The Female Man

by Joanna Russ

  Vitti and I have stayed together in a more commonplace way ever since. In fact, we got married. It comes and goes, that abyss opening on nothing. I run away, usually.

  Vittoria is whoring all over North Continent by now, I should think. We don’t mean by that what you do, by the way. I mean: good for her.

  Sometimes I try to puzzle out the different kinds of love, the friendly kind and the operatic kind, but what the hell.

  Let’s go to sleep.

  XVII

  Under the Mashopi mountain range is a town called Wounded Knee and beyond this the agricultural plain of Green Bay. Janet could not have told you where the equivalents of these landmarks are in the here-and-now of our world and neither can I, the author. In the great terra-reforming convulsion of P.C. 400 the names themselves dissolved into the general mess of re-crystallization so that it would be impossible for any Whileawayan to tell you (if you were to ask) whether Mashopi was ever a city, or Wounded Knee a kind of bush, or whether or not Green Bay was ever a real bay. But if you go South from the Altiplano over the Mashopi Range, and from that land of snow, cold, thin air, risk, and glaciers, to the glider resort at Utica (from whence you may see mountain climbers setting off for Old Dirty-Skirts, who stands twenty-three thousand, nine hundred feet high) and from there to the monorail station at Wounded Knee, and if you take the monorail eight hundred miles into Green Bay and get off at a station I won’t name, you’ll be where Janet was when she had just turned seventeen. A Whileawayan who had come from the Mars training settlement in the Altiplano would have thought Green Bay was heaven; a hiker out of New Forest would have hated it. Janet had come by herself from an undersea farm on the continental shelf on the other side of the Altiplano where she had spent five wretched weeks setting up machinery in inaccessible crannies and squeaking whenever she talked (because of the helium). She had left her schoolmates there, crazy for space and altitude. It’s not usual to be alone at that age. She had stayed at the hostel in Wounded Knee, where they gave her an old, unused cubicle from which she could work by induction in the fuel-alcohol distillery. People were nice, but it was a miserable and boring time. You are never so alone, schoolmates or not. You never feel so all-thumbs (Janet). She made her insistence on change formally, the line of work came through, goodbye everybody. She had left a violin in Wounded Knee with a friend who used to cantilever herself out of the third story of the hostel and eat snacks on the head of a public statue. Janet took the monorail at twenty-two o’clock and sulkily departed for a better personal world. There were four persons of Three-Quarters Dignity in the car, all quiet, all wretched with discontent. She opened her knapsack, wrapped herself in it, and slept. She woke in artificial light to find that the engineer had opened the louvers to let in April: magnolias were blooming in Green Bay. She played linear poker with an old woman from the Altiplano who beat her three times out of three. At dawn everyone was asleep and the lights winked out; she woke and watched the low hills form and re-form outside under an apple-green sky that turned, as she watched it, a slow, sulphurous yellow. It rained but they sped through it. At the station—which was nothing but the middle of a field—she borrowed a bicycle from the bicycle rack and flipped the toggle to indicate the place she wanted to go. It’s a stout machine, with broad tires (compared to ours) and a receiver for registering radio beacons. She rode into the remaining night hung between the plantations of evergreens, then out into the sunrise again. There was an almighty cheeping and chirping, the result of one limb of the sun becoming visible over the horizon. She could see the inflated main dome of the house before she reached the second bicycle drop; somebody going West would pick it up in time and drop it near the monorail. She imagined great masses of sulky girls being requisitioned to ride bicycles coast-to-coast from regions that had a bicycle surplus to those crying out for bicycles. I imagined it, too. There was the sound of a machinist’s ground-car off to the left—Janet grew up with that noise in her ears. Her bicycle was singing the musical tone that lets you know you’re on course, a very lovely sound to hear over the empty fields. “Sh!” she said and put it on the rack, where it obediently became silent. She walked (and so did I) to the main dome of the house and let herself in, not knowing whether everyone was sleeping late or had got up early and already gone out. She didn’t care. We found the empty guest room, ate some stirabout—that’s not what you think, it’s a kind of bread—from her knapsack, lay down on the floor, and fell asleep.

