Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  To be sure, P. Burke/Delphi has to be taught to be adorable, that is, to manage the performance of femininity “DELICIOUSLY.” Her “training” is “exactly what you’d call a charm course.” Yet, as Tiptree writes in her toughest tough-guy lingo, P. Burke is exceptionally “apt” because somewhere “in that horrible body is a gazelle, a houri, who would have been buried forever without this crazy chance. See the ugly duckling go!” 47 Forty years ago, we’d have considered it a tale of the madwoman in the computer, though its author would have seemed to be a Raymond Chandler type, writing noir sci-fi. For, deploying a macho style, Tiptree writes this story slangily without any indication of sympathy for the two-in-one heroines.

  Indeed, whereas P. Burke and Delphi are (together) performing femininity, their author is deftly performing masculinity, even though Allie Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr., are (together) interrogating the Delphic oracle of the Feminine. Miss America? Barbie? Are they no more than dummies—and if you aren’t a dummy, are you just an ugly duckling? As for the reader, the rough tough narrator addresses “us” on and off as “dummy,” “zombie,” etc. We too, “he” implies, would be taken in by Delphi’s fake seductiveness. But while we are complicit with the narrator in our attraction to Delphi, the tough-guy narrator is “himself” complicit in a dynamic that reduces women to dummies or ugly ducklings, a society shaped by more of the many “things that go wrong with men.”

  Using a different, later pseudonym—Raccoona Sheldon—Alice Sheldon dissected more of the major ways in which men go wrong. “The Screwfly Solution” tracks the dilemma of a scientist setting up “a biological pest-control program” 48 in Colombia through a series of letters and other documents sent to him by his wife in Michigan. Relatively cheerful to begin with, she writes him about a new misogy­nistic cult calling themselves “the Sons of Adam.” Somehow, they are associated with a series of “femicides” recounted in a stack of newspaper clippings that a colleague has asked her to send him.

  The situation darkens as the husband understands that the brutal femicides of the Sons of Adam are multiplying like, well, a plague. Racing home to protect his wife and his young daughter, he realizes en route that he, too, has been infected by the pandemic of misogynistic blood lust. Dreaming of erotic fulfillment with his wife, he sees that the “sex was . . . driving some engine of death.” A new missive from his colleague includes a note from another professor: “A potential difficulty for our species has always been implicit in the close linkage between the behavioral expression of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male,” suggesting that the “present crisis” might be “viral or enzymatic in origin.” 49

  Returning home infected, the scientist murders his cherished daughter and then kills himself. In the end, his wife takes refuge in the northern woods, maybe the last human female left. What is the “screwfly solution”? It’s a method of insect control based on the introduction of sterile males into a target population, thereby preventing reproduction. In Raccoona Sheldon’s story, a thought experiment reversing this technique, human male sexuality is exaggerated into blood lust, killing off the females of the species so that no humans can reproduce. Why? Visitors from outer space are scoping out our real estate.

  The slick sci-fi ending, blaming the catastrophic pandemic on extraterrestrial intervention, helps divert attention from the philosophical center of the tale: its analysis of “the close linkage between the behavioral expression of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male.” While “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” suggests that femininity is no more than a performance, “The Screwfly Solution” implies that masculinity might be biologically vulnerable to violent tendencies, sexual lust always in danger of metastasizing into blood lust.

  Compared to such dystopic fantasies, Tiptree’s exuberant representation of a utopia appears in her Hugo Award–winning “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?,” a novella that might be a revision of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.50 A classic space opera, this tale traces the misadventure of three lost astronauts—the Bible-quoting Major Norman Davis, his bawdy second-in-command Captain Bud Geirr, and their sensitive onboard scientist, Dr. Orren Lorimer—as they find themselves and their ship, the Sunbird, spun forward three centuries in time and rescued from death in the sky by the all-woman crew of the Gloria, a big “low-thrust” spaceship from the future that looks, says Bud, “like a flying trailer park.” Even before they board the Gloria, Lorimer and his companions are told that they and their world, in particular their sex, are part of history. Over their radio, one woman explains that “the first Sunbird mission was lost in space.” But in fact, the three astronauts now enter a society in which men, with their “rigid authority code” and its “dominance-submission structure,” no longer exist.51

