The Female Man

I

This is the Book of Joanna.

II

I was driving on a four-lane highway in North America with an acquaintance and his nine-year-old son.

“Beat ’im! Beat ’im!” cried the little boy excitedly as I passed another car in order to change lanes. I stayed in the right-hand lane for a while, admiring the buttercups by the side of the road, and then, in order to change lanes back, fell behind another car.

“Pass ’im! Pass ’im!” cried the distressed child, and then in anxious tears, “Why didn’t you beat ’im?”

“There, there, old sport,” said his indulgent Daddy, “Joanna drives like a lady. When you’re grown up you’ll have a car of your own and you can pass everybody on the road.” He turned to me and complained:

“Joanna, you just don’t drive aggressively enough.”

In training.

III

There’s the burden of knowledge. There’s the burden of compassion. There’s seeing all too clearly what’s in their eyes as they seize your hands, crying cheerily, “You don’t really mind my saying that, do you? I knew you didn’t!” Men’s shaky egos have a terrible appeal to the mater dolorosa. At times I am seized by a hopeless, helpless longing for love and reconciliation, a dreadful yearning to be understood, a teary passion for exposing our weaknesses to each other. It seems intolerable that I should go through life thus estranged, keeping it all to my guilty self. So I try to explain in the softest, least accusing way I can, but oddly enough men don’t behave the way they do on the Late Late Show, I mean those great male stars in their infancy in the Jean Arthur or the Mae West movies: candid, clear-eyed, and fresh, with their unashamed delight in their women’s strength and their naive enjoyment of their own, beautiful men with beautiful faces and the joyfulness of innocents, John Smith or John Doe. These are the only men I will let into Whileaway. But we have fallen away from our ancestors’ softness and clarity of thought into corrupt and degenerate practices. When I speak now I am told loftily or kindly that I just don’t understand, that women are really happy that way, that women can better themselves if they want to but somehow they just don’t want to, that I’m joking, that I can’t possibly mean what I say, that I’m too intelligent to be put in the same class as “women,” that I’m different, that there is a profound spiritual difference between men and women of which I don’t appreciate the beauty, that I have a man’s brain, that I have a man’s mind, that I’m talking to a phonograph record. Women don’t take it that way. If you bring up the subject with them, they begin to tremble out of terror, embarrassment, and alarm; they smile a smile of hideous, smug embarrassment, a magical smile meant to wipe them off the face of the earth, to make them abject and invisible—oh no, no, no, no, don’t think I believe any of that, don’t think I need any of that! Consider:

You ought to be interested in politics.

Politics is baseball. Politics is football. Politics is X “winning” and Y “losing.” Men wrangle about politics in living rooms the way Opera Fan One shouts at Opera Fan Two about Victoria de los Angeles.

No squabble between the Republican League and the Democrat League will ever change your life. Concealing your anxiety over the phone when He calls; that’s your politics.

Still, you ought to be interested in politics. Why aren’t you?

Because of feminine incapacity.

One can go on.

IV

I committed my first revolutionary act yesterday. I shut the door on a man’s thumb. I did it for no reason at all and I didn’t warn him; I just slammed the door shut in a rapture of hatred and imagined the bone breaking and the edges grinding into his skin. He ran downstairs and the phone rang wildly for an hour after while I sat, listening to it, my heart beating wildly, thinking wild thoughts. Horrible. Horrible and wild. I must find Jael.

Women are so petty (translation: we operate on too small a scale).

Now I’m worse than that—I also do not give a damn about humanity or society. It’s very upsetting to think that women make up only one-tenth of society, but it’s true. For example:

My doctor is male.

My lawyer is male.

My tax-accountant is male.

The grocery-store-owner (on the corner) is male.

The janitor in my apartment building is male.

The president of my bank is male.

The manager of the neighborhood supermarket is male.

My landlord is male.

Most taxi-drivers are male.

All cops are male.

