AUDIO

“A type of fiction that asks the classic ‘What if?’ question and attempts to answer it,” speculative fiction by women often includes the idea of the alien, the other. Given the dominance of patriarchal cultures, even today, throughout the world, as well as the tendency to use the masculine as the measure of normality, it is no wonder that so many women writers write about problems of identity and oppression. The idea of the alien – not always an extraterrestrial — becomes a metaphor for the “other,” which can be male or female depending on one’s point of view.

"Diamond Girls" by Louise Marley
There are two aliens in this story, and neither is from outer space. The argument about women participating in sports previously reserved for men is raging today (as it once raged about the female ability to write good fiction, to be doctors, police, fire fighters, college professors). In the heavily masculine world of sports, there have been few breakthroughs as yet. There is not even separate but equal segregation (perhaps there never is) since girls and women’s sports are not heavily funded or popularized (unless you want to count horrible remarks made by radio talk show hosts).

At first we think that this is Ricky’s only problem: she’s a woman in a man’s game. That her sense of otherness, her fight to overcome prejudice, is serious is signaled by her comparison of herself to Jackie Robinson. Marley throws us another curve, and the first hint is early in the story: We learn she has a separate locker room because “[m]aybe the guys didn't want a woman in their locker room. More likely, they didn't want her in their locker room.” Here we see that the problem is more than gender. Shortly, we learn that her mother injected herself with an engineered virus, which has made Ricky into a super-woman. She is almost seven feet tall, and has extraordinary eyesight and strength. The fact that these abilities are not “natural” has earned her many enemies and the nickname “lab rat.”

A newcomer, Grace Everett, called for contrast “the Natural,” is brought in to play against her to provide even more excitement for the fans as they watch these two women, like female mud-wrestlers, trying to defeat each other. But Ricky refuses to take the bait and turn against the only other woman in the game, though at first she can only “concentrate on her own problems” and refuses “to think about Everett, about what this game must mean to her.”

As she is up against Grace, she does not feel the hostility or even jealousy the hostile fans had hoped for, but curiosity and the beginnings of empathy: “Ricky stared at her opponent and wondered if Everett felt like she did. Like a target. Like an outsider. Like no matter how well she played, it would never be enough.”

We learn that Grace does indeed feel this sense of otherness. The coach reminds her that her boss “is an old-fashioned guy. I think he wants to prove you can't do it, that the Natural can't cut it in the bigs."

Each woman comes during the course of the contest to feel greater sympathy for the other. Ricky thinks, “If today was Everett's only chance at the bigs, her only shot. . .that was tough.” Grace in turn is stunned “at the insults that were shouted at Ricky Arendsen.” She feels an unwelcome surge of sympathy but goes ahead to play her best game, knowing that all she and Ricky want is to play ball.

Ricky is the only viable survivor of her mother’s experiments: “Ricky Arendsen—and only Ricky Arendsen—had grown into a superb athlete, with a mind to match. But the gleam Grace saw in her eye was all hers. No virus had made her the competitor she was. She was a ballplayer. A gamer.”

And so was Grace, who realizes they are similar: "This wasn't about modified genes…. She wanted to win, not because of Arendsen, not because it was her first day in the big leagues, not to prove the Natural could do it. She wanted to win because it was baseball and she was in the game. This was about desire.”

At the end, both successful, the two women shake hands, having become a meaningful part of the game they love, but playing it on their terms, as women who respect each other, not as rivals pitted against each other by the media –- or as oppressed women vying for the attentions of a man. Together they are opening up the game for women. In their enthusiasm to do well they show that women too can enjoy a professional life, that women too love to win. No identity problems here.

Human cloning will probably happen. Genetic engineering is already with us. “Diamond Girls” raises the possibility that society will have to adapt to new definitions of human rights.

