The Female Man

by Joanna Russ

  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 infection—you understand, we weren’t near civilization then—and 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 thirty—singletons 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 had—or 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 world—usually in the company of other children—bands 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 relations—which 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?”

  Whileawayan psychology locates
the basis of Whileawayan character in the early indulgence, pleasure, and flowering which is drastically curtailed by the separation from the mothers. This (it says) gives Whileawayan life its characteristic independence, its dissatisfaction, its suspicion, and its tendency toward a rather irritable solipsism.

  “Without which” (said the same Dunyasha Bernadetteson, q.v.) “we would all become contented slobs, nicht war?"

  Eternal optimism hides behind this dissatisfaction, however; Whileawayans cannot forget that early paradise and every new face, every new day, every smoke, every dance, brings back life’s possibilities. Also sleep and eating, sunrise, weather, the seasons, machinery, gossip, and the eternal temptations of art.

  They work too much. They are incredibly tidy.

  Yet on the old stone bridge that links New City, South Continent, with Varya’s Little Alley Ho-ho is chiseled:

  You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.

  If one is lucky, one’s hair turns white early; if—as in old Chinese poetry—one is indulging oneself, one dreams of old age. For in old age the Whileawayan woman—no longer as strong and elastic as the young—has learned to join with calculating machines in the state they say can’t be described but is most like a sneeze that never comes off. It is the old who are given the sedentary jobs, the old who can spend their days mapping, drawing, thinking, writing, collating, composing. In the libraries old hands come out from under the induction helmets and give you the reproductions of the books you want; old feet twinkle below the computer shelves, hanging down like Humpty Dumpty’s; old ladies chuckle eerily while composing The Blasphemous Cantata (a great favorite of Ysaye’s) or mad-moon cityscapes which turn out to be do-able after all; old brains use one part in fifty to run a city (with checkups made by two sulky youngsters) while the other forty-nine parts riot in a freedom they haven’t had since adolescence.

  The young are rather priggish about the old on Whileaway. They don’t really approve of them.

  Taboos on Whileaway: sexual relations with anybody considerably older or younger than oneself, waste, ignorance, offending others without intending to.

  And of course the usual legal checks on murder and theft—both those crimes being actually quite difficult to commit. ("See,” says Chilia, “it’s murder if it’s sneaky or if she doesn’t want to fight. So you yell ‘Olaf!’ and when she turns around, then—”)

  No Whileawayan works more than three hours at a time on any one job, except in emergencies.

  No Whileawayan marries monogamously. (Some restrict their sexual relations to one other person—at least while that other person is nearby—but there is no legal arrangement.) Whileawayan psychology again refers to the distrust of the mother and the reluctance to form a tie that will engage every level of emotion, all the person, all the time. And the necessity for artificial dissatisfactions.

  “Without which” (says Dunyasha Bernadetteson, op. cit.) “we would become so happy we would sit down on our fat, pretty behinds and soon we would start starving, nyet?"

  But there is too, under it all, the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries, mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies and circular mathematical proofs (over which aficionados are moved to tears), and the best graffiti in this or any other world.

  Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work.

  VII

  Two ancients on the direct computer line between city and quarry (private persons have to be content with spark-gap radio), fighting at the top of their lungs while five green girls wait nearby, sulky and bored:

  I can’t make do with five greenies; I need two on-foot checkers and protective gear for one!

  Can’t have.

  Incomp-

  ?

  You hear.

  Is me!

  (affected disdain)

  If catastroph—

  Won’t!

  And so on.

  VIII

  A troop of little girls contemplating three silver hoops welded to a silver cube are laughing so hard that some have fallen down into the autumn leaves on the plaza and are holding their stomachs. This is not embarrassment or an ignorant reaction to something new; they are genuine connoisseurs who have hiked for three days to see this. Their hip-packs lie around the edge of the plaza, near the fountains. One: How lovely!

  IX

  Between shifts in the quarry in Newland, Henla Anaisson sings, her only audience her one fellow-worker.

  A Belin, run mad and unable to bear the tedious-ness of her work, flees above the forty-eighth parallel, intending to remain there permanently. “You” (says an arrogant note she leaves behind) “do not exist” and although agreeing philosophically with this common view, the S & P for the county follows her—not to return her for rehabilitation, imprisonment, or study. What is there to rehabilitate or study? We’d all do it if we could. And imprisonment is simple cruelty.

  You guessed it.

  XI

  “If not me or mine,” (wrote Dunyasha Bernadetteson in 368 A.C.) “O.K.

