The Female Man

by Joanna Russ

  VI

  A beautiful chick who swims naked and whose breasts float on the water like flowers, a chick in a rain-tight shirt who says she balls with her friends but doesn’t get uptight about it, that’s the real thing.

  VII

  And I like Anytown; I like going out on the porch at night to look at the lights of the town: fireflies in the blue gloaming, across the valley, up the hill, white homes where children played and rested, where wives made potato salad, home from a day in the autumn leaves chasing sticks with the family dog, families in the firelight, thousands upon thousands of identical, cozy days.

  “Do you like it here?” asked Janet over dessert, never thinking that she might be lied to.

  “Huh?” said Laur.

  “Our guest wants to know if you like living here,” said Mrs. Wilding.

  “Yes,” said Laur.

  VIII

  There are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress.

  IX

  This then is Laura’s worst mind: perpetually snowed in, a dim upstairs hall wrapped in cotton wool with Self counting rocks and shells in the window-seat. One can see nothing outside the glass but falling white sky—no footprints, no faces—though occasionally Self strays to the window, itself drowned in snowlight, and sees (or thinks she sees) in the petrified whirling waste the buried forms of two dead lovers, innocent and sexless, memorialized in a snowbank.

  Turn away, girl; gird up your loins; go on reading.

  X

  Janet dreamed that she was skating backwards, Laura that a beautiful stranger was teaching her how to shoot. In dreams begin responsibilities. Laura came down to the breakfast table after everybody had gone except Miss Evason. Whileawayans practice secret dream interpretation according to an arbitrary scheme they consider idiotic but very funny; Janet was guiltily seeing how contrary she could make her dream come out and giggling around her buttered toast. She snickered and shed crumbs. When Laura came into the room Janet sat up straight and didn’t guffaw. “I,” said Laur severely, the victim of ventriloquism, “detest women who don’t know how to be women.” Janet and I said nothing. We noticed the floss and dew on the back of her neck—Laur is in some ways more like a thirteen-year-old than a seventeen-year-old. She mugs, for instance. At sixty Janet will be white-haired and skinny, with surprised blue eyes—quite a handsome human being. And Janet herself always likes people best as themselves, not dressed up, so Laur’s big shirt tickled her, ditto those impossible trousers. She wanted to ask if it was one shirt or many; do you scream when you catch sight of yourself?

  She soberly held out a piece of buttered toast and Laur took it with a grimace.

  “I don’t,” said Laur in an entirely different tone, “understand where the devil they all go on Saturday mornings. You’d think they were trying to catch up with the sun.” Sharp and adult.

  “I dreamed I was learning to use a rifle,” she added. We thought of confiding to her the secret dream-system by which Whileawayans transform matter and embrace the galaxies but then we thought better of it.

  Janet was trying in a baffled way to pick up the crumbs she had dropped; Whileawayans don’t eat crunchables. I left her and floated up to the whatnot, on which were perched two biscuit-china birds, beak twined in beak, a cut-glass salt dish, a small, wooden Mexican hat, a miniature silver basket, and a terracotta ashtray shaped realistically like a camel. Laur looked up for a moment, preternaturally hard and composed. I am a spirit, remember. She said: “The hell with it.”

  “What?” said Janet. This response is considered quite polite on Whileaway. I, the plague system darting in the air between them, pinched Janet’s ears, plucked them up like Death in the poem. Nowhere, neither undersea nor on the moon, have I, in my bodiless wanderings, met with a more hard-headed innocence than Miss Evason brings to the handling of her affairs. In the bluntness of her imagination she unbuttoned Laur’s shirt and slid her pants down to her knees. The taboos in Whileawayan society are cross-age taboos. Miss Eva-son no longer smiled.

  “I said the hell with it,” the little girl repeated aggressively.

  “You said—?”

  (Imitation Laura was smiling helplessly and freshly over her shoulder, shivering a little as her breasts were touched. What we like is the look of affection.)

  She studied her plate. She drew a design on it with her finger. “Nothing,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  “Show, then,” said Janet. I bet your knees turn in. Janet didn’t think so. There are these fashion magazines scattered through the house, Mrs. Wilding reads them, pornography for the high-minded. Girls in wet knit bathing suits with their hair dripping, silly girls drowned in sweaters, serious girls in backless jersey evening dresses that barely cover the fine-boned lyres of their small chests. They’re all slim and young. Pushing and prodding the little girl as you fit a dress on her. Stand here. Stand there. How, swooning, they fell into each other’s arms. Janet, who (unlike me) never imagines what can’t be done, wiped her mouth, folded her napkin, pushed back her chair, got up, and followed Laur into the living room. Up the stairs. Laur took a notebook from her desk and handed it to Miss Evason. We stood there uncertainly, ready to laugh or cry; Janet looked down at the manuscript, up over the edge at Laura, down again for a few more lines. Peek.

  “I can’t read this,” I said.

  Laura raised her eyebrows severely.

  “I know the language but not the context,” Janet said. “I can’t judge this, child.”

