Dreamer Easy

Feminist SF, especially feminist SF set in future utopias or dystopias, sometimes handles homosexuality well and sometimes handles it badly. I'm reading The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper, and I've just come across a bit where someone explains that they routinely cure homosexuality, which, as people knew even before the apocalypse, is caused by a simple imbalance of hormones in utero. wtf?!

An interview with a writer on Afghanistan included this observation:

"...women who live in a society that undervalues women as extremely as Afghan society does, never learn to empathise with other women, because they themselves don't place value on other women. And when they themselves are so mistreated it becomes virtually impossible for them to sympathise with other women who are being mistreated. And also of course they are in competition with those other women for the very slim resources that exist.

You know, I always have a hard time trying to talk about this to women in the West, because they say, yes, yes, but I can see by the looks on their faces that they don't believe me. They don't get it. And I was there for the better part of four years, and it took me all that time to come to grips with it myself."

I got it at once, I think; and I attribute this to having read a lot of SF, particularly feminist SF, particularly Suzie McKee Charnas' Holdfast series. SF gives you a form of experience with worlds and world-views you would never even imagine encountering. (Although, reading back through the whole interview, it has to be said that there are shadows of the same mind-set in the West; the Afghanis are not aliens.)

Hugely enjoying the intelligent discussion here of dressing femininely, and what that means. It's not a trivial matter, shallow questions about whether you can wear lipstick and still be a feminist. Women are judged by their appearance, are taught to obsess over their appearance, are used to sell things with their appearance; we can be fired for not wearing makeup; we can be freely assaulted because of what we wear; we can pay to be mutilated to make ourselves "beautiful". No wonder some feminists reject "feminine" clothes et al outright. Others struggle with how to express ourselves and our sexuality in the face of that pressure - perhaps to create a new femininity freed from old assumptions deadly to mind and body and soul.

Coincidentally, last night I came across a 1971 story called Mix-Up, by George Collyn, in which a teleportation accident switches the brains of a brilliant but dull professor and a pretty vacant actress. There's a happy ending as their skills turn out to complement each other - for instance, the actress brings one of the prof's boring lectures to life - and they end up married, still swapped, with other couples queuing up for the process!

Amusingly, despite his male brain, the professor's nervous and glandular system were still 100% feminine, which means he enjoys being kissed by a man (although what red-blooded male wants to run the risk of maternity?) and gets all weepy and dishivelled. His old school chum is confused: The appeal of Dorothy Simone as one of the world's most beautiful women had always rested on the paternal-lover instinct men have in response to helplessness. (Well, I'm not going to complain. There are few things as sexy as a helpless man, after all.) In the end, the prof coaches Dorothy in English Lit: she was only ever artificially unintelligent.

Now: one of the major projects of feminism has been to challenge the idea that men and women are inherently, naturally, inevitably, unchangeably, this-or-that: Linda Low is strictly a female female. With its snippets of Freud, this decades-old SF story is hardly engaged in that project, but it does offer a challenge to the idea of female helplessness - that it's part of a performance. Dorothy's dumb blonde act is exactly that, an act. Her skills as an orator are genuine. The fact that each member of the couple settles down into their new role - after his initial fear of motherhood, the prof ends up happily producing two kids - despite their supposedly inherent differences - is also rather subversive. It's not exactly Joanna Russ, but it was striking, especially given the discussion here, which in a way boils down to: what does "feminine" mean"? What did it once mean? What does it mean now? What could we make it mean?

I grabbed this second-hand because it's on the Feminist SF, Fantasy, and Utopia Reading List. Normally the slightest hint of palace intrigue or warring clans causes me to run a mile from any book, but I was already captured by Vinge's excellent prose before I realised what I was about.

Now, the novel took out the 1981 Hugo, so I feel free to make as much fun of its awful cover as I want.

( Dag Man and Butt Girl )

Speaking of things all writers should read, if you haven't already, visit the Turkey City Lexicon. I was just re-reading it when I came to this definition:


Abbess Phone Home

Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or fantasy element tacked on so it could be sold.


It hit me I knew the story being referred to - it's by Joanna Russ, and just let me hide the title... ( a SPOILER )

There's a fantastic example of "As You Know Bob" in the Blakes 7 episode Aftermath.