Female Man

by Joanna Russ

  II

  Then I turned into a man.

  This was slower and less dramatic.

  I think it had something to do with the knowledge you suffer when you're an outsider—I mean suffer; I do not mean undergo or employ or tolerate or use or enjoy or catalogue or file away or entertain or possess or have .

  That knowledge is, of course, the perception of all experience through two sets of eyes, two systems of value, two habits of expectation, almost two minds. This is supposed to be an infallible recipe for driving you gaga. Chasing the hare Reconciliation with the hounds of Persistence—but there, you see? I'm not Sir Thomas Nasshe (or Lady Nasshe, either, tho' she never wrote a line, poor thing). Rightaway you start something, down comes the portcullis. Blap. To return to knowledge, I think it was seeing the lords of the earth at lunch in the company cafeteria that finally did me in; as another friend of mine once said, men's suits are designed to inspire confidence even if the men can't. But their shoes —! Dear God. And their ears! Jesus. The innocence, the fresh-faced naivete of power. The childlike simplicity with which they trust their lives to the Black men who cook for them and their self-esteem and their vanity and their little dangles to me, who everything for them. Their ignorance, their utter, happy ignorance. There was the virgin We sacrificed on the company quad when the moon was full. (You thought a virgin meant a girl, didn't you?) There was Our thinking about housework—dear God, scholarly papers about housework, what could be more absurd! And Our parties where we pinched and chased Each Other. Our comparing the prices of women's dresses and men's suits. Our push-ups. Our crying in Each Other's company. Our gossip. Our trivia. All trivia, not worth an instant's notice by any rational being. If you see Us skulking through the bushes at the rising of the moon, don't look. And don't wait around. Watch the wall, my darling, you'd better. Like all motion, I couldn't feel it while it went on, but this is what you have to do:

  To resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person.

  This means: in all hopelessness, in terror of your life, without a future, in the sink of the worst despair that you can endure and will yet leave you the sanity to make a choice—take in your bare right hand one naked, severed end of a high-tension wire. Take the other in your left hand. Stand in a puddle. (Don't worry about letting go; you can't.) Electricity favors the prepared mind, and if you interfere in this avalanche by accident you will be knocked down dead, you will be charred like a cutlet, and your eyes will be turned to burst red jellies, but if those wires are your own wires—hang on. God will keep your eyes in your head and your joints knit one to the other. When She sends the high voltage alone, well, we've all experienced those little shocks—you just shed it over your outside like a duck and it does nothing to you—but when She roars down high voltage and high amperage both, She is after your marrow-bones; you are making yourself a conduit for holy terror and the ecstasy of Hell. But only in that way can the wires heal themselves. Only in that way can they heal you. Women are not used to power; that avalanche of ghastly strain will lock your muscles and your teeth in the attitude of an electrocuted rabbit, but you are a strong woman, you are God's favorite, and you can endure; if you can say "yes, okay, go on"—after all, where else can you go? What else can you do?—if you let yourself through yourself and into yourself and out of yourself, turn yourself inside out, give yourself the kiss of reconciliation, marry yourself, love yourself—

  Well, I turned into a man.

  We love, says Plato, that in which we are defective; when we see our magical Self in the mirror of another, we pursue it with desperate cries— Stop! I must possess you!—but if it obligingly stops and turns, how on earth can one then possess it? Fucking, if you will forgive the pun, is an anti-climax. And you are as poor as before. For years I wandered in the desert, crying: Why do you torment me so? and Why do you hate me so ? and Why do you put me down so? and / will abase myself and I will please you and Why, oh why have you forsaken me ? This is very feminine. What I learned late in life, under my rain of lava, under my kill-or-cure, unhappily, slowly, stubbornly, barely, and in really dreadful pain, was that there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want.

  Become it.

