Subject: File: "FEMINISTSF-LIT LOG0203B" ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 00:08:39 -0800 Reply-To: shander@cdsnet.net Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Sharon Anderson Subject: BDG: Gate MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I love Tepper's work.I read the book when it fist came out in paper, and I re-read the same copy. I have always had the visceral response to Tepper's work that "this woman knows what she is talking about." I was surprised at my reaction a few years ago at Wiscon, when I heard her speak. As I recall, the gist of her talk seemed to be "this country thinks itself safe from the horrors in the rest of the world. It isn't. Because men still run things, we are going to ---- in a handbasket. Rapidly." (and she had figures to back this up.) "Women need to change things. And the only way to do this is to take control of reproduction. It's your responsibility; take it!" I remember the speech made me a little uncomfortable. It was a little blunter than I was used to. Still, not as grim as Octavia Butler, who is a little too much for me. Not as grim as Susy Mckee Charnas. (I had trouble finishing Motherlines when it first came out.) The anti=lesbian issue in Gate did and does make me uncomfortable. I have no answer for this. Except to say that I had strong suspicion about the twins, and was hoping that this was Tepper's under-the-table acknowledgment. (I have nothing specific to justify this hope.) --s ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 03:24:43 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Lee Anne Phillips Subject: Re: BDG: Gate Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU In-Reply-To: <3C887183.65313C33@cdsnet.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 12:08 AM 3/8/02 -0800, Sharon Anderson wrote: >gist of her talk seemed to be "this country thinks itself safe from the >horrors in the rest of the world. It isn't. Because men still run >things, we are going to ---- in a handbasket. Rapidly." (and she had >figures to back this up.) "Women need to change things. And the only >way to do this is to take control of reproduction. It's your >responsibility; take it!" I remember the speech made me a little There are ample reference sources, such as Men Are Not Cost-Effective by June Stephenson, but she didn't exactly do that in Gate. She has an elite cabal of women and men who conspire to deceive the vast majority of the population, with people being brought into the conspiracy only when they prove "worthy." Logically, at least some women and quite a few men might quibble with the logic of this, since the same qualities of ruthless aggression they quail at in men would be absolutely necessary in women in order to keep this secret safe. Presumably, any male guessing the secret and not instantly committed to the cause is murdered out of hand or sent into battle with the likelihood of being slaughtered, as they arrange to do for one group of men a little too close to the secret for their comfort. Similarly, any woman who retained her "adolescent" attachment to the manly men and objected when she discovers that they are being drastically culled "for the good of the herd" would have to be done away with lest she tell other women, or worse, men. So the same Eugenics that has them selecting for non-violent men has them selecting for murderous women, and indeed the ruling caste is even more skilled in martial arts and dealing death than are the men. So the whole enterprise seems contradictory and doomed to failure; the more successful the women were in breeding out aggression and violence in men, the less resolute they would be in their pogrom. Assuming, that is, that women share most of their genetic heritage with men and are not a completely different species who happen to inhabit the same planet. And there is a crypto-racism inherent in her scheme, since it would be easy to demonstrate that young African-American males are responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime and might therefore have to be culled even more drastically. She completely ignores the fact that sometimes rage, or even war, is an appropriate response to socially-imposed violence or genocide. In fact, her "final solution" for the men is genocide, with violent cultures of both men and women being necessary (if unstated) targets of particular deadly intention by the "less violent," by which we can safely assume that one or two particular cultures would mean people like themselves. So anyone with the gumption to rise up and overthrow their oppressive slavemasters or colonial rulers would be marked for death, and the end result of this breeding program would seem to be a world in which people can be safely treated like cattle, since the rebellious and untamed are quickly slaughtered. We might remember that Swift modestly proposed a similar solution to the "Irish Problem," and the end result was a tasty addition to the culinary range of the English table. > The anti=lesbian issue in Gate did and does make me uncomfortable. >I have no answer for this. Except to say that I had strong suspicion >about the twins, and was hoping that this was Tepper's under-the-table >acknowledgment. (I have nothing specific to justify this hope.) I doubt it. Her rejection of lesbianism was far too pat and "scientific." We can more likely believe that lesbianism is being bred (or tweaked) out of the race as well, since the people in charge of reproduction are also in charge of covert mind control. Don't