Meet Me at Infinity

by James Tiptree Jr.

  Now, anyone can see certain traces of local, situational complemen-tariness between the Human sexes; it is to be found in any ecosystem. But to seize upon these hints to build something like the yin and yang system is to depart radically from reality. The yin/yang is a lovely system, subtle, elaborate, full of interweavings, dialectical interpenetrations, many pretty mental toys. As an aid to understanding real men and women, it is a monstrous exercise in fluff.

  Consider how a Martian would see us. No matter what trait is measured, he/she/it would find a generally bell-shaped distribution; some of the curves would be a bit skewed, no more. Women and men share forty-five of our forty-six chromosomes. This is about as far from a bipolar situation as you can get.

  With this blast I hope to abolish from at least my thinking the concept that men and women are in what is called a reflexive relation to each other, that they are in some way mirror images of each other. If I had to pick a technical relation which might aid understanding, one could try for example a transitive one. (Example, Man is to Woman as Woman is to Child.) But that’s just as shallow and useless. The problem is to try to understand real people, and to determine whether a handful of genes on one chromosome has any identifiable effects on their way of being Human.

  Are There Two Sexes and if So Which?

  A funny thing happened a few years back, on the way to the bomb shelter. Official Washington held an air attack drill, a very elaborate one. The big set piece was the whisking-away of the whole top of the government to a fantastic shelter—this one was under a mountain—where they had all the war rooms and red buttons and machinery for Retaliation Unto Cinders.

  Well, when the dawn moment came for the senior officials to gulp their orange juice and toddle out to the black limousines, some very odd confrontations took place. They were leaving their wives and families behind to be fried, you see. The silent thought loomed. Have a nice survival, dear. I’m sure you and General Abrams will be very happy…

  Art Buchwald did some very funny columns. The vision of two hundred postmenopausal males crawling out into the lava plain to celebrate the “saving” of America… .

  Now I submit that this is pathology. Pathology of almost inconceivable luxuriance. I call it the pathological hypertrophy of the male sex pattern.

  Okay, let’s go back. Yes, I think we have two sexes. But I do not—repeat, not—think that they are men and women. I see them as patterns, which may or may not be present singly or together in a given individual at a given time.

  Okay, what’s a “sex”? Well, for a try, let’s call it “a coherent pattern of behavior necessary to the reproduction of the species.” We probably can agree also that Human sexual behavior has obscure ties to the biological substrate, but that these are not well understood. (I’ve been reading Money and Ehrhardt’s excellent work on the intersexes, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl.) About all one can be sure of biologically is that androgen often has the effect of evoking the male sexual pattern.

  Yes, I see two sex patterns. One of them is relatively well known, so simple as to be almost trivial and subject to pathology: That is the male pattern. The other I see as overwhelmingly important to the race, very extensive over time, and almost unknown: That is the maternal pattern, or Mothering.

  We can dispense with the male pattern quickly; we see it in any cageful of adolescent male rhesus. The one interesting thing about the male pattern—which may be lethal to humanity—is that it shares the neural pathways of aggression. The male primate pursues, grasps, penetrates with much of the same equipment which serves aggression and predation. This has the dire side effect that the more aggressive males tend by and large to reproduce themselves more effectively and thus intensify the problem. We see considerable sexual dimorphism among our primate relatives; the males are bigger and stronger. Oddly enough, it’s not always coupled with greater aggression; gigantic male gorillas are relatively peaceful citizens. Male baboons, however, are not. They go in for male dominance—and so, unfortunately, do Human males. We appear to be subject to an androgen-related overgrowth of the aggressive syndrome, with its accompanying male-male dominance-submission conflicts, male territoriality, and all the dismal rest. We have had phases like the Ottoman Empire, a totally male society where women were kept as breeding animals and men acted out a complete surrogate fantasy life based on androgen pathology. We are today ruled by gerontomorphic old men—and their young acolytes—who can commit unrealities on the order of that air attack drill.

  A John Foster Dulles, a Stalin, is a biologically irrelevant old animal who has confused his fantasies with life and who ought to be undergoing therapy instead of being in charge of anything. But he has power. And so do young male thugs; it is hard to say which are more dangerous. But leaving aside the terrible importance of their dysfunction, one can draw back and simply characterize the male as the animal with enormous amounts of spare time.

  It is also important to note that the male pattern is powered by immediate genital gratification. (Nonorgasmic males leave no descendants.) In our species, the male drive has also ceased to be controlled by biological signals from the female.

  Now that’s all I want to say about the male pattern, because I want to get on to the next. Of course, we could bow to SF in passing, by remarking how much that air attack drill resembled certain Analog themes. But let’s get on.

  What is a mother? Well, to begin with, it is the pattern which is 99 percent responsible for our being here at all. Descriptively, mothering has a brief initial phase of what we might call aggressive vulnerability, which gets the gametes together. It has another physical phase of gestation and birth, which requires a female physique. Those two early phases are all that men in the grip of male hypertrophy even notice; that is what they think mothers are and that is what they try to reduce women to. I see these phases as merely initiatory, although the physical act of bringing a child into the world must be a very important one to the person. But if mothering stopped there we’d all be dead.