"The Women Men Don't See (1974) by James Tiptree, Jr.
For years, Alice Sheldon hid her identity behind two pseudonyms, Racoona Sheldon and James Tiptree, Jr. Both won -- but were not there physically to accept -- prestigious awards for their stories. The science fiction community was shaken to its foundations when it was revealed that Tiptree was female. The narrator of this story –- Don Fenton -- speaks in a confident tough-guy male voice (think, film noir) and is dismissive of the two women he meets whom he calls a “double female blur.“ They are not attractive enough for him to notice, and they do not seek any attention from him.

This bothers him. The women constantly disappoint his conventional expectations: When the weather turns rough aboard the plane, “I look back with a vague notion of reassuring the women. They are calmly intent on what can be seen of Yucatán.” They are equally calm and practical as the plane goes down, and quick to congratulate the Captain on his crash landing: "’Oh, yes! It was beautiful.’ The women are shaky, but no hysteria.”

Marooned with them and their Mayan pilot in an uninhabitable swamp in Bahia Espiritu Santo, he proves incapable of going beyond his maleness and seeing them as people, making incorrect guesses about them based on his stereotypes of women: “I have Mrs. Parsons figured now; Mother Hen protecting only chick from male predators.“

He longs to assert his traditional male role as protector: “Out of sheer reflex my arm goes around my companion's shoulders — but Mrs. Parsons isn't there; she's up on her knees peering at the burnt-over plain around us.” Then when he spends the night in proximity with her, his male urges take over. She is adept at evading him: “Mrs. Ruth Parsons has judged things to a nicety. If I were twenty years younger, she wouldn't be here. [....] Mrs. Parsons knows her little shorts are safe. Those firmly filled little shorts, so close.”

After their encounter with the bright light, the metallic twitters, and the little voice saying "Eh-ep," Ruth’s behavior changes. She is nervous, waiting. This leads Don –- and perhaps even the reader -- to indulge in all sorts of fantasies: she has “designs” on him, she is obsessed by vicarious fantasies of her daughter in bed with the Captain. She is a government agent or a courier for a guerrilla organization. None of these things is true -- though it is possible that she and her daughter have matter-of-factly sized up the Captain as good sperm donor material:

“Just as I am about to suggest that Mrs. Parsons might care to share my rain shelter, she remarks serenely, ‘The Mayas seem to be a very fine type of people. I believe you said so to Althea.’

“The implications fall on me with the rain. Type. As in breeding, bloodline, sire. Am I supposed to have certified Estéban not only as a stud but as a genetic donor?”

Ruth Parsons is decidedly unconventional, a woman who does not need a man. She gave birth to her child without the father knowing and says she “grew up quite happily under the same circumstances." Almost as if there is an underground core of women secretly surviving in spite of male domination. Her way of life is threatening to Don. Casting about for reassurances, he accuses her of hating men or of suffering from the trauma of rejection: but Miss Parsons tells him: “’Oh, there wasn't any trauma, Don, and I don't hate men. That would be as silly as — as hating the weather.’ She glances wryly at the blowing rain.”

But her independence is not enough. As free as she is, she still lives in a world controlled by men:

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like — like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property.”

She tells him further that "[w]hat women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.” Not able to qualify in Don’s world as a human being, she compares herself and her kind to small secretive animals: "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City." The women men don’t see live out of their sight, hidden even the middle of their greatest cities.

She complains of "All the endless wars [....] All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—"

Don realizes later that in the incident of the bright light Ruth found a device lost by the aliens and made her plan to escape. When the aliens return in search of their machine, Don sees that they aren’t human and that Ruth did not plan this meeting:

“I look where their faces should be and see black hollow dishes with vertical stripes. The stripes move slowly.

“And Ruth — Jesus, of course — Ruth is terrified too; she's edging along the bank away from them, gaping at the monsters in the skiff, who are obviously nobody's friends.”