  XVIII

  There’s no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early , or in the wrong part of town , or unescorted . You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers—the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of die street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you’re a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can’t say no, who’s making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy.

  On Whileaway eleven-year-old children strip and live naked in the wilderness above the forty-seventh parallel, where they meditate, stark naked or covered with leaves, sans pubic hair, subsisting on the roots and berries so kindly planted by their elders. You can walk around the Whileawayan equator twenty times (if the feat takes your fancy and you live that long) with one hand on your sex and in the other an emerald the size of a grapefruit. All you’ll get is a tired wrist.

  While here, where we live—!

  PART FIVE

  I

  I had got stuck with Jeannine. I don’t know how. Also, everybody in the Goddamned subway car was staring at my legs. I think they thought I was a cheerleader. Way up in the Bronx we had waited for the Express, forty-five minutes in the open air with tufts of grass growing between the rails, just as in my childhood, weeds surrounding the vacant subway cars, sunlight and cloud-shadows chasing each other across the elevated wooden platform. I put my raincoat across my knees—skirts are long in nineteen-sixty-nine, Jeannine-time. Jeannine is neat, I suppose, but to me she looks as if she’s wandering all over the place: hanging earrings, metal links for a belt, her hair escaping from a net, ruffles on her sleeves; and on that kind of shapeless, raglan-sleeved coat that always looks as if it’s dragging itself off the wearer’s shoulders, a pin in the shape of a crescent moon with three stars dangling from it on three fine, separate chains. Her coat and shoulder bag are overflowing into her neighbors’ laps.

  So I remember the horsehair petticoats of my teens, which bounded out of one’s hands every time one tried to roll them or fold them up. One per drawer. The train groaned and ground to a stop somewhere between one hundred and eightieth and one hundred and sixty-eighth streets. We can look over the plain of the Bronx, which is covered with houses, to something near the river in the distance—a new stadium, I think.

  Petticoats, waist-cinchers, boned strapless brassieres with torturous nodes where the bones began or ended, modestly high-heeled shoes, double-circle skirts, felt applique’d with sequins, bangle bracelets that always fell off, winter coats with no buttons to hold them shut, rhinestone sunburst brooches that caught on everything. Horrible obsessions, The Home, for example. We sat looking over the tenements, the faraway bridge, the ball park. There were public parks on islands in the river where I don’t remember there being anything of the kind. Jeannine’s giving me gooseflesh, whisper, whisper on the side of the neck (about somebody else’s home permanent across the car), never still, always twisting around to look at something, forever fiddling with her clothes, suddenly deciding she just has to see out the window, I’ll die if I don’t. We changed places so she wouldn’t have the bar between the windows cutting
off her field of view. The sun shone as if on the Perfect City of my twelve-year-old dreams, the kind of thing you see on a billboard under Pittston, Future Jewel Of The Finger Lakes, the ramps, the graceful walkways, the moving belts between hundred-story buildings, the squares of green that are supposed to be parks, and above it all, in the cloudless modern sky, just one sleek, futuristic Airplane.

  II

  JEANNINE: Cal is too much. I don’t know if I ought to give him up or not. He’s awfully sweet but he’s such a baby. And the cat doesn’t like him, you know. He doesn’t take me any place. I know he doesn’t make much money, but you would think he would try, wouldn’t you? All he wants is to sit around and look at me and then when we get in bed, he doesn’t do anything for the longest time; that just can’t be right All he does is pet and he says he likes it like that. He says it’s like floating. Then when he does it you know, sometimes he cries. I never heard of a man doing that

  MYSELF: Nothing.

  JEANNINE: I think there’s something wrong with him. I think he’s traumatized by being so short. He wants to get married so we can have children—on his salary! When we pass a baby carriage with a baby, we both run over to look at it. He can’t make up his mind, either. I never heard of a man like that. Last fall we were going to go to a Russian restaurant and I wanted to go to this place so he said all right, and then I changed my mind and wanted to go to the other place and he said OK, fine, but it turned out to be shut. So what could we do? He didn’t know. So I lost my temper.

