The Female Man

May She save us all!

I saved the King's life once by pi

The fact that I was not afraid to pin a poisonous snake to a wooden table with a fork (a piece of Faery handicraft I had brought with me to eat meat with) raised my prestige immensely. Oh yes, if it had bitten me, I would have been dead. But they don't move that fast. Think of me in quilting and crinolines-not like a Victorian lady, like a player in Kabuki-holding up that poor little broken-backed dinkus amid general hurrahs. Think of me astride a coal-black charger, my black-and-silver cloak streaming in the wind under a heraldic ba

I keep one precious souvenir of that time: the look on the face of my most loyal feudal retainer when I revealed my sex to him. This was a man I had all-but-seduced without his knowing it-little touches on the arm, the shoulder, the knee, a quiet ma

The day that I left I went out into the hills with a few friends for the Faery "ceremony" that was to take me away, and when the Bureau people radio'd me they were ready, I sent the others away, and I told him the truth. I divested myself of my knightly attire (no mean trick, considering what those idiots wear) and showed him the marks of Eve; for a moment I could see that stinking bastard's whole world crumble. For a moment he knew. Then, by God, his eyes got even more moist and slavish, he sank to his knees and piously elevating his gaze, exclaimed in a rapture of feudal enthusiasm-Humanity mending its fences- If the women of Faery are like this, just think what the MEN must be!

One of Her little jokes. Oh Lord, one of Her hardest jokes.

If you want to be an assassin, remember that you must decline all challenges.

Showing off is not your job.

If you are insulted, smile meekly. Don't break your cover.

Be afraid. This is information about the world.

You are valuable. Push yourself.

Take the easiest way out whenever possible. Resist curiosity, pride, and the temptation to defy limits. You are not your own woman and must be built to last.

Indulge hatred. Action comes from the heart.

Pray often. How else can you quarrel with God?

Does this strike you as painfully austere? If not, you are like me; you can turn yourself inside out, you can live for days upside down, the most biddable, unblushing servant of the Lady since the Huns sacked Rome, just for fun.

Anything pursued to its logical end is revelation; as Blake says, The path of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, to that place where all things converge but up high, up unbearably high, that mental success which leads you into yourself, under the aspect of eternity, where you are limber and nice, where you act eternally under the aspect of Everything and where-by doing the One Genuine Thing-you ca

To put it simply: those are the times that I am most myself.

Sometimes I am a little remorseful; I grow sorry that the exercise of my art entails such unpleasant consequences for other people, but really! Hate is a material like any other. If you want me to do something else useful, you had better show me what that something else is. Sometimes I go into one of our cities and have little sprees in the local museums; I look at pictures, I get a hotel room and take long hot baths, I drink lots of lemonade. But the record of my life is the record of work, slow, steady, responsible work. I tied my first sparring partner in enraged knots, as Brynhild tied up her husband in her girdle and hung him on the wall, but aside from that I have never hurt a fellow Womanlander; when I wanted to practice deadly strategies, I did it on the school robot. Nor do I have love-affairs with other women; in some things, as I told you, I am a very old-fashioned girl.

The art, you see, is really the head, however you train the body.

What does all this mean? That I am your hostess, your friend, your ally. That we are in the same boat. That I am the grand-daughter of Madam Cause; my great-aunts are Mistress Doasyouwouldbedoneby and her slower sister, Mistress Bedonebyasyoudid. As for my mother, she was an ordinary woman-that is to say, very helpless-and as my father was pure appearance (and hence nothing at all), we needn't trouble about him.

Everything I do, I do by Cause, that is to say Because, that is to say out of necessity, will-I, nill-I, ineluctably, because of the geas laid on me by my grandmother Causality.

And now-since hysterical strength affects me the way staying up all night affects you-I'm going to sleep.

X

In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.

It was the secret guilt of disease, of failure, of ugliness (much worse things than murder); it was an attribute of my being like the gree

It was in me. It was on me. If it had been the result of anything I had done, I would have been less guilty.

In my dream I was eleven years old.

Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them was what it means to be convicted of rape-I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those shadowy feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightning that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance-which was not chance-had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested itself in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this: She was Cunt.