Nicholas Perez's Reviews > The Female Man

Read for my resolution to read Classic Sci-fi. There's a lot to unpack here.

The Female Man focuses on four women: Joanna, a self-insert of the author (said author does not shy away from revealing so) who is find her place in contemporary (1970s) America; Jeannine, a young woman in a timeline where World War II never happened, therefore the Great Depression is still ongoing and the second-wave feminist movement never happened; Janet, a woman from a timeline where men died out centuries ago and women now live in a, somewhat, peaceful world; and Jael, a woman from a far future timeline where men and woman are in stalemate in their literal gender war with each other. Jael makes the women cross into each other's timelines to see how women are in their respective worlds. Along the way, the Js, mostly Joanna, tries to reconcile being the titular "female man"

Before I get into a review, I want to note a few things. I had previously read Joanna Russ' We Who Are About To . . ., to get used her writing. Russ writes in a very unique that often drifts into stream of consciousness, and it's no different here. I do recommend reading one of her shorter novellas or short stories before tackling this book. Second, my edition, the Gollancz SF Masterworks edition, comes with an introduction by Gwyneth Jones. In Jones' introduction I learned that this book, along with Russ' previous short story "When It Changed" from Again, Dangerous Visions (which is actually our first introduction to Janet's timeline) was written as a response to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Russ and Le Guin actually grew to dislike each other severely.

In 1975, the same year The Female Man was published, but not written, Jeff Smith, the publisher of the fanzine Khatru, moderated a symposium in letters on “Women in Science Fiction.” Le Guin and Russ were both invited to this symposium along with several others. At the symposium, Le Guin called The Female Man John Wayne’s wet dreams with the sexes reversed. Russ had already wrote a scathing review of Le Guin's The Dispossessed and had accused her many times of being accommodating to men. This division between two feminist powerhouses at the time lead to a division between what kind of stories involving gender future writers would write about. Kameron Hurley calls this Big F political feminism (Russ) and little f assumed feminism (Le Guin).

So, all that meandering aside, keep in mind that with this book Russ is responding to both patriarchal society and Le Guin--perhaps she conflated the two! All in all, I found The Female Man conceptually interesting and Russ' syntax inventive, but as with my review of The Left Hand of Darkness, I did not really enjoy the author's discussion of gender. When I read Stranger in a Strange Land, I told myself that in order to get past Robert Heinlein's unsavory views to just accept that he was a man of his times. My good friend carol. pointed out that kind of thinking was weak because there were people during Heinlein's time who were active and loud about going against his kinds of views. carol. is right--as she often is--and I cannot write some of Russ' views off as such.

Like Le Guin, Russ obviously writes within in a binary: men versus women. Par for the course with a feminist novel of the 1970s, most of the male character are one dimensional and, with a few exceptions, are all cruel, pretentious, and evil. I'm not truly bothered by this, as I kind of expected it; it's just kind of boring really. However, the female characters outside of the four Js don't fair much better. All the other women are there briefly to show lifestyles Russ doesn't want to live in. Laura, a teenage girl who gets into a sexual relationship with the adult Janet--this is viewed as taboo in Whileaway, Janet's world--really grated on me and made me wish Janet dump her and go back to her wife. Russ uses these women to show how patriarchy enforces women into certain roles and she has a right to be angry about it. However, whenever there is a female character who is portrayed as being happy with a specific role and states that it was her choice to be in, they are written off as stupid and complacent. I'm fine with showing female characters who don't want to be married and have children--which Russ will remind you a lot of--but hating on women who do just irks me. It's any woman's choice whether she wants to get married or not, and it's not anybody's business, whether it be a man or another woman, what she chooses. Russ doesn't seem to like women who don't follow her exact lifestyle.

As for the four Js, Janet is the most interesting to me. Janet is from Whileaway, the world where men died out centuries ago. In The Female Man we see a man get transported to it briefly, but his fate is unknown. In the previous "When It Changed," men finally come back to Whileaway, which may be Russ admitting that worlds consisting only of women would never be a reality. Anyway, Janet takes an interest in men (not romantically or sexually) because she has never seen one. One man, one of the few nice men in the book, takes an intellectual interest in her and he and her have an interesting, albeit somewhat stilted, conversion. The scene mostly shows the androcentricism of language, but it's still pretty interesting. Janet's perspective also shows that both she and her own society are not totally utopian. Janet admits to killing people (other women) and her sexual relationship with Laura concerns her despite the pleasure it brings. Interestingly enough, even thought here are no wars in Whileaway, the way women there resolve any problems is duels. One woman comes out dead.

