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FMK: The Female Man
The nearest pokestop I can access is approximately 1 hour's walk from my house. Fun facts! (But I did get my third 7-day streak in a row, yay me walking four miles in the rain.)
So, The Female Man by Joanna Russ. This is a book that has A Lot Of Things To Say so I am absolutely not going to even attempt to do that justice in this post, okay. tl,dr: I am going to keep it on the shelf, but I am going to keep it resentfully.
It is very much:
a) second-wave feminist, and
b) literary fiction, not genre fiction.
Read it if you want to read a frequently didactic and/or polemical text that exemplifies second-wave feminism but is relatively readable despite that. Or if you like the sort of literary fiction that is obsessed with its own genius and hits all the cliches from over-elaborate structure to self-insert MC who is a frustrated writer in NYC to the affair with a much younger woman who you are in a position of authority over but you couldn't help it, she came on to you and you were really sex-deprived, what were you supposed to do! Only with white feminists instead of boring white dudes. At least the sex scenes are reasonably well-done.
If you are interested in really cool post-capitalist post-industrialist utopian worldbuilding, read it but skip everything but the sections in Whileaway (and maybe the chapters at the end with Jael, but only if you are willing to wade through the neck-deep transphobia in those). It's pretty easy to tell which chapters are Whileaway and you won't be missing any important "plot" if you skip the rest, I promise; it barely exists and doesn't make a lot of sfnal sense when it does. (Or just read some Monique Wittig instead, 'Lesbian Peoples' is nothing but the second-wave feminist lesbian utopian worldbuilding.)
It's honestly really hard for me to separate my problems with it between the second-wave feminist part and the literary fiction part, because they basically both reduce down to the MC is a self-absorbed asshole with no real empathy in her POV.
So there are three-and-a-half main characters, Janet, Joanna, Jeannine, and Jael (who only shows up at the very end). Joanna is the POV, but it's a very confusing POV that fades in and out from her being a proper character and her being a smugly meta author-character who can ignore reality for the sake of narrative. They are all, in some sense or another, alternate-universe versions of each other. (It actually took me quite awhile to figure out if the smug author-POV was actually the same character as Joanna, but I think so? Or at least it's left deliberately unclear, and the author is at least more Joanna than the others, but some of the author-POV segments contradict the rest of Joanna's story.) Janet is from a far-future postcapitalist utopia with no men. Jeannine is from an alternate history where WWII never happened and the US is stuck in stasis in the late 1930s. Joanna is from "the real world". Jael is from an alternate future where men and women are separated into two literally warring camps.
Janet and Jael's worlds are both really interesting. Jeannine's world is less well-developed - it really is just 1930s NYC with a few cosmetic updates - but she is probably actually the most well-rounded as a person. Joanna's world we get almost no grounding in, presumably because she's supposed to be the reader insert character whose world is already familiar we all automatically identify with her.
I found Janet, Jael, and Jeannine (especially Jeannine) way more relatable in every possible way and Joanna so alien as to be nearly incomprehensible most of the time.
Part of this is that 1975 NYC got dated very quickly (and in a way that Jeannine's 1930s isn't). But it's also something I experience with a lot of "mainstream" fiction, that they present a worldview that just has nothing in common with the world I experience, and also has no conception that any other worldview is possible or worthwhile.
(Maybe that's the real distinction between SF/genre and 'literary' - that literary fiction is by and for people who can't imagine feeling more at home in an alien time or place than in their present, and don't want to.)
Jeannine in particular gets treated like crap by Joanna's POV - she consistently describes her as a shadow or, frequently and unironically, an inanimate object! This angry feminist who is all about respect for womenas long as they are upper-middle-class educated outspoken feminists apparently! - never as a person with her own vibrant life. And yet she gets to have more of a life than any of the other three; she has a family, a job at a library, a cat, she likes mystery novels and trees and looking out the subway windows at New York City, she wishes she had a bigger apartment but also doesn't want the bother of taking care of a bigger apartment. All she really needs to do to have my dream life is deal with the clinical depression (ADMITTEDLY not simple) and then drag the "boyfriend" to Greenwich Village so they can meet some lesbians and fairies and realize why their relationship isn't working out. But she's poor and introverted and socially awkward so she's clearly not a real person amirite or amirite.
(Jeannine is also the only character who isn't incredibly fucking transphobic, btw. I suspect if they did find queer culture, they would be very happy together, she seems to like transfeminine people and Cal likes pretty dresses. If you don't want to wallow in transphobia, basically stop reading as soon as you meet Jael. Not that there isn't some before that, but it doesn't punch you in the face repeatedly and maliciously until the Jael segment.)
