Joanna Russ on Feminism and SF

I've been rereading TO WRITE LIKE A WOMAN: ESSAYS IN FEMINISM AND SCIENCE FICTION, by Joanna Russ. Although released in 1995, it contains many essays published earlier, as far back as the 1970s. It's still available new on Amazon, and you can view the table of contents with the "Look Inside" feature:

To Write Like a Woman

Of particular interest in reading these older works is noting how the image of women in popular fiction has changed since the 70s—as well as recognizing some problems that linger on to the present day. We can hope we've moved beyond the status quo described in "What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write" (1972), in which Russ argues that most of the plot and character archetypes familiar in novels written by and for men don't apply to female characters. An outcome defined as success for a man constitutes failure for a woman. A fictional woman (like career women in real life, at least at the time the essay was written) is apt to find herself stuck in a classic double bind; if she strives to fulfill her ambitions and actually succeeds, she's condemned as "unfeminine," but if she behaves the way a woman is traditionally expected to, she's viewed as weak. Consider how the history of "Alexandra the Great" would read. A female character in male-oriented fiction tends to fall into stereotypical categories such as the Bitch Goddess and the Maiden Victim. She can act as a protagonist in only one kind of story, a love story. Three principal genres are exceptions, according to Russ, giving characters true agency regardless of gender—mystery, horror, and especially science fiction.

Other essays of special interest are two pieces about all-women or women-dominated societies. "Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" (1980) surveys a batch of stories about such societies, written by men. It's amazing how silly most of them sound. Typically, the basic self-contradiction in those dystopias, which embody masculine fears about being dominated by females (in these tales, giving women equality always leads to feminine tyranny), is that women are portrayed as so powerful they can crush men completely (aside from the hero, of course), yet so weak they can be subdued and enlightened by "real" sex or even a passionate kiss. Numerous counter-examples appear in "Recent Feminist Utopias," which analyzes a selection of more nuanced, humane female-dominated societies, all but one written by women. Russ includes Marion Zimmer Bradley's THE SHATTERED CHAIN, presenting the Free Amazon subculture as one such society, even though it's embedded in the patriarchal culture of Darkover as a whole. I would have liked to see a discussion of Bradley's true feminist utopian novel, THE RUINS OF ISIS, but perhaps it hadn't been published at the time of this article.

The first three essays in the book examine science fiction as a genre and try to construct a working definition of its "aesthetic." "Someone's Trying to Kill Me, and I Think It's My Husband" provocatively analyzes the paperback Gothics so popular in the 1960s and 70s. The other pieces range over a variety of topics, including a merciless dissection of the film version of Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog." Despite the age of the material in this collection, it remains fascinating, thought-provoking, and relevant to the current status of the field. Also recommended: Russ's incisive work HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING. ("She didn't write it"; "She wrote it, but she had help"; "She wrote it, but look WHAT she wrote"; etc.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Pregnant Males

Do you follow THE ORVILLE? This TV series begins as an affectionate parody of STAR TREK (even the uniforms look similar) but—as far as I can tell from reading about it and watching the first few episodes—gradually becomes more serious. One alien officer, who lives on board with his mate, belongs to an all-male species. In the second episode, he lays an egg, which hatches in the third episode. I'm not sure why he refuses to take a break from brooding the egg; doesn't his mate help? And what about an artificial incubator? Anyway, the baby turns out to be female, a rare abnormality in this species, for which the standard remedy is an immediate sex-change operation. The serious ramifications of this problem mesh incongruously with the premise of an all-male, oviparous species, which the writers apparently introduced in accordance with what the TV Tropes site calls "the Rule of Funny." In fact, an all-male species that reproduces by itself couldn't exist. The sex that produces ova is, by definition, female. To lay eggs, people of the species portrayed in THE ORVILLE would have to be either female (reproducing by parthenogenesis) or hermaphroditic. Members of an all-male species would have to breed with females of some closely related species (as some all-female types of fish can be fertilized by males of different but not too dissimilar species).

The vintage sitcom MORK AND MINDY gets away with the pregnant alien male motif by presenting it in a funny context with no attempt at a biological rationale. Mork not only becomes pregnant, he gives birth to a "baby" who looks like an old man and, conforming to the life cycle of Mork's species, ages backward.

Octavia Butler described her classic work "Bloodchild" as her "pregnant man story." Technically, the human men don't get pregnant, though. They serve as hosts for the eggs of the centipede-like aliens who've allowed the Terran colonists to settle on their planet. When the larvae hatch, the mother removes them from the host's body before they start to eat their way out—usually.

The TV program ALIEN NATION offers a serious portrayal of how a seahorse-like humanoid male pregnancy could work. The Newcomer aliens have three sexes, including a variant type of male who penetrates the female to catalyze her fertility in some unspecified process before the father inseminates her in the "usual" way. The embryo begins to develop in the female's uterus. Part-way through the pregnancy, the fetus is transferred (in a pool of water) from the female to the male, where it grows in a pouch on the man's abdomen. The baby comes out when the pouch splits open in the course of labor.

Here's a page of speculation about how a single-sex species (female) could work in terms of Earth biology:

Single-Sex Species

In Joanna Russ's classic story "When It Changed," members of the all-female population reproduce by combining ova from two different women.

In isogamy, displayed by some life-forms such as algae and fungi, all gametes have the same size and morphology and so can be considered of the "same sex," which can't technically be labeled either male or female:

Isogamy

Some Earth organisms switch reproductive methods in alternate generations between sexual and asexual reproduction (e.g., budding).

The heroine of Megan Lindholm's CLOVEN HOOVES falls in love with a satyr she thinks of as Pan. This highly unusual novel starts out as, apparently, fantasy, in which at first we can't even be sure the paranormal encounters are happening outside the heroine's mind. Eventually, however, the story becomes SF, when the satyr reveals that he belongs to an all-male species whose members reproduce by implanting clones of themselves into human women through sexual intercourse. Thus, when the heroine gives birth to her satyr baby son, he isn't biologically related to her at all.

The occasional birth of females among the alien race on THE ORVILLE suggests a possibility for the evolution of their alleged all-male species. Maybe they once reproduced alternately sexually (through ordinary mating between male and female) and asexually (by cloning). Maybe some genetic disorder caused the conception of females to cease except in rare cases. Asexual reproduction became the only remaining viable means of perpetuating the species and came to be considered the only normal way. So when the male character in that series lays an egg, he's producing a clone of himself.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt