A Woman of War

When I was much younger it was different, but nowadays I find that it's the passing of women that makes me feel like a chunk has been taken out of my life: Del Martin, Jill Johnston, Jane Rule -- and now Joanna Russ, who died this morning in an Arizona hospice after having suffered several strokes. Since I don't follow the science-fiction press or intertubes, I probably wouldn't have heard about her death for some time, but fortunately her longtime friend and fellow writer/teacher Samuel Delany is one of my friends on Facebook, and he passed along the news that she'd entered the hospice a few days ago, and was slipping fast.

There's quite a bit of information about her on this up-to-date Wikipedia entry, so I needn't add too much to it. I must confess that I usually liked her short stories better than her novels (though that's true of many sf writers), and her critical writings better than her fiction. Even her classic story "When It Changed", about a planet where all the men had died off centuries before, leaving women to carry on quite competently, is uneven; Russ herself said that she got the opening paragraphs quickly, as if by dictation, and then had to "finish the thing by myself and in a voice not my own." It shows, I'm afraid. "When It Changed" was the first thing I read by Russ, and it left me ambivalent, but then a friend referred me to an essay in which Russ argued that SF gave more scope to action by women characters than mundane fiction does, using examples of standard story modules with the sexes reversed: "Alexandra the Great," for example. That was what hooked me on Russ's writing, though I did track down and read all her fiction too. If I had to whittle down my library to its core, I'd certainly keep How to Suppress Women's Writing, (Texas, 1983), Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (Crossing Press, 1985), and To Write Like a Woman (Indiana, 1995), though I'd probably also keep her fiction because most of it's out of print and hard to find.

One of the notable traits of her fiction is its anger, still unacceptable in women's writing to this day. A favorite exchange of mine comes from The Two of Them (Putnam, 1978), in which a female agent violates the Prime Directive by deciding to rescue/kidnap a brilliant, talented girlchild from a planet where girls and women are not permitted to be brilliant or talented.

"Which arm shall I break?" says the female jinn [Irene, the agent, from the perspective of the girl's father].

"If you break my arm, I will not be able to write the visa!" shouts 'Alee.

The female jinn says, "I will not break your writing arm." ...

He cries, "I am a man of peace!"

She smiles; she says, "I am a woman of war" ... [122-3]

I still find this funny, though many of my friends disapproved. Russ's writing helped me to come to terms with my own anger, for she struggled herself with the taboo on women's anger and (even fantasized) violence, and wrote about it brilliantly, as in her essay on man-hating in the collection Amazon Expedition (Times Change Press, 1973, pp. 30-31).

That bad things are done to you is bad enough; worse is the double-think that follows. The man insists -- often semi-sincerely, though he has some inkling of his motives because if you question them, he gets mad -- that (1) he didn't do anything, you must be hallucinating; (2) he did it but it's trivial and therefore you're irrational ("hysterical") to resent it or be hurt; (3) it's important but you're wrong to take it personally because he didn't mean it personally; (4) it's important and personal but you provoked it, i.e., it's your fault and not his. Worse still, he often insists on all of them at once. In this sort of ideologically mystified situation, clarity is crucial. Let us get several things clear: hurting people makes them angry, anger turns to hate when the anger is chronic and accompanied by helplessness, and although you can bully or shame people into not showing their anger, the only way to stop the anger is to stop the hurt. The cure for hate is power -- not power to hurt the hurter, but power to make the hurter stop.

It's a mistake to think that man-hating is a delicate self-indulgence; it's very unpleasant. ...

That was 1973, and it's still cutting-edge, as you can see in some of the comments (especially this one) on this 2010 interview with the editor of a book of essays on Russ's work. I've had enough debates in the past decade with well-meaning (I know they're well-meaning because they tell me so, quite insistently) males in sf / fantasy fandom to know that things haven't changed much in the genre over the past four decades. Anger is definitely out in the gay and feminist movements we now have, dominated as they are by their therapeutic / professional wings, but they were never really in, not that much.

But back to Joanna Russ. She didn't write anything in her later years because she suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and arthritis. That was a loss, to her as much to her readers I'm sure, but the work she did manage to do is still with us, in used bookstores and libraries. Her short-story collections, especially the Alyx stories and The Zanzibar Cat, are probably the most accessible introduction to her fiction, and everybody should read How to Suppress Women's Writing. It's one reason I love books: even long after an author dies, even if I never met her in person, she can still speak to me on the page.

P.S. Nicola Griffith linked to this fine appreciation of Russ today.

A Christian Mind

I meant to include this in the earlier post on "sexualized" children, but it slipped my mind.

