by Joanna Russ
She smiled gracefully but remained modestly silent. This seemed to please him. He enveloped her further, to the point of vanishment, and said in a low voice with a sort of chuckle:
"Don't you dream about it? Don't all you girls dream about us?"
"You know that, Lenny," she said.
"Sure I do," he said enthusiastically. "Sure. I can see it in your face whenever you come here. You get excited just looking at it. Like the doctors say, we can do it with each other but you can't because you don't have nothing to do it with, do you? So you don't get any."
"Lenny" she began (slipping under his arm) "you got us figured out just right. Scout's honor. I've got business to do."
"Come on!" he said (pleading, I think).
"Oh, you're a brick!" cried Jael, moving behind the table, "you surely are. Why, you're so strong, some day you're going to squash us to death." He laughed, basso-profundo. "We're friends," he said, and winked laboriously.
"Sure," said Jael dryly.
"Some day you're gonna walk right in here" and this tiresome creature began all over again, but whether he noticed the rest of us or saw someone or smelt someone I don't know, for suddenly he lumbered off in a great hurry, rousting his billy-club out of his azure sash, next the gun holster. Bouncers don't use their guns at The Prick; too much chance of hitting the wrong people. Jael was talking to someone else, a shadowy, thin-lipped party in a green engineer's suit.
"Of course we're friends," said Jael Reasoner patiently. "Of course we are. That's why I don't want to talk to you tonight. Hell, I don't want to get you in trouble. See those crosses? One jab, one little rip or tear, and those girls will start an epidemic you won't be able to stop for a month. Do you want to be mixed up in that? Now you know we women are into plague research; well, these are some of the experiments. I'm taking them across Manland to another part of our own place; it's a short-cut. I wouldn't take them through here except I have some business to do here tonight. We're developing a faster immunization process. I'd tell all your friends to stay away from this table, too, if I were younot that we can't take care of ourselves and / don't worry; I'm immune to this particular strain but I don't want to see you take the rap for it. You've done a lot for me in the past and I'm grateful. I'm very grateful. You'd get it in the neck, you know. And you might get plague, too, there's always that. Okay?"
Astonishing how each of them has to be reassured of my loyalty! says Jael Reasoner. Even more astonishing that they believe me. They're not very bright, are they? But these are the little fish. Besides, they've been separated from real women so long that they don't know what to make of us; I doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like. The specifications we send them every year grow wilder and wilder and there isn't a murmur of protest. I think they like it. As moths to the flame, so men to the social patterns of the Army, that womanless world haunted by the ghosts of millions of dead women, that discarnate femininity that hovers over everybody and can turn the toughest real-man into one of Them, that dark force they always feel at the backs of their own minds! Would I, do you think, force slavishness and deformity on two-sevenths of my own kind? Of course not! I think these men are not human. No, no, that's wrong / decided long ago that they weren't human. Work is power, but they farm out everything to us without the slightest protest Hell, they get lazier and lazier. They let us do their thinking for them. They even let us do their feeling for them. They are riddled with duality and the fear of duality. And the fear of themselves. 1 think it's in their blood. What human being would sweating with fear and rage mark out two equally revolting paths and insist that her fellow-creatures tread one or the other ?
Ah, the rivalries of cosmic he-men and the worlds they must conquer and the terrors they must face and the rivals they must challenge and overcome!
"You are being a little obvious," says Janet pedantically from inside her suit, "and I doubt that the power of the blood"
Hsst! Here comes my contact.
