Excerpted in this section are three contributions by Tiptree, in one of Alli’s most difficult periods to maintain her male disguise. The first is her initial non-response to the questions; then there are two of her letters commenting on what others said. While this means you are missing parts of the conversation, I think the contexts are clear.
First, to hell with talking about “women in SF.”
What we think and feel about “women in SF” is only a by-product of what we think and feel about women and men in the whole bitter chuckle of life. I think we can take it for granted that women are Human beings who have been drastically oppressed, deprived, and warped out of shape by our male-dominated and largely lunatic culture. So are men, to a lesser and less personally destructive degree. But that said, I don’t feel I personally understand much. This spring I pounded my brains to make a story for Vonda’s anthology. I mean I sweated deep. Maybe not deep for others, but deep for me. I want to talk about some of the thoughts that began to gel in me then, thoughts of
who and what are they,
these alternative forms of humanity? Are they so different and if so how? Are we the same animal? Can we coexist on the same planet? What the hell are “sexes” and how many and which are there?
As a starter, let’s clear away one dire fallacy.
Down with yin and yang thinking!
Our view of men and women is infested with the vicious mental habit of seeing any pair of differing things as somehow symmetrical mirror images of each other. I, man, am hot; therefore, they, women, are cold.
I
am active; therefore,
they
are passive.
I
think; therefore,
they
emote. My id grunts, “Me good;” therefore, they are bad. Perhaps more perniciously, my superego whispers,
I
have selfish and destructive drives; therefore,
they
are altruistic, compassionate, and nurturant. (They better be.)
Put this way it’s clearly silly, but the tendency is very deep in the nature of thinking. Literature and philosophy is smarmed over by the belief that men and women exist at opposite ends of an infinite number of bipolar dimensions. That they in some way mystically reflect and complement each other—on no greater evidence than that occasional men and women do get on well and that the race as a whole hasn’t yet died out.
Now, anyone can see certain traces of local, situational complemen-tariness between the Human sexes; it is to be found in any ecosystem. But to seize upon these hints to build something like the yin and yang system is to depart radically from reality. The yin/yang is a lovely system, subtle, elaborate, full of interweavings, dialectical interpenetrations, many pretty mental toys. As an aid to understanding real men and women, it is a monstrous exercise in fluff.
Consider how a Martian would see us. No matter what trait is measured, he/she/it would find a generally bell-shaped distribution; some of the curves would be a bit skewed, no more. Women and men share forty-five of our forty-six chromosomes. This is about as far from a bipolar situation as you can get.
With this blast I hope to abolish from at least my thinking the concept that men and women are in what is called a
reflexive
relation to each other, that they are in some way mirror images of each other. If I had to pick a technical relation which might aid understanding, one could try for example a
transitive
one. (Example, Man is to Woman as Woman is to Child.) But that’s just as shallow and useless. The problem is to try to understand real people, and to determine whether a handful of genes on one chromosome has any identifiable effects on their way of being Human.
Are There Two Sexes and if So Which?
A funny thing happened a few years back, on the way to the bomb shelter. Official Washington held an air attack drill, a very elaborate one. The big set piece was the whisking-away of the whole top of the government to a fantastic shelter—this one was under a mountain—where they had all the war rooms and red buttons and machinery for Retaliation Unto Cinders.
Well, when the dawn moment came for the senior officials to gulp their orange juice and toddle out to the black limousines, some very odd confrontations took place.
They were leaving their wives and families behind to be fried,
you see. The silent thought loomed. Have a nice survival, dear. I’m sure you and General Abrams will be very happy…
Art Buchwald did some very funny columns. The vision of two hundred postmenopausal males crawling out into the lava plain to celebrate the “saving” of America… .
Now I submit that this is pathology. Pathology of almost inconceivable luxuriance. I call it the pathological hypertrophy of the male sex pattern.
Okay, let’s go back. Yes, I think we have two sexes. But I do not—repeat,
not
—think that they are men and women. I see them as
patterns,
which may or may not be present singly or together in a given individual at a given time.
Okay, what’s a “sex”? Well, for a try, let’s call it “a coherent pattern of behavior necessary to the reproduction of the species.” We probably can agree also that Human sexual behavior has obscure ties to the biological substrate, but that these are not well understood. (I’ve been reading Money and Ehrhardt’s excellent work on the intersexes,
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl.)
About all one can be sure of biologically is that androgen often has the effect of evoking the male sexual pattern.
Yes, I see two sex patterns. One of them is relatively well known, so simple as to be almost trivial and subject to pathology: That is the male pattern. The other I see as overwhelmingly important to the race, very extensive over time, and almost unknown: That is the maternal pattern, or Mothering.
We can dispense with the male pattern quickly; we see it in any cageful of adolescent male rhesus. The one interesting thing about the male pattern—which may be lethal to humanity—is that
it shares the neural pathways of aggression.
The male primate pursues, grasps, penetrates with much of the same equipment which serves aggression and predation. This has the dire side effect that the more aggressive males tend by and large to reproduce themselves more effectively and thus intensify the problem. We see considerable sexual dimorphism among our primate relatives; the males are bigger and stronger. Oddly enough, it’s not always coupled with greater aggression; gigantic male gorillas are relatively peaceful citizens. Male baboons, however, are not. They go in for male dominance—and so, unfortunately, do Human males. We appear to be subject to an androgen-related overgrowth of the aggressive syndrome, with its accompanying male-male dominance-submission conflicts, male territoriality, and all the dismal rest. We have had phases like the Ottoman Empire, a totally male society where women were kept as breeding animals and men acted out a complete surrogate fantasy life based on androgen pathology. We are today ruled by gerontomorphic old men—and their young acolytes—who can commit unrealities on the order of that air attack drill.