The term "rape culture," used repeatedly by the Hathor Legacy blogger, is misleading if it suggests that there is a "rape culture" distinct from the culture as a whole. As Joanna Russ wrote in 1985 (Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts, The Crossing Press, page 92):

I’ve always thought that patriarchal male sexuality must be a rather difficult business. To over-simplify: A partner’s hostility or boredom is ordinarily a real turn-off – and yet this is exactly the situation under patriarchy, where so many women are not interested, not excited, not participants, and not happy. Yet men must penetrate and ejaculate if there are to be any babies – and so the problem for patriarchy (whether you think of this as a one-time invention or a constant process) is to construct a male sexuality that can function in the face of a woman’s non-cooperation or outright fear and hostility.

Most women, whether they think of themselves as feminists or not, recognize this; it's part of the folklore. But it's so extreme, it's like saying that all men are rapists, isn't it? Well, no, it isn't. It's to say that our official culture structures sexual expression this way, even though not all men or women conform to the role they are supposed to play. I suspect it's because most people do not live up to official erotic and gender values that human life is at all bearable -- to the extent that it is bearable.

If you doubt that this is the case, let me present a revealing passage from a highly respectable male writer who calls for a return to traditional Christian values, Harry Blamires. Blamires is, according to Wikipedia, an Anglican theologian, literary critic, novelist, and a protege of C. S. Lewis. He's the author of a mainstream academic work on James Joyce's Ulysses. In his book The Post-Christian Mind: Exposing Its Destructive Agenda (Ann Arbor MI: Servant Publications, 1999), Blamires complained that "the need for living harmoniously in society along with people of other faiths has encouraged a pluralism that saps confidence in the imperatives of the Christian revelation" (14):

Current secularist humanism -- a mishmash of relativistic notions negating traditional values and absolutes -- infects the intellectual air we breathe. There is a campaign to undermine all human acknowledgement of the transcendent, to whittle away all human respect for objective restraints on the individualistic self. The hold of this campaign on the media is such that the masses are being brainwashed as they read the press, listen to the radio or watch TV [9].

And so on. Most of the book is just this overheated. Someday I may quote and discuss more of it. But for now I want to single out one fascinating bit -- fascinating in the same sense as a car wreck: you can't look at it and you can't look away.

... The size of Victorian families indicates an uninhibited level of sexual activity. [As does the number of children sired by Victorian papas and sons on the maidservants.] It could be argued that the Victorians were much more conscious of the power of sex than we are. That could be why women were distanced from men by complex etiquettes of contact in social life. There was a time when female employees in certain respectable institutions were required to lower their eyes when conversing with male colleagues. The ethos between this distancing must surely have been based on a recognition of the compulsive force of the sexual appetite. On those grounds the Victorians would never have been so rash as to put both sexes together in comparable stations, say, on a warship. We, who have seen what doing so had led to, may perhaps concede their prudence. The Victorians seem to have believed in the need to tame sexuality and domesticate it. We find in Victorian literature the image of the virginal young woman who seems chastely remote from contact with the earthiness of procreation. She is someone in whose presence animal appetite is chilled into awe. This image, the angel in the house [!? – the angel in the house was the mother, not a virgin], was surely not the product of male minds castrated by dwelling in the world of top hats that had to be decorously lifted at the sight of a skirt. It was the product of male minds alert to the bubbling cauldron of sexuality that seethed beneath the surface of interchange between the sexes [152-153].

Let me try to tease out some of the remarkable assumptions embedded in this incoherent rant. The most obvious, I suppose, is that for Blamires "the sexual appetite" is exclusively male, and it is always a hairsbreadth away from aggression. A woman who meets a man's eyes -- in "certain respectable institutions," at least, and I wonder which ones he has in mind -- instead of lowering them modestly, risks setting off his hair-trigger lust. The Victorians were not the only ones who believed in the need to tame sexuality and domesticate it; so did the pagan Greeks. The early Christians agreed, but they mostly seem to have thought that the best way to tame male sexuality was total abstinence, with marriage a licit outlet for those who couldn't cut the mustard. But the Victorians seem also to have had little hope of taming the brute beast in the human male, and settled for supplying many outlets, commercial and amateur ("bad girls" of one type or another), for a man's "bubbling cauldron", so that the chaste respectable virgin may be spared his rutting violence if her icy remoteness fails to chill his animal appetite into awe.