Our contact was a half-changed, for Manlanders believe that child care is woman's business; so they delegate to the changed and the half-changed the business of haggling for babies and taking care of children during those all-important, first five yearsthey want to fix their babies' sexual preferences early. This means, practically speaking, that the children are raised in brothels. Now some Manlander real-men do not like the idea of the whole business being in the hands of the feminized and the effeminate but there's not much they can do about it (see Proposition One, about child care, above)although the more masculine look forward to a time when no Manlander will fall away from the ranks of the he-men, and with an obstinacy I consider perverse, refuse to decide who will be the sexual objects when the changed and the half-changed are no more. Perhaps they think sex beneath them. Or above them? (Around the shrine of each gowned and sequinned hostess in The Knife are at least three real-men; how many can a hostess take on in one night?) I suspect we real women still figure, however grotesquely, in Manland's deepest dreams; perhaps on that morning of Total Masculinity they will all invade Womanland, rape everyone in sight (if they still remember how) and then kill them, and after that commit suicide upon a pyramid of their victims' panties. The official ideology has it that women are poor substitutes for the changed. I certainly hope so. (Little girls, crept out of their crčche at last, touching those heroic dead with curious, wee fingers. Nudging them with their patent leather Mary Janes. Bringing their baby brothers out to a party on the green, all flutes and oats and pastoral fun until the food gives out and the tiny heroines must decide: Whom shall we eat? The waving limbs of our starfish siblings, our dead mothers, or those strange, huge, hairy bodies already beginning to swell in the sun?) I flashed that damned passagain!this time at a half-changed in a pink chiffon gown, with gloves up to his shoulder, a monument of irrelevancy on high heels, a pretty girl with too much of the right curves and a bobbing, springing, pink feather boa. Where oh where is the shop that makes those long rhinestone earrings, objects of fetishism and nostalgia, worn only by the half-changed (and usually not by them unless they're rich), hand-made from museum copies, of no use or interest to fully six-sevenths of the adult human race? Somewhere stones are put together by antiquarians, somewhere petroleum is transformed into fabric that can't burn without polluting the air, and won't rot, and won't erode, so that strands of plastic have turned up in the bodies of diatoms at the bottom of the Pacific Trenchsuch a vision was he, so much he wore, such folds and frills and ribbons and buttons and feathers, trimmed like a Christmas tree. Like Garbo playing Anna Karenina, decorated all over. His green eyes shrewdly narrowed. This one has intelligence. Or is it only the weight of his false lashes? The burden of having always to be taken, of having to swoon, to fall, to endure, to hope, to suffer, to wait, to only be? There must be a secret feminine underground that teaches them how to behave; in the face of their comrades' derision and savage contempt, in the face of the prospect of gang rape if they're found alone on the streets after curfew, in the face of the legal necessity to belongevery one of themto a real-man, somehow they still learn the classic shiver, the slow blink, the knuckle-to-lip pathos. These, too, I think, must be in the blood. But whose? My three friends and I pale beside such magnificence! Four lumpy parcels, of no interest to anyone at all, at all.
Anna, with a mechanical shiver of desire, says that we must go with him.
"Her?" says Jeannine, confused.
"Him!" says Anna in a strained contralto. The half-changed are very punctilioussometimes about the changeds' superiority and sometimes about their own genitals. Either way it works out to Him. He's extraordinarily aware, for a man, of Jeannine's shrinking and he resents itas who would not? I myself am respectful of ruined lives and forced choices. On the street once Anna did not fight hard enough against the fourteen-year-old toughs who wanted his twelve-year-old ass; he didn't go to the extremity of berserk rage, reckoning his life as nothing in defense of his virility; he forestalledby
surrenderthe plucking out of an eye, the castration, the throat cut with a broken bottle, the being put out of his twelve-year-old action with a stone or a tire chain. I know a lot about Manlanders' history. Anna made a modus vivendi, he decided life was worth it on any terms. Everything follows from that.
"Oh, you're lovely," says Jeannine, heartfelt. Sisters in misfortune. This really pleases Anna. He shows us a letter of safe-conduct he has from his bossa real-man, of courseand putting it back in pink-brocaded evening bag, draws around him that fake-feather Thing which floats and wobbles in the least current of air-. It's a warm evening. To protect his employer, the big boss (they are Men, even in the child-rearing business) has had to give Anna K a little two-way TV camera to wear in his ear; otherwise somebody would break his high heels and leave him dead or half-dead in an alley. Everybody knows that the half-changed are weak and can't protect themselves; what do you think femininity is all about? Even so Anna probably has a bodyguard waiting at the entrance to The Knife. I'm cynical enough to wonder sometimes if the Manlanders' mystique isn't just an excuse to feminize anybody with a pretty facebut look again, they believe it; look under the padding, the paint, the false hair, the corsetry, the skin rinses and the magnificent dresses and you'll see nothing exceptional, only faces and bodies like any other man's. Anna bats his eyes at us and wets his lips, taking the women inside the suits to be real-men, taking me to be a real-man (what else can I be if I'm not a changed?), taking the big wide world itself to bewhat else?a Real-Man intent on worshipping Anna's ass; the world exists to look at Anna; heor sheis only a real-man turned inside out.