All firemen are male.

The designers of my car are male.

The factory workers who made the car are male.

The dealer I bought it from is male.

Almost all my colleagues are male.

My employer is male.

The Army is male.

The Navy is male.

The government is (mostly) male.

I think most of the people in the world are male.

Now it’s true that waitresses, elementary-school teachers, secretaries, nurses, and nuns are female, but how many nuns do you meet in the course of the usual business day? Right? And secretaries are female only until they get married, at which time, they change or something because you usually don’t see them again at all. I think it’s a legend that half the population of the world is female; where on earth are they keeping them all? No, if you tot up all those categories of women above, you can see clearly and beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are maybe 1-2 women for every 11 or so men and that hardly justifies making such a big fuss. It’s just that I’m selfish. My friend Kate says that most of the women are put into female-banks when they grow up and that’s why you don’t see them, but I can’t believe that.

(Besides, what about the children? Mothers have to sacrifice themselves to their children, both male and female, so that the children will be happy when they grow up; though the mothers themselves were once children and were sacrificed to in order that they might grow up and sacrifice themselves to others; and when the daughters grow up, they will be mothers and they will have to sacrifice themselves for their children, so you begin to wonder whether the whole thing isn’t a plot to make the world safe for (male) children. But motherhood is sacred and mustn’t be talked about.)

Oh dear, oh dear.

Thus in the bad days, in the dark swampy times.

At thirteen desperately watching TV, curling my long legs under me, desperately reading books, callow adolescent that I was, trying (desperately!) to find someone in books, in movies, in life, in history, to tell me it was O.K. to be ambitious, O.K. to be loud, O.K. to be Humphrey Bogart (smart and rudeness), O.K. to be James Bond (arrogance), O.K. to be Superman (power), O.K. to be Douglas Fairbanks (swashbuckling), to tell me self-love was all right, to tell me I could love God and Art and Myself better than anything on earth and still have orgasms.

Being told it was all right “for you, dear,” but not for women .

Being told I was a woman.

At sixteen, giving up.

In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get dressed up and go to a party. Woman is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother; Woman is the eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality; Woman has intuition; Woman is the life-force; Woman is selfless love.

“I am the gateway to another world,” (said I, looking in the mirror) “I am the earth-mother; I am the eternal siren; I am purity,” (Jeez, new pimples) “I am carnality; I have intuition; I am the life-force; I am selfless love.” (Somehow it sounds different in the first person, doesn’t it?)

Honey (said the mirror, scandalized) Are you out of your fuckin’ mind ?

I AM HONEY

I AM RASPBERRY JAM

I AM A VERY GOOD LAY

I AM A GOOD DATE

I AM A GOOD WIFE

I AM GOING CRAZY

Everything was preaches and cream.

(When I decided that the key word in all this vomit was self-less and that if I was really all the things books, friends, parents, teachers, dates, movies, relatives, doctors, newspapers, and magazines said I was, then if I acted as I pleased without thinking of all these things I would be all these things in spite of my not trying to be all these things. So —

"Christ, will you quit acting like a man!")

Alas, it was never meant for us to hear. It was never meant for us to know. We ought never be taught to read. We fight through the constant male refractoriness of our surroundings; our souls are torn out of us with such shock that there isn’t even any blood. Remember: I didn’t and don’t want to be a “feminine” version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.

What future is there for a female child who aspires to being Humphrey Bogart?

Baby Laura Rose, playing with her toes, she’s a real pretty little sweetie-girl, isn’t she?

Sugar and spice

And everything nice —

That’s what little girls are made of!

But her brother’s a tough little bruiser (two identical damp, warm lumps). At three and a half I mixed sour cream and ice cubes on the window sill to see if they would turn into ice cream; I copied the words “hot” and “cold” off the water faucets. At four I sat on a record to see if it would break if pressure were applied evenly to both sides—it did; in kindergarten I taught everybody games and bossed them around; at six I beat up a little boy who took candy from my coat; I thought very well of myself.

