Letter to the Symposium on “Women in Science Fiction” under the Control, for Some Deeply Suspect Reason, of One Jeff Smith
First, some stony facts:
Last night Marilyn turned in rage from the radio and demanded: “Why is it ‘people have abortions,’ but medicine is one of ‘man’s accomplishments’?” What was coming over the BBC was an educational program in which two men, a doctor and a moderator, were discussing abortions and abortion laws. The general run of their conversation was that, while legal abortions were a Good Thing, abortion laws were too lenient. The doctor explained that, as things stood now “anyone could get one” (Like you, Jeff. Or me.) In Rumania, it seems, after the first spate of abortion laws were passed, the population over the next year actually began to go down—so immediately the laws were made more strict (a Good Thing) so that not just everybody (like Harlan Ellison, or Philip K. Dick) could get one. The program ended with some convivial joking about the population explosion: Well, if it was a choice of “the world’s ending in a day from birth control and abortions, or all of us [who?] going on happily breeding for the next hundred years or so, even if that’s all the time we’ve got, then we, I’m afraid, [who is that, now?] will have to choose the latter.” This was not last month, last year, or 1942; it was last night! Now who is this “we” that is going to choose, that is all agreed on “our” choice? Tell me, do you think that this “we” is the “people” who—briefly—brought the birthrate down in Rumania?
And in the last issue or so of F&SF, there is an astonishing story by Philip K. Dick about a Bad Thing: a society where abortions can be performed on children (now wait; whom do abortions usually get performed on? Who is it who goes to the hospital? Who is it who is put under anesthetic?) up to the age of ten. Now Mother, in this story, supports this (and that’s a Bad Thing. After all, “anyone” can be bad) while Fathers and Sons (who are Good Things) try to escape. And I’m sure Dick expects “people” to like his story.
The mankind/humanity/anyone/nobody matrix has been used fifty-four years now (and only fifty-four years; specifically since women took the vote for themselves—before that, nobody even thought it necessary to make the gesture of inclusion), under the ruse of “including” women, to absorb, ride over, and obliterate them. (Who? Them, Jeff. Not us.)
And this morning, I get a letter, signed with a man’s name (Jeffrey Smith; that’s your name, isn’t it, Jeff) addressed to nine women and two men that begins:
“Dear People—”
Look: There are women. There are men. Men have devised an elaborate and insidious behavioral syndrome by which they can imprison, exploit, and oppress women and feel no guilt about it. We (who? Men, that’s who) can do it in such a way that we are unaware that we are doing anything at all, much less a Bad Thing.
There are three women mental patients for every male.
This is an emblem of women’s imprisonment.
Last month’s Scientific American (November 1974) in an article on Alienation drops the statistic that the average middle-class American father spends 23.7 seconds a day (!) playing with his less-than-year-old infant.
Since babies will die with only 23.7 seconds a day of attention, this is an emblem of women’s imprisonment and exploitation.
Today, as I walked to the restaurant where I am writing this (there are seven men within sight of the table where I am sitting; I can hear one woman’s voice and see one other woman—the woman I can see is the waitress: this is an emblem of women’s exploitation), I counted the number of men and women I saw on one block: 126 men to 14 women.
And this is an emblem of women’s imprisonment.
The male/female ratio on the title page of most SF anthologies (or fanzines) is an emblem of women’s oppression and exploitation.
Men have been treating women appallingly for six thousand years. (And, from the evidence of archaeology and paleontology, not too much longer than that. Out of the three million years of human existence, sexism seems to have only really arisen—despite everyone [who?] who would like to rewrite history—since the Neolithic Revolution.)
Men treat women appallingly and oppressively. The “but women don’t really want” argument is no appeal. Anyone (and who are we talking about…?) who had to endure (we’re in the subjunctive, which means we’re not talking about who does endure, which is women, but “anyone” else; and who’s that?) the oppression that women are subjected to, if only to preserve sanity, is not very likely to do much wanting outside pretty proscribed bounds. To preserve sanity you (yes, you) stop wanting what has been made impossible to get or supremely difficult to achieve. And if you know what’s good for you, you forget you were ever able to want anything at all.
There are women.
There are men; the men are sexist.
It’s impossible for us (you and me, Jeff) to be anything but sexist. Any man who claims not to be sexist is simply avowing his blatant ignorance of what sexism is and how it works: women should trust him substantially less far than they can throw him.
Today, there simply is no happy reconciliation possible. We (who?) can’t come on like one big happy family who for our (whose is that again?) purposes have solved it all already and face one another as “people.”
Even for this Symposium.
We have to agree from the start that the situation is horrendous.
It dwarfs the murder of six million Jews in Germany; more than that, it absorbs a good deal of it: compare the statistics on the deaths of Jewish Women in concentration camps to Jewish Men in concentration camps at the hands of German Men, and you get statistics practically congruent to the statistics for American mental hospitals!
