The Female Man

Look at the necks, look at the wrists and ankles, penetrate the veils of false hair and false eyelashes to measure the relative size of eyes and bone structure. The half-changed starve themselves to be slim, but look at their calves and the straightness of their arms and knees. If most of the fully changed live in harims and whore-homes, and if popular slang is beginning to call them "cunts," what does this leave for us? What can we be called?

"The enemy," said Jael. "Sit here." We sat around a large table in the corner where the light was dim, snuggling up to the fake oak paneling. One of the guards, who had followed us inside, came up to Jael and put one giant arm round her, one huge paw crushing her bearishly to his side, his crimson epaulets, his gold boots, his shaved head, his sky-blue codpiece, his diamond-chequered-costumed attempt to beat up the whole world, to shove his prick up the world's ass. She looked so plain next to him. She was all swallowed up.

"Hey, hey," he said. "So you're back again!"

"Well, sure, why not?" (she said) "I have to meet someone. I have some business to do."

"Business!" he said fetchingly. "Don't you want some of the real thing? Come on, fuck business!"

She smiled gracefully but remained modestly silent. This seemed to please him.

He enveloped her further, to the point of vanishment, and said in a low voice with a sort of chuckle: "Don't you dream about it? Don't all you girls dream about us?"

"You know that, Lenny," she said.

"Sure I do," he said enthusiastically. "Sure. I can see it in your face whenever you come here. You get excited just looking at it. Like the doctors say, we can do it with each other but you can't because you don't have nothing to do it with, do you? So you don't get any."

"Lenny-" she began (slipping under his arm) "you got us figured out just right.

Scout's honor. I've got business to do."

"Come on!" he said (pleading, I think).

"Oh, you're a brick!" cried Jael, moving behind the table, "you surely are. Why, you're so strong, some day you're going to squash us to death." He laughed, basso-profundo. "We're friends," he said, and winked laboriously.

"Sure," said Jael dryly.

"Some day you're gonna walk right in here-" and this tiresome creature began all over again, but whether he noticed the rest of us or saw someone or smelt someone I don't know, for suddenly he lumbered off in a great hurry, rousting his billy-club out of his azure sash, next the gun holster. Bouncers don't use their guns at The Prick; too much chance of hitting the wrong people. Jael was talking to someone else, a shadowy, thin-lipped party in a green engineer's suit.

"Of course we're friends," said Jael Reasoner patiently. "Of course we are.

That's why I don't want to talk to you tonight. Hell, I don't want to get you in trouble. See those crosses? One jab, one little rip or tear, and those girls will start an epidemic you won't be able to stop for a month. Do you want to be mixed up in that? Now you know we women are into plague research; well, these are some of the experiments. I'm taking them across Manland to another part of our own place; it's a short-cut. I wouldn't take them through here except I have some business to do here tonight. We're developing a faster immunization process. I'd tell all your friends to stay away from this table, too, if I were you-not that we can't take care of ourselves and / don't worry; I'm immune to this particular strain-but I don't want to see you take the rap for it. You've done a lot for me in the past and I'm grateful. I'm very grateful. You'd get it in the neck, you know. And you might get plague, too, there's always that.

Okay?"

Astonishing how each of them has to be reassured of my loyalty! says Jael Reasoner. Even more astonishing that they believe me. They're not very bright, are they? But these are the little fish. Besides, they've been separated from real women so long that they don't know what to make of us; I doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like. The specifications we send them every year grow wilder and wilder and there isn't a murmur of protest. I think they like it. As moths to the flame, so men to the social patterns of the Army, that womanless world haunted by the ghosts of millions of dead women, that discarnate femininity that hovers over everybody and can turn the toughest real-man into one of Them, that dark force they always feel at the backs of their own minds! Would I, do you think, force slavishness and deformity on two-sevenths of my own kind? Of course not! I think these men are not human. No, no, that's wrong-/ decided long ago that they weren't human. Work is power, but they farm out everything to us without the slightest protest-Hell, they get lazier and lazier. They let us do their thinking for them. They even let us do their feeling for them. They are riddled with duality and the fear of duality.