The Female Man

My palace and gardens (said I) I acquired late in life when I became rich and influential; before that I lived in one of the underground cities among the damnedest passel of neighbors you ever saw, sentimental Arcadian communes-underground, mind you!-whose voices would travel up the sewer pipes at all the wrong times of day and night, shrill sacrifices to love and joy when you want to sleep, ostentatious shuddering whenever I appeared in the corridor, wincing and dashing back inside to huddle together like kittens, conscious of their own innocence, and raise their pure young voices in the blessedness of community song. You know the kind: "But we were having fun!" in a soft, wondering, highly reproachful voice while she closes the door gently but firmly on your thumb. They thought I was Ultimate Evil. They let me know it. They are the kind who want to win the men over by Love. There's a game called Pussycat that's great fun for the player; it goes like this: Meeow, I'm dead (lying on your back, all four paws engagingly held in the air, playing helpless); there's another called Saint George and the Dragon with You Know Who playing You Know What; and when you can no longer tolerate either, you do as I did: come home in a hobgoblin-head of a disguise, howling and chasing your neighbors down the hall while they scream in genuine terror (well, sort of).

Then I moved.

That was my first job, impersonating one of the Manlanders' police (for ten minutes). By "job" I don't mean what I was sent to do last night, that was open and legitimate, but a "job" is a little bit under the table. It took me years to throw off the last of my Pussy-fetters, to stop being (however brutalized) vestigially Pussy-cat-ified, but at last I did and now I am the rosy, wholesome, single-minded assassin you see before you today.

I come and go as I please. I do only what I want. I have wrestled myself through to an independence of mind that has ended by bringing all of you here today. In short, I am a grown woman.

I was an old-fashioned girl, born forty-two years ago in the last years before the war, in one of the few mixed towns still left. It amazes me sometimes to think of what my life would have been like without the war, but I ended up in a refugee camp with my mother. Maddened Lesbians did not put cigarette butts out on her breasts, propaganda to the contrary; in fact she got a lot more self-confident and whacked me when I tore to pieces (out of pure curiosity) a paper doily that decorated the top of the communal radio-this departure from previous practice secretly gratified me and I decided I rather liked the place.

We were re-settled and I was sent to school once the war cooled off; by '52 our territories had shrunk to pretty much what they are today, and we've grown too wise since to think we can gain anything by merely annexing land. I was trained for years-we deplore what we must nonetheless use!-and began my slow drift away from the community, that specialization (they say) that brings you closer to the apes, though I don't see how such an exceedingly skilled and artificial practice can be anything but quintessentially human.

At twelve I artlessly told one of my teachers that I was very glad I was being brought up to be a man-woman, and that I looked down on those girls who were only brought up to be woman-women. I'll never forget her face. She did not thrash me but let an older girl-girl do it-I told you I was old-fashioned.

Gradually this sort of thing wears off; not everything with claws and teeth is a Pussycat. On the contrary!