Joanna Russ - The Female Man

Did I say a moment? Not for an age of moments, particularly if the layman were indeed a man .

“Janet, may I ask you why you and your neighbors do not show up on our instruments? You must have discovered the theory of probability travel some time ago (in your terms), yet you are the first traveler. You wish to visit other universes of probability, yet you make it impossible for anyone to find you, let alone visit you.

“Why is that?”

“Aggressive and bellicose persons,” said Janet with care, “always assume that unaggressive and pacific persons cannot protect themselves.

“Why is that?”

Over trays of pre-cooked steak and chicken that would’ve disgraced an airline (that’s where they came from, I found out later) Jael sat next to Jeannine and glued herself to Jeannine’s ear, glancing round at the rest of us from time to time to see how we were taking it. Her eyes sparkled with the gaiety of corruption, the Devil in the fable tempting the young girl. Whisper, whisper, whisper. All I could hear were the sibilants, when her tongue came between her teeth. Jeannine stared soberly ahead and didn’t eat much, the color leaving her little by little. Jael didn’t eat at all. Like a vampire she fed on Jeannine’s ear. Later she drank a sort of super-bouillon which nobody else could stand and talked a lot to all of us about the war. Finally, Janet said bluntly:

“What war?”

“Does it matter?” said Miss Reasoner ironically, raising her silver eyebrows. “This war, that war, isn’t there always one?”

“No,” said Janet.

“Well, hell,” said Jael more genuinely, “ the war. If there isn’t one, there just was one, and if there wasn’t one, there soon will be one. Eh? The war between Us and Them. We’re playing it rather cool just now because it’s hard to work up an enthusiasm for something forty years old.”

I said, “Us and Them?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Sweet Alice, making a face. “After the plague-—don’t worry; everything you eat is stuffed with anti-toxins and we’ll decontaminate you before you go—besides, this all ended more than seventy years ago—after the bacteriological weapons were cleaned out of the biosphere (insofar as that was possible) and half the population buried (the dead half, I hope) people became rather conservative. They tend to do that, you know. Then after a while you get the reaction against the conservatism, I mean the radicalism. And after that the reaction against the radicalism. People had already begun gathering in like-minded communities before the war: Traditionalists, Neo-Feudalists, Patriarchalists, Matriarchalists, Separatists (all of us now), Fecundists, Sterilists, and what-have-you. They seemed to be happier that way. The War Between the Nations had really been a rather nice war, as wars go; it wiped the have-not nations off the face of the earth and made their resources available to us without the bother of their populations; all our machinery was left standing; we were getting wealthier and wealthier. So if you were not one of the fifty percent who had died, you were having a pretty good time of it. There was increasing separatism, increasing irritability, increasing radicalism; then came the Polarization; then came the Split. The middle drops out and you’re left with the two ends, hein? So when people began shopping for a new war, which they also seem to do, don’t they, there was only one war left. The only war that makes any sense if you except the relations between children and adults, which you must do because children grow up. But in the other war the Haves never stop being Haves and the Have-nots never stop being Have-nots. It’s cooled off now, unfortunately, but no wonder; it’s been going on for forty years—a stalemate, if you’ll forgive the pun. But in my opinion, questions that are based on something real ought to be settled by something real without all this damned lazy miserable drifting. I’m a fanatic. I want to see this thing settled. I want to see it over and done with. Gone. Dead.

“Oh, don’t worry!” she added. “Nothing spectacular is going to happen. All I will do in three days or so is ask you about the tourist trade in your lovely homes. What’s wrong with that? Simple, eh?

“But it will get things moving. The long war will start up again. We will be in the middle of it and I—who have always been in the middle of it—will get some decent support from my people at last.”

“Who?” said Jeannine crossly. “Who, who, for Heaven’s sake! Who’s Us, who’s Them? Do you expect us to find out by telepathy!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Alice Reasoner softly. “I thought you knew. I had no intention of puzzling you. You are my guests. When I say Them and Us I mean of course the Haves and the Have-nots, the two sides, there are always two sides, aren’t there?