Likewise, it absorbs practically every major Western myth, from the Garden of Eden, to Oedipus, to the Trojan War and the Fall of the House of Atrius (as Robert Graves points out, all of these are shorthand accounts of historical overthrow of matriarchal religions by patriarchal religions, written from the point of view of the triumphant patriarchy, whose basic point in their retelling is to show the matriarchy never existed—though all the traditional matriarchal symbols, twins, chalice, serpent, and lamed man, have been neatly absorbed into the new, patriarchal myths) to Jack the Ripper, a crime which Scotland Yard solved to its own satisfaction six months after the last murder was committed, but refused to release the file until 1973 because the murderer, as his stage-cockney notes to the police and newspapers made patently obvious, was “a middle-class male,” and the six women he murdered and mutilated—all East End prostitutes—were “nobodies.”
On the daisy-embossed pamphlets that once accompanied tampons there used to be a page, headed “The History of Menstruation,” which cheerfully explained, for the benefit of young women who had newly reached puberty, that during medieval times menstruating women were locked up during their periods because they were considered unclean. But today, the pamphlet went on, we live in a more enlightened age.
What the pamphlet fails to mention is that “unclean” in medieval times meant specifically “unholy.” (Nobody was clean in medieval times; the invention of the bathtub was several hundred years off.) Women were “unholy” during their periods because there was a superstition prevalent, left over from a matriarchal religion that, here and there in Europe, was strong enough to eventually spark off the Inquisition, that a menstruating woman could cause the death of one of two men simply by walking between them; as well, during their periods, women were assumed to have special powers over crops and tides. That was why fathers locked up their daughters and wives during their (whose? but perhaps we are beginning to see whose) periods: men were terrified that they would be done in for the patriarchal disenfranchisement of their female relatives that was proceeding apace. “People” are perfectly happy to discuss superstitions about “uncleanness and women” amidst daisies and soft-focus photographs. Why aren’t they (and who writes these pamphlets…?) willing to discuss, among the same doves and lilies, the superstitions about power that underlie them?
The situation is appalling, across the whole world, from the various African tribes in which the men circumcise the women (“female circumcision” is a white, male, anthropological euphemism for “clitoridectomy” in which the entire organ is removed, at the root, with a sharp stone) to the anthropologist Edmond Leach, some six months ago, in an honorary lecture presented at London University, pleading that we (who?) reinstitute sexual segregation in Higher Education, and that women be discouraged (by whom…? well, by “people”) from studying certain subjects, that they be restricted (again, by whom…?) to certain others, and that we turn to primitive societies with strict separation of the sexes as a model of how to solve our (whose…? Come on now; whose?) problems.
I am male; I am sexist.
In the current social context the two statements are synonymous.
Any man who doesn’t begin by this admission is lying.
Any woman who won’t admit this is the all-too sympathetic victim of some personal strategy devised to live with her own situation by ignoring the larger one that proscribes it.
When I go out with Marilyn to dinner at our local French restaurant (where we have been going practically once a week for over a year) and Marilyn pays the bill by check (from money she has earned at her own business, which brings in 80 percent of our income), I feel a slight moment of discomfort: it is nowhere near as strong now as it was a year ago, but it is there: it is sexism.
When we go to the same restaurant, with our old friend (of some eighteen years standing) Judy, and Judy, who smokes long, thin cigars, offers us both one after dinner, and I refuse and Marilyn accepts (at other times, I have accepted an after-dinner cigar—specifically from (who?) Michael Perkins, at the Mexican Gardens restaurant on Cordelia Street in New York, and enjoyed it very much), and the waiter appears to light them, I feel a moment of embarrassment, mortification, and discomfort: that’s sexism (whose? mine!).
Marilyn works in her book business three days a week, switching off with her partner; on the odd days, she often has to go to various other shops to buy book stock; so I take care of our nine-month-old daughter 70 percent of the time. Marilyn, a writer who is also running a self-owned, full-time business, takes care of her 30 percent of the time. When Marilyn is out and has agreed to be back to take over Alyx by a certain time, she is usually back to the minute or even a few minutes early. When I have made arrangements to go out and be back to take over Alyx at a specific time, nine times out of ten I am twenty to forty minutes late.
That’s sexism.
This morning I have had free time to go browsing in London’s SF bookstore, Dark They Were and Golden Eyed; and I have stopped into a restaurant for lunch where, between courses, I am jotting the first draft of all this down—with the result I will probably be half an hour late to start my spell with my daughter; even taking the time to write this letter involves my sexism.
As a black American, I would say that once a month on the average I have to endure some situation of overt racism (the racial situation is talked about less and is far worse in England than it is in, say, the North Atlantic States: twice now this year the Indian restaurant on the corner where I live in the middle of London’s wealthy and residential half of the West End has had its plate glass window smashed by gangs of blond young men (I watched from the window) and once defaced with aerosol paint cans, declaring “Wogs Out!” and “Kill the Niggers!” and on one occasion I have listened to the equally blond police, the next day, hem and haw to the Indian owner about, well, what can you do, and then walk away laughing), of the unsubtle type that makes good conversational fodder for the liberal livingroom discussion—the type that even whites can understand because it’s all been outlined for them so many times before, that even they know what you’re talking about.