  (Man, one assumes, is the proper study of Mankind. Years ago we were all cave Men. Then there is Java Man and the future of Man and the values of Western Man and existential Man and economic Man and Freudian Man and the Man in the moon and modern Man and eighteenth-century Man and too many Mans to count or look at or believe. There is Mankind. An eerie twinge of laughter garlands these paradoxes. For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me . Now I say Move over . If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and right now very bright and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman, for honestly now, whoever heard of Java Woman and existential Woman and the values of Western Woman and scientific Woman and alienated nineteenth-century Woman and all the rest of that dingy and antiquated rag-bag? All the rags in it are White, anyway. I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man; I think you will write about me as a Man from now on and speak of me as a Man and employ me as a Man and recognize child-rearing as a Man's business; you will think of me as a Man and treat me as a Man until it enters your muddled, terrified, preposterous, nine-tenths-fake, loveless, papier-mache-bull-moose head that I am a man . (And you are a woman.) That's the whole secret. Stop hugging Moses' tablets to your chest, nitwit; you'll cave in. Give me your Linus blanket, child. Listen to the female man.

  If you don't, by God and all the Saints, I'll break your neck.)

  III

  We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them.

  Shrill vituperative no concern for the future of society maunderings of antiquated feminism selfish femlib needs a good lay this shapeless book of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond twisted, neurotic some truth buried in a largely hysterical of very limited interest, I should another tract for the trash-can burned her bra and thought that no characterization, no plot really important issues are neglected while hermetically sealed women's limited experience another of the screaming sisterhood a not very appealing aggressiveness could have been done with wit if the author had deflowering the pretentious male a man would have given his right arm to hardly girlish a woman's book another shrill polemic which the a mere male like myself can hardly a brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria which feminine lack of objectivity this pretense at a novel trying to shock the tired tricks of the anti-novelists how often must a poor critic have to the usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism denial of the profound sexual polarity which an all too womanly refusal to face facts pseudo-masculine brusqueness the ladies'-magazine level trivial topics like housework and the predictable screams of those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate will unfortunately sexless in its outlook drivel a warped clinical protest against violently waspish attack formidable self-pity which erodes any chance of formless the inability to accept the female role which the predictable fury at anatomy displaced to without the grace and compassion which we have the right to expect anatomy is destiny destiny is anatomy sharp and funny but without real weight or anything beyond a topical just plain bad we "dear ladies," whom Russ would do away with, unfortunately just don't feel ephemeral trash, missiles of the sex war a female lack of experience which

  Q.E.D. Quod erat demonstrandum. It has been proved.

  IV

  Janet has begun to follow strange men on the street; whatever will become of her? She does this either out of curiosity or just to annoy me; whenever she sees someone who interests her, woman or man, she swerves automatically (humming a little tune, da-dum, da-dee) and continues walking but in the opposite direction. When Whileawayan 1 meets Whileawayan 2, the first utters a compound Whileawayan word which may be translated a
s "Hello-yes?" to which the answer may be the same phrase repeated (but without the rising inflection), "Hello-no."

  "Hello" alone, silence, or "No!"

  "Hello-yes" means I wish to strike up a conversation, "Hello" means I don't mind your remaining here but I don't wish to talk; "Hello-no" Stay here if you like but don't bother me in any way; silence I'd be much obliged if you'd get out of here; I'm in a foul temper. Silence accompanied by a quick shake of the head means I'm not ill-tempered but I have other reasons for wanting to be alone . "No!" means Get away or I'll do that to you which you won't like . (In contradistinction to our customs, it is the late-comer who has the moral edge, Whileawayan 1 having already got some relief or enjoyment out of the convenient bench or flowers or spectacular mountain or whatever's at issue.) Each of these responses may be used as salutations, of course.

  I asked Janet what happens if both Whileawayans say "No!"

  "Oh" she says (bored), "they fight."

  "Usually one of us runs away," she added.

  Janet is sitting next to Laura Rose on my nubbly-brown couch, half-asleep, half all over her friend in a confiding way, her head resting on Laur's responsible shoulder. A young she-tiger with a large, floppy cub. In her dozing Janet has shed ten years' anxiety and twenty pounds of trying-to-impress-others; she must be so much younger and sillier with her own people; grubbing in the tomato patch or chasing lost cows; what Safety and Peace officers do is beyond me. (A cow found her way into the Mountainpersons' common room and backed a stranger through a foam wall by trying to start a conversation—Whileawayans have a passion for improving the capacities of domestic animals—she kept nudging this visitor and saying "Friend? Friend?" in a great, wistful moo, like the monster in the movie, until a Mountainperson shooed her away: You don't want to make trouble, do you, child? You want to be milked, don't you? Come on, now.)

  'Tell us about the cow," says Laura Rose. "Tell Jeannine about it," (who's vainly trying to flow into the wall, O agony, those two women are touching) .

  "No," mutters Janet sleepily.

  "Then tell us about the Zdubakovs," says Laur.

  "You're a vicious little beast!" says Janet and sits bolt upright.

  "Oh come on, giraffe," says Laura Rose. "Tell!" She has sewn embroidered bunches of flowers all over her denim jacket and jeans with a red, red rose on the crotch, but she doesn't wear these clothes at home, only when visiting.

  "You are a damned vicious cublet," said Janet. "I'll tell you something to sweeten your disposition. Do you want to hear about the three-legged goat who skipped off to the North Pole?"

  "No," says Laur. Jeannine flattens like a film of oil; she vanishes dimly into a cupboard, putting her fingers in her ears.

  "Tell!" says Laur, twisting my little finger. I bury my face in my hands. Ay, no. Ay, no. Laura must hear. She kissed my neck and then my ear in a passion for all the awful things I do as S & P; I straightened up and rocked back and forth. The trouble with you people is you get no charge from death. Myself, it shakes me all over. Somebody I'd never met had left a note saying the usual thing: ha ha on you, you do not exist, go away , for we are so bloody cooperative that we have this solipsistic underside, you see? So I went up-mountain and found her; I turned on my two-way vocal three hundred yards from criminal Elena Twason and said, "Well, well, Elena, you shouldn't take a vacation without notifying your friends."

  "Vacation?" she says; "Friends? Don't lie to me, girl. You read my letter," and by this I began to understand that she hadn't had to go mad to do this and that was terrible. I said, "What letter? Nobody found a letter."

  "The cow ate it," says Elena Twason. "Shoot me. I don't believe you're there but my body believes; I believe that my tissues believe in the bullet that you do not believe in yourself, and that will kill me."

  "Cow?" says I, ignoring the rest, "what cow? You Zdubakovs don't keep cows. You're vegetable-and-goat people, I believe. Quit joking with me, Elena. Come back; you went botanizing and lost your way, that's all."

  "Oh little girl," she said, so off-hand, so good-humored, "little child, don't deform reality. Don't mock us both." In spite of the insults, I tried again.

  "What a pity," I said, "that your hearing is going so bad at the age of sixty, Elena Twa. Or perhaps it's my own. I thought I heard you say something else. But the echoes in this damned valley are enough to make anything unintelligible; I could have sworn that I was offering you an illegal collusion in an untruth and that like a sensible, sane woman, you were accepting." I could see her white hair through the binoculars; she could've been my mother. Sorry for the banality, but it's true. Often they try to kill you so I showed myself as best I could, but she didn't move—exhausted? Sick? Nothing happened.

  "Elena!" I shouted. "By the entrails of God, will you please come down!" and I waved my arms like a semaphore. I thought: I'// wait until morning at least. I can do that much. In my mind we changed places several times, she and I, both of us acting as illegally in our respective positions as we could, but I might be able to patch up some sort of story. As I watched her, she began to amble down the hillside, that little white patch of hair bobbing through the autumn foliage like deer's tail. Chuckling to herself, idly swinging a stick she'd picked up: weak little thing, just a twig really, too dry to hit anything without breaking. I ambled ghostly beside her; it's so pretty in the mountains at that time of year, everything burns and burns without heat. I think she was enjoying herself, having finally put herself, as it were, beyond the reach of consequences; she took her little stroll until we were quite close to each other, close enough to converse face to face, perhaps as far as I am from you. She had made herself a crown of scarlet maple leaves and put it on her head, a little askew because it was a little too big to fit. She smiled at me.

  "Face facts," she said. Then, drawing down the corners of her mouth with an ineffable air of gaiety and arrogance:

  "Kill, killer."

  So I shot her.

  Laur, who has been listening intently all this time, bloodthirsty little devil, takes Janet's face in her hands. "Oh, come on. You shot her with a narcotic, that's all. You told me so. A narcotic dart."

  "No," said Janet. "I'm a liar. I killed her. We use explosive bullets because it's almost always distance work. I have a rifle like the kind you've often seen yourself."

  "Aaaah!" is Laura Rose's long, disbelieving, angry comment. She came over to me: "Do you believe it?" (I shall have to drag Jeannine out of the woodwork with both hands.) Still angry, Laur straddles the room with her arms clasped behind her back. Janet is either asleep or acting. I wonder what Laur and Janet do in bed; what do women think of women?

