Female Man

by Joanna Russ

  I come and go as I please. I do only what I want. I have wrestled myself through to an independence of mind that has ended by bringing all of you here today. In short, I am a grown woman.

  I was an old-fashioned girl, born forty-two years ago in the last years before the war, in one of the few mixed towns still left. It amazes me sometimes to think of what my life would have been like without the war, but I ended up in a refugee camp with my mother. Maddened Lesbians did not put cigarette butts out on her breasts, propaganda to the contrary; in fact she got a lot more self-confident and whacked me when I tore to pieces (out of pure curiosity) a paper doily that decorated the top of the communal radio—this departure from previous practice secretly gratified me and I decided I rather liked the place. We were re-settled and I was sent to school once the war cooled off; by '52 our territories had shrunk to pretty much what they are today, and we've grown too wise since to think we can gain anything by merely annexing land. I was trained for years—we deplore what we must nonetheless use!—and began my slow drift away from the community, that specialization (they say) that brings you closer to the apes, though I don't see how such an exceedingly skilled and artificial practice can be anything but quintessentially human.

  At twelve I artlessly told one of my teachers that I was very glad I was being brought up to be a man-woman, and that I looked down on those girls who were only brought up to be woman-women. I'll never forget her face. She did not thrash me but let an older girl-girl do it—I told you I was old-fashioned. Gradually this sort of thing wears off; not everything with claws and teeth is a Pussycat. On the contrary!

  My first job (as I told you) was impersonating one of the Manlander police; my most recent one was taking the place of a Manlander diplomat for eighteen months in a primitive patriarchy on an alternate Earth. Oh yes, the Men also have probability-travel, or rather they have it through us; we run the routine operations for them. So far has corruption progressed! With my silver hair, my silver eyes, and my skin artificially darkened to make me look even stranger to the savages, I was presented as a Prince of Faery, and in that character I lived in a dank stone castle with ghastly sanitary arrangements and worse beds for a year and a half. A place that would make your hair stand on end. Jeannine must stop looking so skeptical—please reflect that some societies stylize their adult roles to such a degree that a giraffe could pass for a man, especially with seventy-seven layers of clothes on, and a barbarian prudery that keeps you from ever taking them off. They were impossible people. I used to make up stories about the Faery women; once I killed a man because he said something obscene about the Faery women. Think of that! You must imagine me as the quiet, serene Christian among the pagans, the courteous magician among the blunt men-o'-war, the overcivilized stranger (possibly a Demon because he was understood to have no beard) who spoke softly and never accepted challenges, but who was not afraid of anything under Heaven and who had a grip of steel. And so on. Oh, those cold baths! And the endless joking about how they weren't queer, by God! And the bellicosity, the continual joshing that catches in your skin like thorns and exasperates you almost to murder, and the constant fingering of sex and womankind with its tragic, pitiable bafflement and its even worse bragging; and last of all the perpetual losing battle with fear, the constant unloading of anxious weaknesses on to others (and their consequent enraged fury) as if fear and weakness were not the best guides we human beings ever had! Oh, it was rich! When they found that not a knight in the Men's House could lay a hand on me, they begged for instruction; I had half the warriors of the mead-hall doing elementary ballet under the mistaken impression that they were learning ju-jitsu. They may be doing it still. It made them sweat enough and it's my signature, plain as day, to the whole bloody universe and any Manlander who turns up there again.

  A barbarian woman fell in love with me. It's terrible to see that slavishness in someone else's eyes, feel that halo she puts around you, and know from your own person the nature of that eager deference men so often perceive as admiration. Validate me! she cried. Justify me! Raise me up! Save me from the others! ("I am his wife," she says, turning the mystic ring round and round on her finger, "I am his wife.") So somewhere I have a kind of widow. I used to talk to her sensibly, as no man ever had before, I think. I tried to take her back with me, but couldn't get authorization for her. Somewhere out there is a murderess as rosy and single-minded as I, if we could only get to her.

  May She save us all!