(Honestly, if Joanna had grown up on Tumblr she probably wouldn't be using 'she' either, but she would very likely bite you if you tried to tell her that.)
(Somebody write me a Female Man AU where it lives up to the title and Jeannine was already involved in 1930s queer culture - image if 1930s NYC queer culture had just kept going for decades instead of hitting the brick wall of the 1950s! - and gently helped Joanna find her inner genderqueer self, and meanwhile Whileaway actually has some way of dealing with trans and intersex people and Jael teams up with the trans women instead of beating the shit out of them. please please.)
I'm struggling to even name anything that Janet or Joanna gets to like. Janet likes her wife? And sex with girls? Joanna likes.... basically just disparaging other women, afaict.
It's telling that the only one of them who is shown as having women friends is the one from the planet with no men. And this is presented by the author pov not as a problem with them being all twisted up inside, but with all other women being stooges of the patriarchy and therefore unworthy.
There's this scene where Joanna takes Janet to a party which is supposed to be a typical Earth party (I have never been to a party like that nor ever plan to be) where Joanna is giving all of the other women there horrible nicknames that reduce them to simpering gold-diggers who only care about male approval, and I just want to shake her and go, all of these other women are probably dying inside too and are going to go home and talk about how terrible the party was and they just tried to get through it! maybe you could try talking to one of them instead of just feeling superior! or maybe even listening to Janet, who you brought, instead of treating her like an embarrassment!
Joanna is also really, really bad at her 'job' of being a cultural liaison and it is never explained how she got it and why she wasn't immediately removed from it.
And... how much of all that is wrong with Joanna's POV is about its coming out of the New York intellectual/literary tradition with all its angsty English professors and their affairs, and how much of it is second-wave feminism, and how much is that second-wave feminism (or at least a lot of its most-read writers) came out of the same cultural space as the English professors and their affairs (and were not infrequently the women involved in those affairs.)?
But there are all of these women around Joanna and Jeannine who are fighting their own fights, and the same fights, but also getting on with life, and the POV never even stops to think that maybe there are ways to do feminism that don't involve being white, over-educated, financially stable and obsessed with success, male approval, and self-actualization. So there you go, there's second-wave feminism for you.
The above makes it sound like I hated the book, and okay, I did hate the book a little. But for all of second-wave feminism's issues, it wasn't wrong about the things it did deign to pay attention to, and on the whole, neither is this book. And if there's anything last year in America taught us, it's that the job they were trying to do in the 60s and 70s and 80s still isn't nearly done. And for what it is - for a literary novel published in 1975but tLHoD was published in 1969 that is too into its own cleverness to get out of its own way and frequently interrupts itself for long tirades of textbook second-wave feminism, it's pretty readable and makes important points, and Whileaway makes up for a lot.
But if an SF writer randomly put in a chapter in the middle of a book that was literally nothing but ranting about how mainstream critics failed to recognize the author's genius, they would be laughed out of fandom regardless of how justified they were.
I mean, even Ann Rice hasn't tried that yet.
There's a self-congratulatory bit at the end about how if a time ever comes where women read the book and don't resonate with it, that means its work is done. a) its work is not done, b) resonating with Joanna is not the way to finish it.
Also why the hell did she feel the need to keep translating the matronyms as ---son even after she learned they were matronyms not surnames, it's not like Evasdottir is an incomprehensible name to modern Earth people.
So, The Female Man by Joanna Russ. This is a book that has A Lot Of Things To Say so I am absolutely not going to even attempt to do that justice in this post, okay. tl,dr: I am going to keep it on the shelf, but I am going to keep it resentfully.
It is very much:
a) second-wave feminist, and
b) literary fiction, not genre fiction.
Read it if you want to read a frequently didactic and/or polemical text that exemplifies second-wave feminism but is relatively readable despite that. Or if you like the sort of literary fiction that is obsessed with its own genius and hits all the cliches from over-elaborate structure to self-insert MC who is a frustrated writer in NYC to the affair with a much younger woman who you are in a position of authority over but you couldn't help it, she came on to you and you were really sex-deprived, what were you supposed to do! Only with white feminists instead of boring white dudes. At least the sex scenes are reasonably well-done.
