The Female Man

wife clicked in with a tray of drinks—scarlet skin-tights, no underwear, transparent high-heeled sandals like Cinderella’s—she gave us a homey, cute smile (she wears no make-up and is covered with freckles) and stilted out. Man talk. They seldom earn wives before fifty. Art, they say, has had a Renaissance among the Manlander rich, but this one doesn’t look like a patron: jowly, pot-bellied, the fierce redness of an athlete forced into idleness. His heart? High blood pressure? But they all cultivate their muscles and let their health and their minds rot. There is a rather peculiar wholesomeness to the home life of a Manland millionaire; Boss, for example, would not think of letting his wife go anywhere alone—that is, risk the anarchy of the streets—even with a bodyguard. He knows what’s due her. Their “women,” they say, civilize them. For an emotional relationship, turn to a “woman.”

What am I?

I know what I am, but what’s my brand name?

He stares rudely, unable to conceal it: What are they? What do they do? Do they screw each other? What does it feel like? (Try and tell him!) He doesn’t waste a second on the pink crosses in purdah; they’re only “women” anyhow (he thinks); I’m the soldier, I’m the enemy, I’m the other self, the mirror, the master-slave, the rebel, the heretic, the mystery that must be found out at all costs. (Maybe he thinks the three J’s have leprosy.) I don’t like this at all. J-one (Janet, by her gait) is examining the paintings on the wall; J-two and J-three stand hand in hand, Babes in the Wood. Boss finishes his drink, chewing on something in the bottom of it like a large teddy-bear, with comic deliberation: chomp, chomp. He waves grandly toward the other drinks, his wife having abandoned the tray on top of what looks for all the world like a New Orleans, white-enamelled, bordello piano (Whorehouse Baroque is very big in Manland right now).

I shook my head.

He said, “You have any children?” Pregnancy fascinates them. The rank-and-file have forgotten about menstruation; if they remembered, that would fascinate them. I shook my head again.

His face darkened.

“I thought,” said I mildly, “that we were going to talk business. I’d like to do just that. I don’t mean—that is, I don’t want to be unsociable, but time’s passing and I’d rather not discuss my personal life.”

He said: “You’re on my turf, you’ll Goddamn well talk about what I Goddamn well talk about.”

Let it pass. Control yourself. Hand them the victory in the Domination Sweepstakes and they usually forget whatever it is they were going to do anyway. He glared and brooded. Munched chips, crackers, saltsticks, what-not. Doesn’t really know what he wants. I waited.

“Personal life!” he muttered.

“It’s not really very interesting,” I volunteered,

“You kids screw each other?”

I said nothing.

He leaned forward. “Don’t get me wrong. I think you have a right to do it. I never bought this stuff about women alone having no sex. It’s not in human nature. Now, do you?”

“No,” I said.

He chuckled. “That’s right, cover up. Mind, I’m not condemning you. It’s only to be expected. Eh! If we’d kept together, men and women, none of this would have happened. Right?”

I put on my doubtful, slightly shamed, sly, well-you-know, all-purpose look. I have never known what it means, but they seem to. He laughed out loud. Another drink.

“Look here,” he said, “I expect you have more intelligence than most of those bitches or you wouldn’t be in this job. Right? Now it’s obvious to anyone that we need each other. Even in separate camps we still have to trade, you still have to have the babies, things haven’t changed that much. Now what I have in mind is an experimental project, a pilot project, you might say, in trying to get the two sides back together. Not all at once—”

“I—” I said. (They don’t hear you.)

“Not all at once,” (he continued, deaf as a post) “but a little bit at a time. We have to make haste deliberately. Right?”

I was silent. He leaned back. “I knew you’d see it,” he said. Then he made a personal remark: “You saw my wife?” I nodded.

“Natalie’s grand,” he said, taking some more chips. “She’s a grand girl. She made these. Deep-fried, I think.” (A weak woman handling a pot of boiling oil.) “Have some.”

To pacify him I took some and held them in my hand. Greasy stuff.

“Now,” he said, “you like the idea, right?”

“What?”

“The aversive therapy, for Chrissakes, the pilot group. Social relations, getting back together. I’m not like some of the mossbacks around here, you know, I don’t go for this inferior-superior business; 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 same. Always the same. I sit on, perfectly invisible, a chalk sketch of a woman. An idea. A walking ear.

“What we want” (he said, getting into stride) “is a world in which everybody can be himself. Him. Self. Not this insane forcing of temperaments. Freedom. Freedom for all. I admire you. Yes, let me say that I do indeed, and most frankly, admire you. You’ve broken through all that. Of course most women will not be able to do that—in fact, most women—given the choice—will hardly choose to give up domesticity altogether or even” (here he smiled) “even choose to spend much of their lives in the market-place or the factory. Most women will continue to choose the conservative caretaking of childhood, the formation of beautiful human relationships, and the care and service of others. Servants. Of. The. Race. Why should we sneer at that? And if we find there are certain traits connected with sex, like homemaking, like reasoning power, like certain temperamental factors, well of course there will be, but why derogate one sex or the other on that account? People” (braced for the peroration) “people are as they are. If—”

I rose to my feet. “Excuse me,” I said, “but business—”

“Damn your business!” he said in heat, this confused and irritable man. “Your business isn’t worth two cents compared with what I’m talking about!”

“Of course not, of course not,” I said soothingly.

“I should hope so!”

Numb, numb. With boredom. Invisible. Chained.

“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.