The Power

by Naomi Alderman

Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far.

she remembers that maybe she has always known it and it has always belonged to her. Hers to cup in her hand. Hers to command to strike.

Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.

She’s not found the company of men has had much to recommend it.

She listens at doors and around corners. She has always had this habit. A child in danger must learn to pay more attention to the adults than a child loved and cherished.

The voice says: You heard what she said. Eve passed the apple to Adam. Allie thinks, Maybe she was right to do it. Maybe that’s what the world needed. A bit of shaking up. Something new.

In Manfouha, to the west of the city, an elderly Ethiopian woman walks out of a half-built, scaffold-supported building into the street to greet them, her hands held high, calling out something that none of them can understand. Her back is bent, her shoulders hunched forward, her spine humped between her shoulder blades. Noor takes her palm between her two hands, and the older woman watches her like a patient observing a doctor’s treatment. Noor puts two fingers to her palm and shows her how to use the thing that must always have been in her, must have been waiting all the years of her life to emerge. This is how it works. The younger women can wake it up in the older ones; but from now on all women will have it.

The critical thing isn’t that fifteen-year-old girls can do it: you could contain that. The thing is that they can wake up this power in some of the older women. It raises questions. How long has this been possible? How did no one know until now?

It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

“Jesus is the son. But the son comes from the mother. Consider this: which is greater, God or the world?” They say, for they have learned this already from the nuns, “God is greater, because God created the world.” Eve says, “So the one who creates is greater than the thing created?” They say, “It must be so.” Then Eve says, “So which must be greater, the Mother or the Son?”

For the true religion is love, not fear. The strong mother cradling her child: that is love and that is truth.

“They have said to you that man and woman should live together as husband and wife. But I say unto you that it is more blessed for women to live together, to help one another, to band together and be a comfort one to the next.

De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. There’ll be an accompanying barrage of footage online. Lanzmann’s Shoah.

“It’s not for us to worry about the men,” she says. “Let them please themselves, as they always have. If they want to war with each other and to wander, let them go. We have each other. Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, my sisters.”

“God loves all of us,” she says, “and She wants us to know that She has changed Her garment merely. She is beyond female and male, She is beyond human understanding. But She calls your attention to that which you have forgotten. Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses, for what you can learn from her. Muslims: look to Fatima, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation. “You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbor the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies. God lies within you, God has returned to earth to teach you, in the form of this new power. Do not come to me looking for answers, for you must find the answers within yourself.”

“Now they will know,” shouts one woman into Tunde’s camera, “that they are the ones who should not walk out of their houses alone at night. They are the ones who should be afraid.”

In a letter to this news channel, a terrorist group calling itself Male Power has claimed responsibility for the attack, which destroyed a medical clinic catering to women’s health issues alongside a busy mall in Tucson, Arizona. They claim the attack is only the first “day of action,” intended to force the government to act against the so-called “enemies of man.” A spokesperson for the office of the President has just completed a press conference, giving the strong message that the government of the United States does not negotiate with terrorists and that the claims of this “conspiracy-theory splinter group” are nonsense.

Sometimes a bloke is better at that than a woman—less threatening; they’re better at diplomacy.

“At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.”

“Thus, we institute today this law, that each man in the country must have his passport and other official documents stamped with the name of his female guardian. Her written permission will be needed for any journey he undertakes. We know that men have their tricks and we cannot allow them to band together.

“Any man who does not have a sister, mother, wife or daughter, or other relative, to register him must report to the police station, where he will be assigned a work detail and shackled to other men for the protection of the public. Any man who breaks these laws will be subject to capital punishment. This applies also to foreign journalists and other workers.”

The Minister for Justice turns the page. There is a long list of proclamations printed close together in small type. Men are no longer permitted to drive cars. Men are no longer permitted to own businesses. Foreign journalists and photographers must be employed by a woman. Men are no longer permitted to gather together, even in the home, in groups larger than three, without a woman present. Men are no longer permitted to vote—because their years of violence and degradation have shown that they are not fit to rule or govern. A woman who sees a man flouting one of these laws in public is not only permitted but required to discipline him immediately. Any woman who fails in this duty will be considered an enemy of the state, an accessory to the crime, one who attempts to undermine the peace and harmony of the nation.

In the room, Tunde flicks on the TV. Kristen is saying, The fourth-quarter forecast isn’t looking good. Matt is laughing attractively and saying, Now, I don’t understand that kind of thing at all, but I’ll tell you what I do know about: apple-bobbing.

The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightning strike, it is obscene and uncontained.

A human being is made not by our own will but by that same organic, inconceivable, unpredictable, uncontrollable process that drives the unfurling leaves in season and the tiny twigs to bud and the roots to spread in tangled complications. Even a stone is not the same as any other stone. There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong. Our dreams are more true than our waking.

Some of the worst excesses against men were never—in my opinion anyway—perpetrated against women in the time before the Cataclysm. Three or four thousand years ago, it was considered normal to cull nine in ten boy babies. Fuck, there are still places today where boy babies are routinely aborted, or have their dicks “curbed.” This can’t have happened to women in the time before the Cataclysm. We talked about evolutionary psychology before—it would have made no evolutionary sense for cultures to abort female babies on a large scale or to fuck about with their reproductive organs! So it’s not “natural” to us to live like this. It can’t be. I can’t believe it is. We can choose differently.

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.