Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (26 page)

Ben isn’t happy buried in the footnotes, and he and I don’t speak anymore. He’s mad at me. He never discovered life on Neptune, and nobody, it is clear, is ever likely to. On the other hand, I’m the author of
one of history’s minor taglines. He finds that galling.

It isn’t a great distinction to bear, I’ll admit, but there have been dark nights in my life when I’ve lain awake and wondered whether or not I would leave any ripples behind me. That line is enough of a ripple to bring me through to morning.

First published in
Tomorrow’s Worlds

Copyright © 1971 by Alexei Panshin

*************************

Views expressed b
y guest or resident columnists
are entirely their own.

*

Greg Benford is a Nebula winner and a former Worldcon Guest of Honor. He is the author of more than 30 novels and 6 books of non-fiction, and has edited 10 anthologies.

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To the American male the vagina has been a dark realm, moist and mysterious, controlled by rhythms he could not sense or slake. Beyond that often-obliging passage
lay
the vast, dusky domain of the uterus, where the magical act of bringing forth life occurred, buried deep. He had mere abstract knowledge of that strange cavern territory,
a geography
beyond touch. He could only hear it, with an ear pressed against a wife’s belly, listening to the random thumps of babies on the way, swimming in night.

So as the American turned from the dying frontier of the west, having reached the Pacific and found its oceanic turmoil a salty vastness, he set out to find a new land. The sac that surrounds the embryo has the same saline content as the ocean—as does the blood that knocks in our veins—echoing the Pacific’s patient emptiness. So we began our twencen frontier there: the inner ocean, dark and engulfing, enclosing each of us at our most vulnerable beginnings.

The new frontier was opened in the name of sanitation, the same impulse that brought forth indoor plumbing in the 1890s; a passion to cleanse the world, to make it fresh and new again. So woman was cleaned up, like a problem in municipal maintenance.

Douches, baths, tubes you insert to suck up the dismaying flood, sprays, anti-itch powders, diaphragm, foams, pills—they all ran together as the decades raced by, one stopgap (quite literally) blending into the next as the distinction between hygiene and birth control blurred, and the old dark land yielded to invasions, thrusts deep into its territory, things that dried and sealed off and, after a first rough chill, became an a
c
cepted piece of that dimly lit landscape, a mild discomfort at best, an … appliance.

An old tobacconist’s saying, about drawing a customer in, goes,
Start with a pinch, end with a pound
. So it was with the saline frontier. The urge was not merely one more land rape, but the desire to mechanize, to make rich cropland from the untamed, moist forest.

(Could the rigid rectangularity of the checkerboard
midwest
have a great deal to do with their sex lives? The furrow lines in fields draw you forward to the infinity where parallels meet, over the horizon. In the grip of such geometry, such mathematical order, the impatient, snaky pant and slither of sex doesn’t fit. The American instinct, pinned to the Euclidean landscape, has been to mechanize their own reproduction, just as they did to wheat.)

Agriculture isn’t a hand-dominated industry anymore.
Why
do all that
work?
the
ads say. Sure, they’re talking about household chores, cleaners, toothpaste—but what’s the most basic home-making job a woman has?
No mess, no fuss
… So medicine makes sex safe and dry, far from the moist dark territory of the primordial mind.

But how?

The first step is basic: disconnect the groin from the id.

Ever since Freud, we’ve thrown up temporary barriers to the unconscious—the newly-elected seat of
all our
dark, base drives. But anyone who has been through traditional analysis—or Jungian, or anything
more trendy—
knows how badly
that
works. (A recent study of psychotherapy techniques showed that patients had just as good a chance of improving if they skipped their Freudian-based therapy sessions entirely, and went for a walk.) So if you can’t wrestle the id to the ground, and handcuff it securely, what next?

Disconnect! Assume that sex organs are accidents of birth. Assume that sexuality is carried in the ge
n
italia like incidental freight, neatly packaged. Sure, there are nasty hormones in the blood. (Including that worst offender, testosterone, one of the aggressors; and we know what the United Nations thinks of
them
.) But those hormones are easily fixed—just tinker with the glands. Most of them are lodged in those dict
a
torial organs, the genitals. Outlying areas can be mopped up later.

So some feminists tell us that men and women are basically alike, except—in a coolly analytical phrase I first heard from Marta Randall,
an
sf writer of the 1970s—
except for the plumbing
. (Recall the 1890s. Here lies the final victory of the flush toilet.)

It is tempting to see sex as a set of detachable appliances, fitted to the basic human body frame at birth. Then we can all believe that, way down deep, we’re really the same unisex model.

E pluribus uninum.
Chevy products are all the same car, you know—even though the add-ons and extras are deceptive, the real car has the identical engine, gears,
axle
.
As with products, why not with people?

Social behavior can be endlessly altered, trimmed, sanitized, so this argument goes—if we’ll just ove
r
look the, uh, plumbing. The eternal edgy peace between men and women can then be smoothed over, and final treaties signed, if we apply a bit of operant conditioning—that ugly but useful phrase that comes from Skinner’s neo-Pavlovian work.

***

Seem too simple-minded?
Orwellian?
Something out of
Brave New World
?

Look at Heavy Metal’s recurrent images: women coupling with things that are half-machine; androgyny rampant; high tech meets low lust. Nowhere is the American ambivalence about sexuality reflected better than in these images, saturated with the strange eroticism of the man-machine interface.