As an owner of a radio and an enjoyer of pop music, as a stroller in the streets, as a married male with a daughter, I cannot go for an hour on London’s streets without observing some emblem of overt and rampant sexism—mine or someone (whose?) else’s. Sometimes, in some neighborhoods, I can go for three or four hours without seeing overt signs of racism.
Sexism is a series of socialized and habitual non-responses to the behavior of women as long as that behavior follows very limited and proscribed paths; and it is equally a set of socialized, habitual, subjective negative responses (that may or may not lead to actions) that men experience whenever women’s behavior moves outside this same, confining, oppressive, and exploitative set of expectations.
Is it deep-seated in the male racial unconscious? Or is it merely a superficial habit that can be changed by thought and exposure to a new social order?
What makes this particular question unanswerable is the hopeless confusion between the topology of “mind” and the topology of “brain.” Our “higher thoughts” and our “profound ideas” both take place on the surface of the cerebral cortex—which is, topologically speaking, the deepest part of the brain and evolutionarily speaking, the newest, if one considers the little three square inches of brain where all information both enters and leaves the organ as the “highest” surface. This entrance/exit surface is, evolutionarily speaking, the oldest part of the brain; and the neural matter right “under” it seems to play a large part in the control of all automatic and habitual processes, from the “shadowing” function of language (“shadowing” is the ability to say back what someone is saying to you; with very little practice, most people can shadow another speaker’s words continually with an average of a quarter of a second delay, which is about the minimum time for any human response, which, given the relatively long synapse times, means that the signals involved can not be traveling through more than an inch of brain material) to nailbiting, to heartbeat, to breathing, to digestion, as well as the control of the endocrine glands. Now obviously some of these habits can be programmed from (or through) the “deeper” surface of “conscious thought” and some can’t. But the topological confusion as to what “internal responses” and “external behavior” are basically “deep down and ineradicable” (what is it deep down in, and what is it ineradicable from?) and what is “surface and changeable” (which surface, and of the “brain” or the “mind;” and do you have any clear picture of how the two relate?) puts the discussion beyond rational bounds.
Is this topological confusion between mind and brain, then, an example of sexism?
No. Rather, sexism is such a pervasive problem that any piece of human confusion can be appealed to in support of it. (“Sexism is too ingrained, deep down, and basic to people’s” (whose?) “minds to eradicate” and is therefore “trivial, superficial, and not a deep concern of most mature persons” (who is that again…?) “and the women” (oh, that’s who) “who object to it are only latching on to a superficial fad to cover up their” (whose did you say now?) “deep down neuroses… etc., etc.”) The rational approach, where people sit down and politely try to show each other where they are mistaken, is only of limited use before such an all-pervasive problem.
It leaves the anti-sexist with the burden of clearing up every piece of human confusion there is (the mind/brain topology confusion in discussions of sexist “instincts”/habits; the showing/telling confusion in sexist fiction; the description/explanation confusion in sexist argument; the action/intention confusion in sexist encounters—and on, and on, and on) while the other side blithely jumps from one to the next (and the forms of human illogic, from teleological fallacies to category-concept mistakes, are numberless as the stars—and all very easy to fall into, no matter what one is arguing about). But because sexism is as socially prevalent as it is, all and more such fallacies, knowingly and unknowingly, are going to become part of the argument; and will, specifically, be brought to bear against anti-sexist women.
Sexism is deadening, painful, vicious, and destructive of health, wealth, mind, and life. (Whose…? Guess!)
When somebody has his foot on your neck, he (or his brother) may be quite ready to explain his position to you or your sister (should you ask) and his reasons for standing there. And he may even try to convince you that it doesn’t really hurt you all that much, now, does it? But you are a damn fool if you waste too much energy politely explaining to him (or his brother) why it hurts, or what the logical mistakes in his argument, novels, or relationship with language and/or society are.
In the sexist context of Western society, the only rational response (whose response now…? Do we have that, at least, clear?) is to go out and get a gun. There have already been threats on Robin (editor of Sisterhood is Powerful) Morgan’s life, and she has been carrying one on her university speaking engagements.
Rational discourse, in a situation like this, is all gravy.
Therefore, if we (who? me, Jeff, you, and Tiptree—because we are the only three that any of us can speak for in this Symposium) do not all agree about the seriousness of the situation from the start, then this Symposium is not worth the time, expenditure of energy, and frustration that will result.
Okay? Have “we” got that clear? If so, then what are you doing controlling this Symposium on Women in SF, in this culture? Keep your hands on the table where I can see them.
This is a deadly serious subject.
I don’t want my comments “edited down” for whatever reason. And I certainly don’t want any of the women’s comments “edited down” either; and certainly not by you.
This is the women’s subject; and you (Jeff) are not responsible to edit them down. I know that because I happen to have been born on the same side (male) of the very great cultural divide you were; and I know the temptation/pressures we are under. And I also know about “people” who, in this culture, on this subject, begin letters with “Dear People—”
Last month I was having a conversation with a twelve-year-old, and her father, that began as a discussion about the Earthsea trilogy and went on to the lack, in children’s books, of strong, active, women characters who succeed (like other people, say: Conan the Conqueror, for example; or Tarzan; or Lorq Von Ray; or Tom Swift; or Robinson Crusoe; or Huckleberry Finn; or Tolstoy’s (or Melville’s) Pierre; or David Copperfield; or Tom Jones). I knew from previous conversation that six months back, Livy had devoured all six books of Jean Rhys; she is a pretty bright kid! Extract from the conversation:
ME: What kind of books do you like?
