Joanna Russ - The Female Man

“What’s this?” whispered Jeannine, furtively proffering something for my inspection.

“I don’t know, is it a staple gun?” I said. (It had a handle.) “Whose is it?”

“I found it on Janet’s bed,” said Jeannine, still whispering. “Just lying there. I think she took it out of her suitcase. I can’t figure out what it is. You hold it by the handle and if you move this switch it buzzes on one end, though I don’t see why, and another switch makes this piece move up and down. But that seems to be an attachment. It doesn’t look as if it’s been used as much as the rest of it. The handle’s really something; it’s all carved and decorated.”

“Put it back,” I said.

“But what is it?” said Jeannine.

“A Whileawayan communications device,” I said, “Put it back, Jeannie.”

“Oh?” she said. Then she looked doubtfully at me and at the sleepers. Janet, Jeannine, Joanna. Something very J-ish is going on here.

“Is it dangerous?” said Jeannine. I nodded—emphatically.

“Infinitely,” I said. “It can blow you up.”

“All of me?” said Jeannine, holding the thing gingerly at arm’s length.

“What it does to your body,” said I, choosing my words with extreme care, “is nothing compared to what it does to your mind, Jeannine. It will ruin your mind. It will explode in your brains and drive you crazy. You will never be the same again. You will be lost to respectability and decency and decorum and dependency and all sorts of other nice, normal things beginning with a D. It will kill you, Jeannine. You will be dead, dead, dead.

“Put it back.”

(On Whileaway these charming dinguses are heirlooms. They are menarchal gifts, presented after all sorts of glass-blowing, day-modeling, picture-painting, ring-dancing, and Heaven knows what sort of silliness done by the celebrants to honor the little girl whose celebration it is. There is a tremendous amount of kissing and hand-shaking. This is only the formal presentation, of course; cheap, style-less models that you wouldn’t want to give as presents are available to everybody long before this. Whileawayans often become quite fond of them, as you or I would of a hi-fi set or a sports car, but all the same, a machine’s only a machine. Janet later offered to lend me hers on the grounds that she and Laur no longer needed it.)

Jeannine stood there with an expression of extraordinary distrust: Eve and the hereditary instinct that tells her to beware of apples. I took her by the shoulders, telling her again that it was a radar set. That it was extremely dangerous. That it would blow up if she wasn’t careful. Then I pushed her out of the room.

"Put it back."

Jeannine, Janet, Joanna. Something’s going to happen. I came downstairs my bathrobe at three A.M., unable to sleep. This house ought to be ringed with government spies, keeping their eyes on our diplomat from the stars and her infernal, perverted friends, but nobody’s about. I met Jeannine in the kitchen in her pajamas, looking for the cocoa. Janet, still in sweater and slacks, was reading at the kitchen table, puffy-eyed from lack of sleep. She was cross-noting Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and Marital Patterns of Nebraska College Sophomores, 1938-1948 .

Jeannine said:

“I try to make the right decisions, but things don’t work out. I don’t know why. Other women are so happy. I was a very good student when I was a little girl and I liked school tremendously, but then when I got to be around twelve, everything changed. Other things become important then, you know. It’s not that I’m not attractive; I’m pretty enough, I mean in a usual way, goodness knows I’m no beauty. But that’s all right. I love books, I love reading and thinking, but Cal says it’s only daydreaming; I just don’t know. What do you think? There’s my cat, Mister Frosty, you’ve seen him, I’m terribly fond of him, as much as you can be of an animal, I suppose, but can you make a life out of books and a cat? I want to get married. It’s there, you know, somewhere just around the corner; sometimes after coming out of the ballet or the theatre, I can almost feel it, I know if only I could turn around in the right direction, I’d be able to reach out my hand and take it. Things will get better. I suppose I’m just late in developing. Do you think if I got married I would like making love better? Do you think there’s unconscious guilt—you know, because Cal and I aren’t married? I don’t feel it that way, but if it was unconscious, you wouldn’t feel it, would you? Sometimes I get really blue, really awful, thinking: suppose I get old this way? Suppose I reach fifty or sixty and it’s all been the same—that’s horrible—but of course it’s impossible. It’s ridiculous. I ought to get busy at something. Cal says I’m frightfully lazy. We’re getting married—marvelous!—and my mother’s very pleased because I’m twenty-nine. Under the wire, you know, oops! Sometimes I think I’ll get a notebook and write down my dreams because they’re very elaborate and interesting, but I haven’t yet. Maybe I won’t; it’s a silly thing to do. Do you think so? My sister-in-law’s so happy and Bud’s happy and I know my mother is; and Cal has a great future planned out. And if I were a cat I would be my cat, Mister Frosty, and I’d be spoiled rotten (Cal says). I have everything and yet I’m not happy.

“Sometimes I want to die.”

Then Joanna said:

“After we had finished making love, he turned to the wall and said, ‘Woman, you’re lovely. You’re sensuous. You should wear long hair and lots of eye make-up and tight clothing.’ Now what does this have to do with anything? I remain bewildered. I have a devil of pride and a devil of despair; I used to go out among the hills at seventeen (this is a poetic euphemism for a suburban golf course) and there, on my knees, I swear it, knelen on my kne, I wept aloud, I wrung my hands, crying: I am a poet! I am Shelley! I am a genius! What has any of this to do with me! The utter irrelevancy. The inanity of the whole business. Lady, your slip’s showing. God bless. At eleven I passed an eighth-grader, a boy, who muttered between his teeth, ‘Shake it but don’t break it.’ The career of the sexless sex object had begun. I had, at seventeen, an awful conversation with my mother and father in which they told me how fine it was to be a girl—the pretty clothes (why are people so obsessed with this?) and how I did not have to climb Everest, but could listen to the radio and eat bon-bons while my Prince was out doing it. When I was five my indulgent Daddy told me he made the sun come up in the morning and I expressed my skepticism; ‘Well, watch for it tomorrow and you’ll see,’ he said. I learned to watch his face for cues as to what I should do or what I should say, or even what I should see. For fifteen years I fell in love with a different man every spring like a berserk cuckoo-clock. I love my body dearly and yet I would copulate with a rhinoceros if I could become not-a-woman. There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can’t unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.

“Do you enjoy playing with other people’s children—for ten minutes? Good! This reveals that you have Maternal Instinct and you will be forever wretched if you do not instantly have a baby of your own (or three or four) and take care of that unfortunate victimized object twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for eighteen years, all by yourself. (Don’t expect much help.)