But once again he is wrong. The “monsters” aren’t friendless. Don wants again for Ruth to play the standard female role: “Why doesn't she get over the bank and circle back behind me?” He is willing to be the guy with the gun on the cover of a pulp magazine, defending his woman from the alien monsters, but in the confusion, aiming his gun at the alien, ironically, he shoots her instead, for as he sagely observes later “[s]he's as alien as they, there in the twilight.”

Even when the aliens have returned them to their downed plane, he cannot abandon his authoritarian warrior role: “The alien device is twinkling or phosphorescing slightly. I lean over to look, whispering, ‘Give that to me, I'll pass it to Estéban.’”

Believing a different ethic, she refuses to play his game because "[i]t's theirs, they need it!.[....] They haven't hurt us. I'm sure they could.[....] I think they're gentle."

In this story, it is Don, the aging macho tough guy, who cannot win his objectives either in love or war: he fails to bed Ruth, his attempt to shoot the alien misfires. Hopelessly stuck with his male ego, he doesn’t know anything else to do.

Later, remembering Ruth’s words, he can only judge her as deranged: “We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine....I'm used to aliens [...] She'd meant every word. Insane. How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say good-bye to her home, her world?” He doesn’t realize that he and his kind are the monsters and that she and her daughter are happy to leave such a world; at the end to him they are even less than human: “two of our opossums," he says, "are missing.”

AUDIO 

“Mahmoud’s Wives” by Janis Ian
Here as in “The Women Men Don’t See,” men and women are hopelessly alienated from each other. While the latter story was broad and easily identifiable parody, this story demands close reading in order to pick up on the grotesqueries embedded in the narrative.

It is easy to assume that we are somewhere in the Middle East perhaps isolated from the rest of civilization, but at least on earth where Mahmoud’s “people, nomads for millennia, finally had this entire place to call their own.” But we are not on earth. The first clue (italics mine): “And if a bit of rain fell each time the second moon began its annual cycle, or the floods began when the Eastern Star was at its zenith, what was that compared to this otherwise most perfect of all worlds?”

It is a planet with torrential rains which force the humans to evacuate their farm land and head for the hills. It is not an easy life. There has been famine and “most of the planet was raw wilderness, difficult and time-consuming to clear.”

So in this future, humankind is able to travel to other planets, and probably, given what we now know about our own solar system, other solar systems as well. This may or may not happen, but a new world free from interference from “outsiders” allows not only the inhabitants but also the author a clean slate. The fundamentalists have a good place to start over and do things right. Or wrong.They are “free to practice the faith set down by the first settlers, and without the interference of the Unbeliever.” The men who build a civilization here have given even less freedom to women than exists now on earth. It is easy to overlook exactly what “innovations” these men have made, until you read closely.

The very first line ought to arouse suspicions: “When the rains came, Mahmoud packed his wives into a large canister and loaded them onto the truck.” A canister?

Here are other clues (italics mine): “Still, if Fatimah would only exercise more as he'd suggested, instead of just dragging around all day like a landsnail, she would probably lose some of that extra weight.”

As Mahmoud contemplates his life he complains to himself about his wives’ demands: “And it would be 'Mahmoud, please lift me here,' and 'Mahmoud, please reach me this.' "

A pregnant woman needed “a great deal of upper body strength to get around.”

“Yes, he decided, I will bring them upstairs at least once a day.”

Most telling is the birth of his daughter:

“The screams had been horrible, and the doctor's blood-drenched gown when he left the birth-room was a picture Mahmoud would rather not have seen. He could never look at his daughter without recalling that day, and was relieved when she married and moved away.”

This might be circumcision, a horrendous procedure for a girl baby and not so wonderful for boy babies either. But “[t]hose first few weeks, he'd been so desperate to stop her crying. Afterward, "the child showed a bright enthusiasm, pulling herself up to grab at objects kept safely out of her reach.”

The contrast between boy and girl babies is important: “Boys, however, should be encouraged to run, to jump, to exercise their little muscles.”

