by Joanna Russ
Aphrodissa was sitting in someone's lap, her left eyelash half off. Janet was rather at a loss. Mustn't judge. Shut one eye. Peek. Busy, busy couple, kissing and grabbing. Janet backed off slowly to the other side of the room and there we met the lean academic with the glasses; he's all sharp, nervous and sharp. He gave her a drink and she drank it.
"So you do like it!" he said provokingly.
"I would suhtinly like," said Saccharissa with great energy, "to see all those women athletes from the Olympics compete with all those men athletes; I don't imagine any of these women athletes could even come neah the men."
"But American women are so unusual," said the man from Leeds. "Your conquering energy, dear lady, all this world-wide American efficiency! What do you dear ladies use it for?"
"Why, to conquer the men!" cried Saccharissa, braying.
"In mah baby brain," said Janet, imitating quite accurately, "a suhtin conviction is beginnin' to fo'm."
"The conviction that somebody is being insulted?" said Sharp Glasses. He didn't say that, actually.
"Let's go," said Janet. I know it's the wrong party, but where are you going to find the right party?
"Oh, you don't want to go!" said Sharp Glasses energetically. Jerky, too, they're always so jerky.
"But I do," said Janet.
"Of course you don't," he said; "You're just beginning to enjoy yourself. The party's warming up. Here," (pushing us down on the couch) "let me get you another."
You're in a strange place, Janet. Be civil.
He came back with another and she drank it. Uh-oh. We made trivial conversation until she recovered. He leaned forward confidentially. "What do you think of the new feminism, eh?"
"What is" (she tried again) 'What ismy English is not so good. Could you explain?"
"Well, what do you think of women? Do you think women can compete with men?"
"I don't know any men." She's beginning to get mad.
"Ha ha!" said Sharp Glasses. "Ha ha ha! Ha ha!" (He laughed just like that, in sharp little bursts.) "My name's Ewing. What's yours?"
"Janet."
"Well, Janet, I'll tell you what I think of the new feminism. I think it's a mistake. A very bad mistake."
"Oh," said Janet flatly. I kicked her, I kicked her, I kicked her.
"I haven't got anything against women's intelligence," said Ewing. "Some of my colleagues are women. It's not women's intelligence. It's women's psychology. Eh?"
He's being good-humored the only way he knows how. Don't hit him.
"What you've got to remember," said Ewing, energetically shredding a small napkin, "is that most women are liberated right now. They like what they're doing. They do it because they like it."
Don't, Janet.
"Not only that, you gals are going about it the wrong way."
You're in someone else's house. Be polite.
"You can't challenge men in their own fields," he said. "Now nobody can be more in favor of women getting their rights than I am. Do you want to sit down? Let's. As I said, I'm all in favor of it. Adds a decorative touch to the office, eh? Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you've got to remember, Janet, that women have certain physical limitations."
(here he took off his glasses, wiped them with a little serrated square of blue cotton, and put them back on) "and you have to work within your physical limitations.
"For example," he went on, mistaking her silence for wisdom while Ludicrissa muttered, "How true! How true!" somewhere in the background about something or other, "you have to take into account that there are more than two thousand rapes in New York City alone in every particular year. I'm not saying of course that that's a good thing, but you have to take it into account. Men are physically stronger than women, you know."
(Picture me on the back of the couch, clinging to her hair like a homuncula, battering her on the top of the head until she doesn't dare to open her mouth.)
"Of course, Janet," he went on, "you're not one of thoseuhextremists. Those extremists don't take these things into account, do they? Of course not! Mind you, I'm not defending unequal pay but we have to take these things into account. Don't we? By the way, I make twenty thousand a year. Ha! Ha ha ha!" And off he went into another fit.
She squeaked somethingbecause I was strangling her.
"What?" he said. "What did you say?" He looked at her nearsightedly. Our struggle must have imparted an unusual intensity to her expression because he seemed extraordinarily flattered by what he saw; he turned his head away coyly, sneaked a look out of the corner of his eye, and then whipped his head round into position very fast. As if he had been a bird.
"You're a good conversationalist," he said. He began to perspire gently. He shifted the pieces of his napkin from hand to hand. He dropped them and dusted his hands off. Now he's going to do it
"JanetuhJanet, I wonder if you" fumbling blindly for his drink"that is ifuhyou"
But we are far away, throwing coats out of the coat closet like a geyser.
Is that your method of courtship!
"Not exactly," I said. "You see"
Baby, baby, baby. It's the host, drunk enough not to care.
Uh-oh. Be ladylike.
She showed him all her teeth. He saw a smile.
"You're beautiful, honey."
"Thank you. I go now." (good for her)
"Nah!" and he took us by the wrist "Nah, you're not going."
"Let me go," said Janet.
Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you.
Can't 1 rescue myself?
No.
Why not?
All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party. Everyone seemed amused.
"Give us a good-bye kiss," said the host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine, so to speak. I pushed him away.