Now, a culture based on assumptions like these will be a rape culture. Rape will be the norm, because women's own wishes and desires are not taken into account, or even noticed. The culture will represent men as ravening beasts whose lust is barely kept in check and can be set off by nothing more provocative than making eye contact. On the other hand, the lowered eyes of modesty are wonderfully stimulating: a modest woman knows she's enflaming a man, she's just being coy to entice him; she really Wants It, as all women do. If a man assaults a woman, it's because he lost the war within himself to tame his sexuality; but it also must have been something she did, probably deliberately, so she must have Wanted It. If too many men are losing control, then women should be confined to their homes after dark; any who go out after curfew will know that whatever happens to them is their own fault, so they must Want It too. A fortiori, if you dress up your daughter like a harlot you can hardly pretend to be surprised if some poor man decides she's signaling her sexual availability and takes her up on her offer, even she's only six years old. But even if you lock her in a barrel until she's eighteen and feed her though the bunghole, even if you cover her from head to foot in the name of "modesty," her mere femaleness makes her what the Catholics call an occasion of sin. There will be men trying to break the barrel open to take her, there will be men who will go nuts and attack her because her chador didn't conceal her enough, her sensual body language shines through like X-rays. That's just how men are.

It's worthwhile to compare Blamires's take on male sexuality with Michael Ruse's. Being a post- or at least non-Christian, Ruse lamented that women don't go into heat, because "then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance." Like Blamires, though, Ruse took for granted that men are always on a hair-trigger, ready to be set off at the mere sight of a pretty girl passing by; about women's desires he had nothing to say, apparently being ignorant of their existence and not interested in finding out.

Blamires, remember, is not a Larry Flynt or a Hugh Hefner; he's a reactionary Christian of impeccably respectable credentials. The crazy things he says do come close to normative Victorian (and pre-Victorian, as you can see by reading Shakespeare or Jane Austen; or post-Victorian, if you read Norman Mailer or John Gray) attitudes to male sexuality. Women aren't people in his Christian mind, they're symbols -- either virgins or whores. It's revealing that what he considers the Christian alternative to pervasive secular relativism looks like a scenario out of Victorian pornography.

But Mom! All the Other Kids Are Going to School in Thongs!

Katha Pollitt has a good column at The Nation about the supposed Second Wave / Third Wave rift in feminism, between the supposedly sexless hippie chicks of the Second Wave and their supposedly riot grrls-gone-wild Third Wave daughters.

This division only holds up in a few cases, if at all, like Katie Roiphe and her mother Anne. In general, as Pollitt says,

it's chronologically off. If second wavers are those who made the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and '70s, they are not the mothers of today's young feminists but their grandmothers. ... The wave construct obscures the perspective of women ten or even twenty years younger, like, um, me--in 1966, when NOW was founded, I was a junior in high school--or Susan Faludi (b. 1959), bell hooks (b. 1952) or Anna Quindlen (b. 1952).

The same thing happens at the other end. "Third wave" was indeed intended to define a new generation--it was coined by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's daughter--in 1992. The original third wavers, with their reclaiming of "girl culture" and their commitment to the intersectionality of race, class and gender are now touching 40; they hung up their Hello Kitty backpacks some time ago. Many, like Walker, have children: they are the mothers who, today's "young feminists" complain, use up all the air in the room, according to Nation writer Nona Willis Aronowitz. But the term continues to be used to describe each latest crop of feminists--loosely defined as any female with more political awareness than a Bratz doll--and to portray them in terms of their rejection of second wavers, who are supposedly starchy and censorious. Like moms. Somebody's mom, anyway.

Good stuff, and worth reading in its entirety. It reminded me, first, of similar confusion I've encountered about the gay movement. "Back in your generation, they were all activists!" some younger gays have told me. Not by a hell of a sight, unfortunately. I suppose it's not surprising that people believe such things, since by definition the people who turn up in old video clips about Gay Liberation were activists; and those who don't, though not all were closeted, are invisible. But the movement was the tip of the iceberg of queers in America, and I think that's still true, though probably the gay marriage issue has gotten more of us involved than ever before.

Pollitt's remarks also reminded me of this bit from a 1979 article by Joanna Russ, which I think supplements Pollitt's arguments nicely. It's this dynamic that the media try to exploit with the Second Wave / Third Wave trope:

Every women’s studies teacher, for example, knows the female student who comes into her office and announces defiantly that she’s going to get married – the world is still full of girls who think that heterosexual alliances with men represent a form of rebellion against sexless Mommy. How do these young women imagine their mothers ended up where they were? Yet the hope persists that heterosexual activity (a little wilder than stuffy Mom’s) will provide access to the men’s freer, wider world. Mother’s function as the forewoman who polices Daughter’s sexuality, in many American families, gives some color to this notion – that an alliance with men is an alliance against Mother – and yet these girls must have at least the suspicion that Mom made the same bargain. And surely they know that heterosexual alliance can’t confer membership in the men’s world but only a place (Mother’s place, in fact) on the sidelines. But they don’t. And so they end up married, leading the same life as Mother, or – if unlucky – a worse one with less bargaining power. And their daughters repeat the process.

(From her review of Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur, reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen [University of Liverpool Press, 2007], page 162.)