  My try at defining the maternal pattern is deeply influenced by the picture of the female primate endlessly, tirelessly lugging her infant, monitoring its activities at every moment, teaching, training, leading it to the best of her animal abilities. Not for a day or a week, but throughout its whole infancy and into self-sufficiency. The bond created can be very lasting; it is now speculated that the permanent alliance of mothers and daughters and granddaughters may be the true origin of society.

  Look at what motherhood involves. Leadership without aggression. Empathy of a high order—can it be the true root of speech? Great environmental competence. Aggressive defense of the young. Nest and shelter-building. Food bringing and sharing. A fantastic array of behavior—all of which have been flawlessly carried through by every one of our maternal forebears back to the first mammalian forms, or we would not be here.

  It is my belief that mothers, because of their grasp of development over time, undoubtedly invented agriculture. Animal husbandry, too. The characteristic of the mother pattern is that it extends over time in a way utterly unknown to the male. And it has relations to space and the environment again foreign to the male.

  Most important of all, it is a relation between animals which is totally outside the “male” repertory.

  A pause for wonder, for awe.

  And now the final speculation—because I really view this sex as unknown. What is mothering powered by? What “goals” has it? What reward drives it?

  We don’t know.

  We can only guess and mutter. I personally know many farmers, and I love to grow things when I have a chance. I think the strange, unspoken rewards of growing things must be a little like the rewards that power maternal behavior. What is the satisfaction—joy, really—of helping things to flourish?

  We don’t even have a name for it!

  I tell you, in our crazy culture we have rendered the major sex invisible. The more I think of it the more extraordinary it seems. And I think it cannot be denied that men have att
empted to take it over. They wrest children from the mother, make “men” out of them in lunatic rites. They attempt to kill the mother in themselves… a scene of unspeakable, fascinated, repulsion.

  And what they have made Human mothers into! As practiced today, mothering is a martyrdom for a Human being. Crazy.

  Well, let’s wind this up by noting one more interesting thing about the mothering pattern. (And remember that by mothering I mean the whole years-long scenario of turning out a viable Human being.) Mothering is tied to the rhythms of biological development. It is totally different from “male” enterprises in this respect. If John Campbell or Edward Teller tried to do mothering, they would have to go to school to the nearest monkey mother gazing into her baby’s eyes and untiringly guiding its little hands. They could not have any brilliant technological insights, they could not devise wondrous methods of accelerating or multiplying production; no abstract spasms of genius could shortcut matters. They would just have to do it. One by one by one. Or—no product.

  That, as Tom Lehrer would say, is a sobering thought.

  Because it is, quite simply, the one most important thing we do.

  And our failure to develop really good Human mothering—our failure to organize all society around this work, instead of irrelevant “male” activities and goals—may end us even if nothing dramatic gets us first. We must make a world in which every child is mothered to complete socialization, or die of the lack.

  Now before I end, one word: Please do not read into what I have said that I see mothers as all sweet compassion, nurturance, etc., and hence charge all this onto women. No. All I have described is a pattern of behavior—which you can see operating in any zoo—and which I see as only more or less actualized in individual Human beings at specific times. And one which we have disastrously neglected and do not understand.

  Well.

  So what about those sexes in SF?

  But wait—I have also talked about “Human beings.” By which I mean, the other forty-five chromosomes. Now obviously if I could describe a “Human being” I would be more than I am—and probably living in the future, because I think of Human beings as something to be realized ahead. (If we survive ourselves.) But clearly “Human beings” have something to do with the luminous image you see in a bright child’s eyes—the exploring, wondering, eagerly grasping, undestructive quest for life. I see that undescribed spirit as central to us all. And in the individual, tinged by one or the other—or both—of the sexual patterns.

  And, I guess I must confess, I see “humanity” in its best sense as closer to the maternal pattern than to the male—because of the empty violence which so often infects the male pattern. I would not, God forbid, reduce all life to cozy mommy-wuv. But I think the inherent power of humanity will always carry it beyond that; in fact, a true mother does. Actual mothers are Humans.

  So it is easy to say that as men and women who have more of the (partly unknown) mother patterning come into SF, the goals and fantasies and drives and reality-perception of SF will change. It already has; anthropology, sociology, psychology are sciences which involve concepts of development which are intellectual representations of mother-reality. As they come into SF we leave rocket-opera behind.

  Perhaps we will learn more about mother—her dreams, her fantasies, her perceptions and excitements and glories and dooms and irascibilities and exploits from bisexual SF.

  Now what I have said here implies that individual women can quite easily be, in effect, males. When they are acting on and powered by elements of the male pattern. (And they can be subject to its pathology, too.) I don’t see this as a problem. What I do see as a problem and a very urgent one, is:

  How soon, O Lord, can men learn to be mothers?

  I cannot resist ending with a couple of notes which have struck me.

