Joanna Russ The Female Man.pdf

Joanna Russ

The Female Man

First published in 1975

This book is dedicated to Anne, to Mary and to the other one and three-quarters billions of us.

If Jack succeeds in forgetting something, this is of little use if Jill continues to remind

him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep

quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also.

Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on

"bringing it up." He may invalidate her experience. This can be done more or less radically.

He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant

to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to

imagination: "It's all in your imagination." Further still, he can invalidate the content: "It

never happened that way." Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality, and

content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into

the bargain.

This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time. In order

for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable to overlay it with a thick

patina of mystification. For instance, by denying that this is what one is doing, and further

invalidating any perception that it is being done by ascriptions such as "How can you think

such a thing?"

"You must be paranoid." And so on.

--R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Penguin Books, Ltd., London, 1967, pp.31-

PART ONE

I was born on a farm on Whileaway. When I was five I was sent to a school on South

Continent (like everybody else) and when I turned twelve I rejoined my family. My mother's

name was Eva, my other mother's name Alicia; I am Janet Evason. When I was thirteen I

stalked and killed a wolf, alone, on North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using

only a rifle. I made a travois for the head and paws, then abandoned the head, and finally got

home with one paw, proof enough (I thought). I've worked in the mines, on the radio network,

on a milk farm, a vegetable farm, and for six weeks as a librarian after I broke my leg. At

thirty I bore Yuriko Janetson; when she was taken away to a school five years later (and I

never saw a child protest so much) I decided to take time off and see if I could find my

family's old home--for they had moved away after I had married and relocated near Mine City

in South Continent. The place was unrecognizable, however; our rural areas are always

changing. I could find nothing but the tripods of the computer beacons everywhere, some

strange crops in the fields that I had never seen before, and a band of wandering children.

They were heading North to visit the polar station and offered to lend me a sleeping

bag for the night, but I declined and stayed with the resident family; in the morning I started

home. Since then I have been Safety Officer for the county, that is S & P (Safety and Peace),

a position I have held now for six years. My Stanford-Binet corrected score (in your terms) is

187, my wife's 205 and my daughter's 193. Yuki goes through the ceiling on the verbal test.

I've supervised the digging of fire trails, delivered babies, fixed machinery, and milked more

moo-cows than I wish I knew existed. But Yuki is crazy about ice-cream. I love my daughter.

I love my family (there are nineteen of us). I love my wife (Vittoria). I've fought four duels.

I've killed four times.

Jeannine Dadier (DADE-yer) worked as a librarian in New York City three days a week for

the W. P. A. She worked at the Tompkins Square Branch in the Young Adult section. She

wondered sometimes if it was so lucky that Herr Shicklgruber had died in 1936 (the library

had books about this). On the third Monday in March of 1969 she saw the first headlines

about Janet Evason but paid no attention to them; she spent the day stamping Out books for

the Young Adults and checking the lines around her eyes in her pocket mirror (I'm only

twenty-nine!). Twice she had had to tuck her skirt above her knees and climb the ladder to the

higher-up books; once she had to move the ladder over Mrs. Allison and the new gentleman

assistant, who were standing below soberly discussing the possibility of war with Japan.

There was an article in The Saturday Evening Post.

"I don't believe it," said Jeannine Nancy Dadier softly. Mrs. Allison was a Negro. It

was an unusually warm, hazy day with a little green showing in the park: imaginary green,

perhaps, as if the world had taken an odd turning and were bowling down Spring in a dim

bye-street somewhere, clouds of imagination around the trees.

"I don't believe it," repeated Jeannine Dadier, not knowing what they were talking

about. "You'd better believe it!" said Mrs. Allison sharply. Jeannine balanced on one foot.

(Nice girls don't do that.) She climbed down the ladder with her books and put them on the

reserve table. Mrs. Allison didn't like W. P. A. girls. Jeannine saw the headlines again, on

Mrs. Allison's newspaper.

WOMAN APPEARS FROM NOWHERE ON BROADWAY, POLICEMAN

VANISHES "I don't--" (I have my cat, I have my room, I have my hot plate and my window

and the ailanthus tree).

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Cal outside in the street; he was walking bouncily

and his hat was tipped forward; he was going to have some silly thing or other to say about

being a reporter, little blond hatchet face and serious blue eyes; "I'll make it some day, baby."

