Now what I have said here implies that individual women can quite easily be, in effect, males. When they are acting on and powered by elements of the male pattern. (And they can be subject to its pathology, too.) I don’t see this as a problem. What I do see as a problem and a very urgent one, is:
How soon, O Lord, can men learn to be mothers?
I cannot resist ending with a couple of notes which have struck me.
“What is a woman?” This question haunted me until I moved on the thinking about sex as pattemings. But it is probably a valid question, if only to stimulate thought. One of my first answers was that women are really truly
aliens.
(And hence supremely entitled to write SF, as Craig Strete has pointed out about American Indians.) This tells us a lot about our culture. Another part answer which continues to amuse me came from looking at our current crop of male transvestites and female impersonators like Holly Woodlawn. Watch them; so like a woman and yet so profoundly lacking something. What is missing? Well, it seems to me that they are totally focused on what I have called here the initiatory phase, the aggressive or provocative vulnerability that promotes genital Contact.
And that is all they have.
Behind them looms the mocking visage of the mother which they are not. They are biological mayflies, triggers to an unloaded gun.
Another, more terrible question: Are women doomed? Can they achieve true liberation and acceptance as full Humans in our society? I have grave fears. (In my story “The Women Men Don’t See,” Ruth spoke of this.) Because of their physical, political, and economic weakness, the women’s movement is
dependent on the civilized acceptance of men.
Are we sufficiently civilized? Will the hand that holds the club really lay it down? Or will we, when panicked, revert back to the old power play, riot roughshod over the rights of the weaker, and throw them again into bondage, to be serfs and property? Let us not kid, men have the power. In the same way, American whites have the power to wipe out black rights. Will we stay unpanicked? Is our civilization deep enough in the bone? I fear the answer…
Again on the power situation: Are there too many men? Would a different ratio be saner, say one man to a hundred women? The ridiculous economic imperatives of our culture teach even women to value male babies more. It is a fearsome thought that if we gain control over the sex of the unborn, we might have a wave of male births, a society preponderantly male. I believe that it is urgent for mothers-to-be to value girls more. And I tend to think that we have far too many men…
Lastly. You may have noticed the word
lunacy
in this. It comes from Rebecca West’s marvelous prologue to
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
(A book that tells one more that you wish to know about certain male activities.) May I end with this provocative quote? It is not really a mirror-image concept although it sounds like it at first glance:
The word
idiot
comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
Such as, for example, overlooking a little problem like how you recreate the Human race starting with two hundred old men.
—November 3, 1974
From all the letters, except maybe two, I learned something. I was also heartened to the see the splendid demonstration of male taciturnity vs female loquacity—Delany and I between us took up fifty percent of the space.
Charnas’s point, also touched on by Russ and Mclntyre—that women have to know men more fully than men know women—of course, of course, yes, I see it. Isn’t it the phenomenon that R. Osbourne described in his study of communication in organizations: The people on the bottom of any power structure
know
the people on top—their intimate habits, motives, secrets, everything. While the people on top are ignorant of, and wildly misinterpret, the people on the bottom. Moreover, the people on top see all the actions of the people below as related to them, the bosses, and to their interests.
Did any of you read those unearthly interviews with whites eulogizing their black cooks at the time of Selma? Fantastic, pitiable if it weren’t so vicious. By the way, Osbourne’s old book is worth glancing at, the title was
Is Anybody Listening?
I think we have accounted for the greater verisimilitude of male characters drawn by women, without dragging in intuition. (Aside to UKLeG: Some day let’s argue about the lifelikeness of Flaubert’s Emma—frankly I’ve always seen her as a “man’s woman” in every sense. Much better to me was Proust’s Mme. Verdurin—and by God she conforms to Delany’s, or Delany and Hackett’s, command to get the economic base in. Just thought of that. Maybe a male author writing about a woman’s sex relations with men almost
has
to fall victim to the my-cook-loves-me fallacy.)
