The Female Man

I'll tell you how I turned into a man.

First I had to turn into a woman.

For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman at all but One Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS! there is this giggling and this chuckling and this reddening and this Uriah Heep twisting and writhing and this fiddling with ties and fixing of buttons and making of allusions and quoting of courtesies and this self-conscious gallantry plus a smirky insistence on my physique-all this dreary junk just to please me. If you get good at being One Of The Boys it goes away. Of course there's a certain disembodiment involved, but the sandwich board goes; I back-slapped and laughed at blue jokes, especially the hostile kind. Underneath you keep saying pleasantly but firmly No no no no no no. But it's necessary to my job and I like my job. I suppose they decided that my tits were not of the best kind, or not real, or that they were someone else's (my twin sister's), so they split me from the neck up; as I said, it demands a certain disembodiment. I thought that surely when I had acquired my Ph. D. and my professorship and my tennis medal and my engineer's contract and my ten thousand a year and my full-time housekeeper and my reputation and the respect of my colleagues, when I had grown strong, tall, and beautiful, when my I.Q. shot past 200, when I had genius, then I could take off my sandwich board. I left my smiles and happy laughter at home. I'm not a woman; I'm a man. I'm a man with a woman's face. I'm a woman with a man's mind. Everybody says so. In my pride of intellect I entered a bookstore; I purchased a book; I no longer had to placate The Man; by God, I think I'm going to make it. I purchased a copy of John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women; now who can object to John Stuart Mill? He's dead. But the clerk did. With familiar archness he waggled his finger at me and said "tsk tsk"; all that writhing and fussing began again, what fun it was for him to have someone automatically not above reproach, and I knew beyond the shadow of a hope that to be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgment is not human and whose services are at anyone's command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the test. This is until you're forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one. Nothing can put you above this or below this or beyond it or outside of it, nothing, nothing, nothing at all, not your muscles or your brains, not being one of the boys or being one of the girls or writing books or writing letters or screaming or wringing your hands or cooking lettuce or being too tall or being too short or traveling or staying at home or ugliness or acne or diffidence or cowardice or perpetual shrinking and old age.

In the latter cases you're only doubly damned. I went away-"forever feminine," as the man says-and I cried as I drove my car, and I wept by the side of the road (because I couldn't see and I might crash into something) and I howled and wrung my hands as people do only in medieval romances, for an American woman's closed car is the only place in which she can be alone (if she's unmarried) and the howl of a sick she-wolf carries around the world, whereupon the world thinks it's very comical. Privacy in cars, in bathrooms, what ideas we have! If they tell me about the pretty clothes again, I'll kill myself.

I had a five-year-old self who said: Daddy won't love you.

I had a ten-year-old self who said: the boys won't play with you.

I had a fifteen-year-old self who said: nobody will marry you.

I had a twenty-year-old self who said: you can't be fulfilled without a child.

(A year there where I had recurrent nightmares about abdominal cancer which nobody would take out.)

I'm a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don't consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul's claws and standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big flat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don't think my body would sell anything. I don't think I would be good to look at. O of all diseases self-hate is the worst and I don't mean for the one who suffers it!

Do you know, all this time you preached at me? You told me that even Grendel's mother was actuated by maternal love.

You told me ghouls were male.

Rodan is male-and asinine.

King Kong is male.

I could have been a witch, but the Devil is male.

Faust is male.

The man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was male.

I was never on the moon.