An eerie sisterliness, a smile at Jeannine. All that narcissism! Brains underneath, though.
Remember where their loyalties lie.
(Are they jealous of us? I don't think they believe we're women.)
He wets his lips again, the indescribable silliness of that insane mechanism, practiced anywhere and everywhere, on the right people, on the wrong people. But what else is there? It seems that Anna's boss wants to meet me. (I don't like that.) But we'll go; we maintain our outward obedience until the very end, until the beautiful, bloody moment that we fire these stranglers, these murderers, these unnatural and atavistic nature's bastards, off the face of the earth.
"Dearest sister," says Anna softly, sweetly, "come with me."
VIII
I guess Anna's boss just wanted to see the alien poontang. I don't know yet what he wants, but I will. His wife clicked in with a tray of drinksscarlet skin-tights, no underwear, transparent high-heeled sandals like Cinderella'sshe gave us a homey, cute smile (she wears no make-up and is covered with freckles) and stilted out. Man talk. They seldom earn wives before fifty. Art, they say, has had a Renaissance among the Manlander rich, but this one doesn't look like a patron: jowly, pot-bellied, the fierce redness of an athlete forced into idleness. His heart? High blood pressure? But they all cultivate their muscles and let their health and their minds rot. There is a rather peculiar wholesomeness to the home life of a Manland millionaire; Boss, for example, would not think of letting his wife go anywhere alonethat is, risk the anarchy of the streetseven with a bodyguard. He knows what's due her. Their "women," they say, civilize them. For an emotional relationship, turn to a "woman."
What am I?
I know what I am, but what's my brand name?
He stares rudely, unable to conceal it: What are they? What do they do? Do they screw each other? What does it feel like? (Try and tell him!) He doesn't waste a second on the pink crosses in purdah; they're only "women" anyhow (he thinks); I'm the soldier, I'm the enemy, I'm the other self, the mirror, the master-slave, the rebel, the heretic, the mystery that must be found out at all costs. (Maybe he thinks the three J's have leprosy.) I don't like this at all. J-one (Janet, by her gait) is examining the paintings on the wall; J-two and J-three stand hand in hand, Babes in the Wood. Boss finishes his drink, chewing on something in the bottom of it like a large teddy-bear, with comic deliberation: chomp, chomp. He waves grandly toward the other drinks, his wife having abandoned the tray on top of what looks for all the world like a New Orleans, white-enamelled, bordello piano (Whorehouse Baroque is very big in Manland right now).
I shook my head.
He said, "You have any children?" Pregnancy fascinates them. The rank-and-file have forgotten about menstruation; if they remembered, that would fascinate them. I shook my head again.
His face darkened.
"I thought," said I mildly, "that we were going to talk business. I'd like to do just that. I don't mean that is, I don't want to be unsociable, but time's passing and I'd rather not discuss my personal life."
He said: "You're on my turf, you'll Goddamn well talk about what I Goddamn well talk about."
Let it pass. Control yourself. Hand them the victory in the Domination Sweepstakes and they usually forget whatever it is they were going to do anyway. He glared and brooded. Munched chips, crackers, saltsticks, what-not. Doesn't really know what he wants. I waited.
"Personal life!" he muttered.
"It's not really very interesting," I volunteered,
"You kids screw each other?"
I said nothing.
He leaned forward. "Don't get me wrong. I think you have a right to do it. I never bought this stuff about women alone having no sex. It's not in human nature. Now, do you?"