  The women’s utopian world, it turns out, is not only egalitarian but also sophisticated and low-tech. As Lorimer enters the women’s space, he notes that the “future is a vast bright cylinder, its whole inner surface festooned with unidentifiable objects, fronds of green”—which turn out to be greenhouse plants, chickens, somebody’s leather work, somebody else’s beading rack, a loom, and a “damned kudzu vine.” In a spoof of twentieth-century American domesticity, this futuristic Herland is stuffed with what, from Lorimer’s irascible masculine point of view, is hatefully “cozy.”52

  Yet, as Tiptree points out, this world works, in every sense of the word. Not only do its inhabitants explore space, but on their home planet—Earth—they farm, fish, and manufacture necessities. More strikingly, because all the males perished in an apocalyptic epidemic, these women clone themselves and educate their daughters. They need no government, but collaboratively organize their industries. And when Bud openly masturbates after his attempt to rape one of them, the intended “victim” efficiently catches his semen in a plastic bag—presumably for use in introducing another genotype into their culture.

  The dystopian behavior of the men in “Houston, Houston” is even more central to the story than is the utopian equilibrium of the women. For this novella is not only another analysis of “the human male” but an elegy for him. The three astronauts are, to be sure, stereotypes. From the intellectual Lorimer’s perspective, the Major and the Captain are “alpha males”—but two different versions. Major Davis, the Bible-quoting commander, dramatizes the “dominance-submission” structure of the space crew he rules, not just because of his technical expertise but because of his patriarchal theology. His underling, “Bud” Geirr, is a bad buddy, a foul-mouthed would-be rapist.

  Yet Lorimer can’t help admiring just those Alpha-male qualities that endanger the serene community of the Gloria. When Bud sexually assaults one of the women, provoking a melee in the spaceship’s greenhouse, Major Davis pulls out a gun, declaring, “Let the women learn in silence and all subjection.” But by the end of the tale, the men, alpha or not, have been overwhelmed by the greater efficiency of the women, who are, after all, ingenious survivors. As the women tow the supine Major and his fallen Captain out of the greenhouse, Lorimer declares, “elegiacally,” that “they were good men,” and knows he is “speaking for it all, for Dave’s Father, for Bud’s manhood, for Cro-Magnon, for the dinosaurs too, maybe,” noting rebelliously that he and his fellow men “built your precious civilization.” One of the women responds that though “we enjoy your inventions and we do appreciate your evolutionary role[,] . . . what you protected people from was largely other males, wasn’t it? We’ve just had an extraordinary demonstration in that. You’ve brought history to life for us.”53

  There is no Houston at the end of this story to “read” the tale and its moral, Tiptree implies, nor should there be. The women of the Gloria aren’t “Amazonia” or “Liberation.” They are quite simply the human race, as if bringing to life the recent T-shirt slogan THE FUTURE IS FEMALE. The human male with his obsessive “dominance-submission” is gone like the dinosaurs. Even while impersonating masculinity, Tiptree/Sheldon seems to wonder: what redemption can there be for th
e dystopian “masculinity” we have known?

  JOANNA RUSS’S MISANDRY

  Joanna Russ’s The Female Man—published in the middle of the seventies but written at the very beginning of the decade—turned away from masculinity, except in its most melodramatic forms, to examine the spectrum of possibilities that constitute the feminine. In this experimental novel, Russ dramatized four possible iterations of the world in which one woman, the author/narrator Joanna, might live. Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, Jael: together this quartet of women constitutes the split-up consciousness of the “female man”—that is, the Woman Human Being. Elegantly constructed as it is, however, The Female Man is not dispassionate. While Tiptree examines masculinity by impersonating the masculine, Russ dreams of murdering cartoon men.