LIVY: Oh, well… you know. Books about people.
ME: Can you think of any women characters in the books you read that you particularly like?
LIVY: Oh, I never read books about women!
The tragic point is that even a twelve-year-old already knows that women are not people; and even a twelve-year-old has begun the construction of all those tragic strategies one must create if one is a woman, to live with this piece of appalling news, echoed in the lyrics of every popular song, underscored by every advertisement and movie and television program and walk down the street you take.
Livy’s father (an Oxford graduate, with one son sixteen and three daughters, fifteen, twelve, and twelve), in the discussion of children’s books, with the blatant example of its effect that had suddenly confronted him with his own daughter, suddenly became very concerned with sexism. Two months before, I’d watched him reduce his fifteen-year-old daughter to tears: No, she could not unplug the hi-fi and carry it down from the third floor! She must wait till her sixteen-year-old brother (who, incidentally, is two inches shorter than she is) got home to do it for her! She knows nothing about such things and might break it or get a shock…! Now is this sexism? Surely this is just how people who have families have to act from time to time to keep order. And I think I am safe in saying that, despite his concern for sexism in children’s literature, within his family order will prevail.
This is a serious subject.
We do it right or we don’t do it at all. I feel no compunction to be intelligent, civilized, and rational over all this: I have a daughter to rear and books to write that she can read someday without having to cut her soul in half to enter and enjoy them.
Any shit and I bow out.
I have better things to do.
That settled, I go on to your actual questions:
The first three sentences of your first question are logical gobbledygook; so I’ll ignore them. The last two—“What attracted women writers to SF? What attracted you?”—sounds pretty much like it’s addressed to the “people” again (unless you always use the third person as a form of address…?) and, considering your subject, is pretty damned insulting.
Nevertheless: Certainly one of the reasons I was initially attracted to SF was that, like the Western and the Detective novel, it seemed to offer a slightly wider range of interesting women characters than straight fiction, whose situation anent all this Leslie Fiedler had been so acutely bewailing in Love and Death in the American Novel a year or so before I wrote my first (published) book. At least there was the Empress of the Universe in Glory Road, or the odd woman scientist, or the benevolent super alien disguised as a woman. In serious contemporary literature, it was all Philip Roth, early Barth, and Malamud: spineless English instructors having affairs with absolutely nonexistent faculty wives who got pregnant/had abortions/died. (From 1930 to 1965, any “person” who had an abortion in an American novel or film was automatically killed off by the author. This was known as Daring Writing.) I was not particularly interested in writing all-male extravaganzas a la Moby Dick cum The Naked and the Dead. Women interested me: I had just married one. Also, I was told they composed almost half the people in the world. (I later found out they composed slightly more than half the people in the world.) I knew that the women I read about in books had nothing to do with my wife or our women friends. The first literary task I ever consciously set myself, in my very first novel, was to show women characters differently from the stereotypes.
My idea of the way to do this, at nineteen, was to present my women characters as stereotypes and, at the end, say: “See, they’re not really like that at all!” I had an Evil Priestess who, at the end, turned out to be a Good Guy after all. And I had a Princess To Be Rescued From a Tower who turned out, on rescue, to be a pretty spunky little character instead of the usual simp. And what I learned from this naive attempt was that stereotypes are far more powerful things than I had ever dreamed. The moment you slip your mind into their well-worn ruts, they take over you, your story, and a good deal of your world!
Marilyn was eighteen and I was nineteen when we were married, in 1961. Marilyn’s first job was with Ace Books, as an assistant editor. She had just finished N.Y.U. (and had added a couple of years to her age to get the job). I was working as a bookstore clerk at Barnes and Noble, in the textbook department. Marilyn had been working at Ace for perhaps two weeks when she learned that a young man of twenty-three, named Ed, who had no degree and who shared the office with her and who had been hired the same week she had been, to do the same job, was making twenty dollars a week more than she was. Just out of curiosity, she asked the managing director why. (This was Ed’s first publishing job as well. And, on the records, Marilyn and Ed were the same age.) The managing director smilingly explained that it was customary to start men higher.
Shortly a phone was installed in their office, on Ed’s desk. Marilyn was doing rights-and-permissions for Ace and had to use the phone in her work. Ed by now was basically reading, selecting, and copy-editing. So Marilyn had to get up from her desk and go use the phone on Ed’s, whenever she had to phone the rights department at another publisher. After a couple of weeks, she mentioned this to the office manager; and was told, “Oh we never give phones to women employees; they make too many personal phone calls.” (In 1961 nobody even thought such a statement insulting—as something that, even if you felt it, you might at least try to dissemble about it when called on it.) About a week after this, Marilyn came home upset by an encounter she’d had that afternoon with Ed. Marilyn, as I said, needed the phone for her work. Most of the phone calls that came into the office, however, were (personal) calls for Ed. For the first week, simply because her work required she use the phone to call out so much, she had taken to answering it—putting down what she was doing, getting up from her desk, going over to Ed’s, and answering it. Now that it had become clear what the phone pattern was, however, Marilyn had suddenly realized that he still expected her to do the same thing. He was quite prepared to sit there and read, while the phone rang seven or eight times at his elbow, till Marilyn got up, came over, and answered it for him.
