The Female Man

by Joanna Russ

She showed him all her teeth. He saw a smile. “You’re beautiful, honey.” “Thank you. I go now.” (good for her) “Nah!” and he took us by the wrist. “Nah, you’re not going.” “Let me go,” said Janet. Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you. Can’t I rescue myself? No. Why not? All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party. Everyone seemed amused. “Give us a good-bye kiss,” said the host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine, so to speak. I pushed him away. “What’sa matter, you some kinda prude?” he said and enfolding us in his powerful arms, et cetera—well, not so very powerful as all that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. If you scream, people say you’re melodramatic; if you submit, you’re masochistic; if you call names, you’re a bitch. Hit him and he’ll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn’t come?

She’s a bright girl. She learned in her thirteenth year that you can get old films of Mae West or Marlene Dietrich (who is a Vulcan; look at the eyebrows) after midnight on UHF if you know where to look, at fourteen that pot helps, at fifteen that reading’s even better. She learned, wearing her rimless glasses, that the world is full of intelligent, attractive, talented women who manage to combine careers with their primary responsibilities as wives and mothers and whose husbands beat them.

I've never slept with a girl. I couldn’t. I wouldn't want to. That’s abnormal and I'm not, although you can't be normal unless you do what you want and you can't be normal unless you love men. To do what I wanted would be normal, unless what I wanted was abnormal, in which case it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didn’t want to do, which isn’t normal.

There is this business of the narcissism of love, the fourth-dimensional curve that takes you out into the other who is the whole world, which is really a twist back into yourself, only a different self.

The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the passive player. I’m never impressed—no woman ever is—it’s just a cue that you like me and I’m supposed to like that. If you really like me, maybe I can get you to stop. Stop; I want to talk to you! Stop; I want to see you! Stop; I’m dying and disappearing! SHE: Isn’t it just a game? HE: Yes, of course. SHE: And if you play the game, it means you like me, doesn’t it? HE: Of course. SHE: Then if it’s just a game and you like me, you can stop playing. Please stop. HE: No. SHE: Then I won’t play. HE: Bitch! You want to destroy me. I’ll show you. (He plays harder) SHE: All right. I’m impressed. HE: You really are sweet and responsive after all. You’ve kept your femininity. You’re not one of those hysterical feminist bitches who wants to be a man and have a penis. You’re a woman. SHE: Yes. (She kills herself)

As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e. her fore-bears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree above her dropped bang thud on her head: OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY.

She is the victim of a natural, but ignorant and unjustified alarm; she thinks that being grabbed is not just a gesture but is altogether out of line.

HE: I can’t stand stupid, vulgar women who read Love Comix and have no intellectual interests. ME: Oh my, neither can I. HE: I really admire refined, cultivated, charming women who have careers. ME: Oh my, so do I. HE: Why do you think those awful, stupid, vulgar, commonplace women get so awful? ME: Well, probably, not wishing to give any offense and after considered judgment and all that and very tentatively, with the hope that you won’t jump on me—I think it’s at least partly your fault. (Long silence) HE: You know, on second thought, I think bitchy, castrating, unattractive, neurotic women are even worse. Besides, you’re showing your age. And your figure’s going. OR HE: Darling, why must you work part-time as a rug salesman? SHE: Because I wish to enter the marketplace and prove that in spite of my sex I can take a fruitful part in the life of the community and earn what our culture proposes as the sign and symbol of adult independence—namely money. HE: But darling, by the time we deduct the cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax bracket, and your box lunches from your pay, it actually costs us money for you to work. So you see, you aren’t making money at all. You can’t make money. Only I can make money. Stop working. SHE: I won’t. And I hate you. HE: But darling, why be irrational? It doesn’t matter that you can’t make money because I can make money. And after I’ve made it, I give it to you, because I love you. So you don't have to make money. Aren’t yo...

For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman at all but One Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS! there is this giggling and this chuckling and this reddening and this Uriah Heep twisting and writhing and this fiddling with ties and fixing of buttons and making of allusions and quoting of courtesies and this self-conscious gallantry plus a smirky insistence on my physique—all this dreary junk just to please me. If you get good at being One Of The Boys it goes away. Of course there’s a certain disembodiment involved, but the sandwich board goes; I back-slapped and laughed at blue jokes, especially the hostile kind. Underneath you keep saying pleasantly but firmly No no no no no no. But it’s necessary to my job and I like my job. I suppose they decided that my tits were not of the best kind, or not real, or that they were someone else’s (my twin sister’s), so they split me from the neck up; as I said, it demands a certain disembodiment I thought that surely when I had acquired my Ph.D. and my professorship and my tennis medal and my engineer’s contract and my ten thousand a year and my full-time housekeeper and my reputation and the respect of my colleagues, when I had grown strong, tall, and beautiful, when my I.Q. shot past 200, when I had genius, then I could take off my sandwich board. I left my smiles and happy laughter at home. I’m not a woman;...

I purchased a copy of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women; now who can object to John Stuart Mill? He’s dead. But the clerk did. With familiar archness he waggled his finger at me and said “tsk tsk”; all that writhing and fussing began again, what fun it was for him to have someone automatically not above reproach, and I knew beyond the shadow of a hope that to be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgment is not human and whose services are at anyone’s command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the test. This is until you’re forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one. Nothing can put you above this or below this or beyond it or outside of it nothing, nothing, nothing at all, not your muscles or your brains, not being one of the boys or being one of the girls or writing books or writing letters or screaming or wringing your hands or cooking lettuce or being too tall or being too short or traveling or staying at home or ugliness or acne or diffidence or cowardice or perpetual shrinking and old age. In the latter cases you’re only doubly damned.