A John Foster Dulles, a Stalin, is a biologically irrelevant old animal who has confused his fantasies with life and who ought to be undergoing therapy instead of being in charge of anything. But he has power. And so do young male thugs; it is hard to say which are more dangerous. But leaving aside the terrible importance of their dysfunction, one can draw back and simply characterize the male as the animal with enormous amounts of spare time.
It is also important to note that the male pattern is powered by immediate genital gratification. (Nonorgasmic males leave no descendants.) In our species, the male drive has also ceased to be controlled by biological signals from the female.
Now that’s all I want to say about the male pattern, because I want to get on to the next. Of course, we could bow to SF in passing, by remarking how much that air attack drill resembled certain
Analog
themes. But let’s get on.
What is a
mother?
Well, to begin with, it is the pattern which is 99 percent responsible for our being here at all. Descriptively, mothering has a brief initial phase of what we might call aggressive vulnerability, which gets the gametes together. It has another physical phase of gestation and birth, which requires a female physique. Those two early phases are all that men in the grip of male hypertrophy even notice; that is what they think mothers are and that is what they try to reduce women to. I see these phases as merely initiatory, although the physical act of bringing a child into the world must be a very important one to the person. But if mothering stopped there we’d all be dead.
My try at defining the maternal pattern is deeply influenced by the picture of the female primate endlessly, tirelessly lugging her infant, monitoring its activities at every moment, teaching, training, leading it to the best of her animal abilities. Not for a day or a week, but throughout its whole infancy and into self-sufficiency. The bond created can be very lasting; it is now speculated that the permanent alliance of mothers and daughters and granddaughters may be the true origin of society.
Look at what motherhood involves. Leadership without aggression. Empathy of a high order—can it be the true root of speech? Great environmental competence. Aggressive defense of the young. Nest and shelter-building. Food bringing and sharing. A fantastic array of behavior—
all of which have been flawlessly carried through by every one of our maternal forebears
back to the first mammalian forms, or we would not be here.
It is my belief that mothers, because of their grasp of development over time, undoubtedly invented agriculture. Animal husbandry, too. The characteristic of the mother pattern is that it extends over time in a way utterly unknown to the male. And it has relations to space and the environment again foreign to the male.
Most important of all, it is a relation
between
animals which is totally outside the “male” repertory.
A pause for wonder, for awe.
And now the final speculation—because I really view this sex as unknown. What is mothering powered by? What “goals” has it? What reward drives it?
We don’t know.
We can only guess and mutter. I personally know many farmers, and I love to grow things when I have a chance. I think the strange, unspoken rewards of growing things must be a little like the rewards that power maternal behavior. What is the satisfaction—joy, really—of helping things to flourish?
We don’t even have a name for it!
I tell you, in our crazy culture we have rendered the major sex
invisible.
The more I think of it the more extraordinary it seems. And I think it cannot be denied that men have attempted to take it over. They wrest children from the mother, make “men” out of them in lunatic rites. They attempt to kill the mother in themselves… a scene of unspeakable, fascinated, repulsion.
And what they have made Human mothers into! As practiced today, mothering is a martyrdom for a Human being. Crazy.
Well, let’s wind this up by noting one more interesting thing about the mothering pattern. (And remember that by mothering I mean the whole years-long scenario of turning out a viable Human being.) Mothering is tied to the rhythms of biological development. It is totally different from “male” enterprises in this respect. If John Campbell or Edward Teller tried to do mothering, they would have to go to school to the nearest monkey mother gazing into her baby’s eyes and untiringly guiding its little hands. They could not have any brilliant technological insights, they could not devise wondrous methods of accelerating or multiplying production; no abstract spasms of genius could shortcut matters. They would just have to
do it.
One by one by one. Or—no product.
That, as Tom Lehrer would say, is a sobering thought.
Because it is, quite simply, the one most important thing we do.
And our failure to develop really good Human mothering—our failure to organize all society around this work, instead of irrelevant “male” activities and goals—may end us even if nothing dramatic gets us first. We must make a world in which every child is mothered to complete socialization, or die of the lack.
Now before I end, one word: Please do not read into what I have said that I see mothers as all sweet compassion, nurturance, etc., and hence charge all this onto women. No. All I have described is a
pattern of behavior
—which you can see operating in any zoo—and which I see as only more or less actualized in individual Human beings at specific times. And one which we have disastrously neglected and do not understand.
Well.
So what about those sexes in SF?
But wait—I have also talked about “Human beings.” By which I mean, the other forty-five chromosomes. Now obviously if I could describe a “Human being” I would be more than I am—and probably living in the future, because I think of Human beings as something to be realized ahead. (If we survive ourselves.) But clearly “Human beings” have something to do with the luminous image you see in a bright child’s eyes—the exploring, wondering, eagerly grasping, undestructive quest for life. I see that undescribed spirit as central to us all. And in the individual, tinged by one or the other—or both—of the sexual patterns.
And, I guess I must confess, I see “humanity” in its best sense as closer to the maternal pattern than to the male—because of the empty violence which so often infects the male pattern. I would not, God forbid, reduce all life to cozy mommy-wuv. But I think the inherent power of humanity will always carry it beyond that; in fact, a true mother does. Actual mothers are Humans.
So it is easy to say that as men and women who have more of the (partly unknown) mother patterning come into SF, the goals and fantasies and drives and reality-perception of SF will change. It already has; anthropology, sociology, psychology are sciences which involve concepts of
development
which are intellectual representations of mother-reality. As they come into SF we leave rocket-opera behind.
Perhaps we will learn more about mother—her dreams, her fantasies, her perceptions and excitements and glories and dooms and irascibilities and exploits from bisexual SF.