That day, Marilyn—who was correcting galleys after lunch—simply decided she wasn’t going to answer the phone anymore. The next time it rang, she let it ring, till Ed looked up and asked: “Are you going to get that?”
“Nope,” Marilyn said, and went on reading.
There was no blow-up. Ed answered the phone—which was for him. Later, however, he asked Marilyn would she at least answer the phone when there were writers or other editors in the office; and went on to explain that he didn’t mind answering the phone, since most of the calls were for him; but it would make him uncomfortable if he were to answer a phone call that did turn out to be for her. In short, he explained, he wanted Marilyn to pretend to be his secretary, but would be made uncomfortable should anyone possibly mistake him for hers. Nor did he see the least contradiction or unfairness in this. At that time, “people” didn’t.
On Wednesday mornings there were editorial meetings to which assistant editors were not invited. Marilyn had already realized that the only way to survive in this situation was to move up out of it as fast as possible. She came up with a six-month publishing program for public-domain “classics,” that Ace had been dabbling in for the educational market. She showed the program to the editor-in-chief, who showed it to A. A. Wyn, then the publisher, who decided Marilyn must be “a pretty bright girl” (all women in publishing, yea unto fifty-five-year-old senior editors at Harcourt Brace, were “girls” back then). So, the next week, Marilyn and Ed were invited to attend the editorial conference. No, Ed had had nothing to do with the idea, drafting or presentation of the program. But it was just that it was customary (it was explained to Marilyn) to invite the male assistant editors to the editorial conferences after they had been there six months as a matter of course. No, the women assistant editors were not usually asked to the editorial conferences at all. But since an exception had been made in Marilyn’s case, it had been decided that they might as well move up his invitation by three months, since Marilyn’s program had shown that assistant editors (who? Why, people who were assistant editors, of course) could be pretty bright after all. Besides, it might make Ed feel bad if she were moved up over him. And did she know that she was the first woman editor ever to be asked to the editorial conferences at all at Ace? That was something to be proud of! (Why, when nobody would have thought for one moment about her feelings three months later when Ed would have been automatically asked to the editorial conferences and she would be left in her office?) In short, Marilyn’s editorial program had won another battle for “people.”
The women friends who dropped by our Lower East Side apartment during that year seemed to have only one topic of conversation. Most of them were Marilyn’s university friends, and they were all moving from the world of the University to the world of work. The most frequent topic of conversation was: What do you do about jobs that advertise positions as “editors,” “travel agents,” or “stockbrokers” in the women’s classified section of the Times, that close with the phrase: Some typing required. The inclusion of this phrase, all these women had found out, meant that, regardless of the title of the job, you were going to be somebody’s secretary.
They didn’t want to be secretaries.
They had just completed university.
They wanted to be editors, travel agents, stockbrokers.
I must have sat listening to hundreds of hours of conversation in which these young women tried to figure out strategies for how to deal with this. Some simply had refused to learn to type. Some refused to admit they already knew. One strategy that, to me anyway, looked good at first was to answer such an ad: “I can type enough for my own correspondence,” which seemed to be putting it on the line: You lie to me, I’ll lie to you, and we both know what we’re talking about. The only problem with that tactic (as I remember a young woman who’d gone to work for a travel agency first explaining) was that we (who?) all know that if you can type enough to type your own letters, you can type enough to type somebody (who-body?) else’s.
And the one strategy you could not use was to go into a job interview and say: Do you want me for the job advertised, or are you lying to me and trying to finesse me into a job as a secretary with a college degree at less than the salary you would have to pay a secretary out of secretarial school, the lure of “advancement” supposed to compensate me for the low starting (for secretary) salary?
What did I think of all this?
Well, I figured that these were just some of the various problems that people (who…?) had to face in the world of work. After all, I had real problems too, working at Barnes and Noble: the store was hooked into a kind of muzak where vast, 16 rpm records played the dullest sop imaginable out over the store all day long. A bunch of us learned that the store manager held a master’s degree in music from Columbia University. One of the other clerks had some 16 rpm recordings of Mozart divertimenti (the original muzak, but oh-so-much-better done). A deputation of us went to see the store manager and asked her if we wouldn’t all be happier if she swapped the Mozart for the muzak.
Her response was: “I can’t abide Mozart!”
And that was that.
Now that was the kind of problem I had to put up with at work. Didn’t that show that everybody (who…?) had to learn to live with problems?
