Joanna Russ - The Female Man

Alas! those who were shocked at my making love that way to a man are now shocked at my making love to a machine; you can’t win.

“Well?” said the Swedish Miss.

“Well,” said I, “this is what we want. We want bases on your worlds; we want raw materials if you’ve got them. We want places to recuperate and places to hide an army; we want places to store our machines. Above all, we want places to move from—bases that the other side doesn’t know about. Janet is obviously acting as an unofficial ambassador, so I can talk to her, that’s fine. You two might object that you are persons of no standing, but whom do you expect me to ask, your governments? Also, we need someone who can show us the local ropes. You’ll do fine for me. You are the authorities, as far as I’m concerned.

“Well?

“Is it yes or no?

“Do we do business?”

This is the Book of Joanna.

I was driving on a four-lane highway in North America with an acquaintance and his nine-year-old son.

“Beat ’im! Beat ’im!” cried the little boy excitedly as I passed another car in order to change lanes. I stayed in the right-hand lane for a while, admiring the buttercups by the side of the road, and then, in order to change lanes back, fell behind another car.

“Pass ’im! Pass ’im!” cried the distressed child, and then in anxious tears, “Why didn’t you beat ’im?”

“There, there, old sport,” said his indulgent Daddy, “Joanna drives like a lady. When you’re grown up you’ll have a car of your own and you can pass everybody on the road.” He turned to me and complained:

“Joanna, you just don’t drive aggressively enough.”

In training.

There’s the burden of knowledge. There’s the burden of compassion. There’s seeing all too clearly what’s in their eyes as they seize your hands, crying cheerily, “You don’t really mind my saying that, do you? I knew you didn’t!” Men’s shaky egos have a terrible appeal to the mater dolorosa. At times I am seized by a hopeless, helpless longing for love and reconciliation, a dreadful yearning to be understood, a teary passion for exposing our weaknesses to each other. It seems intolerable that I should go through life thus estranged, keeping it all to my guilty self. So I try to explain in the softest, least accusing way I can, but oddly enough men don’t behave the way they do on the Late Late Show, I mean those great male stars in their infancy in the Jean Arthur or the Mae West movies: candid, clear-eyed, and fresh, with their unashamed delight in their women’s strength and their naive enjoyment of their own, beautiful men with beautiful faces and the joyfulness of innocents, John Smith or John Doe. These are the only men I will let into Whileaway. But we have fallen away from our ancestors’ softness and clarity of thought into corrupt and degenerate practices. When I speak now I am told loftily or kindly that I just don’t understand, that women are really happy that way, that women can better themselves if they want to but somehow they just don’t want to, that I’m joking, that I can’t possibly mean what I say, that I’m too intelligent to be put in the same class as “women,” that I’m different, that there is a profound spiritual difference between men and women of which I don’t appreciate the beauty, that I have a man’s brain, that I have a man’s mind, that I’m talking to a phonograph record. Women don’t take it that way. If you bring up the subject with them, they begin to tremble out of terror, embarrassment, and alarm; they smile a smile of hideous, smug embarrassment, a magical smile meant to wipe them off the face of the earth, to make them abject and invisible—oh no, no, no, no, don’t think I believe any of that, don’t think I need any of that! Consider:

You ought to be interested in politics.

Politics is baseball. Politics is football. Politics is X “winning” and Y “losing.” Men wrangle about politics in living rooms the way Opera Fan One shouts at Opera Fan Two about Victoria de los Angeles.

No squabble between the Republican League and the Democrat League will ever change your life. Concealing your anxiety over the phone when He calls; that’s your politics.

Still, you ought to be interested in politics. Why aren’t you?

Because of feminine incapacity.

One can go on.

I committed my first revolutionary act yesterday. I shut the door on a man’s thumb. I did it for no reason at all and I didn’t warn him; I just slammed the door shut in a rapture of hatred and imagined the bone breaking and the edges grinding into his skin. He ran downstairs and the phone rang wildly for an hour after while I sat, listening to it, my heart beating wildly, thinking wild thoughts. Horrible. Horrible and wild. I must find Jael.

Women are so petty (translation: we operate on too small a scale).

Now I’m worse than that—I also do not give a damn about humanity or society. It’s very upsetting to think that women make up only one-tenth of society, but it’s true. For example:

My doctor is male.

My lawyer is male.

My tax-accountant is male.

The grocery-store-owner (on the corner) is male.

The janitor in my apartment building is male.

The president of my bank is male.

The manager of the neighborhood supermarket is male.

My landlord is male.

Most taxi-drivers are male.

All cops are male.

All firemen are male.

The designers of my car are male.

The factory workers who made the car are male.

The dealer I bought it from is male.

Almost all my colleagues are male.

My employer is male.

The Army is male.

The Navy is male.

The government is (mostly) male.

I think most of the people in the world are male.

Now it’s true that waitresses, elementary-school teachers, secretaries, nurses, and nuns are female, but how many nuns do you meet in the course of the usual business day? Right? And secretaries are female only until they get married, at which time, they change or something because you usually don’t see them again at all. I think it’s a legend that half the population of the world is female; where on earth are they keeping them all? No, if you tot up all those categories of women above, you can see clearly and beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are maybe 1-2 women for every 11 or so men and that hardly justifies making such a big fuss. It’s just that I’m selfish. My friend Kate says that most of the women are put into female-banks when they grow up and that’s why you don’t see them, but I can’t believe that.

(Besides, what about the children? Mothers have to sacrifice themselves to their children, both male and female, so that the children will be happy when they grow up; though the mothers themselves were once children and were sacrificed to in order that they might grow up and sacrifice themselves to others; and when the daughters grow up, they will be mothers and they will have to sacrifice themselves for their children, so you begin to wonder whether the whole thing isn’t a plot to make the world safe for (male) children. But motherhood is sacred and mustn’t be talked about.)

Oh dear, oh dear.

Thus in the bad days, in the dark swampy times.

At thirteen desperately watching TV, curling my long legs under me, desperately reading books, callow adolescent that I was, trying (desperately!) to find someone in books, in movies, in life, in history, to tell me it was O.K. to be ambitious, O.K. to be loud, O.K. to be Humphrey Bogart (smart and rudeness), O.K. to be James Bond (arrogance), O.K. to be Superman (power), O.K. to be Douglas Fairbanks (swashbuckling), to tell me self-love was all right, to tell me I could love God and Art and Myself better than anything on earth and still have orgasms.