V

Learning to

despise

one’s

self

VI

Brynhild hung her husband on a nail in the wall, tied up in her girdle as in a shopping bag, but she, too, lost her strength when the magic shlong got inside her. One can’t help feeling that the story has been somewhat distorted in the re-telling. When I was five I thought that the world was a matriarchy.

I was a happy little girl.

I couldn’t tell the difference between “gold” and “silver” or “night gown” and “evening gown,” so I imagined all the ladies of the neighborhood getting together in their beautiful “night gowns"—which were signs of rank—and making all the decisions about our lives. They were the government. My mother was President because she was a school teacher and local people deferred to her. Then the men would come home from “work” (wherever that was; I thought it was like hunting) and lay “the bacon” at the ladies’ feet, to do with as they wished. The men were employed by the ladies to do this. Laura Rose, who never swam underwater a whole month in summer camp with goggles on or slept in the top bunk, fancying herself a Queen in lonely splendor or a cabin-boy on a ship, has no such happy memories. She’s the girl who wanted to be Genghis Khan. When Laura tried to find out who she was, they told her she was “different” and that’s a hell of a description on which to base your life; it comes down to either “Not-me” or “Convenient-for me” and what is one supposed to do with that? What am I to do? (she says) What am I to feel? Is “supposed” like “spoused"? Is “different” like “deteriorate"? How can I eat or sleep? How can I go to the moon?

I first met Laur a few years ago when I was already grown up. Cinnamon and apples, ginger and vanilla, that’s Laur. Now having Brynhildic fantasies about her was nothing—I have all sorts of extraordinary fantasies which I don’t take seriously—but bringing my fantasies into the real world frightened me very much. It’s not that they were bad in themselves, but they were Unreal and therefore culpable; to try to make Real what was Unreal was to mistake the very nature of things; it was a sin not against conscience (which remained genuinely indifferent during the whole affair) but against Reality, and of the two the latter is far more blasphemous. It’s the crime of creating one’s own Reality, of “preferring oneself” as a good friend of mine says. I knew it was an impossible project.

She was reading a book, her hair falling over her face. She was radiant with health and life, a study in dirty blue jeans. I knelt down by her chair and kissed her on the back of her smooth, honeyed, hot neck with a despairing feeling that now I had done it—but asking isn’t getting. Wanting isn’t having. She’ll refuse and the world will be itself again. I waited confidently for the rebuke, for the eternal order to reassert itself (as it had to, of course)—for it would in fact take a great deal of responsibility off my hands.

But she let me do it. She blushed and pretended not to notice. I can’t describe to you how reality itself tore wide open at that moment. She kept on reading and I trod at a snail’s pace over her ear and cheek down to the corner of her mouth, Laur getting hotter and redder all the time as if she had steam inside her. It’s like falling off a cliff, standing astonished in mid-air as the horizon rushes away from you. If this is possible, anything is possible. Later we got stoned and made awkward, self-conscious love, but nothing that happened afterward was as important to me (in an unhuman way) as that first, awful wrench of the mind.

Once I felt the pressure of her hip-bone along my belly, and being very muddled and high, thought: She’s got an erection. Dreadful. Dreadful embarrassment. One of us had to be male and it certainly wasn’t me. Now they’ll tell me it’s because I’m a Lesbian, I mean that’s why I’m dissatisfied with things. That’s not true. It’s not because I’m a Lesbian. It’s because I’m a tall, blonde, blue-eyed Lesbian .

Does it count if it’s your best friend? Does it count if it’s her mind you love through her body? Does it count if you love men’s bodies but hate men’s minds? Does it count if you still love yourself?

Later we got better.

VII

Jeannine goes window-shopping. She has my eyes, my hands, my silly stoop; she’s wearing my blue plastic raincoat and carrying my umbrella. Jeannine is out on the town on a Saturday afternoon saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to all that.