“I mean the men and the women.”

Later I caught Jeannine by the door as we were all leaving; “What did she talk to you about?” I said. Something had gotten into Jeannine’s clear, suffering gaze; something had muddied her timidity. What can render Miss Dadier self-possessed? What can make her so quietly stubborn? Jeannine said:

“She asked me if I had ever killed anybody.”

She took us topside in the branch elevator: The Young One, The Weak One, The Strong One, as she called us in her own mind. I’m the author and I know. Miss Sweden (she also called Janet this) ran her hands over the paneling and studied the controls while the other two gaped. Think of me in my usual portable form. Their underground cities are mazes of corridors like sunken hotels; we passed doors, barricades, store windows, branch corridors leading to arcades. What is this passion for living underground? At one barrier they put us in purdah, that is, some kind of asbestos-like fireman’s suit that protects you against other people’s germs and them against yours. But this time it was a fake, meant only to hide us. “Can’t have them looking at you,” said Jael. She went apart with the border guard and there was some low-voiced, aggressive byplay, some snarling and lifting of hackles which a third party resolved by a kind of rough joking. I didn’t hear a word of it. She told us honestly that we couldn’t be expected to believe anything we hadn’t seen with our own eyes. There would be no films, no demonstrations, no statistics, unless we asked for them. We trundled out of the elevator into an armored car waiting in a barn, and across an unpaved, shell-pocked plain, a sort of no-man’s-land, in the middle of the night. Is the grass growing? Is that a virus blight? Are the mutated strains taking over ? Nothing but gravel, boulders, space, and stars. Jael flashed her pass at a second set of guards and told them about us, jerking her thumb backwards at the three of us: unclean, unclean, unclean. No barriers, no barbed wire, no searchlights; only the women have these. Only the men make a sport of people-hunting across the desert. Bulkier than three pregnancies, we followed our creatrix into another car, from out that first one, through the rubble and ruin at the edges of an old city, left standing just as it had been during the plague. Teachers come out here on Sundays, with their classes. It looks as if it’s been used for target practice, with holes in everything and new scars, like mortar scars, on the rubble. “It has,” says Jael Reasoner. Each of us wears a luminous, shocking-pink cross on chest and back to show how deadly we are. So the Manlanders (who all carry guns) won’t take pot-shots at us. There are lights in the distance—don’t think I know any of this by hearsay; I’m the spirit of the author and know all things. I’ll know it when we begin to pass the lit-up barracks at the edge of the city, when we see in the distance the homes of the very rich shining from the seven hilltops on which the city is built; I’ll know it when we go through a tunnel of rubble, built fashionably to resemble a World War I trench, and emerge neither into a public nursery (they’re either much further inside the city proper or out in the country) nor into a brothel, but into a recreation center called The Trench or The Prick or The Crotch or The Knife. I haven’t decided on a name yet. The Manlanders keep their children with them only when they’re very rich—but what posit I? Manlanders have no children. Manlanders buy infants from the Womanlanders and bring them up in batches, save for the rich few who can order children made from their very own semen: keep them in city nurseries until they’re five, then out into the country training ground, with the gasping little misfits buried in baby cemeteries along the way. There, in ascetic and healthful settlements in the country, little boys are made into Men—though some don’t quite make it; sex-change surgery begins at sixteen. One out of seven fails early and makes the full change; one out of seven fails later and (refusing surgery) makes only half a change: artists, illusionists, impressionists of femininity who keep their genitalia but who grow slim, grow languid, grow emotional and feminine, all this the effect of spirit only. Five out of seven Manlanders make it; these are “real-men.” The others are “the changed” or “the half-changed.” All real-men like the changed; some real-men like the half-changed; none of the real-men like real-men, for that would be abnormal. Nobody asks the changed or half-changed what they like. Jael flashed her civil pass at the uniformed real-man at the entrance to The Crotch and we trundled after. Our hands and feet look very small to me, our bodies odd and dumpy.