"Joanna Russ - When It Changed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

girls in wisps of chiffon who slink about writhing with lust (Keith Laumer
wrote a charming, funny one called "The War with the Yukks"), or the women
have set up a static, beelike society in imitation of some presumed primitive
matriarchy. These stories are written by men. Why women who have been alone
for generations should "instinctively" turn their sexual desires toward
persons of whom they have only intellectual knowledge, or why female people
are presumed to have an innate preference for Byzantine rigidity, I don't
know. "Progress" is one of the scared cows of SF, so perhaps the latter just
goes to show that although women can run a society by themselves, it isn't a
good one. This is flattering to men, I suppose. Of SF attempts to depict real
matriarchies ("He will be my concubine for tonight," said the Empress of Zar
coldly) it is better not to speak. I remember one very good post-bomb story by
an English writer (another static society, with the Magna Mater literally and
supernaturally in existence) but on the whole we had better just tiptoe past
the subject.

In my story I have used assumptions that seem to me obviously true. One of
them is the idea that almost all the characterological sex differences we take
for granted are in fact learned and not innate. I do not see how anyone can
walk around with both eyes open and both halves of his/her brain functioning
and not realize this. Still, the mythology persists in SF, as elsewhere, that
women are naturally gentler than men, that they are naturally less creative
than men, or less intelligent, or shrewder, or more cowardly, or more
dependent, or more self-centered, or more self-sacrificing, or more
materialistic, or shyer, or God knows what, whatever is most convenient at the
moment. True, you can make people into anything. There are matrons of fifty so
domesticated that any venture away from home is a continual flutter: where's
the No Smoking sign, is it on, how do I fasten my seat belt, oh dear can you
see the stewardess, she's serving the men first, they always do, isn't it
awful. And what's so fascinating about all this was that the strong, competent
"male" to whom such a lady in distress turned for help recently was Carol
Emshwiller. Wowie, zowie, Mr. Wizard! This flutteriness is not "femininity"
(something men are always so anxious women will lose) but pathology.

It's men who get rapturous and yeasty about the wonderful mystery of Woman,
lovely Woman (this is getting difficult to write as I keep imagining my reader
to be the George-Georgina of the old circuses: half-bearded,
half-permanentwaved). There are few women who go around actually feeling: Oh,
what a fascinating feminine mystery am I. This makes it clear enough, I think,
which sex (in general) has the higher prestige, the more freedom, the more
education, the more money, in Sartre's sense which is subject and which is
object. Every role in life has its advantages and disadvantages, of course; a
fiery feminist student here at Cornell recently told an audience that a man
who acquires a wife acquires a "lifelong slave" (fierce look) while the
audience justifiably giggled and I wondered how I'd ever been inveigled into
speaking on a program with such a lackwit. I also believe, like the villain of
my story, that human beings are born with instincts (though fuzzy ones) and
that being physically weaker than men and having babies makes a difference.
But it makes less and less of a difference now.