If you are interested in really cool post-capitalist post-industrialist utopian worldbuilding, read it but skip everything but the sections in Whileaway (and maybe the chapters at the end with Jael, but only if you are willing to wade through the neck-deep transphobia in those). It's pretty easy to tell which chapters are Whileaway and you won't be missing any important "plot" if you skip the rest, I promise; it barely exists and doesn't make a lot of sfnal sense when it does. (Or just read some Monique Wittig instead, 'Lesbian Peoples' is nothing but the second-wave feminist lesbian utopian worldbuilding.)
It's honestly really hard for me to separate my problems with it between the second-wave feminist part and the literary fiction part, because they basically both reduce down to the MC is a self-absorbed asshole with no real empathy in her POV.
So there are three-and-a-half main characters, Janet, Joanna, Jeannine, and Jael (who only shows up at the very end). Joanna is the POV, but it's a very confusing POV that fades in and out from her being a proper character and her being a smugly meta author-character who can ignore reality for the sake of narrative. They are all, in some sense or another, alternate-universe versions of each other. (It actually took me quite awhile to figure out if the smug author-POV was actually the same character as Joanna, but I think so? Or at least it's left deliberately unclear, and the author is at least more Joanna than the others, but some of the author-POV segments contradict the rest of Joanna's story.) Janet is from a far-future postcapitalist utopia with no men. Jeannine is from an alternate history where WWII never happened and the US is stuck in stasis in the late 1930s. Joanna is from "the real world". Jael is from an alternate future where men and women are separated into two literally warring camps.
Janet and Jael's worlds are both really interesting. Jeannine's world is less well-developed - it really is just 1930s NYC with a few cosmetic updates - but she is probably actually the most well-rounded as a person. Joanna's world we get almost no grounding in, presumably because she's supposed to be the reader insert character whose world is already familiar we all automatically identify with her.
I found Janet, Jael, and Jeannine (especially Jeannine) way more relatable in every possible way and Joanna so alien as to be nearly incomprehensible most of the time.
Part of this is that 1975 NYC got dated very quickly (and in a way that Jeannine's 1930s isn't). But it's also something I experience with a lot of "mainstream" fiction, that they present a worldview that just has nothing in common with the world I experience, and also has no conception that any other worldview is possible or worthwhile.
(Maybe that's the real distinction between SF/genre and 'literary' - that literary fiction is by and for people who can't imagine feeling more at home in an alien time or place than in their present, and don't want to.)
Jeannine in particular gets treated like crap by Joanna's POV - she consistently describes her as a shadow or, frequently and unironically, an inanimate object! This angry feminist who is all about respect for women
(Jeannine is also the only character who isn't incredibly fucking transphobic, btw. I suspect if they did find queer culture, they would be very happy together, she seems to like transfeminine people and Cal likes pretty dresses. If you don't want to wallow in transphobia, basically stop reading as soon as you meet Jael. Not that there isn't some before that, but it doesn't punch you in the face repeatedly and maliciously until the Jael segment.)
(Honestly, if Joanna had grown up on Tumblr she probably wouldn't be using 'she' either, but she would very likely bite you if you tried to tell her that.)
(Somebody write me a Female Man AU where it lives up to the title and Jeannine was already involved in 1930s queer culture - image if 1930s NYC queer culture had just kept going for decades instead of hitting the brick wall of the 1950s! - and gently helped Joanna find her inner genderqueer self, and meanwhile Whileaway actually has some way of dealing with trans and intersex people and Jael teams up with the trans women instead of beating the shit out of them. please please.)
I'm struggling to even name anything that Janet or Joanna gets to like. Janet likes her wife? And sex with girls? Joanna likes.... basically just disparaging other women, afaict.
It's telling that the only one of them who is shown as having women friends is the one from the planet with no men. And this is presented by the author pov not as a problem with them being all twisted up inside, but with all other women being stooges of the patriarchy and therefore unworthy.
There's this scene where Joanna takes Janet to a party which is supposed to be a typical Earth party (I have never been to a party like that nor ever plan to be) where Joanna is giving all of the other women there horrible nicknames that reduce them to simpering gold-diggers who only care about male approval, and I just want to shake her and go, all of these other women are probably dying inside too and are going to go home and talk about how terrible the party was and they just tried to get through it! maybe you could try talking to one of them instead of just feeling superior! or maybe even listening to Janet, who you brought, instead of treating her like an embarrassment!
Joanna is also really, really bad at her 'job' of being a cultural liaison and it is never explained how she got it and why she wasn't immediately removed from it.