Mahmoud enjoys remembering his sons: “The way they crawled after him when he left in the mornings, trying to stand well before their tiny legs would hold them, just to imitate him! The way he felt watching them take their first quivering steps. The shine on their small bodies as they worked beside him in the fields.”

There are no such memories of his daughter.

The rationale: “Women were best kept inside, at home, away from important matters. They were incapable of fending for themselves; they needed guidance, and judgment. That was why the forefathers, in their infinite wisdom, had created The Law. A new Law, for a new world. Women needed to stay in one place, to avoid tempting others.”

The fact of the ritual mutilation of women at birth becomes clear toward the end of the story when Mahmoud is dead and Fatimah exits the canister: “Satisfied with what she saw, she motioned the other wives to help lift her the rest of the way. They made a platform for her with their backs, and she slowly pulled her body over the top, then turned hand-over-hand to lower herself. Once in the bed of the truck, she clambered down to the ground and knuckled her way toward the campsite.”

That Fatimah must “knuckle” her way to the campsite is less ambiguous, but the description of the youngest wife is crystal clear: “ ''Who would have known so many wonderful foods grew just within reach?’ agreed the youngest, as she teetered on her stumps and put another piece of Mahmoud's chair on the fire.”

Is this too unlikely? Remember Ruth Parsons’ words: “Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like — like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property.”  The crisis here is simply one of opportunity. Power corrupts. For past precedents take a look at the historical reality of foot binding, which severely crippled Chinese women for many centuries.

That this crippling of women has made life also harder for men is obvious in Mahmoud’s exhaustion: His lower back is “feeling the effects” of lifting his wives everywhere he wants them to go and his nerves are strained from their demands. But, like the young bachelors in “Goddesses,” he doesn’t see that the mutilation of women, like the aborting of girl babies, is harmful to the whole society.

Mahmoud in his thinking is as stunted, as incomplete, as his wives are in their legless bodies. And his limitation of intellect is his undoing. He thinks he is impressing them with his philosophizing and complains to himself rather proudly about their desire to please him: “He picked up a covered dish and peeked inside to see what it contained. Dates again. Truth be told, he was a bit tired of dates, for all their healthy reputation. He'd made the mistake once, early on, of telling Fatimah how much he liked their taste. From then on nothing would do but that he have them with every meal.

“He bit into one. Very sweet, much more so than usual. She certainly did try to see to his needs.”

Ironically, these dates are the source of his death, and his last words reiterate why they have killed him, the rationale of oppressors everywhere: "What we do, we do for your own good. There is such a thing as too much freedom; temptation is difficult enough for a man to resist, let alone a woman. No, we do it for your good, and the good of your souls."

That his wives rebel should not surprise us. At some level he knows that he has too much power: ”He tried very hard to pay attention to their small needs and concerns, and he rarely grew angry enough to punish them. But up here in the mountains, with the nearest government authority three day's drive away, there was nothing to make sure he continued that way. The very thought made him uneasy.” His uneasiness at the extent of his power reflects the entire situation of planetary isolation which has allowed these men to become a law unto themselves.

Over and over again we have seen — in literature and in life -- that oppression doesn’t pay off in the long run. Hobbled as they are, the wives are smart enough to work out a plan for their freedom. Mahmoud is lulled by his sense of mastery and readily eats the poisoned dates. He is killed, cooked, and eaten by women who simply want freedom -- and a good meal. We recall his frustration at their complaining: “why couldn't they have meat every day, instead of once a week?” In hindsight we can enjoy the macabre humor when he thinks: “I'll let the women stew a while longer.” Or when we are told that "[h]unger tickled his ribs,” followed just a little later by Fatimah, who “smiled contentedly to herself, and carefully placed the rest of the rib she'd been eating onto the fire.” And of course a younger wife’s priceless assessment: "Truly, this meal is a feast, Fatimah!" said the second wife, gnawing on a large piece of meat. "So delicately spiced — it is amazing what you can do with so little!"