  Laura frowned. I thought she might wring her hands but no such luck. She went back to the desk and picked up something else, which she handed to Miss Evason. I knew enough to recognize mathematics, that’s all. She tried to stare Janet down. Janet followed a few lines, smiled thoughtfully, then came to a hitch. Something wrong. “Your teacher—” began Miss Evason.

  “I don’t have a teacher,” said perspicacious Laur. “I do it myself, out of the book.”

  “Then the book’s wrong,” said Janet; “Look,” and she proceeded to scribble in the margin. What an extraordinary phenomenon mathematical symbols are! I flew to the curtains, curtains Mrs. Wilding had washed and ironed with her own hands. No, she took them to the cleaner’s, popping the clutch of the Wildings’ station wagon. She read Freud in the time she would have used to wash and iron the curtains. They weren’t Laur’s choice. She would have torn them down with her own hands. She wept. She pleaded. She fainted. Et cetera.

  They bent over the book together.

  “Goddamn,” said Janet, in surprised pleasure.

  “You know math!” (that was Laur).

  “No, no, I’m just an amateur, just an amateur,” said Miss Evason, swimming like a seal in the sea of numbers.

  “The life so short, the craft so long to learn,” quoted Laur and turned scarlet. The rest goes: I mene love.

  “What?” said Janet, absorbed.

  “I’m in love with someone in school,” said Laur. “A man.”

  A really extraordinary expression, what they mean by calling someone’s face a study—she can’t know that I know that she doesn’t know that I know!—crossed Janet’s face and she said, “Oh, sure,” by which you can tell that she didn’t believe a word of it. She didn’t say, “You’re too young.” (Not for him, for her, nitwit).

  “Of course,” she added.

  XI

  I’m a victim of penis envy (said Laura) so I can’t ever be happy or lead a normal life. My mother worked as a librarian when I was little and that’s not feminine. She thinks it’s deformed me. The other day a man came up to me in the bus and called me sweetie and said, “Why don’t you smile? God loves you!” I just stared at him. But he wouldn’t go away until I smiled, so finally I did. Everyone was laughing. I tried once, you know, went to a dance all dressed up, but I felt like such a fool. Everyone kept making encouraging remarks about my looks as if they were afraid I’d cross back over the line again; I was trying , you know, I was provi
ng their way of life was right, and they were terrified I’d stop. When I was five I said, “I’m not a girl, I’m a genius,” but that doesn’t work, possibly because other people don’t honor the resolve. Last year I finally gave up and told my mother I didn’t want to be a girl but she said Oh no, being a girl is wonderful. Why? Because you can wear pretty clothes and you don’t have to do anything; the men will do it for you. She said that instead of conquering Everest, I could conquer the conqueror of Everest and while he had to go climb the mountain, I could stay home in lazy comfort listening to the radio and eating chocolates. She was upset, I suppose, but you can’t imbibe someone’s success by fucking them. Then she said that in addition to that (the pretty clothes and so forth) there is a mystical fulfillment in marriage and children that nobody who hasn’t done it could ever know. “Sure, washing floors,” I said. “I have you,” she said, looking mysterious. As if my father didn’t have me, too. Or my birth was a beautiful experience et patati et patata , which doesn’t quite jibe with the secular version we always get when she’s talking about her ailments with her friends. When I was a little girl I used to think women were always sick. My father said, “What the hell is she fussing about this time?” All those songs, what’s-its-name, I enjoy being a girl, I’m so glad I’m female, I’m all dressed up, Love will make up for everything, tra-la-la. Where are the songs about how glad I am I’m a boy? Finding The Man. Keeping The Man. Not scaring The Man, building up The Man, pleasing The Man, interesting The Man, following The Man, soothing The Man, flattering The Man, deferring to The Man, changing your judgment for The Man, changing your decisions for The Man, polishing floors for The Man, being perpetually conscious of your appearance for The Man, being romantic for The Man, hinting to The Man, losing yourself in The Man. “I never had a thought that wasn’t yours.” Sob, sob. Whenever I act like a human being, they say, “What are you getting upset about?” They say: of course you’ll get married. They say: of course you’re brilliant. They say: of course you’ll get a Ph.D. and then sacrifice it to have babies. They say: if you don’t, you’re the one who’ll have two jobs and you can make a go of it if you’re exceptional, which very few women are, and if you find a very understanding man. As long as you don’t make more money than he does. How do they expect me to live all this junk? I went to a Socialist—not really Socialist, you understand—camp for two summers; my parents say I must have gotten my crazy ideas there. Like hell I did. When I was thirteen my uncle wanted to kiss me and when I tried to ran away, everybody laughed. He pinned my arms and kissed me on the cheek; then he said, “Oho, I got my kiss! I got my kiss!” and everybody thought it was too ducky for words. Of course they blamed me—it’s harmless, they said, you’re only a child, he’s paying you attention; you ought to be grateful. Everything’s all right as long as he doesn’t rape you. Women only have feelings; men have egos . The school psychologist told me I might not realize it, but I was living a very dangerous style of life that might in time lead to Lesbianism (ha! ha!) and I should try to look and act more feminine. I laughed until I cried. Then he said I must understand that femininity was a Good Thing, and although men’s and women’s functions in society were different, they had equal dignity. Separate but equal, right? Men make the decisions and women make the dinners. I expected him to start in about that mystically-wonderful-experience-which-no-man-can-know crap, but he didn’t. Instead he took me to the window and showed me the expensive clothing stores across the way. Then he said, “See, it’s a woman’s world, after all.” The pretty clothes again. I thought some damn horrible thing was going to happen to me right there on his carpet. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move. I felt deathly sick. He really expected me to live like that—he looked at me and that’s what he saw, after eleven months. He expected me to start singing “I’m So Glad I’m A Girl” right there in his Goddamned office. And a little buck-and-wing. And a little nigger shuffle.