  Tiptree, an admirer of Russ’s, instantly recognized the all-consuming anger that flames through The Female Man and other works. “Holy peanut butter, dear writer,” she told Russ in one letter, “do you imagine that anyone with half a functional neuron can read your work and not have his fingers smoked by the bitter, multi-layered anger in it? It smells and smolders like a volcano buried so long and deadly it is just beginning to wonder whether it can explode.”54 Explode it did, throughout the seventies and into the eighties. “Gee, isn’t it awful for women to hate men?” Russ asked sardonically in The Village Voice in a piece titled “The New Misandry,” adding bitterly, “What male reviewer found Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’ one-20th as revolting as Solanas’s ‘Scum Manifesto’? Of course Solanas went out and did it, but then so do many men”55—including the serial rapist-killer at the center of Frenzy.

  The plot of The Female Man is triggered by the appearance on earth of Janet, an emissary from the utopian all-female planet of Whileaway—a place that is in the future “but not our future.”56 Janet appears in what is simultaneously the impoverished society of Jeannine—an America where the Depression has never ended and the Second World War has never happened—and the more “realistic” (though equally depressing) society of Joanna, who inhabits the real American seventies. Jeannine, a dreamy librarian, longs for marriage yet is ambivalent about the sexual practices of her impotent boyfriend. Joanna takes Janet to a party where a panoply of goofy men make passes at her, while Swiftian cartoon women—Lamentissa, Aphrodissa, etc.—mouth stereotypically “feminine” anti-feminist platitudes. Clearly Jeannine and Joanna are products of dystopian culture, whereas Janet’s utopian Whileaway, where she lives with her wife, Vittoria, enacts a fantasy of lesbian separatism, not unlike that of the community on Tiptree’s Gloria.

  The true incarnation of feminist/female rage comes onstage toward the end: Jael, the murderess, appears with subtly concealed steel claws and teeth. She is from a future of endless sexual warfare where Manland and Womanland are in mortal opposition. When she whisks the other three off to Manland, she demonstrates her skill as an assassin, violently eviscerating a smug bossy type. After this, she returns to her home, where she makes love to a beautiful robot named “Davy”—a sex toy not unlike Delphi in Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.”

  As Pat Wheeler put it, “Russ’s seminal novel . . . keyed into the zeitgeist of radical feminist politics of the day”—the disgust with stale sex roles, the yearning for a utopia of one’s own, and the rage at pompous patriarchs.57 Indeed, like Rich, Russ was demanding to replace not just the deadly dystopia that created Jael but also the humdrum dystopias inhabited by Jeannine and Joanna with Janet’s utopia right away. At the same time, recognizing the impossibility of such a project, she was mourning its impossibility. The sardonic yet lyrical passage with which she concludes the novel comically summarizes her ambition for change.

  Go, little book, trot through Texas and Vermont and Alaska and Maryland and Washington and Florida and Canada and England and France; bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millet [sic], Greer, Firestone, and all the rest. . . . Wash your face and take your place without a fuss in the Library of Congress. . . . Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. . . .

  Rejoice, little book!

  For on that day, we will be free.58

  URSULA LE GUIN’S ANDROGYNY

  Whereas Tiptree was a widely traveled woman posing as a widely traveled man, and Russ was an impassioned lesbian academic, Ursula K. Le Guin usually defined herself as “a Portland housewife.”59 Yet she was no ordinary homemaker, of the kind Friedan had profiled. The daughter of the distinguished anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, she married Charles Le Guin in her early 20s and settled down to mothering three children in the fifties and sixties. While her husband worked as a history professor, Le Guin started writing speculative fiction. Her householding partnership with her husband seems neither to have obstructed her productivity nor quelled her ambition. Her gender-bending chef d’oeuvre, The Left Hand of Darkness, appeared in 1969 and inspired plaudits from both Russ and Tiptree, who became frequent correspondents.