Then there are the birds, with (as Shaw so nobly puts it) the touching poetry of their loves and nestings in which the males sing so well and beautifully and the females sit on the nest, and the baboons who get torn in half (female) by the others (male), and the chimpanzees with their hierarchy (male) written about by professors (male) with their hierarchy, who accept (male) the (male) view of (female) (male). You can see what’s happening. At heart I must be gentle, for I never even thought of the praying mantis or the female wasp; but I guess I am just loyal to my own phylum.

We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them. Shrill … vituperative … no concern for the future of society … maunderings of antiquated feminism … selfish femlib … needs a good lay … this shapeless book … of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond … twisted, neurotic … some truth buried in a largely hysterical … of very limited interest, I should … another tract for the trash-can … burned her bra and thought that … no characterization, no plot … really important issues are neglected while … hermetically sealed … women’s limited experience … another of the screaming sisterhood … a not very appealing aggressiveness … could have been done with wit if the author had … deflowering the pretentious male … a man would have given his right arm to … hardly girlish … a woman’s book … another shrill polemic which the … a mere male like myself can hardly … a brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria which … feminine lack of objectivity … this pretense at a novel … trying to shock … the tired tricks of the anti-novelists … how often must a poor critic have to … the usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism … denial of the profound sexual polarity which … an all too womanly refusal to face facts … pseudo-masculine brusqueness … the ladies’-magazine level … trivial topics like housework and the predictable screams of … those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate will … un...

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.) “Are you lonely? Good! This shows that you have Feminine Incompleteness; get married and do all your husband’s personal services, buck him up when he’s low, teach him about sex (if he wants you to), praise his technique (if he doesn’t), have a fam...

Work is power, but they farm out everything to us without the slightest protest—Hell, they get lazier and lazier. They let us do their thinking for them. They even let us do their feeling for them. They are riddled with duality and the fear of duality. And the fear of themselves. I think its in their blood. What human being would—sweating with fear and rage—mark out two equally revolting paths and insist that her fellow-creatures tread one or the other?

I believe in equality. If we get back together, it has to be on that basis. Equals.” “But—” I said, meaning no offense. “It has to be on the basis of equality! I believe that. And don’t think the man in the street can’t be sold on it, propaganda to the contrary. We’re brought up on this nonsense of woman’s place and woman’s nature when we don’t even have women around to study. What do we know! I’m not any less masculine because I’ve done woman’s work; does it take less intelligence to handle an operation like the nurseries and training camps than it does to figure the logistics of War Games? Hell, no! Not if you do it rationally and efficiently; business is business.” Let it go. Perhaps it’ll play itself out; they do sometimes. I sat attentively still while he gave me the most moving plea for my own efficiency, my rationality, my status as a human being. He ended by saying anxiously, “Do you think it’ll work?” “Well—” I began. “Of course, of course,” (interrupted this damned fool once again) “you’re not a diplomat, but we have to work through the men we have, don’t we? Individual man can accomplish ends where Mass-man fails. Eh?” I nodded, picturing myself as Individual Man. The “woman’s work” explains it, of course; it makes him dangerously irritable. He had gotten now into the poignant part, the mystifying and moving account of our Sufferings. This is where the tears come in. It helps to be able to classify what they’re going to do, but Lord! it’s depressing, all the sam...

“That’s the trouble with you women, you can’t see anything in the abstract!”

He wants me to cringe. I really think so. Not the content of what I say but the endless, endless feeding of his vanity, the shaky structure of self. Even the intelligent ones. “Don’t you appreciate what I’m trying to do for you?” Kiss-me-I’m-a-goodguy. “Don’t you have any idea how important this is?” Sliding down the slippery gulf into invisibility. “This could make history!” Even me, with all my training! “Of course, we have a tradition to uphold.” It’ll be slow. “—we’ll have to go slowly. One thing at a time.” If it’s practical. “We’ll have to find out what’s practicable. This may be—uh—visionary. It may be in advance of its time.” Can’t legislate morality. “We can’t force people against their inclinations and we have generations of conditioning to overcome. Perhaps in a decade—” Perhaps never. “—perhaps never. But men of good will—” Did he hear that? “—and women, too, of course, you understand that the word ‘men’ includes the word ‘women’; it’s only usage—” Everyone must have his own abortion. “—and not really important. You might even say” (he giggles) “ ‘everyone and his husband’ or ‘everyone will be entitled to his own abortion’ ” (he roars) “but I want you to go back to your people and tell them—” It’s unofficial. “—that we’re prepared to negotiate. But it can’t be official. You must understand that I face considerable opposition. And most women—not, you, of course; you’re different—well, most women aren’t used to thinking a thing through like this. They can’t do it...

Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people’s minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those shadowy feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightning that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance—which was not chance—had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested itself in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this: She was Cunt. She had “lost” something. Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick—but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had “gotten away with” something (possibly what she had “lost”). And there I was, listening at eleven years of age: She was out late at night. She was in the wrong part of town. Her skirt was too short and that provoked him. She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk.

Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want to ensure the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come to for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job, and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be so wretched and so full of venom in this best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little out-worn. As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.

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!

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 ...

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.)

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.

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).

He went on, low and urbane, not mocking me, I think, but with the self-confidence of someone who has always had money and strength to spare, who doesn’t know what it is to be second-class or provincial. Which is very odd, because the day before, I would have said that was an exact description of me.