Eccentric Flower:199810/neutered by ursula
From Eccentric Flower
«October 1998 «Eccentric Flower
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sixteen october ninety eight two p m Neutered By Ursula Gender-studies lit-crit rant approaching. I find all literary analysis pretentious, and I'll understand if you do too; if this bothers you, then simply don't look inside my glass house. Try the previous postcard from today instead, which is chatty and in an altogether better mood. - - - I am now about one-third through The Left Hand Of Darkness. I recognize that I should wait until I finish it to comment on it, but right now it's annoying me enough that I may have to calm down before I finish it. As Mark Twain said in a similar situation, "You don't have to eat a whole apple to know it's rotten." I am happy to say that I have managed to overcome the gripe about the book that led me to put it down, barely begun, when I was in high school. That was the problem of "begats." These are the inclusions of too-many made-up nouns and pseudohistorical details, intended to bolster the atmosphere I suppose, but annoying. Do I really need to know that Roderick was late an envoy to the Sultan of Diplodocus, the legendary Fourth Kingdom on the continent of Blip? (The term is after the bible chapters which consist of nothing but "A begat B, B begat C, C begat D ....") As I say, I've managed to get past the begats and successfully caught up in the story. But now I have a much more serious problem. (There are mild spoilers ahead, which shouldn't be a problem since I'm apparently the last person on earth to read the book.) LeGuin makes this race androgynous, but what she really does is she makes the race asexual. Ok, men are no less a "shameful" form in the book than women are - but this equality comes at what cost? Sex - even taking on sexual characteristics - is a hidden act, a secret pleasure. In public, not being asexual would be seen as being perverse. Furthermore, LeGuin chooses to use the male pronoun by default - or, more precisely, her protagonist does. So I am left with the impression that her hero is interacting with a race of completely sexless men who have a variety of cliché behavior characteristics taken from both sexes. Does LeGuin sincerely believe this is an improvement? She had her hero eliminate racism by making everyone gray, in The Lathe of Heaven, and I never could tell whether she honestly thought that was a good solution or whether she was pulling the reader's leg. It would be nice to have a world where there aren't any gender stereotypes - better yet a world where we could choose our gender - even better a world where we could keep changing our gender at will. This isn't the way to do it, though. - - - Digression. I remember reading "When It Changed," by Joanna Russ - an amazing story. On the planet in that story, there are no men. None. They all died. They can make more children, but since they're essentially clones, all the babies are female. The planet's been that way for ages. Now male spacemen have arrived from Earth. Russ, bless her, is a hard-liner. The women are happy as they are, and the men cannot seem to understand that. One of them keeps repeating, "Where are the people?" He really means, "Where are the men?" Russ paints him in a way that he literally cannot conceive of women as human. Another, more sensible, astronaut can see that the women are happy - but cannot get past the idea that the arrangement is unnatural, that something is inevitably missing from the arrangement. And the protagonist - Russ's stand-in - is filled with bitterness. Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, looking at the lot of us [...] Which of you plays the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes! In the end, Russ undermines herself with her own sense of the inevitable - the men will come back, the paradise she has built for herself is not permitted to continue to exist even in her story. Nonetheless, my reaction to this gender-utopia is much more favorable than my reaction to LeGuin's. - - - To a certain extent, my self-loathing may be butting heads with what I am reading. I concede that if these people were shown as basically asexual women, some of whom occasionally grew penises for sexual convenience, I'd be a lot happier. In other words, I'm aware of my own biases here, and that I have a lot of loathing for my own gender. (How could I not be aware?) That bias, though, is not as severe as you might think. I tend to innately favor women, true. But I also resent any "all men are pigs" diatribe. No clichés allowed for anyone! (I have read some journal entries from women who don't like other women much - there are apparently quite a few - and I find myself thinking, "You've spent a lot of time meeting the wrong women." But I also read a lot of entries - from writers of both genders - that make me say, "You've spent a lot of time meeting the wrong men.") I despise the bad blood all around. I'd love it if we didn't carry all this gender baggage around with us, if we realized that some men are bad news and some women are too, and that gender is not involved in whether people are cruel to each other or wishy-washy or what-have-you. But neutering everyone isn't the answer. That misses the point, and takes away some of the best parts. - - - Yes, I intend to finish the book. It has a nice plot despite this, full of intrigues, and once I am resigned to the fact that there will not be any sexual love in the book, nor any women, I'll keep going. At least it's not Dawn (Octavia Butler), which was wonderful up to the last twenty pages - at which point I threw it across the room. I hope my reaction doesn't startle everyone too badly, but just in case, let me make it clear: I don't want to be sexless. I don't want to be ambiguous. I don't want to keep people guessing. I want to be female. Got it? I think I've just succeeded in upsetting myself. OK, time to go think about something else for a while. Men don't get to cry in this godforsaken culture. Should have skipped the postcard like I told you to.
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