  “Would you like to live like that?” I said.

  He said, “That’s irrelevant, because I’m a man.”

  I haven’t the right hobbies, you see. My hobby is mathematics, not boys. And being young, too, that’s a drag. You have to take all kinds of crap.

  Boys don’t like smart girls. Boys don’t like aggressive girls. Unless they want to sit in the girls’ laps, that is. I never met a man yet who wanted to make it with a female Genghis Khan. Either they try to dominate you, which is revolting, or they turn into babies. You might as well give up. Then I had a lady shrink who said it was my problem because I was the one who was trying to rock the boat and you can’t expect them to change . So I suppose I’m the one who must change. Which is what my best friend said. “Compromise,” she said, answering her fiftieth phone call of the night. “Think what power it gives you over them.”

  Them! Always Them, Them, Them. I can’t just think of myself. My mother thinks that I don’t like boys, though I try to tell her: Look at it this way; I’ll never lose my virginity. I’m a Man-Hating Woman and people leave the room when I come in it. Do they do the same for a Woman-Hating Man? Don’t be silly.

  She’ll never know—nor would she credit if she knew—that men sometimes look very beautiful to me. From the depths, looking up.

  There was a very nice boy once who said, “Don’t worry, Laura. I know you’re really very sweet and gentle underneath.” And another with, “You’re strong, like an earth mother.” And a third, “You’re so beautiful when you’re angry.” My guts on the floor, you’re so beautiful when you’re angry. I want to be recognized.

  I’ve never slept with a girl. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to. That’s abnormal and I’m not, although you can’t be normal unless you do what you want and you can’t be normal unless you love men. To do what I wanted would be normal, unless what I wanted was abnormal, in which case it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didn’t want to do, which isn’t normal.

  So you see.

  XII

  Dunyasha Bernadetteson (the most brilliant mind in the world, b. A.C. 344, d. A.C.. 426) heard of this unfortunate young person and immediately pronounced the following shchasniy, or cryptic one-word saying:

  “Power!”

  XIII

  We persevered, reading magazines and covering the neighbors’ activities in the discreetest way possible, and Janet—who didn’t believe us to be fully human—kept her affections to herself. She got used to Laur’s standing by the door every time we went out in the evening with a stubborn look on her face as if she were going to fling herself across the door with her arms spread out, movie style. But Laur controlled herself. Janet went out on a few arranged dates with local men but awe silenced them; she learned nothing of the usual way such things were done. She went to a high school basketball game (for the boys) and a Fashion Fair (for the girls). There was a Science Fair, whose misconceptions she enjoyed mightily. Like oil around water, the community parted to let us through.

  Laura Rose came up to Miss Evason one night as the latter sat reading alone in the living room; it was February and the soft snow clung to the outside of the picture window. Picture windows in Anytown do not evaporate snow in the wintertime as windows do on Whileaway. Laur watched us standoffishly for a while, then came into the circle of fantasy and lamplight. She stood there, twisting her class ring around her finger. Then she said:

  “What have you learned from all that reading?”

  “Nothing,” said Janet. The soundless blows of the snowflakes against the glass. Laur sat down at Janet’s feet ("Shall I tell you something?") and explained an old fantasy of hers, snow and forests and knights and lovelorn maidens. She said that to anyone in love the house would instantly seem submarine, not a house on Earth but a house on Titan under the ammonia snow. “I’m in love,” she said, reviving that old story about the mythical man at school.

  “Tell me about Whileaway,” she added. Janet put down her magazine. Indirection is so new to Miss Evason that for a moment she doesn’t understand; what Laur has said is:
Tell me about your wife. Janet was pleased. She had traced Laur’s scheme not as concealment but as a kind of elaborate frivolity; now she fell silent. The little girl sat tailor-fashion on the living room rug, watching us.

  “Well, tell me,” said Laura Rose.

  Her features are delicate, not particularly marked; she has a slightly indecently milky skin and lots of freckles. Knobby knuckles.

  “She’s called Vittoria,” said Janet—how crude, once said!—and there goes something in Laura Rose’s heart, like the blows of something light but perpetually shocking: oh! oh! oh! She reddened and said something very faintly, something I lip-read but didn’t hear. Then she put her hand on Janet’s knee, a hot, moist hand with its square fingers and stubby nails, a hand of tremendous youthful presence, and said something else, still inaudible.