Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

“If it was a dream, everybody else had it, too,” said Rufinella. “And there’s the evidence: there they are—or at least their shadows—on film, on video, in the newspapers, in books, in the news…. They were real; if you’re going to judge by the evidence they left behind, they were more real than the women.”

“Then maybe they woke up to reality one day, and found that the women were gone.”

“Nobody dreamed me ,” said the daughter of my best friend, very firmly. Rufinella was two months old when the men disappeared. Therefore, unlike her own daughter, she had a father, but she cannot possibly remember him, or any man. Although she has tried, through hypnotic regression. According to her, she succeeded in going back before her birth, to her time in the womb. She said she could remember her mother’s body. But she could not remember her father. She couldn’t remember a male presence, no more than imagine how creatures called men might have differed so dramatically from creatures called women, as all history, all art, tells us they did.

Art is metaphor, and history is an art. It was like this. It was not like that. We are language-using, storytelling creatures. Trying to explain reality, we transform it. We can’t travel in time and know the past that way, but only, endlessly, try to re-create it. As a teacher (I’m semiretired, now), I tried to make my students understand something they could never know for themselves. Imaginative reconstruction of a place that no longer exists. They can’t go there, but neither can I. My own memories are stories I tell myself.

Maybe women did make up men, invented them the way earlier civilizations created gods, to fill a need. A group of revisionist historians—psychohistorians they call themselves—would like us all to believe that there was never any “second sex,” never any “other” kind of human being except ourselves. According to them, men were a cultural invention. After all, if they were truly other than us, necessary in the same way as are male animals, how is it that we women have managed to continue to reproduce ourselves, managed to conceive and bear children, without any of the equipment or the contortions depicted in illustrated texts on human sexuality, and in a certain class of film?

I’ve heard many clever and convincing arguments for the revisionist view of human history, and there are times when I feel that only a native stubbornness keeps me clinging to what I “know.” Yet the argument they think is the clincher for their point of view does not convince me.

Like all sane and sensible people, they still, thirty-four years after the fact, cannot come to terms with, can hardly believe, the way that men disappeared. Overnight; all at once; in the twinkling of an eye. They simply were no longer. Reality doesn’t work like that; dreams do. So it makes a certain comforting sense to conclude that the whole class or gender of men was a dream. Nothing vanished except an illusion. There was no sudden, worldwide disappearance, but only an equally sudden change in perception. Men no longer existed because we no longer needed to pretend that they did.

Things that exist do not suddenly cease to be. They change, possibly out of all recognition, but something doesn’t become nothing except through a process of transformation. This is true not only of objects, but also of needs. What happened to that need which made women invent the story of men in such convincing detail, and cling to it for so many thousands of years? Why should it be any easier to erase such a need than half the human race? How could it vanish in the blink of an eye, between one breath and the next?

I said something of this sort to Rufinella. She looked tired and sad. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You’re right. The need is still there, and we still don’t understand it. That’s why I think men are coming back.”

“The same way they left?” I loved my husband very much, and grieved for him and other male friends and family when they disappeared; I had mourned for years, wanting them back. And yet, now, the thought that they might all return, be found back in place tomorrow morning, was strangely horrible.

“Oh, no. I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re going to roll over in bed one night and find you’re not alone. I think they’re coming back in a different way… more slowly, but more surely. We’ve had this time, all these years, to learn to understand ourselves and to change, and we haven’t done it. We’ve missed our chance. We’ve blown it, as your generation says. We still need them, and we don’t know why. So men are coming back. And I think it’s going to be worse for us this time; a lot worse.”

Rufinella is bright and observant and cautious, not given to making rash, unprovable statements.

“Why?”

“You don’t spend much time around children, do you?”

“Not much,” I said. “In fact, hardly any. I suppose your Leni’s birthday party was the last time.”

“I spend two afternoons a week in the community nursery,” Rufinella said. “And of course I live with Leni, and there’s her friends, and Alice has an eight-year-old… since I’ve noticed, I’ve been talking to more mothers and teachers and nursery workers and… it’s consistent. It’s not isolated incidents; there’s a pattern to it, and it’s—”

“What?”

“I didn’t mean to tell you yet—I didn’t mean to tell anyone, until I was certain. Until I had more evidence. I could be wrong, I could be overreacting, imagining things…. I thought it was just a fad, at first. Most people who’ve noticed it probably think that. Because you only see a part of it, you only see what the kids in your house or your school or your neighborhood are doing, and you don’t realize that they are all doing the same thing, all across the city, all across the country… all over the world, I suspect, although of course I don’t know … yet. At first I thought… you know how children are; I myself remember what it was like. Making up codes, secret languages, little rituals. It’s part of childhood. A children’s culture. And that’s what this is. They have their own culture.”

I felt the way I always feel before a medical examination. I wanted to leap ahead of her, tell her before she could tell me. “And you recognize it—this culture—from the old movies.”

“Not the details. The details are different. I guess they’d have to be. But, yes, I do recognize it… at least, I recognize one thing about it… you would, too, I think.”

“Tell me.”

“They have their own language, their own rituals. Those might differ from group to group, but the worst of it is, there are always two. Two separate classes, if you like. They’ve created certain differences… certain, consistent differences. Two types of language, two types of ritual. One group of children uses one, and one is for the other. No crossover allowed. You can’t change the group you belong to, once you’ve picked it… or once it’s picked you. I can’t quite work out how the division is determined, or how early it is established, but somehow they all seem to know. A two-year-old going to nursery for the first time—it’s settled before a word is spoken. They all know which group she belongs to, and there’s no mistake possible, no appeal allowed. Almost as if they can see signs we can’t—as if it were established at birth, the way sex used to be.” Rufinella looked at me steadily, yet somehow desperately. She was pleading, I realized; hoping that I would have some advice, some wisdom from the age before hers.

“You think they’re reinventing gender.”

She nodded.

“What do they say about it? Have you asked them?”

“They can’t explain it. They say that’s just how things are. They invent new languages, they create differences, but they talk about it as if they can’t help it. As if these are discoveries, not inventions.”