Joanna Russ - The Female Man

Being told it was all right “for you, dear,” but not for women .

Being told I was a woman.

At sixteen, giving up.

In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get dressed up and go to a party. Woman is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother; Woman is the eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality; Woman has intuition; Woman is the life-force; Woman is selfless love.

“I am the gateway to another world,” (said I, looking in the mirror) “I am the earth-mother; I am the eternal siren; I am purity,” (Jeez, new pimples) “I am carnality; I have intuition; I am the life-force; I am selfless love.” (Somehow it sounds different in the first person, doesn’t it?)

Honey (said the mirror, scandalized) Are you out of your fuckin’ mind ?

I AM HONEY

I AM RASPBERRY JAM

I AM A VERY GOOD LAY

I AM A GOOD DATE

I AM A GOOD WIFE

I AM GOING CRAZY

Everything was preaches and cream.

(When I decided that the key word in all this vomit was self-less and that if I was really all the things books, friends, parents, teachers, dates, movies, relatives, doctors, newspapers, and magazines said I was, then if I acted as I pleased without thinking of all these things I would be all these things in spite of my not trying to be all these things. So —

"Christ, will you quit acting like a man!")

Alas, it was never meant for us to hear. It was never meant for us to know. We ought never be taught to read. We fight through the constant male refractoriness of our surroundings; our souls are torn out of us with such shock that there isn’t even any blood. Remember: I didn’t and don’t want to be a “feminine” version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.

What future is there for a female child who aspires to being Humphrey Bogart?

Baby Laura Rose, playing with her toes, she’s a real pretty little sweetie-girl, isn’t she?

Sugar and spice

And everything nice —

That’s what little girls are made of!

But her brother’s a tough little bruiser (two identical damp, warm lumps). At three and a half I mixed sour cream and ice cubes on the window sill to see if they would turn into ice cream; I copied the words “hot” and “cold” off the water faucets. At four I sat on a record to see if it would break if pressure were applied evenly to both sides—it did; in kindergarten I taught everybody games and bossed them around; at six I beat up a little boy who took candy from my coat; I thought very well of myself.

Learning to

despise

one’s

self

Brynhild hung her husband on a nail in the wall, tied up in her girdle as in a shopping bag, but she, too, lost her strength when the magic shlong got inside her. One can’t help feeling that the story has been somewhat distorted in the re-telling. When I was five I thought that the world was a matriarchy.

I was a happy little girl.

I couldn’t tell the difference between “gold” and “silver” or “night gown” and “evening gown,” so I imagined all the ladies of the neighborhood getting together in their beautiful “night gowns"—which were signs of rank—and making all the decisions about our lives. They were the government. My mother was President because she was a school teacher and local people deferred to her. Then the men would come home from “work” (wherever that was; I thought it was like hunting) and lay “the bacon” at the ladies’ feet, to do with as they wished. The men were employed by the ladies to do this. Laura Rose, who never swam underwater a whole month in summer camp with goggles on or slept in the top bunk, fancying herself a Queen in lonely splendor or a cabin-boy on a ship, has no such happy memories. She’s the girl who wanted to be Genghis Khan. When Laura tried to find out who she was, they told her she was “different” and that’s a hell of a description on which to base your life; it comes down to either “Not-me” or “Convenient-for me” and what is one supposed to do with that? What am I to do? (she says) What am I to feel? Is “supposed” like “spoused"? Is “different” like “deteriorate"? How can I eat or sleep? How can I go to the moon?

I first met Laur a few years ago when I was already grown up. Cinnamon and apples, ginger and vanilla, that’s Laur. Now having Brynhildic fantasies about her was nothing—I have all sorts of extraordinary fantasies which I don’t take seriously—but bringing my fantasies into the real world frightened me very much. It’s not that they were bad in themselves, but they were Unreal and therefore culpable; to try to make Real what was Unreal was to mistake the very nature of things; it was a sin not against conscience (which remained genuinely indifferent during the whole affair) but against Reality, and of the two the latter is far more blasphemous. It’s the crime of creating one’s own Reality, of “preferring oneself” as a good friend of mine says. I knew it was an impossible project.

She was reading a book, her hair falling over her face. She was radiant with health and life, a study in dirty blue jeans. I knelt down by her chair and kissed her on the back of her smooth, honeyed, hot neck with a despairing feeling that now I had done it —but asking isn’t getting. Wanting isn’t having. She’ll refuse and the world will be itself again. I waited confidently for the rebuke, for the eternal order to reassert itself (as it had to, of course)—for it would in fact take a great deal of responsibility off my hands.

But she let me do it. She blushed and pretended not to notice. I can’t describe to you how reality itself tore wide open at that moment. She kept on reading and I trod at a snail’s pace over her ear and cheek down to the corner of her mouth, Laur getting hotter and redder all the time as if she had steam inside her. It’s like falling off a cliff, standing astonished in mid-air as the horizon rushes away from you. If this is possible, anything is possible. Later we got stoned and made awkward, self-conscious love, but nothing that happened afterward was as important to me (in an unhuman way) as that first, awful wrench of the mind.

Once I felt the pressure of her hip-bone along my belly, and being very muddled and high, thought: She’s got an erection . Dreadful. Dreadful embarrassment. One of us had to be male and it certainly wasn’t me. Now they’ll tell me it’s because I’m a Lesbian, I mean that’s why I’m dissatisfied with things. That’s not true. It’s not because I’m a Lesbian. It’s because I’m a tall, blonde, blue-eyed Lesbian .

Does it count if it’s your best friend? Does it count if it’s her mind you love through her body? Does it count if you love men’s bodies but hate men’s minds? Does it count if you still love yourself?

Later we got better.

Jeannine goes window-shopping. She has my eyes, my hands, my silly stoop; she’s wearing my blue plastic raincoat and carrying my umbrella. Jeannine is out on the town on a Saturday afternoon saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to all that.

Goodbye to mannequins in store windows who pretend to be sympathetic but who are really nasty conspiracies, goodbye to hating Mother, goodbye to the Divine Psychiatrist, goodbye to The Girls, goodbye to Normality, goodbye to Getting Married, goodbye to The Supernaturally Blessed Event, goodbye to being Some Body, goodbye to waiting for Him (poor fellow!), goodbye to sitting by the telephone, goodbye to feebleness, goodbye to adoration, goodbye Politics, hello politics. She’s scared but that’s all right. The streets are full of women and this awes her; where have they all come from? Where are they going? (If you don’t mind the symbolism.) It’s stopped raining but mist coils up from the pavement. She passes a bridal shop where the chief mannequin, a Vision in white lace and tulle, sticks out her tongue at Jeannine. “Didn’t do it!” cries the mannequin, resuming her haughty pose and balancing a bridal veil on her head. Jeannine shuts her umbrella, latches it, and swings it energetically round and round.