forget that the young "breeder" women are encouraged (and subtly coerced) to admire the most brutal men so their enthusiastic mating with them becomes the reward for the most suicidal excesses of male violence. So the ruling caste are whore masters as well as death camp overseers. While I'm, sure there might be some possible feminist analysis of female brothel keepers as "liberating," please pardon me if I find it hard to swallow. Doubtless, from the viewpoint of the women in "Women's Country," this is all easily seen as being for our own good so our later discovery of the fact that we've been lied to and coerced into having sex with essentially random men later elicits our acquiescence and cooperation. It would seem that not only men but women are being bred for docility and other useful traits quite valuable in farm animals. Her scheme just doesn't hang together at all when examined closely. She's ripped off Lesbian Separatism while trying to incorporate men in it as co-rulers and retain compulsory heterosexuality as the social norm. This is not, and cannot be, tolerant of lesbianism in practice, since the philosophical coherence of Separatism demands it and she denies it a priori. And it's now known that sporadic mating with men is potentially fatal for women, as the rates of pre-eclampsia and other serious complications of pregnancy, including spontaneous abortion, rise sharply when the female reproductive system (and it is a system) is exposed to "strange" sperm. Our immune systems are part of our total reproductive biology, and it is hubris to assume that we can fool around with this very complex system without consequence. The safest and most successful pregnancies (on average) are those involving a man with whom the woman has had a long and exclusive intimate sexual relationship. This is not to say that in vitro, sperm donor, and other reproductive techniques don't work, or that they are not appropriate in some situations, but Gate turns the system on its head, allowing for *no* normal pregnancies and making artificial techniques the standard procedure. And when we discover that the young women are being tricked by their "betters," and that what they think are their own reproductive choices are being covertly denied to them and the "correct" choice made secretly on their behalf, with pregnancies by the "best" fathers being forced on them while unconscious, at what we know (outside the novel) is considerable risk to their lives and health, by the ruling cabal, we really ought to be shocked. This is the same institutionalized rape system as that enforced by men in the Handmaid's Tale or the Charnas world, just run by women. Does that make it better? Is rape and forced pregnancy ok when women do it to other women? Is murder ok when women do it? Is it permissible for *any* small group to control the lives of the majority? Are we expected to identify with the majority of women in the novel? Or do we secretly rejoice in the fact that *we* are among the few cognoscenti, the movers and shakers who control the destiny of the human race through trickery and murder? I think we are so meant to do, and that the implications of her total society are not fully realized by Tepper. It's so seductive and flattering to be taken into the inner circles of power that when a writer invites us, even in an imaginary world, we most of us find it easy to become co-conspirators and collaborators. Milgram's classic experiment involving our obedience to authority, even when we seem to be harming others, shows that this disturbing tendency is universal, and that we are just as likely to become part of the problem in real life as we are in this deeply flawed novel. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 08:04:10 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Sandy Cronin Subject: Re: BDG: Gate Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > So the same Eugenics that has them selecting for non-violent men has > them selecting for murderous women, and indeed the ruling caste is > even more skilled in martial arts and dealing death than are the men. OK, first I must say that I haven't re-read GATE yet, but I wanted to comment on this. To me, I can see a distinction between ruthlessness (being able to do tough, even violent, things when they're necessary), and the violent aggression that they're trying to weed out of the men (short-fuse violent tempers; a tendency to solve any problem with physical violence). If you've read the Belsarius books (David Drake and Eric Flint; the Free library at baen.com got me hooked on them), it seems to me that Belsarius' temperment is what they're going for in this society; people CAPABLE of violence and ruthlessness, but very much in control of their tempers and aggression. Doesn't seem all THAT contradictory when looked at like that, to me, at least. > So the whole enterprise seems contradictory and doomed to failure; > the more successful the women were in breeding out aggression > and violence in men, the less resolute they would be in their pogrom. > Assuming, that is, that women share most of their genetic heritage > with men and are not a completely different species who happen > to inhabit the same planet. If some of the "acceptable" men are in the cabal, though, then they have to be just as ruthless as the women, so that selection isn't going strictly along gender lines... > And there is a crypto-racism inherent in her scheme, since it would > be easy to demonstrate that young African-American males are > responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime and might > therefore have to be culled even more drastically. But this isn't addressed in the book, and it seems to me that each case was decided individually, by the boy himself, rather than by society at large or based on any demographic...unless you mean something different by "culled" than "decides to stay in the men's camps rather than come back into the city with the women"... Like I said, though, it's been a while since I read the book. :) -Sandy _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 12:02:36 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Dave Belden Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate To Women's Country Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Tepper has been a favorite author of mine in the last decade, but Lee Ann's demolition job on Gateway is extremely convincing. I hadn't realized Lee Ann's point that they were also selecting for female murderousness; nor that successfully breeding only from gentle men would eventually reduce the murderous ability of the women running the program and thus subvert it; but this is clearly correct. I guess I never saw the story as a call to arms, and am somewhat shocked to learn that Tepper saw it that way. I thought it was a book riding on feminist anger against the murderousness of males, certainly. But beyond that I just enjoyed the Machiavellian quality of the story (as I enjoyed Dune, for example, at least for the first book or two) and the cleverness with which she told it and revealed the twist in the tail of the story. Maybe I enjoyed it because it was a kind of reverse of male sf, a murderous conspiratorial tale in which the women came out on top, without really realizing that this in itself is a 'male' template? Assuming it's more male to murder. Of course, if aliens attacked, the women would be all too happy to have those murderous male warriors defend them, wouldn't they? How much of male murderousness has in fact been bred into them by the choice of their mothers down the ages, to mate with warriors, in order to improve their (the mothers' and their children's') survival? On nature/nurture, eugenics, biology, a lot has changed even since Tepper wrote the book. Lee Ann's point about the poor health consequences for women of multiple partners is very new, for example, (at least I only read of it in the last month) so Tepper can't be faulted for condemning her breeders to that - although of course the far more damning point that they are effectively being raped still stands. Perhaps counteracting the point about poor health outcomes of having multiple partners, is the finding that females in many species, including ours , routinely practice deception: e.g. bond with the gentle, committed Daddy type to get ongoing help raising the kids, but secretly go to the wandering, sexy adventurer (or warrior) for sex, to get tougher genes for the kids. Bird species, previously thought to be monogamous, do this a lot, it turns out, and there is strong evidence humans did too in the ancestral pre-civilized environment (not to mention today, as DNA surveys of apartment blocks have shown somewhat startlingly). Not that that justifies the elite in Gateway... So much has come down the pike on biological differences between men and women, what testosterone does, etc. in the last decade or so, that many feminists would have a little difficulty now with Joy writing that > I think a basic premise of feminism is that genes or biology aren't the most important > determinants (to use a pretty icky word) in human society; rather, we think women and men > learn to be women and men. In that sense, I'd say I'd have to question > whether this is a feminist book. > Not that even the most enthusiastic sociobiologists think that we do not learn to be men and women - they would say we do, but that the genetic and ongoing hormonal/biological influence is very great. In fact, it seems that feminism, which at one point practically had it as an a priori belief that culture was the culprit, now has no choice but to take into account biology. Not that biology has to be destiny: but if there are in fact significant biological differences between men and women, then we have to learn differently, as men and as women, how to deal with our biology, in order to achieve a more feminist society. This actually makes learning and choice even more important. But it requires first a clear-sightedness about what biological realities we are dealing with in ourselves (and obviously we have a lot more research to do on that). Tepper's call to arms, then, may later be seen as more like an early feminist attempt (made when it was still unfashionable in feminist circles) to come to terms with biological difference. A wild and unconvincing approach, but then, that's partly what sf is for. Please forgive me gabbing on, but I can't resist adding this. In my men's group last night we had this conversation: Do most men in our culture not cry easily because we are taught not to? (This is the theory I had been going on for 25+ years). Or is it in part because testosterone inhibits crying? (Viz. an article in the New York Times last year about a woman who had a sex change, who was amazed to find that the more testosterone she took, the more her tears dried up - involuntarily, as she experienced it). I suggested that if testosterone promoted crying, crying would have a great deal of respect in a male-dominated culture. (On the same lines as the saying "If men could give