During my wanderings in the worlds of science fiction, I came across An old-fashioned girl by Joanna Russ, author of science-fiction, in fact, but also of feminist essays and reflections, such as Forbidden to Write, recently published in Italy by Enciclopedia delle donne.
The story is biting and teasing towards the norm of gender roles and sexual relationships: in the distant future there will be semi-conscious “inflatable dolls”, in which the soul is external, the soul is beauty. Russ towards the end of the story adds, through the words of one of the protagonists, that “there was a widespread erroneous belief that men, in the past, had had women like I had a Davy (the name of the prostituto, nda), that women had been to men what Davy was to me.”
And again, in conclusion:
“Davy’s soul is in Davy’s beauty; it hurts to think that Davy will never experience the soul of him. Beauty is all that matters in him, beauty is always empty, always external.
It is not so?”
Attention because the banality of these considerations which clearly refer to stereotypes aimed at the female world imply a series of enormous reflections and consequences, not only on the role of women but also on the perception of one’s body, by others but also by ourselves.
However, this is not the point I would like to address today, but a reflection aroused by the anthology that includes the story.
The text is from 1974, published in Italy in 1977 in the collection Last Stage. The purpose of the anthology is very interesting: given a series of themes (robotics, space exploration, aliens, etc.) authors are chosen who have already developed them in previous works to bring them to a paradox or to the extreme. For example, you can find a story by Isaac Asimov where the three laws of robotics are questioned.
Joanna Russ has been called to deal with the topic of sex, after all she anticipates in her comment to follow the writing of one of her most famous novels, Female Man.
“The sexual subject that is most commonly treated in science fiction seems to be that of the substitute for the normal bed partner: androids, cassette tapes, telepathic machines. […] And if someone makes love with an extraterrestrial, it is always an extraterrestrial of the opposite sex; as if it mattered much! (Which would you prefer: a human of the same sex or a rhino of the opposite sex?). I admit that I have written about an automated human substitute […] And what I was actually aiming for was a reversal of roles: a Playboy bunny with testicles.”
so he writes without mincing words.
So satisfied we can turn the page and continue with other fantastic themes and paradoxes and we are faced with: Sex in the future.
Again.
The editorial note at the bottom of the first page draws our attention.
“Why two stories about sex when every other subject has had only one?”
Good question, who knows why.
As a first motivation we find the fact that the topic is hot due to the frequent clashes between feminists and anti-feminists (/i, I add), a sign that things never change and that the myth of feminism “for serious reasons that everyone would support”, the “true feminism” of the seventies that many are keen to remember to discredit today’s struggles is precisely a myth. Women’s struggles have always been discredited, even those that today seem to us to be fundamental rights, have never been discounted for us and unfortunately we must continue to consider them this way. Antifeminists still exist, disguised as victims and scared of real equality and all that it entails, now as then.
The second motivation also hurts me, because even if the anthology is dated, things haven’t changed that much.
“It is right that both genders should have equal opportunities to make their voices heard“.
At first glance the sentence is really difficult to dispute, I challenge anyone to disagree, but it sounds (and is) like the sentences of circumstance in which we are all equal and if everyone in the world loved each other a little we would all be better off.
But let’s go step by step. Throughout the collection, I note, men and women have been called to deal with the most varied topics.
For example we have Kit Reed and James Tiptree Jr, but it occurred to no one that their point of view on the assigned topic was “feminine”.
Why do we need two points of view about sex?
As for “equal possibilities”, just read a minimum of science fiction to get an idea: there are hundreds of novels that deal more or less centrally with sex, relationships, women and they are all written by men. Even for a simple matter of proportions, for heaven’s sake, science fiction was (is?) a genre purely inhabited by the opposite sex.
So was there really a need to put an “unheard” male voice on the subject?
The male point of view is never questioned or compared. It’s universal and that’s it.
Since the universal is required of a woman this becomes singular and needs implementation.
Is it really so difficult to think of female experience, female sexual experience in particular, not as otherness or as a complement, but as a valid and complete experience in itself?
Carla Lonzi wrote, equality is an ideological attempt to enslave women at the highest levels.
It is the principle on the basis of which the hegemon continues to condition the non-hegemon.
The world of equality is the world of legalized oppression, of the one-dimensional.