  ME: Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  SHE: He’s just too much. Do you think I should get rid of him?

  ME: (I shook my head)

  JEANNINE (Confidingly): Well, he is funny some-times.

  (She bent down to pick lint off her blouse, giving herself a momentary double chin. She pursed her lips, pouted, bridled, drooped her eyelids in a knowing look.)

  Sometimes—sometimes—he likes to get dressed up. He gets into the drapes like a sarong and puts on all my necklaces around his neck, and stands there with the curtain rod for a spear. He wants to be an actor, you know. But I think there’s something wrong with him. Is it what they call transvestism?

  JOANNA: No, Jeannine.

  JEANNINE: I think it might be. I think I’ll throw him over. I don’t like anybody calling my cat, Mr. Frosty, names. Cal calls him The Blotchy Skinny Cat Which he isn’t. Besides, I’m going to call up my brother next week and go stay with him during vacation—I get three weeks. It gets pretty dull by the end of it—my brother stays in a small town in the Poconos, you know—but the last time I was there, there was a block dance and a Grange supper and I met a very, very handsome man. You can tell when somebody likes you, can’t you? He liked me. He’s an assistant to the butcher and he’s going to inherit the business; he’s got a real future. I went there quite a lot; I can tell, the way somebody looks at me. Mrs. Robert Poirier. Jeannine Dadier-Poirier. Ha ha! He’s good-looking. Cal—Cal is—well! Still, Cal is sweet. Poor, but sweet. I wouldn’t give up Cal for anything. I enjoy being a girl, don’t you? I wouldn’t be a man for anything; I think they have such a hard time of it. I like being admired. I like being a girl. I wouldn’t be a man for anything. Not for anything .

  ME: Has anyone proposed the choice to you lately?

  JEANNINE: I won’t be a man.

  ME: Nobody axed you to.

  III

  She was sick in the subway. Not really, but almost. She indicated by signs that she was going to be sick or had just been sick or was afraid she was going to be sick.

  She held my hand.

  IV

  We got out at forty-second street; and this is the way things really happen, in broad daylight, publicly, invisibly; we meandered past the shops. Jeannine saw a pair of stockings that she just had to have. We went in the store and the store owner bullied us. Outside again with her stockings (wrong size) she said, “But I didn’t want them!” They were red fishnet hose, which she’ll never dare wear. In the store window there was a zany-faced mannequin who roused my active hatred: painted long ago, now dusty and full of hair-fine cracks, a small shopkeeper’s economy. “Ah!” said Jeannine sorrowfully, looking again at the edge of the fishnet hose in her package. Mannequins are always dancing, this absurd throwing back of the head and bending of the arms and legs. They enjoy being mannequins. (But I won’t be mean.) I will not say that the sky ripped open from top to bottom, from side to side, that from the clouds over Fifth Avenue descended seven angels with seven trumpets, that the vials of wrath were loosed over Jeannine-time and the Angel of Pestilence sank Manhattan in the deepest part of the sea. Janet, our only savior, turned the corner in a gray flannel jacket and a gray flannel skirt down to her knees. That’s a compromise between two worlds. She seemed to know where she was going. Badly sunburned, with more freckles than usual across her flat nose, Miss Evason stopped in the middle of the street, scratched her head all over, yawned, and entered a drugstore. We followed.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of that,” said the man behind the counter.

  “Oh my goodness, really?” said Miss Evason. She put away a piece of paper, on which she had written whatever-it-was, and went to the other side of the store, where she had a soda.

  “You’ll need a prescription,” said the man behind the counter.

  “Oh my goodness,” Miss Evason said mildly. It did not help that she was carrying her soda. She put it down on the plastic counter top and joined us at the door, where Miss Dadier was trying—softly but very determinedly—to bolt. She wanted to get back to the freedom of Fifth Avenue, where there were so many gaps—so much For Rent, so much cheaper, so much older, than I remembered.