Charnas’s point about women being taught to view each other as threats or models interested me a lot. That’s what happens in what used to be called a situation of unstable rewards. In a UR situation, like, say, a fire in a theater, everybody has to cooperate or everybody loses. If a few people start to panic and grab, everybody dies. Only by cooperation can all, or the maximum number, get out safely. Men seem to have created a total UR situation for women. Which, of course, is very much to men’s advantage.
Now to the excitement. There I was ponderously calling for men to learn to be mothers, and here is Delany actually doing it. Stupendous. Lord, the questions I’d like to ask: What does it
feel
like? Is it rewarding in itself, or only a duty? Do you do it differently from the way Hack-ett does it? Do you gaze into the child’s eyes? Do you feel it is entirely learned behavior, or do you feel a latent pattern which has been “trained out of you?” Are you late taking your turn because you are late in life generally (many female mothers are)? Would you be late if the baby was alone, if the female mother
had
to leave on time? Have you developed that famous acuity, the power of being able to hear your infant’s voice through a din?
And so on. But, always, deepest,
what
is the motive, what is the reward for this behavior?
Why
is a baby cared for and raised?
Why?
Well, from this you can see that I am far from repentant about asking that attention be directed to the sex called “mother.” Of course I do repent the way I did it; I should never have tried an abstraction from behavior and people without warning and explanation. The abstraction is difficult, too, not entirely possible. Like W. Sheldon’s attempt to separate somatotype and personality type, while everybody
knows
that an extreme endomorph is
not
going to be a high somatomic. Similarly, we all “know” that men tend to be males and mothers are apt to be women.
And above all, I should never have advanced a view of sex which violates the great sacred totem of our time: the all-importance of copulation. My view of sex looks at the reproduction of the race, and really trivializes intercourse. How blasphemous can you get?
Anyone silly enough to put down the central industry of our day, the
Playboy
scene, the D. H. Lawrence gospel, has to start with an hour of propitiatory dances and ritual purification.
And of course I should
never
have used the word
mother.
(Maybe not
male,
either.)
Mother
seems to be the last dirty word. In trying ruminations on other people, Fve had reactions of—believe it—fear and rage. As if we were
afraid
to look at a behavior which accounts for our existence. Fear of stereotypes, maybe; and maybe justified, if blindness is ever justified. But the stop signals somehow do not stop me; I think there is something hidden there.
Consider: If men alone had always raised infants, how monumental, how privileged a task it would be! We would have tons of conceptual literature on infant-father interaction, technical journals, research establishments devoted to it, a huge esoteric vocabulary. It would be as sacred as the stock exchange or football, and we would spend hours hearing of it.
But because women do it, it is invisible and embarrassing.
Look at the atmosphere that surrounds the small area of child-raising that men do: prep schools and college teaching. Think what a “professor” is! And he has perhaps taught a young person the names of some minerals or French poets.
But the mother who taught the young person to speak at all—she has done nothing.
Right?
(I am reminded of the story of how it was discovered that black leopards are not inherently vicious. For as long as man kept them, zookeepers knew they were the most savage of all animals, hating man from birth. Then one day a N.Y. zookeeper’s wife took a new cub home and raised it normally. Abrupt end of one myth.)
All of which boils down to saying that I, personally, want to go on looking at this behavior. And since there is nothing duller that a minority defending itself, let’s leave it at that.
I gather you suspect me of paranoia, or at least an inaccurate grasp of the power balance between men and women and/or whites and blacks. Well, yes, I am paranoid. We’re all prisoners of our histories, and mine has included concentration camps on American soil; 50,000 Americans robbed of their land and possessions and caged in a desert behind barbed wire. The lesson of my time is, If it is inHuman, cruel, and unthinkable, it’ll happen.
Of course I don’t
believe
it will… at least on my better days. And I would be very glad to live long enough to be proved wrong. Very happy.
