From: lichter@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Michael I. Lichter)
Subject: Re: The the great ongoing misogyny/misandry discussion
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 09:52:11 GMT

Sheering away a little bit from _Native Tongue_, my two favorite SF books 
on relations between the sexes are Joanna Russ's _The Female Man_ and
Sheri Tepper's _The Gate to Women's Country_.  

Russ's book is, to my knowledge, the classic feminist SF text.  It
weaves together the lives of women from three seperate universes,
Joanna (the author's fictionalized self) from our world; Janet Evason
from Whileaway, a future earth where no man has gone for a long time;
and Janine Dadier, who lives in a contemporary earth in which Hitler
died young and there was no World War II, leaving gender relations at
about their 1920's state.  The book is very much the product of an
English professor, much more so than anything I've seen by Kim Stanley
Robinson, for instance.  With great rapidity and great humor, Russ
changes viewpoints, mixes worlds together, plays off a world in which
women are relatively helpless and dependent on men and a world in which
women are lesbian amazons against our own.  The writing (if you can keep
your head from spinning - and you may need to read twice through) is
wonderful and while her strategy is a bit dated, I think it still works.
Sample:

	I'll tell you how I turned into a man.
	First I had to turn into a woman.
	For a long time I had been a neuter, not a woman at all but One
	Of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men,
	professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a
	sandwich board that says: LOOK!  I HAVE TITS! there is this
	giggling and this chuckling and this reddening...  If you get
	good at being One Of The Boys it goes away...  I thought surely
	when I got my PhD and my professorship and my tennis medal and
	my engineer's contract and my ten thousand a year and my
	full-time housekeeper and my reputation and the respect of all
	my colleagues, when I had grown strong, tall, and beautiful,
	when my I.Q. shot past 200, when I had genius, *then* I could
	take off my sandwich board.  I left my smiles and happy
	laughter at home.  I'm not a woman; I'm a man.  I'm a man with
	a woman's face.  I'm a woman with a man's mind.  Everybody says
	so.

Ok, so it doesn't look SF, but altogether it is.  Relative to the
earlier indictment of McCaffery and somebody else I don't recall, Russ
does not have any very sympathetic male characters.  It's not that
males are evil, it's rather that their assumptions about women and
about themselves prevent them from relating to women as fellow humans
in a respectful way.  You may think she overstates her case, but the book
is thoughtful and often subtle, and deserves a read.


I haven't seen any talk here about Sheri Tepper, so I feel compelled to
trumpet her virtues. She is also a marvelous writer, with an original
imagination and a particularly good sense for place and character.
_The Gate to Women's Country_ portrays a low-tech society in the
post-catastrophe U.S.  Cities are small, and are divided between the
city proper, where the women and girls live, and the garrison, where
most of the men and boys live.  Women perform most functions, from
farming to craft manufacture, while men are all warriors, except for
the minority who opt out of military service and become "servitors".
Men and women only meet for "carnival", a brief period of sexual frenzy.

The story is told mainly from the point of view of Stavia, a very
sympathetic young woman (actually we see her as a girl, a young woman,
and a woman in early middle age) who gets in trouble by smuggling books
to a boy she likes, thus breaking one of the rules that binds the
society of Women's Country.  Stavia's breaking of the rules leads her
on a journey that eventually exposes the unexpected logic that
underlies Women's Country, a surprise I don't want to spoil.

Tepper treats men both well and badly.  The warrior culture is just plain
gross, but it doesn't represent the blanket condemnation of men.  Women
are not made out to be saints.  Despite the sharpness of the division
between men and women Tepper sets up, she actually shows quite a bit of
subtlety, complexity, multidimensionality in her handling of the
interaction between men and women.  I recommend the book highly.

Michael