"No," I said.
He chuckled. "That's right, cover up. Mind, I'm not condemning you. It's only to be expected. Eh! If we'd kept together, men and women, none of this would have happened. Right?"
I put on my doubtful, slightly shamed, sly, well-you-know, all-purpose look. I have never known what it means, but they seem to. He laughed out loud. Another drink.
"Look here," he said, "I expect you have more intelligence than most of those bitches or you wouldn't be in this job. Right? Now it's obvious to anyone that we need each other. Even in separate camps we still have to trade, you still have to have the babies, things haven't changed that much. Now what I have in mind is an experimental project, a pilot project, you might say, in trying to get the two sides back together. Not all at once"
"I" I said. (They don't hear you.)
"Not all at once," (he continued, deaf as a post) "but a little bit at a time. We have to make haste deliberately. Right?"
I was silent. He leaned back. "I knew you'd see it," he said. Then he made a personal remark: "You saw my wife?" I nodded.
"Natalie's grand," he said, taking some more chips. "She's a grand girl. She made these. Deep-fried, I think." (A weak woman handling a pot of boiling oil.) "Have some."
To pacify him I took some and held them in my hand. Greasy stuff.
"Now," he said, "you like the idea, right?"
"What?"
"The aversive therapy, for Chrissakes, the pilot group. Social relations, getting back together. I'm not like some of the mossbacks around here, you know, I don't go for this inferior-superior business; I believe in equality. If we get back together, it has to be on that basis. Equals."
"But" I said, meaning no offense.
"It has to be on the basis of equality! I believe that. And don't think the man in the street can't be sold on it, propaganda to the contrary. We're brought up on this nonsense of woman's place and woman's nature when we don't even have women around to study. What do we know! I'm not any less masculine because I've done woman's work; does it take less intelligence to handle an operation like the nurseries and training camps than it does to figure the logistics of War Games? Hell, no! Not if you do it rationally and efficiently; business is business."
Let it go. Perhaps it'll play itself out; they do sometimes. I sat attentively still while he gave me the most moving plea for my own efficiency, my rationality, my status as a human being. He ended by saying anxiously, "Do you think it'll work?"
"Well" I began.
"Of course, of course," (interrupted this damned fool once again) "you're not a diplomat, but we have to work throug
h the men we have, don't we? Individual man can accomplish ends where Mass-man fails. Eh?"
I nodded, picturing myself as Individual Man. The "woman's work" explains it, of course; it makes him dangerously irritable. He had gotten now into the poignant part, the mystifying and moving account of our Sufferings. This is where the tears come in. It helps to be able to classify what they're going to do, but Lord! it's depressing, all the same. Always the same. I sit on, perfectly invisible, a chalk sketch of a woman. An idea. A walking ear.
"What we want" (he said, getting into stride) "is a world in which everybody can be himself. Him. Self. Not this insane forcing of temperaments. Freedom. Freedom for all. I admire you. Yes, let me say that I do indeed, and most frankly, admire you. You've broken through all that. Of course most women will not be able to do that in fact, most womengiven the choicewill hardly choose to give up domesticity altogether or even" (here he smiled) "even choose to spend much of their lives in the market-place or the factory. Most women will continue to choose the conservative caretaking of childhood, the formation of beautiful human relationships, and the care and service of others. Servants. Of. The. Race. Why should we sneer at that? And if we find there are certain traits connected with sex, like homemaking, like reasoning power, like certain temperamental factors, well of course there will be, but why derogate one sex or the other on that account? People" (braced for the peroration) "people are as they are. If"
I rose to my feet. "Excuse me," I said, "but business"
"Damn your business!" he said in heat, this confused and irritable man. "Your business isn't worth two cents compared with what I'm talking about!"
"Of course not, of course not," I said soothingly.
"I should hope so!"
Numb, numb. With boredom. Invisible. Chained.
"That's the trouble with you women, you can't see anything in the abstract!"
He wants me to cringe. I really think so. Not the content of what I say but the endless, endless feeding of his vanity, the shaky structure of self. Even the intelligent ones.