The Female Man (Bluestreak)

I read this book 40 years ago. I still remember it as being one of the most offensive, insane things I have ever read. Absolutely disgusting and weird, don't read it.

I realize this book is considered one of the best female science fiction books of all time. With that in mind, I think the operative word is FEMALE. I am a male, and while I didn't find the book offensive, I thought it was difficult to follow. All four main characters are named with similar names - Janelle, Jeanine, etc. I had to keep flipping back a chapter or two to figure out which character was now speaking. I actually put the book down for a week or two and came back to see if it was easier to follow. It wasn't. Sorry - I think some other female sci-fi writers (like Kate Wilheim) are better represented than this.

A woman from a world without men. A feminist during the Women's Liberation in the 70s. A woman trying her best to fit in to her patriarchal society in the 60s. A female assassin from a period where men and women are warring against each other. What do they all have in common? Well, you'll have to read Joanna Russ' THE FEMALE MAN for the answer to that question, but you'll be glad you did. Russ' science fiction novel compares the lives of four women from parallel universes and their relations - or lack thereof - with men. Written during the height of the women's lib movement in 1975, The Female Man boldly attempts to reconsider our patriarchal society and to question woman's place in this world. I found this book extremely intelligent, entertaining, and thought-provoking. Russ created highly plausible and interesting characters with which I could relate and found believable. While much of the novel deals with feminist issues, it is done in a reasonable fashion and yet it creates controversy at the same time - a good duo in my opinion. I found Russ' writing style of jumping back and forth between character, narrator, and time period very confusing at first, but after a while I was able to catch on just fine. I really liked this method of telling the story because Russ allows you to enter into the mind of all the characters so as to get a different perspective on the same incident and to further one's understanding of the characters and events. I would highly recommend this book to anyone - male or female - who claims to like science fiction and especially those who say they do not - I'm converted!:-)

Most "classic" science fiction uses the devices of the genre - alien monsters, lightspeed ships, evil empires to be overcome - to mask the basic fact that, despite the high-tech window dressing, the books still promulgate the old ways of doing things: man on top, woman making the coffee and changing the diapers (even if she wears a space suit at the time). Not surprisingly, Joanna Russ will have none of that in any of her books, but particularly not The Female Man, which may be her best (though "Souls" in her award-winning volume (Extra)Ordinary People may be an easier read for some - and still just as hard-hitting). In The Female Man, Russ uses the very old SF device of time travel to bring contrasting characters together for the sheer pleasure of watching the man-centered universe fly wildly apart. ///Sidebar: What male-centered science fiction universe? Try reading Russ's take on the Star Wars phenomenon (the original episode), in her essay SF and Technology as Mystification (in To Write Like a Woman, U of Indiana Press): "After the hero's mother (disguised as his aunt) dies, there is only one woman left in the entire universe (Princess L.)." Yes, Star Wars came out after Female Man, but it's all-male premise was born many decades before.///I must dismiss any cries of complaint about the "disjoined" sequence of events in Female Man. The time-shifting she used is little different from that in such classics as Conrad's The Secret Agent (where anarchist bombs constantly disrupt the PHYSICAL plotting of the book)or Philip K. Dick's Martian Time Slip (which is constantly jumping about in time and space); nor is it much different from the movie Pulp Fiction, which broke & rearranged the narrative at several points. As for Jael, the violent, psychotic assassin of The Female Man's later chapters, it will do the reader good to notice that her earlier incarnations - especially Jeannine, from 1970s earth - find her violence just as horrifying as does any reader! I suspect that if Jael had been male, her combination of "time-travelling secret agent" and "openly sadistic murderer" would not have seemed so out of line. After all, most of the Cyberpunk genre is filled with similar (male) characters, and nobody flinches a bit. No, the beauty and value of a book like this is that it upsets so many on the one side, while making the rest shout "Finally!" The Female Man remains unrelenting and unrepentant - attributes many find acceptable (even positive) in males, but dangerous and "anti-feminine" in females. If nothing else, The Female Man asks one simple question: Can Science Fiction (and/or the world) progress while still shackled by the rotting corpse of the feminine mystique?

This is the book that convinced me that I don't necessarily hate science fiction. It is also the book that convinced my roommate's macho boyfriend and I that we COULD find a feminist ground on which we were both comfortable. Much of Russ's work is entertaining, powerful, and intelligent; THE FEMALE MAN surpasses anything else that I have read by her (or virtually anyone else) in all of those categories. She does use angry characters, but she uses them to raise questions, rather than to spew her own anger. Her use of the multiple first person and of parallel realms may confuse some readers, but this confusion is easily overcome. TFM is absolutely the earth-shatteringest book I've read. It should be required reading for young feminists and utopia/sci-fi fans, and recommended reading for virtually everyone else.