  I saved the King's life once by pinning to the festive Kingly board a pretty little hamadryad somebody had imported from the Southern lands to kill His Majesty. This helped me a good deal. Those primitive warriors are brave men—that is, they are slaves to the fear of fear—but there are some things they believe every man is entitled to run from in abject terror, viz . snakes, ghosts, earthquakes, disease, demons, magic, childbirth, menstruation, witches, afreets, incubi, succubi, solar eclipses, reading, writing, good manners, syllogistic reasoning, and what we might generally call the less reliable phenomena of life. The fact that I was not afraid to pin a poisonous snake to a wooden table with a fork (a piece of Faery handicraft I had brought with me to eat meat with) raised my prestige immensely. Oh yes, if it had bitten me, I would have been dead. But they don't move that fast. Think of me in quilting and crinolines—not like a Victorian lady, like a player in Kabuki—holding up that poor little broken-backed dinkus amid general hurrahs. Think of me astride a coal-black charger, my black-and-silver cloak streaming in the wind under a heraldic banner comprising crossed forks on a field of reptile eggs. Think of anything you please. Think, if you will, how hard it is to remain calm under constant insults, and of the genuine charm of playing bullfight with a big, beautiful, nasty blond who goes hartyhar every chance he gets, and whom you can reel in and spin out again as if you knew all his control buttons, as indeed you do. Think of giving the King bad advice week after week: modestly, deliberately, and successfully. Think of placing your ladylike foot on the large, dead neck of a human dinosaur who has bothered you for months and has finally tried to kill you; there he lies, this big, carnal flower gathered at last by Chaos and Old Night, torn and broken in the dust, a big limpid Nada, a nothing, a thing, an animal, a creature brought down at last out of his pride to the truth of his organic being— and you did it.

  I keep one precious souvenir of that time: the look on the face of my most loyal feudal retainer when I revealed my sex to him. This was a man I had all-but-seduced without his knowing it—little touches on the arm, the shoulder, the knee, a quiet manner, a certain look in the eyes—nothing so gross that he thought it to be me; he assumed it was all himself. I loved that part. His first impulse, of course, was to hate me, fight me, drive me off—but I wasn't doing anything, was I? I had made no advances to him, had I? What sort of mind did he have? A pitiable confusion! So I got even nicer. He got madder and guiltier, of course, and loathed the very sight of me because I made him doubt his own reason; finally he challenged me and I turned him into a faithful dog by beating him right into the ground; I kicked that man so bloody hard that I couldn't stand it myself and had to explain to him that what he believed were unnatural lusts were really a species of religious reverence; he just wanted to lie peacefully on the ground and kiss my boot.

  The day that I left I went out into the hills with a few friends for the Faery "ceremony" that was to take me away, and when the Bureau people radio'd me they were ready, I sent the others away, and I told him the truth. I divested myself of my knightly attire (no mean trick, considering what those idiots wear) and showed him the marks of Eve; for a moment I could see that stinking bastard's whole world crumble. For a moment he knew . Then, by God, his eyes got even more moist and slavish, he sank to his knees and piously elevating his gaze, exclaimed in a rapture of feudal enthusiasm—Humanity mending its fences—

  If the women of Faery are like this, just think what the MEN must be!

  One of Her little jokes. Oh Lord, one of Her hardest jokes.

  If you
want to be an assassin, remember that you must decline all challenges. Showing off is not your job.

  If you are insulted, smile meekly. Don't break your cover.

  Be afraid. This is information about the world.

  You are valuable. Push yourself.

  Take the easiest way out whenever possible. Resist curiosity, pride, and the temptation to defy limits. You are not your own woman and must be built to last.

  Indulge hatred. Action comes from the heart.

  Pray often. How else can you quarrel with God?

  Does this strike you as painfully austere? If not, you are like me; you can turn yourself inside out, you can live for days upside down, the most biddable, unblushing servant of the Lady since the Huns sacked Rome, just for fun. Anything pursued to its logical end is revelation; as Blake says, The path of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, to that place where all things converge but up high, up unbearably high, that mental success which leads you into yourself, under the aspect of eternity, where you are limber and nice, where you act eternally under the aspect of Everything and where—by doing the One Genuine Thing—you cannot do anything untruly or half-way.

  To put it simply: those are the times that I am most myself.

  Sometimes I am a little remorseful; I grow sorry that the exercise of my art entails such unpleasant consequences for other people, but really! Hate is a material like any other. If you want me to do something else useful, you had better show me what that something else is. Sometimes I go into one of our cities and have little sprees in the local museums; I look at pictures, I get a hotel room and take long hot baths, I drink lots of lemonade. But the record of my life is the record of work, slow, steady, responsible work. I tied my first sparring partner in enraged knots, as Brynhild tied up her husband in her girdle and hung him on the wall, but aside from that I have never hurt a fellow Womanlander; when I wanted to practice deadly strategies, I did it on the school robot. Nor do I have love-affairs with other women; in some things, as I told you, I am a very old-fashioned girl.

  The art, you see, is really the head, however you train the body.

  What does all this mean? That I am your hostess, your friend, your ally. That we are in the same boat. That I am the grand-daughter of Madam Cause; my great-aunts are Mistress Doasyouwouldbedoneby and her slower sister, Mistress Bedonebyasyoudid. As for my mother, she was an ordinary woman—that is to say, very helpless—and as my father was pure appearance (and hence nothing at all), we needn't trouble about him.