Goodbye to mannequins in store windows who pretend to be sympathetic but who are really nasty conspiracies, goodbye to hating Mother, goodbye to the Divine Psychiatrist, goodbye to The Girls, goodbye to Normality, goodbye to Getting Married, goodbye to The Supernaturally Blessed Event, goodbye to being Some Body, goodbye to waiting for Him (poor fellow!), goodbye to sitting by the telephone, goodbye to feebleness, goodbye to adoration, goodbye Politics, hello politics. She’s scared but that’s all right. The streets are full of women and this awes her; where have they all come from? Where are they going? (If you don’t mind the symbolism.) It’s stopped raining but mist coils up from the pavement. She passes a bridal shop where the chief mannequin, a Vision in white lace and tulle, sticks out her tongue at Jeannine. “Didn’t do it!” cries the mannequin, resuming her haughty pose and balancing a bridal veil on her head. Jeannine shuts her umbrella, latches it, and swings it energetically round and round.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye to everything.

We met in Schrafft’s and sat, the four of us, at one table, ordering their Thanksgiving dinner, argh, which is so traditional you can’t stand it. Gah.

“What’s Indian pudding?” says Janet, baffled.

“No, don’t, better not,” says Joanna.

We munch in silence, slowly, the way Whileawayans eat: munch, munch, gulp. Munch. Gulp, gulp, gulp, Munch. Meditatively. It’s pleasant to eat. Janet screws up her eyes, yawns, and stretches athletically, leaning over the back of her chair and working her bent arms first to this side, then to that. She ends up by pounding on the table. “Mm!” she says.

“My goodness, look at that,” says Jeannine, very self-possessed and elegant, her fork in mid-air. “I thought you were going to knock someone’s hat off.”

Schrafft’s is full of women. Men don’t like places like this where the secret maintenance work of femininity is carried on, just as they turn green and bolt when you tell them medical events are occurring in your genito-urinary system. Jael has got something stuck between her steel teeth and her sham ones, and cocking an eye around Schrafft’s, she slips off her tooth cover and roots around for the blackberry seed or whatever, exposing to the world her steely, crocodilian grin. Back they go. In. Done.

“So?” says Jael. “Do we do business?” There is a long, uncomfortable silence. I look around Schrafft’s and wonder why women at their most genteel are so miserly; why is there no Four Seasons, no Maxim’s, no Chambord, for women? Women are very strange about money, feudal almost: Real Money is what you spend on the house and on yourself (except for your appearance): Magic Money is what you get men to spend on you. It takes a tremendous rearrangement of mental priorities for women to eat well, that is to spend money on their insides instead of their outsides. The Schrafft’s hostess stands by the cashier’s desk in her good black dress and sensible shoes; women left to themselves are ugly, i.e. human, but Gentility has been interfering here.

“This is awful food,” says Janet, who is used to Whileaway.

“This is wonderful food,” says Jael, who is used to Womanland and Manland.

Both burst out laughing.

“Well?” says Jael again. Another silence. Janet and I are very uncomfortable. Jeannine, one cheek bulging like a squirrel’s, looks up as if surprised that we could hesitate to do business with Womanland. She nods briefly and then goes back to building mashed-sweet-potato mountains with her fork. Jeannine now gets up late, neglects the housework until it annoys her, and plays with her food.

“Jeannine?” says Jael.

“Oh, sure,” says Jeannine. “I don’t mind. You can bring in all the soldiers you want. You can take the whole place over; I wish you would.” Jael goes admiringly tsk tsk and makes a rueful face that means: my friend, you are really going it. “My whole world calls me Jeannie,” says Jeannine in her high, sweet voice. “See?”

(Laur is waiting outside for Janet, probably baring her teeth at passing men.)

To Janet, Jael suddenly says:

“You don’t want me?”