Jeannine slipped into the stacks, hiding behind Mrs. Allison's P. M.-Post: Woman Appears

from Nowhere on Broadway, Policeman Vanishes. She daydreamed about buying fruit at the

free market, though her hands always sweat so when she bought things outside the

government store and she couldn't bargain. She would get cat food and feed Mr. Frosty the

first thing she got to her room; he ate out of an old china saucer. Jeannine imagined Mr.

Frosty rubbing against her legs, his tail waving. Mr. Frosty was marked black-and-white all

over. With her eyes closed, Jeannine saw him jump up on the mantelpiece and walk among

her things: her sea shells and miniatures. "No, no, no!" she said. The cat jumped off, knocking

over one of her Japanese dolls.

After dinner Jeannine took him out; then she washed the dishes and tried to mend

some of her old clothing. She'd go over the ration books. When it got dark she'd turn on the

radio for the evening program or she'd read, maybe call up from the drugstore and find out

about the boarding house in New Jersey. She might call her brother. She would certainly plant

the orange seeds and water them. She thought of Mr. Frosty stalking a bath-robe tail among

the miniature orange trees; he'd look like a tiger. If she could get empty cans at the

government store.

"Hey, baby?" It was a horrid shock. It was Cal.

"No," said Jeannine hastily. "I haven't got time."

"Baby?" He was pulling her arm. Come for a cup of coffee. But she couldn't. She had

to learn Greek (the book was in the reserve desk). There was too much to do.

He was frowning and pleading. She could feel the pillow under her back already, and

Mr. Frosty stalking around them, looking at her with his strange blue eyes, walking

widdershins around the lovers. He was part Siamese; Cal called him The Blotchy Skinny Cat.

Cal always wanted to do experiments with him, dropping him from the back of a chair,

putting things in his way, hiding from him. Mr. Frosty just spat at him now.

"Later," said Jeannine desperately. Cal leaned over her and whispered into her ear; it

made her want to cry. He rocked back and forth on his heels. Then he said, "I'll wait." He sat

on Jeannine's stack chair, picking up the newspaper, and added: "The vanishing woman.

That's you." She closed her eyes and daydreamed about Mr.

Frosty curled up on the mantel, peacefully asleep, all felinity in one circle.

Such a spoiled cat.

"Baby?" said Cal.

"Oh, all right," said Jeannine hopelessly, "all right."

I'll watch the ailanthus tree.

III

Janet Evason appeared on Broadway at two o'clock in the afternoon in her underwear. She

didn't lose her head. Though the nerves try to keep going in the previous track, she went into

evasive position the second after she arrived (good for her) with her fair, dirty hair flying and

her khaki shorts and shirt stained with sweat. When a policeman tried to take her arm, she

threatened him with le savate, but he vanished. She seemed to regard the crowds around her

with a special horror. The policeman reappeared in the same spot an hour later with no

memory of the interval, but Janet Evason had returned to her sleeping bag in the New Forest

only a few moments after her arrival. A few words of Pan-Russian and she was gone. The last

of them waked her bedmate in the New Forest.

"Go to sleep," said the anonymous friend-for-the-night, a nose, a brow, and a coil of

dark hair in the dappled moonlight.

"But who has been mucking about with my head!" said Janet Evason.

When Janet Evason returned to the New Forest and the experimenters at the Pole Station were

laughing their heads off (for it was not a dream) I sat in a cocktail party in mid-Manhattan. I

had just changed into a man, me, Joanna. I mean a female man, of course; my body and soul

were exactly the same.

So there's me also.

The first man to set foot on Whileaway appeared in a field of turnips on North Continent. He

was wearing a blue suit like a hiker's and a blue cap. The farm people had been notified. One,

seeing the blip on the tractor's infrared scan, came to get him; the man in blue saw a flying

machine with no wings but a skirt of dust and air. The county's repair shed for farm

machinery was nearby that week, so the tractor-driver led him there; he was not saying

anything intelligible. He saw a translucent dome, the surface undulating slightly. There was

an exhaust fan set in one side. Within the dome was a wilderness of machines: dead, on their

sides, some turned inside out, their guts spilling on to the grass. From an extended framework

under the roof swung hands as big as three men. One of these picked up a car and dropped it.