About this time an incident occurred that I think of as the turning point in my own awareness of what was going on. Marilyn was out somewhere that afternoon. It was raining cats and dogs. Suddenly the door burst open and Marilyn, dripping wet, came in and plopped down some shopping bundles. “Here.” I handed her a pair of my jeans since they were the nearest things to hand. “Why don’t you change into these.” And in the middle of the growing puddle on the kitchen floor, Marilyn undressed, toweled herself off, and slipped into my pants (we both wore size 28/28 back then!), zipped them up, turned around while she slid her hands into the pockets—
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She’d gotten the strangest expression. “The pockets!” she exclaimed. “They’re so big!”
Then she showed me the pockets in the pair of girls’ jeans she’d bought a few weeks ago; and the pockets in her overcoat. And in her skirts. None of them was large enough to accommodate a pack of cigarettes without its sticking out the top. (Remember, this was 1961: pre-Kennedy assassination; pre-Beatles; pre-wraparound denim skirts; even people who styled themselves “beatniks” had short hair; peyote was legal; and my father, who had been a jazz musician in his youth, had told me that marijuana led to death, not because he believed it, but because he thought it was a good idea that I should; trying to explain to an intelligent person that Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave” was an incredibly complex musical structure encountered the same disbelief as trying to explain that Stockhausen’s “Cry of the Children” is true music today.) The idea that pockets in men’s clothes were functional had never occurred to her. The idea that pockets in women’s clothing were basically decorative had never occurred to me. We began to talk about this, which led on to other things—and before long we realized that, though we had gone to the same high school, had seen each other daily for four years, had shared thousands of intimate conversations, somehow without even knowing that the other existed, we had been raised in two totally different cultures.
What defines a culture?
An anthropologist will tell you costume, language, economic organization and relationship to the world, relationship to art (for me, Jeff, most Great Music is written by other men; for a woman, most Great Music is written by Someone Else), and to God/religion. Strictly on a man/woman basis, these were all socially entirely different for Marilyn and me. I had seen the economic side of it already (twenty dollars a week, for starters) and it was perfectly clear that, in terms of opportunities, there was nothing symmetrical about the two cultures in the least. Women’s was cramped, limited, and exploited. (It was back in 1960 that I first heard the then-popular joke from a young male stockbroker: “In American business, women do the work; men do the thinking.” He thought it was very funny.) Now all this was going on in the months before, the months during, and the months after I decided to write my first science fiction novel. What did I think about it?
I thought it was unfair, frustrating, demeaning, degrading, and totally unpleasant.
It was so unpleasant, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it!
As a writer, I still had the vague idea that writing was there to entertain. And how were you supposed to entertain “people” if you told them that the world was like that? So I decided I would write science fiction.
What did I want to write about in science fiction? Well, I thought that science fiction was perfectly capable of dealing with real problems of real people—like muzak versus Mozart! I was sure there would be no real difficulty in translating this kind of problem into SF terms.
Could I have translated Marilyn’s problems into SF terms?
I think I already suspected that it was a subject that even to touch at any point would cause the whole thing to break open and splatter all over everything, like the great, rotten fruit it was.
Yes, science fiction was preferable.
Marilyn’s chronic complaint about her job was the actual material of the fiction she edited: specifically, the women characters. They were completely restricted to two types. There was Vicious Evil Bitches, who were basically man-haters. A man-hater is a woman who is not consciously aware that she hates men, but all her actions, even to her very demeanor (self-assured) and bearing (confident), make it perfectly clear to every man and woman who gets within twenty feet of her what she is. A man-hater who is in business, for instance, doesn’t hate men because she is getting twenty dollars a week less than they are for doing the same job, but because she was raped by her uncle as a child and has completely blotted it out of her mind. If she could only remember she was raped, then she’d stop hating men. And if she could only get a good lay (which meant violently, against her will, and usually in some particularly physically uncomfortable place, like a sandy beach or a twiggy forest floor—anyone who has ever had sex on a beach or in a forest is aware that they contain certain nearly mind-obliterating disadvantages to passion and/or romance), then she would leave business forever and become a happy housewife. (This was called Psychological Insight and was frequently combined with Daring Writing.) If she were in publishing, for instance, she wouldn’t answer telephones for the men on the other side of her office; she resented having to pretend to be somebody’s secretary. And you never found out what salary she made (why, she made the same salary as everyone [who…?] else, didn’t she?); and if she proposed an editorial project, she was openly delighted if it netted her some advancement, but if it proved generally beneficial to “people,” she was secretly bitter. The real Psychological Insight writers went so far as to explain that the problem underlying all these sick women’s mental disease was frigidity. They were frigid, which was why they had all these awful feelings in the first place. (But, as I said, I’d married a woman, and I knew that wasn’t the problem.) Occasionally, the explanation was that they were nymphomaniacs, which meant that, really, they were frigid, which was why they had all these awful feelings in the first place. (But, like I said, I was living with a woman, day in and day out, and that just wasn’t it either…) The Vicious Evil Bitch, however, could always be assured of defeat in the end (it was as certain as death-from-abortion); if she wasn’t shot, or run over, or didn’t slip off a cliff, or get struck by lightening, then some Extremely Masculine Male would Put Her In Her Place, and chuckle about it all the way to the bar to have a drink with the boys. The bitches, however, at least lent some life to the stories they were in.