And... how much of all that is wrong with Joanna's POV is about its coming out of the New York intellectual/literary tradition with all its angsty English professors and their affairs, and how much of it is second-wave feminism, and how much is that second-wave feminism (or at least a lot of its most-read writers) came out of the same cultural space as the English professors and their affairs (and were not infrequently the women involved in those affairs.)?
But there are all of these women around Joanna and Jeannine who are fighting their own fights, and the same fights, but also getting on with life, and the POV never even stops to think that maybe there are ways to do feminism that don't involve being white, over-educated, financially stable and obsessed with success, male approval, and self-actualization. So there you go, there's second-wave feminism for you.
The above makes it sound like I hated the book, and okay, I did hate the book a little. But for all of second-wave feminism's issues, it wasn't wrong about the things it did deign to pay attention to, and on the whole, neither is this book. And if there's anything last year in America taught us, it's that the job they were trying to do in the 60s and 70s and 80s still isn't nearly done. And for what it is - for a literary novel published in 1975
But if an SF writer randomly put in a chapter in the middle of a book that was literally nothing but ranting about how mainstream critics failed to recognize the author's genius, they would be laughed out of fandom regardless of how justified they were.
I mean, even Ann Rice hasn't tried that yet.
There's a self-congratulatory bit at the end about how if a time ever comes where women read the book and don't resonate with it, that means its work is done. a) its work is not done, b) resonating with Joanna is not the way to finish it.
Also why the hell did she feel the need to keep translating the matronyms as ---son even after she learned they were matronyms not surnames, it's not like Evasdottir is an incomprehensible name to modern Earth people.
no subject
But if you aren't a Joanna - and to be a Joanna you have to be in that INCREDIBLY specific set of cages - it's a book that's actively contemptuous of you, and that's a problem. (I grew up around the same time as you and spent a lot of time in my mom's hometown about fifty miles up interstate 75, but I suspect the intersection of minor differences in class and culture background and family temperament were enough that the version of womanhood and patriarchy I got, even when I was in rural Ohio, was very different from the one Joanna, or you, did. And that's without bringing in the *major* differences if you look beyond middle-class-ish white women from southwest Ohio in the 80s and 90s.)
And I could go into that at super-long length, and have already deleted two version of it, but I don't think we're that much in disagreement and you probably already know everything I would have said. I am glad the book helped you! It's great that there were books out there to help people like you! There probably are still a lot of women it would help, although hopefully most of them have access to a greater variety of feminisms than we did even in the 90s. But it would be nice if it managed to do that without declaring that everyone who *isn't* a Joanna or a Janet or a Jael is an unperson beneath contempt.
Even in 1975, the version of feminism where everyone who isn't a Joanna or a Janet is an unperson was going to be incredibly alienating to probably the majority of women, *even if* they already agree with most of what she's angry about.
It's true that I was never in that exact particular set of prisons. But most of what she actually experiences as patriarchy - the microaggressions, the constant fear of sexual assault, the limitations imposed by society, the contradictory expectations, I could go on - is still part of my life, it's mostly Joanna's psychological overlay that alienated me. And "you are not in the same prison as me" is not the same as "we are free".
I mean, like I said, I am not really sure how much of my problem with the book is that her version of feminism is one that excludes me, and how much of it is that the book is also part of that New York literary tradition that also actively excludes me and makes me very angry, to the point that I was hoping for awhile it was intentionally parodying it but I don't think it was that self-aware. They both unperson the same kind of people.
(seriously did it have to have the lolita subplot, I realize an affair with icky power imbalance is required for the mainstream critics to like you, but seriously.)
And I am really glad that this gave you a starting point for understanding the concept of gender as socially constructed. Everybody should have one of those. But by the time it was written The Left Hand of Darkness had had its Hugo for five years and I could name probably half a dozen other SF novels that were out by the late 70s that, while they certainly didn't treat gender theory perfectly, managed to address it while being a lot less actively transphobic about it. (I had worn through my 70s paperback copy of tLHoD of before I knew Joanna Russ existed....it was given to me by an uncle from rural Ohio, actually.)
...I didn't go into any detail on my problems with the "plot" because tbh I never quite figured out if we were supposed to be treating the plot as a thing that was suppose to abide by anything other than dream-logic or not. If it was just supposed to be a feminist fantasia about how Joanna has been forced into a quadruple consciousness by patriarchy and it's all metaphorical etc., fine, it's not my favorite kind of storytelling but it's an interesting way to do it and it's okay that it's unclear and full of plotholes and self-contradictions and never really explains where it is going. But then just as I was pretty sure we *weren't* supposed to be judging it as an SF novel with an SF plot, there would be a section that was nice solid SF. It didn't quite seem to ever have the conviction that it was one or the other.
