The Female Man

"Of course we're friends," said Jael Reasoner patiently. "Of course we are.

That's why I don't want to talk to you tonight. Hell, I don't want to get you in trouble. See those crosses? One jab, one little rip or tear, and those girls will start an epidemic you won't be able to stop for a month. Do you want to be mixed up in that? Now you know we women are into plague research; well, these are some of the experiments. I'm taking them across Manland to another part of our own place; it's a short-cut. I wouldn't take them through here except I have some business to do here tonight. We're developing a faster immunization process. I'd tell all your friends to stay away from this table, too, if I were you-not that we can't take care of ourselves and / don't worry; I'm immune to this particular strain-but I don't want to see you take the rap for it. You've done a lot for me in the past and I'm grateful. I'm very grateful. You'd get it in the neck, you know. And you might get plague, too, there's always that.

Okay?"

Astonishing how each of them has to be reassured of my loyalty! says Jael Reasoner. Even more astonishing that they believe me. They're not very bright, are they? But these are the little fish. Besides, they've been separated from real women so long that they don't know what to make of us; I doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like. The specifications we send them every year grow wilder and wilder and there isn't a murmur of protest. I think they like it. As moths to the flame, so men to the social patterns of the Army, that womanless world haunted by the ghosts of millions of dead women, that discarnate femininity that hovers over everybody and can turn the toughest real-man into one of Them, that dark force they always feel at the backs of their own minds! Would I, do you think, force slavishness and deformity on two-sevenths of my own kind? Of course not! I think these men are not human. No, no, that's wrong-/ decided long ago that they weren't human. Work is power, but they farm out everything to us without the slightest protest-Hell, they get lazier and lazier. They let us do their thinking for them. They even let us do their feeling for them. They are riddled with duality and the fear of duality.

And the fear of themselves.1 think it's in their blood. What human being would -sweating with fear and rage-mark out two equally revolting paths and insist that her fellow-creatures tread one or the other?

Ah, the rivalries of cosmic he-men and the worlds they must conquer and the terrors they must face and the rivals they must challenge and overcome!

"You are being a little obvious," says Janet pedantically from inside her suit, "and I doubt that the power of the blood-"

Hsst! Here comes my contact.

Our contact was a half-changed, for Manlanders believe that child care is woman's business; so they delegate to the changed and the half-changed the business of haggling for babies and taking care of children during those all-important, first five years-they want to fix their babies' sexual preferences early. This means, practically speaking, that the children are raised in brothels. Now some Manlander real-men do not like the idea of the whole business being in the hands of the feminized and the effeminate but there's not much they can do about it (see Proposition One, about child care, above)-although the more masculine look forward to a time when no Manlander will fall away from the ranks of the he-men, and with an obstinacy I consider perverse, refuse to decide who will be the sexual objects when the changed and the half-changed are no more. Perhaps they think sex beneath them. Or above them? (Around the shrine of each gowned and sequi

This one has intelligence. Or is it only the weight of his false lashes? The burden of having always to be taken, of having to swoon, to fall, to endure, to hope, to suffer, to wait, to only be? There must be a secret feminine underground that teaches them how to behave; in the face of their comrades' derision and savage contempt, in the face of the prospect of gang rape if they're found alone on the streets after curfew, in the face of the legal necessity to belong-every one of them-to a real-man, somehow they still learn the classic shiver, the slow blink, the knuckle-to-lip pathos. These, too, I think, must be in the blood. But whose? My three friends and I pale beside such magnificence! Four lumpy parcels, of no interest to anyone at all, at all.

A

"Her?" says Jea

"Him!" says A

"Oh, you're lovely," says Jea