  "I don't care what either of you thinks of me," says Laur. "I like it! By God, I like the idea of doing something to somebody for a change instead of having it done to me. Why are you in Safety and Peace if you don't enjoy it!"

  "I told you," says Janet softly.

  Laur said, "I know, someone has to do it. Why you?"

  "I was assigned."

  Why? Because you're bad! You're tough." (She smiles at her own extravagance. Janet sat up, wavering a little, and shook her head.)

  "Dearest, I'm not good for much; understand that. Farm work or forest work, what else? I have some gift to unravel these human situations, but it's not quite intelligence."

  "Which is why you're an emissary?" says Laur. "Don't expect me to believe that." Janet stares at my rug. She yawns, jaw-cracking. She clasps her hands loosely in her lap, remembering perhaps what it had been like to carry the body of a sixty-year-old woman down a mountainside: at first something you wept over, then something horrible, then something only distasteful, and finally you just did it.

  "I am what you call an emissary," she said slowly, nodding courteously to Jeannine and me, "for the same reason that I was in S & P. I'm expendable, my dear. Laura, Whileawayan intelligence is confined in a narrower range than yours; we are not only smarter on the average but there is much less spread on either side of the average. This helps our
living together. It also makes us extremely intolerant of routine work. But still there is some variation." She lay back on the couch, putting her arms under her head. Spoke to the ceiling. Dreaming, perhaps. Of Vittoria?

  "Oh, honey," she said, "I'm here because they can do without me. I was S & P because they could do without me. There's only one reason for that, Laur, and it's very simple.

  "I am stupid."

  Janet sleeps or pretends to, Joanna knits (that's me), Jeannine is in the kitchen. Laura Rose, still resentfully twitching with unconquered Genghis Khan-ism, takes a book from my bookshelf and lies on her stomach on the rug. I believe she is reading an art book, something she isn't interested in. The house seems asleep. In the desert between the three of us the dead Elena Twason Zdubakov begins to take shape; I give her Janet's eyes, Janet's frame, but bent with age, some of Laur's impatient sturdiness but modified with the graceful trembling of old age: her papery skin, her smile, the ropy muscles on her wasted arms, her white hair cut in an economical kind of thatch. Helen's belly is loose with old age, her face wrinkled, a never-attractive face like that of an extremely friendly and intelligent horse: long and droll. The lines about her mouth would be comic lines. She's wearing a silly kind of khaki shorts-and-shirt outfit which is not really what Whileawayans wear, but I give it to her anyway. Her ears are pierced. Her mountain twig has become a carved jade pipe covered with scenes of vines, scenes of people crossing bridges, people pounding flax, processions of cooks or grain-bearers. She wears a spray of red mountain-ash berries behind one ear. Elena is about to speak; from her comes a shock of personal strength, a wry impressiveness, an intelligence so powerful that in spite of myself I open my arms to this impossible body, this walking soul, this somebody's grandma who could say with such immense elan to her legal assassin, "Face facts, child." No man in our world would touch Elena. In Whileawayan leaf-red pajamas, in silver silk overalls, in the lengths of moony brocade in which Whileawayans wrap themselves for pleasure, this would be a beautiful Helen. Elena Twason swathed in cut-silk brocade, nipping a corner of it for fun. It would be delightful to have erotic play with Elena Twason; I feel this on my lips and tongue, the palms of my hands, all my inside skin. I feel it down below, in my sex. What a formidable woman! Shall I laugh or cry? She's dead, though—killed dead—so never shall Ellie Twa's ancient legs entwine with mine or twiddle from under the shell of a computer housing, crossing and uncrossing her toes as she and the computer tell each other uproarious jokes. Her death was a bad joke. I would like very much to make love skin-to-skin with Elena Twason Zdubakov, but she is thank-the-male-God dead and Jeannine can come shudderingly out of the woodwork. Laur and Janet have gone to sleep together on the couch as if they were in a Whileawayan common bedroom, which is not for orgies, as you might think, but for people who are lonesome, for children, for people who have nightmares. We miss those innocent hairy sleepies we used to tangle with back in the dawn of tine before some progressive nitwit took to deferred gratification and chipping flint.