The Female Man

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 distrust of the mother and the reluctance to form a tie that will engage every level of emotion, all the person, all the time. And the necessity for artificial dissatisfactions.

"Without which" (says Dunyasha Bernadetteson, op. cit.) "we would become so happy we would sit down on our fat, pretty behinds and soon we would start starving, nyet?"

But there is too, under it all, the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries, mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies and circular mathematical proofs (over which aficionados are moved to tears), and the best graffiti in this or any other world.

Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work.

VII