The Female Man

"Do you enjoy playing with other people's children-for ten minutes? Good! This reveals that you have Maternal Instinct and you will be forever wretched if you do not instantly have a baby of your own (or three or four) and take care of that unfortunate victimized object twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for eighteen years, all by yourself. (Don't expect much help.)

"Are you lonely? Good! This shows that you have Feminine Incompleteness; get married and do all your husband's personal services, buck him up when he's low, teach him about sex (if he wants you to), praise his technique (if he doesn't), have a family if he wants a family, follow him if he changes cities, get a job if he needs you to get a job, and this too goes on seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year forever and ever amen unless you find yourself a divorcee at thirty with (probably two) small children. (Be a shrew and ruin yourself, too, how about it?)

"Do you like men's bodies? Good! This is beginning to be almost as good as getting married. This means that you have True Womanliness, which is fine unless you want to do it with him on the bottom and you on the top, or any other way than he wants to do it, or you don't come in two minutes, or you don't want to do it, or you change your mind in mid-course, or get aggressive, or show your brains, or resent never being talked to, or ask him to take you out, or fail to praise him, or worry about whether he Respects You, or hear yourself described as a whore, or develop affectionate feelings for him (see Feminine Incompleteness, above) or resent the predation you have to face and screen out so unremittingly- "I am a telephone pole, a Martian, a rose-bed, a tree, a floor lamp, a camera, a scarecrow. I'm not a woman.

"Well, it's nobody's fault, I know (this is what I'm supposed to think). I know and totally approve and genuflect to and admire and wholly obey the doctrine of Nobody's Fault, the doctrine of Gradual Change, the doctrine that Women Can Love Better Than Men so we ought to be saints (warrior saints?), the doctrine of It's A Personal Problem.

"(Selah, selah, there is only one True Prophet and it's You, don't kill me, massa, I'se jes' ig'nerant.)

"You see before you a woman in a trap. Those spike-heeled shoes that blow your heels off (so you become round-heeled). The intense need to smile at everybody.

The slavish (but respectable) adoration: Love me or I'll die. As the nine-year-old daughter of my friend painstakingly carved on her linoleum block when the third grade was doing creative printing: I am like I am suppose to be Otherwise I'd kill myself Rachel.

"Would you believe-could you hear without laughing-could you credit without positively oofing your sides with hysterical mirth, that for years my secret, teenage ambition-more important than washing my hair even and I wouldn't tell it to anybody-was to stand up fearless and honest like Joan of Arc or Galileo- "And suffer for the truth?"

So Janet said: "Life has to end. What a pity! Sometimes, when one is alone, the universe presses itself into one's hands: a plethora of joy, an organized plenitude. The iridescent, peacock-green folds of the mountains in South Continent, the cobalt-colored sky, the white sunlight which makes everything too real to be true. The existence of existence always amazes me. You tell me that men are supposed to like challenge, that it is risk that makes them truly men, but if I-a foreigner-may venture an opinion, what we know beyond any doubt is that the world is a bath; we bathe in air, as Saint Teresa said the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish. I fancy your old church windows wished to show worshippers' faces stained with that emblematic brightness. Do you really want to take risks? Inoculate yourself with bubonic plague. What foolishness! When that intellectual sun rises, the pure sward lengthens under the crystal mountain; under that pure intellectual light there is neither material pigment nor no true shadow any more, any more. What price ego then?

"Now you tell me that enchanted frogs turn into princes, that frogesses under a spell turn into princesses. What of it? Romance is bad for the mind. I'll tell you a story about the old Whileawayan philosopher-she is a folk character among us, rather funny in an odd way, or as we say, 'ticklish'. The Old Whileawayan Philosopher was sitting cross-legged among her disciples (as usual) when, without the slightest explanation, she put her fingers into her vagina, withdrew them, and asked, 'What have I here?'

"The disciples all thought very deeply.

" 'Life,' said one young woman.

" 'Power,' said another.

"Housework,' said a third.

" 'The passing of time,' said the fourth, 'and the tragic irreversibility of organic truth.'