Much more common than the bitch, however, was the Simp. Usually the simp was around solely to be rescued; invariably she would Watch in Terror the final fight between hero and villain, too paralyzed with fear even to think about throwing a punch or a paperweight or a desk drawer herself. If a simp, even by accident, strayed into business, not only would she happily answer the phone for all (who…?) and sundry, make coffee and stay after work to help out any man who smiled at her; if she got an idea for a publishing program, she terribly tactfully suggested it to the guy across the office in such a way that even he thought it was his own idea, and then just gnawed her nails with worry over whether he got invited to the editorial conference or not, and was generally the sort of woman people (who…?) just loved to have around—until she was offstage, at which point somebody (who? Usually one of the Boys at the Bar) would explain: She’s really a bitch. All she wants to do is get her claws into you (no matter how nice they were, underneath every simp was a bitch; a simp was a “healthy” bitch who demonstrated her health by suppressing all evidence of bitchiness except wanting desperately to be married to You [who?]); and can you really imagine life tied down to a fragile, spineless, terrified little ball of dough like that? Then everybody would laugh and have another drink. (Who-body…?)
Now Marilyn and I were both writers, as well as book clerks and editors. Marilyn was working with poetry. I was working with fiction. (I am not, nor have I ever been, a poet.) This “tiny part” of the problem— female characters in fiction—I thought I might be able to handle without getting my hands dirty. As I said, I didn’t want to exclude women from my writing. Coming up with better, more varied, more believable women characters seemed like a safe and, if not easy, at least purely literary task. I had already written one novel that had shown me the traps of trying to fit somebody (who-body was that again?) into the stereotype and then breaking it suddenly. Before I began The Fall of the Towers, I did some hard thinking about what was necessary for a template to make good, women characters.
A couple of hours discussion with Marilyn, and we had it pretty well fixed:
First of all, action is the clearest (and most commercial) way to present character. A good character of either sex must be shown performing purposeful actions (that further the plot), habitual actions (that particularly define her or him), and gratuitous actions (actions that imply a life beyond the limit of the fiction). Simply because of the way most books are plotted, the male characters regularly get to indulge in all three types of actions. The women characters, however, if evil bitch, are all purposeful, but no habitual or gratuitous actions; if simp, she is all gratuitous, but no purposeful or habitual actions. So the first task, after finding a plot that just does not require women in either of these two ugly, banal, and boringly cliché grooves, is to make sure you portray your women characters clearly performing all three types of actions. (And, re the purposeful actions, performing them successfully!) (In case you haven’t noticed, I am now answering the one answerable sentence in your second question: “How do you create characters of the opposite sex?” I have refrained from asking “opposite to what?” simply to avoid war.) That’s one axis of the problem.
The other, as I conceived it at age twenty, runs more or less like this:
To create strong, believable characters of either sex, the character’s economic anchors to the world must be clearly shown. Fiction as we know it is a response to the same elements of the Industrial Revolution as Marxism is: Marx discovered that “The mode of production of material life generally dominates the development of social, political, and intellectual life.” Because of this relation (that would have existed whether Marx discovered it or not), fiction works on the premise that the products of production, reflecting back to the mode of production, also reflect (and reflect on) social, political, and intellectual life—which is what we are doing when we describe people’s clothes and furniture and cars and what they eat and what they live in, in a piece of fiction that ostensibly is only concerned with “what happens.” This is why it is so important, in the maintenance of fictional reality, to keep clear either by implication or direct statement, where the money comes from, how much, and what the relationship is to the money of other people involved. Almost all genre fictions—from the Western to James Bond— become fantasies at the exact point they obfuscate this all-important point. Think of the number of women characters for whom jobs are simply never mentioned. They get their money from their husbands? All right, how do they get it? In a monthly allowance? If so, how much and what is it expected to cover? The following two “supported housewives of wealthy husbands” are sociopolitically two very different people, and would have to be clearly differentiated in a piece of fiction in which they both occurred: The woman whose husband makes seventy-five thousand a year, pays all major household expenses himself, and who gives his wife a hundred dollars a week free and clear allowance for herself, in return for which she is to oversee the house, cooking, children and entertaining, transferring all bills to him; and the woman whose husband makes sixty thousand a year and maintains a joint checking account with her in which there is always ten thousand, she paying all bills out of this account. The economic freedom to take part in some romantic hugger-mugger of two such women, their attitudes about it, and what it might mean to the rest of their lives, would be vastly different! (I would have been delighted to have such information, say, about the Faye Dunaway character in Polanski’s Chinatown.) Whether it is stated or implied, the writer must make this information palpable if the character, female or male, is to be believable in fictional terms.