The sides of the car fell off. Littler hands sprang up from the grass.

"Hey, hey!" said the tractor-driver, knocking on a solid piece set into the wall. "It fell,

it passed out!"

"Send it back," said an operator, climbing out from under the induction helmet at the

far end of the shed. Four others came and stood around the man in the blue suit.

"Is he of steady mind?" said one.

"We don't know."

"Is he ill?"

"Hypnotize him and send him back."

The man in blue--if he had seen them--would have found them very odd: smooth-

faced, smooth-skinned, too small and too plump, their coveralls heavy in the seat. They wore

coveralls because you couldn't always fix things with the mechanical hands; sometimes you

had to use your own. One was old and had white hair; one was very young; one wore the long

hair sometimes affected by the youth of Whileaway, "to while away the time." Six pairs of

steady curious eyes studied the man in the blue suit.

"That, mes enfants," said the tractor-driver at last, "is a man.

"That is a real Earth man."

Sometimes you bend down to tie your shoe, and then you either tie your shoe or you don't;

you either straighten up instantly or maybe you don't. Every choice begets at least two worlds

of possibility, that is, one in which you do and one in which you don't; or very likely many

more, one in which you do quickly, one in which you do slowly, one in which you don't, but

hesitate, one in which you hesitate and frown, one in which you hesitate and sneeze, and so

on. To carry this line of argument further, there must be an infinite number of possible

universes (such is the fecundity of God) for there is no reason to imagine Nature as prejudiced

in favor of human action. Every displacement of every molecule, every change in orbit of

every electron, every quantum of light that strikes here and not there--each of these must

somewhere have its alternative.

It's possible, too, that there is no such thing as one clear line or strand of probability,

and that we live on a sort of twisted braid, blurring from one to the other without even

knowing it, as long as we keep within the limits of a set of variations that really make no

difference to us. Thus the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past one visits is never

one's own Past but always somebody else's; or rather, one's visit to the Past instantly creates

another Present (one in which the visit has already happened) and what you visit is the Past

belonging to that Present--an entirely different matter from your own Past. And with each

decision you make (back there in the Past) that new probable universe itself branches, creating

simultaneously a new Past and a new Present, or to put it plainly, a new universe. And when

you come back to your own Present, you alone know what the other Past was like and what

you did there.

Thus it is probable what Whileaway--a name for the Earth ten centuries from now, but

not our Earth, if you follow me--will find itself not at all affected by this sortie into somebody

else's past. And vice versa, of course. The two might as well be independent worlds.

Whileaway, you may gather, is in the future.

But not our future.

VII

I saw Jeannine shortly afterward, in a cocktail lounge where I had gone to watch Janet Evason

on television (I don't have a set). Jeannine looked very much out of place; I sat next to her and

she confided in me: "I don't belong here." I can't imagine how she got there, except by

accident. She looked as if she were dressed up for a costume film, sitting in the shadow with

her snood and her wedgies, a long-limbed, coltish girl in clothes a little too small for her.

Fashion (it seems) is recovering very leisurely from the Great Depression. Not here

and now, of course. "I don't belong here!" whispered Jeannine Dadier again, rather anxiously.

She was fidgeting. She said, "I don't like places like this."

She poked the red, turfed leather on the seat "What?" I said.

"I went hiking last vacation," she said big-eyed. "That's what I like. It's healthy."

I know it's supposed to be virtuous to run healthily through fields of flowers, but I like

bars, hotels, air-conditioning, good restaurants, and jet transport, and I told her so.

"Jet?" she said.

Janet Evason came on the television. It was only a still picture. Then we had the news

from Cambodia, Laos, Michigan State, Lake Canandaigua (pollution), and the spinning globe

of the world in full color with its seventeen man-made satellites going around it. The color

was awful. I've been inside a television studio before: the gallery running around the sides of

the barn, every inch of the roof covered with lights, so that the little woman-child with the

wee voice can pout over an oven or a sink. Then Janet Evason came on with that blobby look

people have on the tube. She moved carefully and looked at everything with interest. She was

well dressed (in a suit). The host or M. C. or whatever-you-call-him shook hands with her and

then everybody shook hands with everybody else, like a French wedding or an early silent

movie. He was dressed in a suit. Someone guided her to a seat and she smiled and nodded in

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