But as I mentioned to Joanna, I am the type of person who gets a twinge down the spine when I see the gun holstered on a cop’s square arse. And I can count guns. The opening scenes of Charnas’s novel
Walk to the End of the World
struck me as all too lifelike. In fact, I’ve seen it alive. So… here’s hoping.
Let me end with a question that occurred to me:
If men did not exist, would women have invented them?
If women did not exist, I do believe men, alone, would have invented them or something very much like them. (I have changed my mind, by the way: Of course it is not women who are aliens. Men are.) And I wonder, in literature or life, would women alone have invented men?
Would you?
—February 11, 1975
Good-bye, old, new, and ex-friends; it’s 5:00 a.m. and 85° F down here, the sand is blowing, the sea is pink, the pelicans are sailing—and I have to go kill cockroaches. Probably
mother
cockroaches, too.
Seems to be symposium time again, assuming you want any more from me. I feel about as relevant as a cuckoo clock in eternity.
But I did feel the good, hot, exciting relevance of all your letters, even those that diverge or disagree. Revolutions are not monodirec-tional streams, they are turbulent wave fronts full of Yes buts and squabbles over priorities, if not worse.
I read the bundle at the same time that I was reading the winter issue of
Aphra
and Howe and Bass’s feminist poetry collection
No More Masks.
That’s worth getting, by the way, if you haven’t. I admit to a touch of disappointment that they didn’t find room for at least a line or two from some of the older forgotten women. Anybody else here an admirer of Anna Wickham (“My work has the incompetence of pain”)? There is a verse of hers that struck deep in my mind.
I have to thank God I’m a woman,
For in these ordered days a woman only
Is free to be very hungry, very lonely.
That’s worth a lot of ranting about beautiful urns. And I may say she isn’t as irrelevant to our topic here as I am. Her poem that begins
“Up the crag/In the screaming wind/Naked and bleeding/I fought blind”—ends when “In the house of my love/
I
found a pen”
It’s called “Weapons.”
For how many of us, me in my way, you in yours, are not our pens the weapons with which we can do something—a tiny something—about wrongs? Even if only to name them?
To our muttons.
Of the letters, the two which spoke most immediately to me were Kate’s and Suzy’s—because they spoke so clearly of what are my own fears of the abuse of power and death. (Kate, how guilty are you going to make me feel? You’re deep in all those things I quit even dabbling at when I had my recent bout of illness. Someday I want to ask you more about AIM; Craig Strete has given me, and, I suspect, Joanna, some slightly devastating insights. Probably like everything, biased. He’s very, well, young.)
But Suzy. Dear lady, your essay on the death-relatedness of women was excruciatingly interesting. But—if you will forgive a stranger—may I seize your arm, gaze into your eyes and plead with you to cast that thought from you with all your power?
It’s not that it’s totally untrue; we can find Death in almost anything, in fall, in drought, in animals, in our hearts, in the physical processes of our bodies, female
or
male. (Believe me.) Maybe what you say has appealed to the mythic terrors in some people in some places. But it is not a thought you should dwell on—forgive me again. Because to me it rang a terrifying bell. I have heard that same reasonable, intellectually excited tone in the writings of some few highly intellectualized Jewish writers who thought they could see why non-Jews could hate them, why they were peculiarly persecutable. Hateful. Exterminable—appropriate for extermination.
Yes.
This took place during World War II, so you may have missed it. But those, Suzy, were men. You must realize that 99 percent of what you’re dealing with here is far more easily explained as the self-hatred of the oppressed. It is a deeply pernicious thing, preventing friendship and solidarity. I have had a close look at it in some older women—my mother would vote for Midge Dector—and it wrings the heart. It has nothing to do with deathliness. In fact, I’ve known something of the same feeling in the wretched soldiers, the Tommies of Colonial Empire, who felt they merited, were suited for, death.
Men
felt this about themselves.