Your essay grade was based on your including the following topics in your discussion. Whether you liked or disliked Gethenian society was not a factor in your grade. It was not based on the number of topics but which ones you selected and how well you discussed them.

Topics: gender roles, social stability (population), parenting (childcare, day care, toys, color coding, unwanted children), childbirth (infant mortality and birth rates), rules of socio-sexual interaction, sexual dualism, aggression, war, rape, non-consensual sex, frustrated sex drive, sex abuse (children, women), sexism, stereotyping, sexual objectification, incest, marriage, STDs, work and work relations, sexual harassment, health issues (bulimia and anorexia, abortion), job discrimination (equal pay), sexual exploitation (prostitution, advertising), homosexuality, laws, politics, friendship, family structure (matriarchy/patriarch, materilineal/patrilineal descent, matrilocal/patrilocal residence), language/communication, shared sexual experience, misogyny, cost to reproduce, education. division of labor (home, work force), emi/etic (insider/outsider perspective) of the writer, environment, glass ceilings, glass walls, sex slavery, sex industry, prostitution, color coded clothes and toys, sports teams, romnce?, religion, sex based advertising, single sex restrooms, prisons,

The topics in red are the main ones I was looking for in your essay.

One of the main points needed to be understood and demonstrated in your essay is that this is not a choice. Gethenians are this way from birth. Ambisexuality is normal. It is the norm of behavior. They haven’t lost anything. Gendered societies are as strange to them as theirs is to others. They have no knowledge of a gendered society. The experiment was done to foster survival on a climatically severe planet not to eliminate problems of gendered societies.

It is also important that your essay indicated that you clearly understood the difference between gender and sex.

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