Jeannine was probably the most dislikeable of the Js. When she complained about how people said she should be nothing more than a housewife, I understood her. But her criticisms of her boyfriend Cal and a man she briefly dates seems bit excessive. Cal wanting to dress up and not immediately have sex with her once he gets in bed with her is not as drastic as she makes it out to be. She gets mad at her other date when he says he's finishing his BA and isn't sure what to do in life. Most people in their 20s are like that. The book's criticisms of men wavered between being uncaring about women and then not being masculine enough, the latter of which is odd.

Jael is an interesting character, but her perspective is really problematic. Jael hates men totally, the only two exceptions are the patron of a brothel in the Manland (yes, that's what it's called) and Davy, a genetically modified man whom she has sex with. The sex scene between her and Davy I'm sure was meant to be shocking in its day because Jael is the dominate one; however, I feel that by today's standards it would be considered "kinky." In Jael's world, the Manlanders take weaker and less masculine men and perform surgeries on them, based on schematics sent by the women, and use them for sexual pleasure. Through Jael, Russ states very clearly how these transgender individuals are inhuman. I really shouldn't be surprised that Russ was a TERF. And please, do not tell me that it's because Trans Rights began in the 80s, the first transgender activists came about in the mid-60s and gradually came more to prominence over the decades after Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera came into the public eye. Russ knew exactly what she was doing.

Joanna is the perspective I feel most mixed about. We don't really get to see a lot of her world unlike the other three. Perhaps it is because it is our world (in the 70s, mind you) and Russ feels that we should know about. Joanna doesn't really reveal much except of the sexism of her world. I am a little dismayed at the lack of explanation of her being "a female man." The basic ontology is discussed: a female man is a woman who doesn't act like a man's stereotyped view of a woman, she's a woman who has pushed herself through everything to become stronger and smarter. However, in doing this, Joanna is only equal on men's terms and she has somewhat isolated herself from other women. But it just ends there. The concept of a female man is very reminiscent the Christian-Platonist concept of a woman who is "forgetful of her sex." Plato was one who inscribed men being of light, culture, dominance, the mind, and transcendence and woman of dark, nature, passivity, the body, and immanence. Later, early Christian writers, fully schooled in Platonism, would write of certain female saints who overcame certain gender challenges as "forgetful of her sex: and "being like a man." I wish Russ investigated this further.

The prose is somewhat challenging. As I said before, it's very stream of consciousness, even though the syntax is cleverly crafted. However, the perspective changes were the most difficult. There's a running theme throughout the book that the four Js are essentially different aspects of one woman, so sometimes when one J is talking it is mixed between first and third person. This got confusing as I sometimes couldn't tell which specific J was talking and who had taken over the dialogue.

The other issue, other than everything else described above, and I don't want to just plainly say that the book is outdated, is that some of Russ' critiques don't really aid her point. For example, near the very end of the book she gives a list of people in her life in certain positions who are men. She mentions the janitor at her apartment building and that taxi-drivers, cops, factory workers, and that the Army and Navy are all men. Are women desperate to becoming janitors and taxi-drivers and factory workers? Do women, especially in today's world with everything America has done around the world, really want to be cops or soldiers? I don't think men even want to be cops of soldiers with everything that's been exposed. Russ then lists off things women can be: waitresses, nurses, teachers, secretaries and nuns and then says "But how many nuns do meet in the course of the usual business day?"

You don't meet many nuns during the day--unless you're in a heavily Catholic area--because as per their vocation they are confined to the convents and monasteries. If Russ had used any of the other professions she listed, I could've gotten her point. Though you could probably meet a lot of those women today.

I feel the same way about this book as I did Stranger in a Strange Land. I recognize that it was foundational, it gave us an unapologetic, feminist manifesto, lesbian love and relationships displayed without shame, and gave us one of the first brutal female characters in SFF; it feels like only very recently that more brutal female characters are coming into focus now. However, Russ' views on any women who doesn't choose her lifestyle and on transgender people really irk me.

There's a brief portion in the book where the narrative goes meta and Russ predicts how the book will be criticized and written off by, mostly, men and some women. It was clever and there is some truth to what she says there, and perhaps I might be considered one of the ones lumped into it, but I stand by what I say.

2/5 stars.