  A detailed ethnography of the planet Gethen (or Winter, in English), The Left Hand of Darkness examines the sociocultural implications of an androgynous world and might well have influenced Carolyn Heilbrun’s 1973 meditation on gender, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. Le Guin’s Gethenians are sexually neutral for twenty-six days of the month, and then they go into “kemmer,” or what we would consider estrus in certain animals. When in kemmer, any Gethenian can become male or female; if female and impregnated, “she” remains female throughout pregnancy and lactation. (Even the king can be pregnant, one of Le Guin’s favorite adages.) Then “she” reverts to androgynous neutrality. Many Gethenians, as Le Guin’s terrestrial narrator explains, have both birthed and sired children, though descent is traced through the maternal line.

  And “consider,” Le Guin declares, the meaning of such ambisexuality. For one thing, “anyone can turn his hand to anything [since] everybody has the same [sexual] risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.” And “consider,” too, that a “child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father,” so there “is no myth of Oedipus on Winter.” Moreover, “there is no unconsenting sex, no rape,” nor is there any “division of humanity into strong and weak halves. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened or changed, on Winter.”60 Nor is there war on Winter, because the testosterone-fueled aggressiveness that animates Terran masculinity is absent in ambisexual beings. The Gethenians are capable of treachery, but they have no armies, no battles.

  Le Guin’s experimental analysis of ambisexuality was the most striking achievement of feminist science fiction in the twentieth century. But Le Guin’s planet Winter was hardly a utopia: the novel’s plot features intrigue, betrayal, a desperate flight across the icy crest of the world, and the death of the Gethenian whom the narrator has come to love. Moreover, as Le Guin herself conceded, her representation of ambisexuality was marred by her use of the pronoun “he” throughout the book.61 Though we know that her Gethenians are both women and men, the pronoun leaves us imagining them as men—who might just become pregnant.

  Within a few years, Le Guin addressed this problem: when republishing another Gethenian tale, “Winter’s King” (1969), in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), she changed the problematic “he” of the original version to “she,” explaining that “in revising the story for this edition, . . . I use the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians—while preserving certain masculine titles such as King and Lord, just to remind one of the ambiguity.” 62 And several decades later, another story similarly uses “she” for everyone who is not in kemmer.63

  A decade later, Le Guin produced a more utopian vision of our own planet in the short story “Sur,” an exhilarating account of an all-woman expedition to the South Pole. In 1908, her narrator tells us, a group of nine South American women—from Peru, Argentina, and Chile—ventured through the Antarctic to the South Pole with the help of a kindly ship’s captain, w
ho deposited the party on the otherwise unreachable ice shelf. Le Guin provides her story with a map of the area explored by the dauntless women, not unlike the maps usually appended to accounts of the expeditions led by such male polar explorers as Scott, Shackleton, and Amundson.

  However, her female explorers are very different from their male contemporaries. For one thing, the women are less hierarchical: from the start, they decide that they’ll be “all crew.” Then, arriving at “Hut Point,” the polar station made famous in Scott’s Voyage of the Discovery (1905), they are repelled by the “mean disorder” left behind by the male explorers: “Empty meat tins lay about; biscuits were spilled on the floor.” But then, they remind themselves, “housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.” 64

  That these women are no amateurs is revealed by the base camp they make for themselves. Digging into the ice, they carve out an elegant dwelling with comfortable burrows for sleeping, a stove that draws well, skylights, and even sculptures—whose maker “cannot bring them north. That is the penalty of carving in water.” Then, for a while, as they explore the frozen landscape, they note that there “was nothing to see at all,” yet because they had “come to that white place on the map, that void, . . . we flew and sang like sparrows.” 65

  As they explore the region further, they begin to bestow revisionary names on notable features of the terrain. What Shackleton called “the Beardmore” glacier, they rename the “Florence Nightingale” glacier; various peaks are called “Bolivar’s Big Nose,” “Whose Toe?,” and “Throne of Our Lady of the Southern Cross.” Finally, reports the narrator, on “the twenty-second of December, 1909,” they reach the South Pole, a “dreary place,” and decide to leave “no sign there, for some man longing to be first might come some day, and find it, and know then what a fool he had been, and break his heart.” 66