Joanna Russ Female Man

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carrots, and their abdomens the water supply).
They lay pipe (again, by induction).
They fix machinery.
They are not allowed to have anything to do with malfunctions or breakdowns
"on foot," as the
Whileawayans say, meaning in one's own person and with tools in one's own
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hands, without the induction helmets that make it possible to operate dozens
of waldoes at just about any distance you please. That's for veterans.
They do not meddle with computers "on foot" nor join with them via induction.
That's for old veterans.
They learn to like a place only to be ordered somewhere else the next day,
commandeered to excavate coastline or fertilize fields, kindly treated by the
locals (if any) and hideously bored.
It gives them something to look forward to.
At twenty-two they achieve Full Dignity and may either begin to learn the
heretofore forbidden jobs or have their learning formally certificated. They
are allowed to begin apprenticeships. They may marry into pre-existing
families or form their own. Some braid their hair. By now the typical
Whileawayan girl is able to do any job on the planet, except for specialties
and extremely dangerous work. By twenty-five she has entered a family, thus
choosing her geographical home base (Whileawayans travel all the time).
Her family probably consists of twenty to thirty other persons, ranging in age
from her own to the early fifties. (Families tend to age the way people do;
thus new groupings are formed again in old age.
Approximately every fourth girl must begin a new or join a nearly-new family.)
Sexual relations which have begun at puberty continue both inside the family
and outside it, but mostly outside it. Whileawayans have two explanations for
this. "Jealousy," they say for the first explanation, and for the second, "Why
not?"
Whileawayan psychology locates the basis of Whileawayan character in the early
indulgence, pleasure,
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man and flowering which is drastically curtailed by
the separation from the mothers. This (it says) gives
Whileawayan life its characteristic independence, its dissatisfaction, its
suspicion, and its tendency toward a rather irritable solipsism.
"Without which" (said the same Dunyasha Bernadetteson, q.v.) "we would all
become contented slobs, nicht war?"
Eternal optimism hides behind this dissatisfaction, however; Whileawayans
cannot forget that early paradise and every new face, every new day, every
smoke, every dance, brings back life's possibilities.
Also sleep and eating, sunrise, weather, the seasons, machinery, gossip, and
the eternal temptations of art.
They work too much. They are incredibly tidy.
Yet on the old stone bridge that links New City, South Continent, with Varya's
Little Alley Ho-ho is chiseled:
You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.
If one is lucky, one's hair turns white early; if as in old Chinese poetry one
is indulging oneself, one dreams of old age. For in old age the Whileawayan
woman no longer as strong and elastic as the young
has learned to join with calculating machines in the state they say can't be
described but is most like a sneeze that never comes off. It is the old who
are given the sedentary jobs, the old who can spend their days mapping,
drawing, thinking, writing, collating, composing. In the libraries old hands
come out from under the induction helmets and give you the reproductions of
the books you want; old feet twinkle below the computer shelves, hanging down
like Humpty Dumpty's; old ladies chuckle eerily while composing The
Blasphemous Cantata (a great favorite of Ysaye's) or mad-moon cityscapes which
turn out to be do-able after all; old brains use one part in fifty to run a
city (with checkups made by two sulky youngsters) while the other forty-nine
parts riot in a freedom they haven't had since adolescence.
The young are rather priggish about the old on Whileaway. They don't really
approve of them.
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Taboos on Whileaway: sexual relations with anybody considerably older or
younger than oneself, waste, ignorance, offending others without intending to.
And of course the usual legal checks on murder and theft both those crimes
being actually quite difficult to commit. ("See," says Chilia, "it's murder if
it's sneaky or if she doesn't want to fight. So you yell 'Olaf!' and when she
turns around, then ")
No Whileawayan works more than three hours at a time on any one job, except in
emergencies.
No Whileawayan marries monogamously. (Some restrict their sexual relations to
one other person at
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man least while that other person is nearby but there
is no legal arrangement.) Whileawayan psychology again refers to the distrust
of the mother and the reluctance to form a tie that will engage every level of
emotion, all the person, all the time. And the necessity for artificial
dissatisfactions.
"Without which" (says Dunyasha Bernadetteson, op. cit.) "we would become so
happy we would sit down on our fat, pretty behinds and soon we would start
starving, nyet?"
But there is too, under it all, the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of
high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the cast of mind that makes
industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of wilderness
where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries,
mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists
of tautologies and circular mathematical proofs (over which aficionados are
moved to tears), and the best graffiti in this or any other world.
Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work.
And they work
.
VII
Two ancients on the direct computer line between city and quarry (private
persons have to be content with spark-gap radio), fighting at the top of their
lungs while five green girls wait nearby, sulky and bored:
I can't make do with five greenies; I need two on-foot checkers and protective
gear for one!
Can't have.
Incomp-
?
You hear.
Is me!
(affected disdain)
If catastroph

Won't!
And so on.
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man
VIII
A troop of little girls contemplating three silver hoops welded to a silver
cube are laughing so hard that some have fallen down into the autumn leaves on
the plaza and are holding their stomachs. This is not embarrassment or an
ignorant reaction to something new; they are genuine connoisseurs who have
hiked for three days to see this. Their hip-packs lie around the edge of the
plaza, near the fountains. One: How lovely!
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IX
Between shifts in the quarry in Newland, Henla Anaisson sings, her only
audience her one fellow-
worker.
A Belin, run mad and unable to bear the tedious-ness of her work, flees above
the forty-eighth parallel, intending to remain there permanently. "You" (says
an arrogant note she leaves behind) "do not exist"
and although agreeing philosophically with this common view, the S & P for the
county follows her
not to return her for rehabilitation, imprisonment, or study. What is there to
rehabilitate or study? We'd all do it if we could. And imprisonment is simple
cruelty.
You guessed it.
XI
"If not me or mine," (wrote Dunyasha Bernadetteson in 368 A.C.) "O.K.
"If me or mine alas.
"If us and ours
watch out!"
XII
Whileaway is engaged in the reorganization of industry consequent to the
discovery of the induction principle.
The Whileawayan work-week is sixteen hours.
PART FOUR
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