussions' seem to come with pre-decided conclusions and actions attached, and those can jolly well bog off, but a discussion on itself is precisely that. A talk. A question. A grievance. Things can get ugly, and in this weather, they many times do, but there is still a sense of proportion. The participants of a discussion are generally not allowed to club each other dead. It is a talk, one that will hopefully bring forth some new considerations.
I cannot say that I agree with every conclusion on matters such as this, but listening is free. If a discussion comes with the 'understanding' that failure to agree and act on its conclusions was some sort of 'dog whistle', an indication of hate that must lead to a swift, forceful response, it would be, but someone raising a grievance in a structured manner is not an act of censorship.
Removing social media profiles, getting in touch with someone's employer to have them fired (or indeed having the former PM that now runs the national herring bank close their accounts on vague charges of money laundering) is censorship. Presenting things that you think matter and should change, and being animate when you do it, is not.
Why, I think practically all contemporary architecture is an utter scam, an ugly waste, and I am not censoring modern architects until I directly or indirectly silence or stop them. I can propagate for the cause of stopping their vandalism, provided I do it well and refrain from calling them hideous things, but I cannot write them threatening letters or slash their tyres. I cannot demand that architects should not be allowed to speak. Modern architects are also free to disagree (provided they have some better point than that I would see their beauty, too, if I spend too much time in the same schools as they), but it ends, of course, when they ring up my employer.
Tests such as the Bechdel example are not, to my mind, censorship until works that fail them are stopped, in short. It is as useful a measure as you make it. It is a possibility for discussion, and a useful tool if you do feel the need to use it. It is, if nothing else, a good ground for you to consider your own conditions and considerations.
