The Female Man

by Joanna Russ

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.