The Female Man

On Whileaway they have a saying: When the mother and child are separated they both howl, the child because it is separated from the mother, the mother because she has to go back to work. Whileawayans bear their children at about thirty—singletons or twins as the demographic pressures require. These children have as one genotypic parent the biological mother (the “body-mother') while the non-bearing parent contributes the other ovum ('other mother'). Little Whileawayans are to their mothers both sulk and swank, fun and profit, pleasure and contemplation, a show of expensiveness, a slowing-down of life, an opportunity to pursue whatever interests the women have been forced to neglect previously, and the only leisure they have ever had—or will have again until old age. A family of thirty persons may have as many as four mother-and-child pairs in the common nursery at one time. Food, cleanliness, and shelter are not the mother’s business; Whileawayans say with a straight face that she must be free to attend to the child’s “finer spiritual needs.” Then they go off by themselves and roar. The truth is they don’t want to give up the leisure. Eventually we come to a painful scene. At the age of four or five these independent, blooming, pampered, extremely intelligent little girls are torn weeping and arguing from their thirty relatives and sent to the regional school, where they scheme and fight for weeks before giving in; some of them have been known to construct deadfalls or small bombs (having picked this knowledge up from their parents) in order to obliterate their instructors. Children are cared for in groups of five and taught in groups of differing sizes according to the subject under discussion. Their education at this point is heavily practical: how to run machines, how to get along without machines, law, transportation, physical theory, and so on. They learn gymnastics and mechanics. They learn practical medicine.

They learn how to swim and shoot. They continue (by themselves) to dance, to sing, to paint, to play, to do everything their Mommies did. At puberty they are invested with Middle-Dignity and turned loose; children have the right of food and lodging wherever they go, up to the power of the community to support them. They do not go back home.

Some do, of course, but then neither Mother may be there; people are busy; people are traveling; there’s always work, and the big people who were so kind to a four-year-old have little time for an almost-adult. “And everything’s so small,” said one girl.

Some, wild with the desire for exploration, travel all around the world—usually in the company of other children—bands of children going to visit this or that, or bands of children about to reform the power installations, are a common sight on Whileaway.

The more profound abandon all possessions and live off the land just above or below the forty-eighth parallel; they return with animal heads, scars, visions.

Some make a beeline for their callings and spend most of puberty pestering part-time actors, bothering part-time musicians, cajoling part-time scholars.

Fools! (say the older children, who have been through it all) Don’t be in such a hurry. You’ll work soon enough.

At seventeen they achieve Three-Quarters Dignity and are assimilated into the labor force. This is probably the worst time in a Whileawayan’s life. Groups of friends are kept together if the members request it and if it is possible, but otherwise these adolescents go where they’re needed, not where they wish; nor can they join the Geographical Parliament nor the Professional Parliament until they have entered a family and developed that network of informal associations of the like-minded which is Whileaway’s substitute for everything else but family.

They provide human companionship to Whileawayan cows, who pine and die unless spoken to affectionately.

They run routine machinery, dig people out of landslides, oversee food factories (with induction helmets on their heads, their toes controlling the green-peas, their fingers the vats and controls, their back muscles the carrots, and their abdomens the water supply).

They lay pipe (again, by induction).

They fix machinery.

They are not allowed to have anything to do with malfunctions or breakdowns “on foot,” as the Whileawayans say, meaning in one’s own person and with tools in one’s own hands, without the induction helmets that make it possible to operate dozens of waldoes at just about any distance you please. That’s for veterans.

They do not meddle with computers “on foot” nor join with them via induction. That’s for old veterans.

They learn to like a place only to be ordered somewhere else the next day, commandeered to excavate coastline or fertilize fields, kindly treated by the locals (if any) and hideously bored.

It gives them something to look forward to.

At twenty-two they achieve Full Dignity and may either begin to learn the heretofore forbidden jobs or have their learning formally certificated. They are allowed to begin apprenticeships. They may marry into pre-existing families or form their own. Some braid their hair. By now the typical Whileawayan girl is able to do any job on the planet, except for specialties and extremely dangerous work. By twenty-five she has entered a family, thus choosing her geographical home base (Whileawayans travel all the time). Her family probably consists of twenty to thirty other persons, ranging in age from her own to the early fifties. (Families tend to age the way people do; thus new groupings are formed again in old age. Approximately every fourth girl must begin a new or join a nearly-new family.)

Sexual relations—which have begun at puberty—continue both inside the family and outside it, but mostly outside it. Whileawayans have two explanations for this. “Jealousy,” they say for the first explanation, and for the second, “Why not?”

Whileawayan psychology locates the basis of Whileawayan character in the early indulgence, pleasure, and flowering which is drastically curtailed by the separation from the mothers. This (it says) gives Whileawayan life its characteristic independence, its dissatisfaction, its suspicion, and its tendency toward a rather irritable solipsism.

“Without which” (said the same Dunyasha Bernadetteson, q.v.) “we would all become contented slobs, nicht war?'

Eternal optimism hides behind this dissatisfaction, however; Whileawayans cannot forget that early paradise and every new face, every new day, every smoke, every dance, brings back life’s possibilities. Also sleep and eating, sunrise, weather, the seasons, machinery, gossip, and the eternal temptations of art.

They work too much. They are incredibly tidy.

Yet on the old stone bridge that links New City, South Continent, with Varya’s Little Alley Ho-ho is chiseled:

You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.

If one is lucky, one’s hair turns white early; if—as in old Chinese poetry—one is indulging oneself, one dreams of old age. For in old age the Whileawayan woman—no longer as strong and elastic as the young—has learned to join with calculating machines in the state they say can’t be described but is most like a sneeze that never comes off. It is the old who are given the sedentary jobs, the old who can spend their days mapping, drawing, thinking, writing, collating, composing. In the libraries old hands come out from under the induction helmets and give you the reproductions of the books you want; old feet twinkle below the computer shelves, hanging down like Humpty Dumpty’s; old ladies chuckle eerily while composing The Blasphemous Cantata (a great favorite of Ysaye’s) or mad-moon cityscapes which turn out to be do-able after all; old brains use one part in fifty to run a city (with checkups made by two sulky youngsters) while the other forty-nine parts riot in a freedom they haven’t had since adolescence.

The young are rather priggish about the old on Whileaway. They don’t really approve of them.

Taboos on Whileaway: sexual relations with anybody considerably older or younger than oneself, waste, ignorance, offending others without intending to.

And of course the usual legal checks on murder and theft—both those crimes being actually quite difficult to commit. ('See,” says Chilia, “it’s murder if it’s sneaky or if she doesn’t want to fight. So you yell ‘Olaf!’ and when she turns around, then—”)

No Whileawayan works more than three hours at a time on any one job, except in emergencies.

No Whileawayan marries monogamously. (Some restrict their sexual relations to one other person—at least while that other person is nearby—but there is no legal arrangement.) Whileawayan psychology again refers to the