  Miss Dadier looked sulkily up at the sky, calling on the invisible angels and the Wrath of God to witness, and then she said, grudgingly:

  “I can’t imagine what you were trying to buy.” She did not want to admit that Janet existed. Janet raised her eyebrows and directed a glance at me, but I don’t know. I never know anything.

  “I have athlete’s foot,” said Miss Evason.

  Jeannine shuddered. (Catch her taking off her shoes in public!) “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “You didn’t,” said Miss Evason tolerantly. “Are you ready?”

  “No,” said Jeannine. But she did not repeat it. I’m not sure I’m ready. Janet led us put into the street and had us stand close together, all within one square of the sidewalk. She looked at her watch. The Whileawayan antennae come searching through the ages like a cat’s whisker. It would have been better to leave from some less public spot, but they don’t seem to care what they do; Janet waved engagingly at passersby and I became aware that I had become aware that I remembered becoming aware of the curved wall eighteen niches from my nose. The edge of the sidewalk, where the traffic. Had been.

  Now I know how I got to Whileaway, but how did I get stuck with Jeannine? And how did Janet get into that world and not mine? Who did that? When the question is translated into Whilewayan, Dear Reader, you will see the technicians of Whileaway step back involuntarily; you will see Boy Scout Evason blanch; you will see the Chieftainess of the Whileawayan scientific establishment, mistress of ten thousand slaves and wearer of the bronze breastplates, direct stern questions right and left, while frowning. Etcetera.

  Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Jeannine was saying miserably under her breath. I don’t want to be here. They forced me. I want to go home. This is a terrible place.

  “Who did that?” said Miss Evason. “Not me. Not my people.”

  V

  Praise God, Whose image we put in the plaza to make the eleven-year-olds laugh. She has brought me home.

  VI

  Dig in. Winter’s coming. When I—not the “I” above but the “I” down here, naturally; that’s Janet up there —

  When “I” dream of Whileaway, I dream first of the farms, and although words are inadequate to this great theme, while I live I yet must tell you that the farms are the only family units on Whileaway, not
because Whileawayans think farm life is good for children (they don’t) but because farm work is harder to schedule and demands more day-to-day continuity than any other kind of job. Farming on Whileaway is mainly caretaking and machine-tending; it is the emotional security of family life that provides the glamor. I do not know this from observation; I know it from knowledge; I have never visited Whileaway in my own person, and when Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna stepped out of the stainless steel sphere into which they had been transported from wherever the dickens it was that they were before (etcetera), they did so alone. I was there only as the spirit or soul of an experience is always there.

  Sixty eight-foot-tall Amazons, the Whileawayan Praetorian Guard, threw daggers in all directions (North, South, East, and West).

  Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna arrived in the middle of a field at the end of an old-fashioned tarmac that stretched as a feeder to the nearest hovercraft highway. No winter, few roofs. Vittoria and Janet embraced and stood very still, as Aristophanes describes. They didn’t yell or pound each other’s shoulders, or kiss, or hug, or cry out, or jump up and down, or say “You old son-of-a-gun!” or tell each other all the news, or push each other to arm’s length and screech, and then hug each other again. More farsighted than either Jeannine or Janet, I can see beyond the mountain range on the horizon, beyond the Altiplano, to the whale-herders and underground fisheries on the other side of the world; I can see desert gardens and zoological preserves; I can see storms brewing. Jeannine gulped. Must they do that in public ? There are a few fluffy summer clouds above Green Bay, each balancing on its own tail of hot air; the dust settles on either side of the highway as a hovercar roars and passes. Vittoria’s too stocky for Jeannine’s taste; she could at least be good-looking. We strolled down the feeder road to the road to the hovercraft-way, observed by nobody, all alone, except that I can see a weather satellite that sees me. Jeannine keeps just behind Vittoria, staring with censorious horror at Vittoria’s long, black hair.