  “What is a woman?” This question haunted me until I moved on the thinking about sex as pattemings. But it is probably a valid question, if only to stimulate thought. One of my first answers was that women are really truly aliens. (And hence supremely entitled to write SF, as Craig Strete has pointed out about American Indians.) This tells us a lot about our culture. Another part answer which continues to amuse me came from looking at our current crop of male transvestites and female impersonators like Holly Woodlawn. Watch them; so like a woman and yet so profoundly lacking something. What is missing? Well, it seems to me that they are totally focused on what I have called here the initiatory phase, the aggressive or provocative vulnerability that promotes genital Contact. And that is all they have. Behind them looms the mocking visage of the mother which they are not. They are biological mayflies, triggers to an unloaded gun.

  Another, more terrible question: Are women doomed? Can they achieve true liberation and acceptance as full Humans in our society? I have grave fears. (In my story “The Women Men Don’t See,” Ruth spoke of this.) Because of their physical, political, and economic weakness, the women’s movement is dependent on the civilized acceptance of men. Are we sufficiently civilized? Will the hand that holds the club really lay it down? Or will we, when panicked, revert back to the old power play, riot roughshod over the rights of the weaker, and throw them again into bondage, to be serfs and property? Let us not kid, men have the power. In the same way, American whites have the power to wipe out black rights. Will we stay unpanicked? Is our civilization deep enough in the bone? I fear the answer…

  Again on the power situation: Are there too many men? Would a different ratio be saner, say one man to a hundred women? The ridiculous economic imperatives of our culture teach even women to value male babies more. It is a fearsome thought that if we gain control over the sex of the unborn, we might have a wave of male births, a society preponderantly male. I believe that it is urgent for mothers-to-be to value girls more. And I tend to think that we have far too many men…

  Lastly. You may have noticed the word lunacy in this. It comes from Rebecca West’s marvelous prologue to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. (A book that tells one more that you wish to know about certain male activities.) May I end with this provocative quote? It is not really a mirror-image concept although it sounds like it at first glance:

  The word idiot comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

  Such as, for example, overlooking a little problem like how you recreate the Human race starting with two hundred old men.

  —November 3, 1974

  From all the letters, except maybe two, I learned something. I was also heartened to the see the splendid demonstration of male taciturnity vs female loquacity—Delany and I between us took up fifty percent of the space.

  Charnas’s point, also touched on by Russ and Mclntyre—that women have to know men more fully than men know women—of course, of course, yes, I see it. Isn’t it the phenomenon that R. Osbourne described in his study of communication in organizations: The people on the bottom of any power structure know the people on top—their intimate habits, motives, secrets, everything. While the people on top are ignorant of, and wildly misinterpret, the people on the bottom. Moreover, the people on top see all the actions of the people below as related to them, the bosses, and to their interests.

  Did any of you read those unearthly interviews with whites eulogizing their black cooks at the time of Selma? Fantastic, pitiable if it weren’t so vicious. By the way, Osbourne’s old book is worth glancing at, the title was Is Anybody Listening?

  I think we have accounted for the greater verisimilitude of male characters drawn by women, without dragging in intuition. (Aside to UKLeG: Some day let’s argue about the lifelikeness of Flaubert’s Emma—frankly I’ve always seen her as a “man’s woman” in e
very sense. Much better to me was Proust’s Mme. Verdurin—and by God she conforms to Delany’s, or Delany and Hackett’s, command to get the economic base in. Just thought of that. Maybe a male author writing about a woman’s sex relations with men almost has to fall victim to the my-cook-loves-me fallacy.)

  Charnas’s point about women being taught to view each other as threats or models interested me a lot. That’s what happens in what used to be called a situation of unstable rewards. In a UR situation, like, say, a fire in a theater, everybody has to cooperate or everybody loses. If a few people start to panic and grab, everybody dies. Only by cooperation can all, or the maximum number, get out safely. Men seem to have created a total UR situation for women. Which, of course, is very much to men’s advantage.

  Now to the excitement. There I was ponderously calling for men to learn to be mothers, and here is Delany actually doing it. Stupendous. Lord, the questions I’d like to ask: What does it feel like? Is it rewarding in itself, or only a duty? Do you do it differently from the way Hack-ett does it? Do you gaze into the child’s eyes? Do you feel it is entirely learned behavior, or do you feel a latent pattern which has been “trained out of you?” Are you late taking your turn because you are late in life generally (many female mothers are)? Would you be late if the baby was alone, if the female mother had to leave on time? Have you developed that famous acuity, the power of being able to hear your infant’s voice through a din?

  And so on. But, always, deepest, what is the motive, what is the reward for this behavior? Why is a baby cared for and raised? Why?

  Well, from this you can see that I am far from repentant about asking that attention be directed to the sex called “mother.” Of course I do repent the way I did it; I should never have tried an abstraction from behavior and people without warning and explanation. The abstraction is difficult, too, not entirely possible. Like W. Sheldon’s attempt to separate somatotype and personality type, while everybody knows that an extreme endomorph is not going to be a high somatomic. Similarly, we all “know” that men tend to be males and mothers are apt to be women.