“No,” says Janet. “No, sorry.”

Jael grins. She says:

“Disapprove all you like. Pedant! Let me give you something to carry away with you, friend: that ‘plague’ you talk of is a lie. I know . The world-lines around you are not so different from yours or mine or theirs and there is no plague in any of them, not any of them. Whileaway’s plague is a big lie. Your ancestors lied about it. It is I who gave you your ‘plague,’ my dear, about which you can now pietize and moralize to your heart’s content; I, I, I, I am the plague, Janet Evason. I and the war I fought built your world for you, I and those like me, we gave you a thousand years of peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish themselves on the bones of the men we have slain.

“No,” said Janet dryly, “I don’t believe.” Now you must know that Jeannine is Everywoman. I, though I am a bit quirky, I too am Everywoman. Every woman is not Jael, as Uncle George would say—but Jael is Everywoman. We all stared accusingly at Janet but Miss Evason was not moved. Laur came through Schrafft’s revolving door and waved wildly; Janet got up to go.

“Think about it,” said Alice Reasoner. “Go home and find out about it.”

Janet began to weep—those strange, shameless, easy, Whileawayan tears that well out of the eyes without destroying the composed sadness of the face. She is expressing her grief about (for) Alice Reasoner. I think—when I stop to think about it, which is not often—that I like Jael the best of us all, that I would like to be Jael, twisted as she is on the rack of her own hard logic, triumphant in her extremity, the hateful hero with the broken heart, which is like being the clown with the broken heart. Jael averts her face in a death’s-head grimace that is only a nervous tic of Alice Reasoner’s, an expression that began perhaps twenty years ago as a tasting-something-sour look and has intensified with time into sheer bad-angelry, luminous with hate. She has cords in her neck. She could put out her captive’s claws and slash Schrafft’s tablecloth into ten separate, parallel ribbons. That’s only one one-hundredth of what she can do. Jeannine is playing an absorbing game with her green peas (she had no dessert). Jeannine is happy.

We got up and paid our quintuple bill; then we went out into the street. I said goodbye and went off with Laur, I, Janet; I also watched them go, I, Joanna; moreover I went off to show Jael the city, I Jeannine, I Jael, I myself.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Goodbye to Alice Reasoner, who says tragedy makes her sick, who says never give in but always go down fighting, who says take them with you, who says die if you must but loop your own intestines around the neck of your strangling enemy. Goodbye to everything. Goodbye to Janet, whom we don’t believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair, who appears Heaven-high in our dreams with a mountain under each arm and the ocean in her pocket, Janet who comes from the place where the labia of sky and horizon kiss each other so that Whileawayans call it The Door and know that all legendary things come therefrom. Radiant as the day, the Might-be of our dreams, living as she does in a blessedness none of us will ever know, she is nonetheless Everywoman. Goodbye, Jeannine, goodbye, poor soul, poor girl, poor as-I-once-was. Goodbye, goodbye. Remember: we will all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will all be free. I swear it on my own head. I swear it on my ten fingers. We will be ourselves. Until then I am silent; I can no more. I am God’s typewriter and the ribbon is typed out.

Go, little book, trot through Texas and Vermont and Alaska and Maryland and Washington and Florida and Canada and England and France; bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millet, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest; behave yourself in people’s living rooms, neither looking ostentatious on the coffee table nor failing to persuade due to the dullness of your style; knock at the Christmas garland on my husband’s door in New York City and tell him that I loved him truly and love him still (despite what anybody may think); and take your place bravely on the book racks of bus terminals and drugstores. Do not scream when you are ignored, for that will alarm people, and do not fume when you are heisted by persons who will not pay, rather rejoice that you have become so popular. Live merrily, little daughter-book, even if I can’t and we can’t; recite yourself to all who will listen; stay hopeful and wise. Wash your face and take your place without a fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both little and big. Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.

Rejoice, little book!

For on that day, we will be free.