  “If me or mine—alas.

  “If us and ours—watch out!”

  XII

  Whileaway is engaged in the reorganization of industry consequent to the discovery of the induction principle.

  The Whileawayan work-week is sixteen hours.

  PART FOUR

  I

  After six months of living with me in the hotel suite, Janet Evason expressed the desire to move in with a typical family. I heard her singing in the bathroom:

  I know

  That my

  Rede-emer

  Liveth

  And She

  Shall stand

  Upon the latter da-ay (ruffle)

  On Earth.

  “Janet?” She sang again (not badly) the second variation on the lines, in which the soprano begins to decorate the tune:

  I know (up)

  Tha-at my (ruffle)

  Re-e-edeemer (fiddle)

  Liveth

  And She

  Shall stand (convex)

  And She

  Shall stand (concave)

  “Janet, he’s a Man!” I yelled. She went into the third variation, where the melody liquefies itself into its own adornments, very nice and quite improper:

  I know (up)

  That my redee (a high point, this one)

  mer

  Li-i-veth (up up up)

  And She

  Shall stand (hopefully)

  And She shall stand (higher)

  Upon the la-a-a-a-atter da-a-a-y

  (ruffle fiddle drip)

  O-on Earth (settling)

  “JANET!” But of course she doesn’t listen.

  II

  Whileawayans like big asses, so I am glad to report there was nothing of that kind in the family she moved in with. Father, mother, teenage daughter, and family dog were all delighted to be famous. Daughter was an honor student in the local high school. When Janet got settled I drifted into the attic; my spirit seized possession of the old four-poster bed stored next to the chimney, near the fur coats and the shopping bag full of dolls; and slowly, slowly, I infected the whole house.

  III

  Laura Rose Wilding of Anytown, U.S.A.

  She has a black poodle who whines under the trees in the back yard and bares his teeth as he rolls over and over in the dead leaves. She’s reading the Christian Existentialists for a course in school. She crosses the October weather, glowing with health, to shake hands clumsily with Miss Evason. She’s pathologically shy. She puts one hand in the pocket of her jeans, luminously, the way well-beloved or much-studied people do, tugging at the zipper of her man’s leather jacket with the other hand. She has short sandy hair and freckles. Says over a
nd over to herself Non Sum, Non Sum, which means either I don’t exist or I’m not that , according to how you feel it; this is what Martin Luther is supposed to have said during his fit in the monastery choir. “Can I go now?”

  IV

  The black poodle, Samuel, whined and scurried across the porch, then barked hysterically, defending the house against God-knows-what.

  “At least she’s White,” they all said.

  V

  Janet, in her black-and-white tweeds with the fox collar like a movie star’s, gave a speech to the local women’s club. She didn’t say much. Someone gave her chrysanthemums which she held upside-down like a baseball bat. A professor from the local college spoke of other cultures. A whole room was full of offerings brought by the club—brownies, fudge cake, sour cream cake, honey buns, pumpkin pie—not to be eaten, of course, only looked at, but they did eat it finally because somebody has to or it isn’t real. “Hully gee, Mildred, you waxed the floor!” and she faints with happiness. Laur, who is reading psychology for the Existentialists (I said that, didn’t I?), serves coffee to the club in the too-big man’s shirt they can’t ever get her out of, no matter what they do, and her ancient, shape less jeans. Swaddling graveclothes. She’s a bright girl. She learned in her thirteenth year that you can get old films of Mae West or Marlene Dietrich (who is a Vulcan; look at the eyebrows) after midnight on UHF if you know where to look, at fourteen that pot helps, at fifteen that reading’s even better. She learned, wearing her rimless glasses, that the world is full of intelligent, attractive, talented women who manage to combine careers with their primary responsibilities as wives and mothers and whose husbands beat them. She’s put a gold circle pin on her shirt as a concession to club day. She loves her father and once is enough. Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?) and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman’s identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness. Laur is daydreaming. She looks straight before her, blushes, smiles, and doesn’t see a thing. After the party she’ll march stiff-legged out of the room and up to her bedroom; sitting tailor-fashion on her bed, she’ll read Engels on the family and make in the margin her neat, concise, perfectly written notes. She has shelves and shelves of such annotated works. Not for her “How true!!!!” or “oiseaux = birds.” She’s surrounded by mermaids, fish, sea-plants, wandering fronds. Drifting on the affective currents of the room are those strange social artifacts half dissolved in nature and mystery: some pretty girls . Laur is daydreaming that she’s Genghis Khan.