And it's quite possible that was intentional and I was just the wrong sort of reader for it literary-wise as well as feminist-wise, but I spent a large part of the book stuck in what one how-to-write-sf book called "The caterpillar bus problem" where once you have a world where it *isn't* always just a metaphor, your readers will never be sure when it's supposed to be a metaphor and when it's actually a bus that's a caterpillar, and you will lose them while they try to figure that out. I am that reader.
(Does Jeannine actually have the ability to shift into furniture? Because if so, a) she is even more awesome than I though, an b) I read that HP fanfic, but sadly I think that's just a cruel metaphor via Joanna. Maybe? Or maybe it is actually a weird effect of the way she's being pulled through time? I can't tell! and by extension if she really is just Joanna's self-hatred personified, okay, patriarchy gives us all an inner self-hatred, but if Joanna actually does believe she's an individual person, Joanna is fucking horrible, there are plenty of us who hate our inner Jeannines while valuing the Jeannines we know in the world.)
It is definitely possible that somewhere in there is an actual, really interesting plot that holds together about how Janet's world and Jael's world are fighting a secret cross-dimensional cold war and we're caught in the middle, but it would take a TON of fanwanking to find it, and require Janet to be lying about basically everything which would undermine her role in the feminist metaphor, and I don't feel like putting in that much effort in for a book where it's maybe just all a metaphor anyway.
(Also unless I really misread how nonlinear the narrative was, Janet didn't appear on Joanna? Or, at least, the time when the military found her and she stayed long-term, she didn't appear near Joanna, she appeared in the Pentagon. Joanna was watching TV interviews with Janet before the male establishment knew Joanna existed; the first time they found out about her was when Janet kidnapped her to go joyriding. And Joanna at least didn't know about the alternate-selves part until Jael told them, so I doubt Janet told the Pentagon either even if she knew. I can totally get the part about the Establishment forcing her into the job just because she's convenient, although it's never actually stated outright whether she was given a choice or not, and it's implied that it was Janet who requested her. But it makes no plot sense regardless that they're forcing Joanna on Janet but not giving her any *other* supervision, which they pretty clearly aren't, given that Joanna is shit at supervising her. It works on the feminist-metaphor level, but if you're trying to make it work as an SF plot it really really doesn't.)
no subject
It strikes me that while Joanna's *general* problem is the patriarchy, and I am with her on that, her *specific* problem (as you mentioned) is that everybody always told her she was a genius and a star, and that now that she has grown up everybody is not treating her as a genius and a star, and she thinks she deserves to be treated as a genius and a star.
And while those are certainly not two separate problems - it is certainly easier to be treated as a genius and a star if you are not also fighting the patriarchy for it - they are not the *same* problem.
There are many, many women who never expected that they would be treated like Shakespeare, and were taught that even if they are gifted, the most they should aspire to was an apartment in the city and a job they didn't hate and a cat and some good female friends, that it's fine to write poetry but you have to have a job that will support you too and being Shakespeare isn't that great anyway.
And those people aren't, actually, wrong because not everybody, even the gifted ones, can be Shakespeare, because there can only be so many Shakespeares, and most people wouldn't enjoy being Shakespeare anyway. And most of those people are not going to be excited when you tell them that the main problem facing feminism is that award-winning NYC writers get unfair reviews, which Joanna in fact does a couple times.
(There are also many men who were taught they could never be Shakespeare even if they had the potential because they needed to take the factory job to support their family. they aren't wrong either, not if they want a family more than they want a tiny chance to be a star.
And many more men who were brought up thinking they were Shakespeare and ended up with an apartment and a cat instead, and in my experience they tend to deal with it by blaming the Jeannines in their lives for their "failure" in a way not unlike the way Joanna does. I have known. far too many men like that. and far too many women screwed over by buying into it the way joanna does, while dating them. for me to give it any sympathy at all. especially since the solution there is not for Joanna to be lauded as a genius, or for us to solve patriarchy - you'll note that Janet is actually just as fucked up about "genius" as Joanna is, the text is just more low-key about it - it's for us to stop fucking up our gifted kids of all genders in all the myriad ways we do and to stop teaching them that patriarchalist/imperialist/capitalist concept of success as the only way to be a real person)
(I may have strong feelings about this)
no subject
THIS, oh my gods yes this.