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As I read Allen's essay, I found myself intrigued by her tale of Western corruption of American Indian culture. I could understand her outrage at the way the "White Man" had gotten her down. In fact, I found myself completely agreeing with her, until I reached the next to last page. There, Allen claims that "Much of women's culture bears marked resemblance to tribal culture. The perceptual modes that women, even those of us who are literate, industrialized, and reared within masculinist academic traditions, habitually engage in more closely resemble inclusive-field perception than excluding foreground-background perceptions." Allen wastes thousands of words complaining about the ways in which European-Americans don't understand American Indian culture, and then she believes she can make a blanket statement which theoretically includes the women of these very cultures.

While I am more than willing to admit that I am no expert on American Indian culture, I am pretty sure that I am living proof that Allen's statement makes a claim without any support. I hate to use experience, especially given Tuesday's essay, but I still believe that experience is useful in theories of falsification, another concept I refuse to give up. I also argue that this sort of theory promotes the idea of a gender binary, with inherent differences between male and female. Perhaps an argument could be made that since gender is a social construct, it is constructed as much as culture is, and therefore the notion of differences between genders is as valid as notions of differences between ethnicities. However, such an argument would, for me, only make me question the validity of Allen's earlier points.