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

Also, the patriarchal society must have considerable survival value. I suspect
that it is actually more stable (and more rigid) than the primeval matriarchal
societies hypothesized by some anthropologists. I wish somebody knew. To take
only one topic: it seems clear that if there is to be a sexual double
standard, it must be one we know and not the opposite; male potency is too
biologically precious to repress. A society that made its well-bred men
impotent, as Victorian ladies were made frigid, would rapidly become an
unpeopled society. Such things ought to be speculated about.

Meanwhile, my story. It did not come from this lecture, of course, but vice
versa. I had read a very fine SF novel, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of
Darkness, in which all the characters are humanoid hermaphrodites, and was
wondering at the obduracy of the English language, in which everybody is "he"
or "she" and "it" is reserved for typewriters. But how can one call a
hermaphrodite "he," as Miss Le Guin does? I tried (in my head) changing all
the masculine pronouns to feminine ones, and marveled at the difference. And
then I wondered why Miss Le Guin's native "hero" is male in every important
sexual encounter of his life except that with the human man in the book. Weeks
later the Daemon suddenly whispered, "Katy drives like a maniac," and I found
myself on Whileaway, on a country road at night. I might add (for the benefit
of both the bearded and unbearded sides of the reader's cerebrum) that I never
write to shock. I consider that as immoral as writing to please. Katharina and
Janet are respectable, decent, even conventional people, and if they shock
you, just think what a copy of Playboy or Cosmopolitan would do to them.
Resentment of the opposite sex (Cosmo is worse) is something they have yet to
learn, thank God.

Which is why I visit WhileawayтАФalthough I do not live there because there are
no men there. And if you wonder about my sincerity in saying that,
George-Georgina, I must just give you up as hopeless.