"What'sa matter, you some kinda prude?" he said and enfolding us in his powerful arms, et ceterawell, not so very powerful as all that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn't come?
"Let go,-," said Janet (some Russian word I didn't catch).
"Ha ha, make me," said the host, squeezing her wrist and puckering up his lips; "Make me, make me," and he swung his hips from side to side suggestively.
No, no, keep on being ladylike/
"Is this human courting?" shouted Janet. "Is this friendship? Is this politeness?" She had an extraordinarily loud voice. He laughed and shook her wrist.
"Savages!" she shouted. A hush had fallen on the party. The host leafed dexterously through his little book of rejoinders but did not come up with anything. Then he looked up "savage" only to find it marked with an affirmative: "Masculine, brute, virile, powerful, good." So he smiled broadly. He put the book away.
"Right on, sister," he said.
So she dumped him. It happened in a blur of speed and there he was on the carpet. He was flipping furiously through the pages of the book; what else is there to do in such circumstances? (It was a little limp-leatherexcuse mevolume bound in blue, which I think they give out in high schools. On the cover was written in gold WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION.)
"Bitch!" (flip flip flip) "Prude!" (flip flip) "Ball-breaker!" (flip flip flip flip) "Goddamn cancerous castrator!" (flip) "Thinks hers is gold!" (flip flip) "You didn't have to do that!"
Was ist? said Janet in German.
He gave her to understand that she was going to die of cancer of the womb.
She laughed.
He gave her to understand further that she was taking unfair advantage of his good manners.
She roared.
He pursued the subject and told her that if he were not a gentleman he would ram her stinking, s
hitty teeth up her stinking shitty ass.
She shrugged.
He told her she was so ball-breaking, shitty, stone, scum-bag, mother-fucking, plug-ugly that no normal male could keep up an erection within half a mile of her.
She looked puzzled. ("Joanna, these are insults, yes?")
He got up. I think he was recovering his cool. He did not seem nearly so drunk as he had been. He shrugged his sports jacket back into position and brushed himself off. He said she had acted like a virgin, not knowing what to do when a guy made a pass, just like a Goddamned scared little baby virgin.
Most of us would have been content to leave it at that, eh, ladies?
Janet slapped him.
It was not meant to hurt, I think; it was a great big stinging theatrical performance, a cue for insults and further fighting, a come-on-get-your-guard contemptuous slap meant to enrage, which it jolly well did.
THE MARINE SAID, "YOU STUPID BROAD, I'M GONNA CREAM YOU!"
That poor man.
I didn't see things very well, as first off I got behind the closet door, but I saw him rush her and I saw her flip him; he got up again and again she deflected him, this time into the wallI think she was worried because she didn't have time to glance behind her and the place was full of peoplethen he got up again and this time he swung instead and then something very complicated happenedhe let out a yell and she was behind him, doing something cool and technical, frowning in concentration.
"Don't pull like that," she said. "You'll break your arm."
So he pulled. The little limp-leather notebook fluttered out on to the floor, from whence I picked it up. Everything was awfully quiet. The pain had stunned him, I guess.
She said in astonished good-humor: "But why do you want to fight when you do not know how?"
I got my coat and I got Janet's coat and I got us out of there and into the elevator. I put my head in my hands.
"Why'd you do it?"
"He called me a baby."
The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said ("You stupid broad" et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs downcries manhood vindicated . Under "Real Fight With Girl" was written Don't hurt (except whores) . I took out my own pink book, for we all carry them, and turning to the instructions under "Brutality" found:
Man's bad temper is the woman's fault. It is also the woman's responsibility to patch things up afterwards.
There were sub-rubrics, one (reinforcing) under "Management" and one (exceptional) under "Martyrdom." Everything in my book begins with an M.
They do fit together so well, you know. I said to Janet:
"I don't think you're going to be happy here."
"Throw them both away, love," she answered.
III
Why make pretensions to fight (she said) when you can't fight? Why make pretensions to anything? I am trained, of course; that's my job, and it makes me the very devil angry when someone calls me names, but why call names? All this uneasy aggression. True, there is a little bit of hair-pulling on Whileaway, yes, and more than that, there is the temperamental thing, sometimes you can't stand another person. But the cure for that is distance. I've been foolish in the past, I admit. In middle-age one begins to settle down; Vittoria says I'm comic with my tohu-bohu when Yuki comes home with a hair out of place. I hope not. There is this thing with the child you've borne yourself, your body-child. There is also the feeling to be extra-proper in front of the children, yet hardly anybody bothers. Who has the time? And since I've become S & P I have a different outlook on all this: a job's a job and has to be done, but I don't like doing it for nothing, to raise the hand to someone. For sport, yes, okay, for hatred no. Separate them.
I ought to add there was a fourth duel in which nobody got killed; my opponent developed a lung infection, then a spinal infectionyou understand, we weren't near civilization thenand the convalescence was such a long, nasty business. I took care of her. Nerve tissue's hard to regrow. She was paralyzed for a while, you know. Gave me a very salutary scare. So I don't fight with weapons now, except on my job, of course.