That’s number one; number two is:
Women characters must have central-to-the-plot, strong, developing, positive relations with other women characters. The commercial/art novel would be impossible without such relationships between men: from Ishmael and Queequeg, to Fafhrd and Mouser, to Huck and Jim, to Holmes and Watson, to Nick and Gatsby, such friendships are the form, content, propellant and subject of the novel. I would pause here to state, from thirteen years distance, that any novel that does not, in this day and age, have a strong, central, positive relation between women can be dismissed as sexist (no matter the sex of the author) from the start. The reason for this is contained in the third point:
Despite whatever romantic interest there is in the plot, it is necessary that all the central characters, women and men, have some central, non-romantic problem which they must exert their efforts to solve. There has always been a lot of talk about the plot “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.” To my knowledge, no such novel has ever been written in English or any other language I’m familiar with. (A good number have been written with the plot “Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy” and they are mostly godawful.) The plot that is abbreviated “Boy meets girl, et cetera” is, in reality, always: “Boy discovers problem to be solved, in the course of which he meets girl; boy tries to solve problem, in the course of which he loses girl; boy solves problem (or occasionally boy discovers problem cannot be solved) as a result of which/reward for which (or in compensation for which) he gets girl.” And the problems he discovers/tries to solve/solves are getting a new job, climbing a mountain, writing a novel, solving a murder, moving up in society; the romance is always the subplot, never the plot itself.
The Fall of the Towers began (as did Gordon Dickson’s Naked to the Stars, and several other novels) as a polemical answer to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (for polemical point, see pages 323–326 of the Ace Books one-volume edition ); in it, I resolved to submit my female characters to the same structural calculus as my male characters. As far as it went, I feel, on that score at any rate, it was successful; and I still believe, twelve years later, that the parameters I set out at twenty are the primary ones needed to overcome the literary problem—if one bears in mind that they are parameters, not analytic definitions of “what every good story must have.” They are not parameters that automatically contain excellence within their boundaries and automatically exclude all mediocrity. At any rate, they more or less got me through the Fall, The Ballad of Beta-2, Babel-17, and Empire Star—though, here and there, I found myself in spite of what I knew, slipping up on that all-important question of friendships between women.
I still think these parameters are primary.
And they don’t go anywhere near far enough!
Anyone who has ever tried to deploy male and female characters into a plot so that they all have non-romantic problems to solve, are firmly economically delineated, and have, beside their romantic interests, firm friendships with members of their own sex, and through the solution of their problems change in some way clearly dramatized by the plot (get a better job, more fame, wealth, prestige—love is a personal reward, not a social one), will have run up against the reason why these parameters are not enough:
Unless you are writing total fantasy—indeed, if you are writing about practically any analogue of our society where the raising of children is primarily apportioned to women, and a significant number of women are out of the work force because they are at home either taking care of children or preparing to take care of them, and by “significant” I mean more women are so occupied than men—you are going to run smack into (and you are going to have to run your female characters dead on through) all those nasty, unpleasant problems Marilyn was having to face day after day in her work: just exactly those problems which I felt were too nasty and ugly to handle in SF.
Science fiction offers the writer a standard solution to the above problem: the “super-woman” solution. You can write about the woman Space Captain (who’s already made it to the top), but you never make your main (or one of your sympathetic central) character the woman first lieutenant, who is in competition with men for the position of captain, that is to be decided and granted by men—because then you’ll be right back having to write about sexual politics again; and they are hideously ugly, as Marilyn’s life at Ace Books had amply demonstrated to me. You make your woman character the head of the Publishing Firm/Intelligence Service/Empress of the Universe; but you will have a very ugly pot to scour if you go at all realistically into how she got there, what she had to put up with, what she had to finesse her way out of; believe me it will not be “Muzak vs. Mozart.” The other thing, of course, is that Super-woman better not have any women friends with whom she can occasionally shoot the breeze (and especially not a subordinate woman that she’s taken a liking to and feels like giving some motherly advice to about the Way the World Is; because if she does, “people” are just not going to come off too nicely. And you know who they are, by now, don’t you?). If you do, there is no way to avoid those ugly problems. (Say 20 percent of the space-fleet has women captains; and say that 20 percent of the crew is women. That seems fairly egalitarian, doesn’t it— considering someone has to bear children and raise them through those first, formative, early years. That means that the majority of women captains—80 percent—are going to come up through the ranks under male captains. Think of any two cultural encounters at an 80:20 proportioning. This is the most abusable deployment. Ace Books, back then, had an editorial staff of five, with one woman: 20 percent!) By and large, I’d used the super-woman solution in my own work (from Mabel Whyman to Maudline Hinkle); this solution allows the emblems of success to women characters, at the price of those fictional necessities, change and growth.
The necessary parameters for writing SF with good female and male characters are laid out above—with a final, fourth one: Do not shirk, avoid, and lie about the ugly when logical story development runs you into it (and with a problem like sexism, one cannot logically walk three steps in any direction without becoming mired down in it). I knew them when I was twenty as clearly as I do now. And not in one single book I have written have I ever followed the four completely—specifically because I wanted to dodge the ugly and the shoddy; because there were things I could not bring myself to say about “people,” people who were not Marilyn, but whom I was born one of; it determined my particular approach to SF writing. And any survey of the evidence of my books— despite any intellectualization I may occasionally indulge to the contrary—shows that it is with “people,” with men and against women, my own allegiances have lain.
Do you, Jeff, understand now why I am so distrustful of yours?
Samuel R. Delany. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press. Wesleyan University Press, 2009.