AUDIO

James Tiptree, Jr., "The Women Men Don't See
For years, Alice Sheldon hid her identity behind two pseudonyms, Racoona (think masks) Sheldon and James Tiptree,Jr. Both won prestigious awards for their stories. The SF community was shaken to its foundations when it was revealed that Tiptree was female. The narrator of this story is Don Fenton, who speaks in a confident tough-guy male voice 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 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 shoulder — 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 are 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." 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.”

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. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

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 plans 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 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 but shoot – like the government and eco-terrorists in “Wetlands Preserve,” like the crazed men and women –and governments-- in “Amnesty.”

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 are missing.”

In these stories, three women authors use the alien encounter to make statements about the nature of humanity. All three fictions dethrone human beings from their privileged place in the universe that even a fairly pessimistic novel like Childhood’s End accords them. Arthur C. Clarke could not avoid subtle praise of the human species: we are inexorably inventive (like Stormgren and Jan); we, unlike the poor Overlords, are capable of joining the Overmind. In some “true” contemporary alien abduction narratives also is a similar human-centeredness. The aliens, it seems, want us to have their babies and delight in sexual experimentation. But in Kress, Sheldon, and Butler we are hopelessly muddled – we would rather kill than understand. In all 3 stories someone, whether individual or group, tries or will try to get rid of the aliens.

The result of this fatal flaw --in Butler and Kress -- will be the extinction of the human race. Tiptree’s story does not consider apocalypse – the two women simply prefer to leave the planet than to remain aliens as women sharing the world with a species that calls itself Man.

Week of Oct. 16 — 22.
This week, you should work on your papers. I’ll post a discussion where you can talk about the story you are writing about – good ideas can come from discussion.

Be sure to get your paper in on time, because in the following week we leave earth for space. Since it’s a long trip, this is also a good time to start reading our second novel The Left Hand of Darkness.