Or look to science fiction. The most interesting version of future sexuality to emerge in the 1970s was John Varley’s quick-change utopia, in which people switch sexes whenever taste dictates. From
The Ophiuchi Hotline
through
Steel Beach
, he envisioned a society restless with change—indeed, alive with metamorphosis.

This ferment produces a remarkably laissez-faire society, in which family roles dissolve. All is optional. Varley assumes that there will be no more racism or sexism in such a world, because everyone will have the ability to be anything. When you can be the
Other
, there soon is none.

The next, subtle yet crucial assumption is that, when you switch, you take no baggage with you. The
details of the process are high tech indeed—you speed-grow a clone of yourself, have your brain tran
s
planted—or just “map” the brain—and
zap
you’re reborn.

Is this plausible? More to the point, do Varley’s assumptions set the stage for a fiction that can tell us something about the nature of sexuality and society? Does the brain flip-flop from male to female, on orders from the hormones?

We now know by direct experiment that men use one local part on one side of their brains to process sound. Women, on the other hand, use both sides in a more diffuse manner. This may explain why girls have greater early verbal fluency, while men’s abilities grow steadily greater from a slow start.

Why did our evolution select this substantial difference? Seldom is a trait taken on for a single cause, especially in the complex warrens of our neural labyrinths, where abilities cross-link. We will probably never know why our specializations arose. But the plain differences between men and women stand out; we are moderately shaped for specialized tasks.

Men are better at high-power work, using motor muscles. Their sense of spatial arrangement is better and appears earlier. Women can sit longer, do delicate hand-eye work more adeptly,
have
better color perce
p
tion. (Partial color blindness, such as I have, is carried by the female, though; one of evolution’s little jokes.)

We differ. Nature wanted it that way.
On average, with a considerable spread in individual abilities within each sex.
Plenty of women in my neighborhood can outrun their mates.

So consider an opposite tide of thought about sex, one moored in the molecular architecture. Edward Wilson’s
Sociobiology
(1975) sounded the trumpet for an enduring genetic program, seated far back in the brain, not lodged in the organs.
Hardwired sexuality that could not be pried out.

Wilson’s
On Human Nature
(1978) enraged people across the entire political/social spectrum. Anyone who believed in the high merit and ultimate perfectibility of humans was offended—from the gentle philosophical humanists, to the flinty-eyed, up-against-the-wall Stalinist-Marxists.

Wilson’s point of view is simple, and comes from an essentially conservative notion: that much social behavior springs from genetic programming. Society itself—insect or human—is often a manifestation of genetic needs.

So are sexual roles. An example: Humans (and other primates) produce few children, and nurture them intensively. A female’s reproductive potential is then limited by her ability to provide nurture. A male, though, can sire many more young than a single female can bear and
raise
. The more females he mates with, the greater his reproductive success—i.e., how many of the next generation carry his genes. Males then compete to fertilize females, investing little in each offspring.

On the other hand, the female’s preferred strategy is to choose a male who will lend a hand in bringing up the kids. A well-respected study of western women by anthropologist Heather Fowler found that women associate two basic symbols with sexually attractive men: money and status. Such men can provide good nurturing background, steadiness, security—they’re success symbols. Similarly, men notoriously go for women with unwrinkled skin (therefore younger, able to reproduce better), large breasts (better nurture?) and a “certain sexual receptivity” (promising a ready “conquest”).

Do men and women think this through? No! They’re wired for it, through pleasure. In most societies, sex is widely regarded as something men seek and women dispense. This attitude is so common across cultures that it cannot be an accident.

Still, it’s a wise man who knows his own son—so cuckoldry is a rage-producing taboo. A man who d
u
tifully rears
children
who do not, in fact, carry his genetic code, never gets represented in the next gener
a
tion. Universally, he is a fool.

It’s not surprising that evolution has selected for males who have strong views on such matters. The prime reason for murders of women by men, in both America and Africa, is suspected or actual female infidelity. It’s even an important cause of murder among male gays. Its passions run deep.

Gays, in fact, represent one of the unexpected insights that a good scientific theory gives. The mala
d
justments many male gays have with their own sexual impulses represent something very deep—an abiding sense of frustration over the conflict between genetically driven patterns and what society wants us to do. The family, after all, is a rickety cage, restraining male promiscuity, husbanding (literally) resources, providing continuity to all. Society shores up family life in many ways, to build big, stable institutions based on the small, private virtues learned at home. This disguises some of our innate drives.

To see the naked patterns of sexual behavior, then, look to homosexual behavior. There, society’s bonds are gone. Every study shows that gay males tend strongly toward one-night stands. Lesbians are much more apt to pair-bond, forming long-term relationships. The two divergent strategies
laid
bare.

Ironically, then, we can see our genetic heritage most clearly in the patterns of the homosexual outgroup. Doubly ironic, since this is the one group that passes on less of its genetic material than do the couples of suburbia.

Why, then, any homosexuality at all? The fashionable attitudes of our time hold that homosexuality is perfectly all right because it
is
a right, like free speech. The political language revolves around “sexual preference,” trivializing a profound inner sense into a fashion choice. Who ever looked over the sexual opportunities, like shopping?