  Everything I do, I do by Cause, that is to say Because , that is to say out of necessity, will-I, nill-I, ineluctably, because of the geas laid on me by my grandmother Causality.

  And now—since hysterical strength affects me the way staying up all night affects you—I'm going to sleep.

  X

  In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.

  It was the secret guilt of disease, of failure, of ugliness (much worse things than murder); it was an attribute of my being like the greenness of the grass. It was in me. It was on me. If it had been the result of anything I had done, I would have been less guilty.

  In my dream I was eleven years old.

  Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them was what it means to be convicted of rape—I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those shadowy feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightning that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance—which was not chance —had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested itself in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this:

  She was Cunt.

  She had "lost" something.

  Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick—but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what she had "lost").

  And there I was, listening at eleven years of age:

  She was out late at night.

  She was in the wrong part of town.

  Her skirt was too short and that provoked him.

  She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk.

  I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a gray, geometric plane—or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies.

  I was dirty.

  I was crying.

  I demanded comfort.

  I was being inconvenient.

  I did not disappear into thin air.

  And if that isn't guilt, what is? I was very lucid in my nightmare. I knew it was not wrong to be a girl because Mommy said so; cunts were all right if they were neutralized, one by one, by being hooked on to a man, but this orthodox arrangement only partly redeems them and every biological possessor of one knows in her bones that radical inferiority which is only another name for Original Sin.

  Pregnancy, for example (says the box), take pregnancy now, it's a disaster, but we're too enlightened to blame the woman for her perfectly natural behavior, aren't we? Only keep it secret and keep it going—and I'll give you three guesses as to which partner the pregnancy is in.

  When you grow up as an old-fashioned girl, you always remember that cozy comfort: Daddy getting angry a lot but Mummy just sighs. When Daddy says, "For God's sake, can't you women ever remember anything without being told?" he isn't asking a real question any more than he'd ask a real question of a lamp or a wastebasket. I blinked my silver eyes inside my box. If you stumble over a lamp and you curse that lamp and then you become aware that inside that lamp (or that wooden box or that pretty girl or that piece of bric-a-brac) is a pair of eyes watching you and that pair of eyes is not amused —what then?

  Mommy never shouted, "I hate your bloody guts!" She controlled herself to avoid a scene. That was her job.

  I've been doing it for her ever since.

  Now here the idiot reader is likely to hit upon a fascinating speculation (maybe a little late), that my guilt is blood-guilt for having killed so many men. I suppose there is nothing to be done about this. Anybody who believes I feel guilty for the murders I did is a Damned Fool in the full Biblical sense of those two words; you might as well kill yourself right now and save me the trouble, especially if you're male. I am not guilty because I murdered.

  I murdered because I was guilty.

  Murder is my one way out.

  For every drop of blood shed there is restitution made; with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a little of my soul; with every gasp of horrified comprehension I come a little more into the light. See? It's me!

  I am the force that is ripping out your guts; I, I, I, the hatred twisting your arm; I, I, I, the fury who has just put a bullet into your side. It is I who cause this pain, not you. It is I who am doing it to you, not you. It is I who will be alive tomorrow, not you. Do you know? Can you guess? Are you catching on? It is I, who you will not admit exists.

  Look! Do you see me?

  I, I, I. Repeat it like magic. That is not me. I am not that. Luther crying out in the choir like one possessed: NON SUM, NON SUM, NON SUM!

  This is the underside of my world.

  Of course you don't want me
to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you're intelligent. You don't want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don't want me to despise myself; you only want to ensure the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don't want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come to for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don't, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don't complain, women who don't nag or push, women who don't hate you really, women who know their job, and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be so wretched and so full of venom in this best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.

  As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

  But the frogs die in earnest.

  XI

  I don't like didactic nightmares. They make me sweat. It takes me fifteen minutes to stop being a wooden box with a soul and to come back to myself in ordinary human bondage.

  Davy sleeps nearby. You've heard about blue-eyed blonds, haven't you? I passed into his room barefoot and watched him curled in sleep, unconscious, the golden veils of his eyelashes shadowing his cheeks, one arm thrown out into the streak of light falling on him from the hall. It takes a lot to wake him (you can almost mount Davy in his sleep) but I was too shaken to start right away and only squatted down by the mattress he sleeps on, tracing with my fingertips the patterns the hair made on his chest: broad high up, over the muscles, then narrowing toward his delicate belly (which rose and fell with his breathing), the line of hair to below the navel, and then that suddenly stiff blossoming of the pubic hair in which his relaxed genitals nestled gently, like a rosebud.