The Female Man

And the fear of themselves.1 think it's in their blood. What human being would -sweating with fear and rage-mark out two equally revolting paths and insist that her fellow-creatures tread one or the other?

Ah, the rivalries of cosmic he-men and the worlds they must conquer and the terrors they must face and the rivals they must challenge and overcome!

"You are being a little obvious," says Janet pedantically from inside her suit, "and I doubt that the power of the blood-"

Hsst! Here comes my contact.

Our contact was a half-changed, for Manlanders believe that child care is woman's business; so they delegate to the changed and the half-changed the business of haggling for babies and taking care of children during those all-important, first five years-they want to fix their babies' sexual preferences early. This means, practically speaking, that the children are raised in brothels. Now some Manlander real-men do not like the idea of the whole business being in the hands of the feminized and the effeminate but there's not much they can do about it (see Proposition One, about child care, above)-although the more masculine look forward to a time when no Manlander will fall away from the ranks of the he-men, and with an obstinacy I consider perverse, refuse to decide who will be the sexual objects when the changed and the half-changed are no more. Perhaps they think sex beneath them. Or above them? (Around the shrine of each gowned and sequinned hostess in The Knife are at least three real-men; how many can a hostess take on in one night?) I suspect we real women still figure, however grotesquely, in Manland's deepest dreams; perhaps on that morning of Total Masculinity they will all invade Womanland, rape everyone in sight (if they still remember how) and then kill them, and after that commit suicide upon a pyramid of their victims' panties. The official ideology has it that women are poor substitutes for the changed. I certainly hope so. (Little girls, crept out of their crшche at last, touching those heroic dead with curious, wee fingers. Nudging them with their patent leather Mary Janes. Bringing their baby brothers out to a party on the green, all flutes and oats and pastoral fun until the food gives out and the tiny heroines must decide: Whom shall we eat? The waving limbs of our starfish siblings, our dead mothers, or those strange, huge, hairy bodies already beginning to swell in the sun?) I flashed that damned pass-again!-this time at a half-changed in a pink chiffon gown, with gloves up to his shoulder, a monument of irrelevancy on high heels, a pretty girl with too much of the right curves and a bobbing, springing, pink feather boa. Where oh where is the shop that makes those long rhinestone earrings, objects of fetishism and nostalgia, worn only by the half-changed (and usually not by them unless they're rich), hand-made from museum copies, of no use or interest to fully six-sevenths of the adult human race? Somewhere stones are put together by antiquarians, somewhere petroleum is transformed into fabric that can't burn without polluting the air, and won't rot, and won't erode, so that strands of plastic have turned up in the bodies of diatoms at the bottom of the Pacific Trench-such a vision was he, so much he wore, such folds and frills and ribbons and buttons and feathers, trimmed like a Christmas tree. Like Garbo playing Anna Karenina, decorated all over. His green eyes shrewdly narrowed.

This one has intelligence. Or is it only the weight of his false lashes? The burden of having always to be taken, of having to swoon, to fall, to endure, to hope, to suffer, to wait, to only be? There must be a secret feminine underground that teaches them how to behave; in the face of their comrades' derision and savage contempt, in the face of the prospect of gang rape if they're found alone on the streets after curfew, in the face of the legal necessity to belong-every one of them-to a real-man, somehow they still learn the classic shiver, the slow blink, the knuckle-to-lip pathos. These, too, I think, must be in the blood. But whose? My three friends and I pale beside such magnificence! Four lumpy parcels, of no interest to anyone at all, at all.

Anna, with a mechanical shiver of desire, says that we must go with him.

"Her?" says Jeannine, confused.