Am I sorry I hurt him?
Not me!
IV
Whileawayans are not nearly as peaceful as they sound.
V
Burned any bras lately har har twinkle twinkle A pretty girl like you doesn't need to be liberated twinkle har Don't listen to those hysterical bitches twinkle twinkle twinkle I never take a woman's advice about two things: love and automobiles twinkle twinkle har May I kiss your little hand twinkle twinkle twinkle. Har. Twinkle.
VI
On Whileaway they have a saying: When the mother and child are separated they both howl, the child because it is separated from the mother, the mother because she has to go back to work. Whileawayans bear their children at about thirtysingletons or twins as the demographic pressures require. These children have as one genotypic parent the biological mother (the "body-mother") while the non-bearing parent contributes the other ovum ("other mother"). Little Whileawayans are to their mothers both sulk and swank, fun and profit, pleasure and contemplation, a show of expensiveness, a slowing-down of life, an opportunity to pursue whatever interests the women have been forced to neglect previously, and the only leisure they have ever hador will have again until old age. A family of thirty persons may have as many as four mother-and-child pairs in the common nursery at one time. Food, cleanliness, and shelter are not the mother's business; Whileawayans say with a straight face that she must be free to attend to the child's "finer spiritual needs." Then they go off by themselves and roar. The truth is they don't want to give up the leisure. Eventually we come to a painful scene. At the age of four or five these independent, blooming, pampered, extremely intelligent little girls are torn weeping and arguing from their thirty relatives and sent to the regional school, where they scheme and fight for weeks before giving in; some of them have been known to construct deadfalls or small bombs (having picked this knowledge up from their parents) in order to obliterate their instructors. Children are cared for in groups of five and taught in groups of differing sizes according to the subject under discussion. Their education at this point is heavily practical: how to run machines, how to get along without machines, law, transportation, physical theory, and so on. They learn gymnastics and mechanics. They learn practical medicine.
They learn how to swim and shoot. They continue (by themselves) to dance, to sing, to paint, to play, to do everything their Mommies did. At puberty they are invested with Middle-Dignity and turned loose; children have the right of food and lodging wherever they go, up to the power of the community to support them. They do not go back home.
Some do, of course, but then neither Mother may be there; people are busy; people are traveling; there's always work, and the big people who were so kind to a four-year-old have little time for an almost-adult. "And everything's so small," said one girl.
Some, wild with the desire for exploration, travel all around the worldusually in the company of other childrenbands of children going to visit this or that, or bands of children about to reform the power installations, are a common sight on Whileaway.
The more profound abandon all possessions and live off the land just above or below the forty-eighth parallel; they return with animal heads, scars, visions.
Some make a beeline for their callings and spend most of puberty pestering part-time actors, bothering part-time musicians, cajoling part-time scholars.
Fools! (say the older children, who have been through it all) Don't be in such a hurry. You'll work soon enough.
At seventeen they achieve Three-Quarters Dignity and are assimilated into the labor force. This is probably the worst time in a Whileawayan's life. Groups of friends are kept together if the members request it and if it is possible, but otherwise these adolescents go where they're needed, not where they wish; nor can they join the Geographical Parliament nor the Professional Parliament until they
have entered a family and developed that network of informal associations of the like-minded which is Whileaway's substitute for everything else but family.
They provide human companionship to Whileawayan cows, who pine and die unless spoken to affectionately.
They run routine machinery, dig people out of landslides, oversee food factories (with induction helmets on their heads, their toes controlling the green-peas, their fingers the vats and controls, their back muscles the carrots, and their abdomens the water supply).
They lay pipe (again, by induction).
They fix machinery.
They are not allowed to have anything to do with malfunctions or breakdowns "on foot," as the Whileawayans say, meaning in one's own person and with tools in one's own hands, without the induction helmets that make it possible to operate dozens of waldoes at just about any distance you please. That's for veterans.
They do not meddle with computers "on foot" nor join with them via induction. That's for old veterans.
They learn to like a place only to be ordered somewhere else the next day, commandeered to excavate coastline or fertilize fields, kindly treated by the locals (if any) and hideously bored.
It gives them something to look forward to.
At twenty-two they achieve Full Dignity and may either begin to learn the heretofore forbidden jobs or have their learning formally certificated. They are allowed to begin apprenticeships. They may marry into pre-existing families or form their own. Some braid their hair. By now the typical Whileawayan girl is able to do any job on the planet, except for specialties and extremely dangerous work. By twenty-five she has entered a family, thus choosing her geographical home base (Whileawayans travel all the time). Her family probably consists of twenty to thirty other persons, ranging in age from her own to the early fifties. (Families tend to age the way people do; thus new groupings are formed again in old age. Approximately every fourth girl must begin a new or join a nearly-new family.)
Sexual relationswhich have begun at puberty continue both inside the family and outside it, but mostly outside it. Whileawayans have two explanations for this. "Jealousy," they say for the first explanation, and for the second, "Why not?"