birth, abortion would be a sacrament"). Because testosterone in fact seems to inhibit crying, and that creates a difference between men and women, then men's culture may value non-crying and exaggerate it. The biology may predate the culture, or may have co-evolved with it; and so we may have to create a culture that, for example, doesn't put boys and men down simply because they aren't crying ("you're so repressed!"), but which still helps them access their feelings. This is the same thing many feminist parents have discovered in trying to control their children's play: in my son's small daycare in San Francisco, which may have been the most feminist-nurtured on the planet, with kids exclusively from feminist/liberal families, and a good number of the kids having two mommies or two daddies, it was uncanny how much the two and three year old boys rushed around killing things while the same-aged girls came behind healing them. No parent in that daycare could escape the sense that something biological was going on, and that our hopes of creating a more feminist world depended on recognizing that. Dave ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 14:18:45 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Rose Reith Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate To Women's Country Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" >Tepper has been a favorite author of mine in the last decade, Mine too. > but Lee Ann's >demolition job on Gateway (pardon my nitpicking, but it's Gate to Women's Country not dateway - somehow I think the word gateway alters the meaning -apologies if my correction offends) > is extremely convincing. I hadn't realized Lee >Ann's point that they were also selecting for female murderousness; nor that >successfully breeding only from gentle men would eventually reduce the >murderous ability of the women running the program and thus subvert it; but >this is clearly correct. Oh my, I really don't agree at all. How could anyone think of Morgot as murderous considering she only did what she did when forced to do so to protect herself or the women of Women's Country. The martial arts she knew were a secret, obviously because they were not used frequently. It's not like she went around showing them off, as the men in these novels probably would have given the way they are written. And she herself admitted that among themselves the women on the council called themselves "the damned few". They are not thrilled with what they do, but they believe it is important that if there is any way to eliminate that part of the human character that believes that honor can be found in repeatedly going to battle over things that aren't important, then they are going to try to achieve that end. Remember, these are people who have descended from survivors of what was most likely a nuclear war. They have seen the worst in their own history and they are damned sick and tired of it and sure as heck don't want to give anyone, male or female, the chance to have it happen again. They are in a different place than we are and thus have different perspectives on what is REALLY important. There is also the whole section in the play where Hecuba bemoans the fact that she could have killed Talthybius, because she had hidden the knife in her skirt, but then she felt that if she killed him she would be killing some woman's son and that woman would end up grieving over him. Instead she and her daughter-in-law end up watching him throw the baby, Astyanax, off the cliff wall, so she feels that she is damned for not having saved her grandson and would have been damned if she had killed Talthybius. Either way she is damned, so shouldn't she work toward what might have been a better future rather than not acting at all? I really think that the play is truly the key to understanding the novel, and I have found that it takes several readings to see what she really put in there. I am sure that I am still missing quite a bit, and I have read it all so many times that I feel as if I ought to have it memorized. (It is one of the books I am using for my Master's Thesis) Yet each time I go to look something up I see relationships in the text that I hadn't quite understood previously. And there are parts that I definitely drew the wrong conclusions from in the first few readings. How could they be selecting for female murderousness? The majority of the women, who would also be the majority of the mothers, were not members of the council, and therefore were not murdering anyone. And as far as the sexualtiy goes, obviouly Tepper has a problem with anything that is not heterosexuality. I will admit that that does present a problem for anyone who is even remotely sensitive to alternative possibilities in relationships, so that is a drawback to the book, but you have to admit that given the times she was writing in a few years back her inclusion of the carnival weeks was a reflection of the liberated behavior that was pretty much a norm for many people. What was far more peculiar is the fact that these people are doing with out sexual contact for months out of the year. That I think is rather unnatural, and I was left wondering what about her relationship with Joshua and Stavia's with Corrig? There is never any mention that there was any sexual contact between them at inappropriate times, yet they live together. Are women's Country children so well behaved that they never walk in on their "parents". I also had a problem from that point of view with the way she wrote that in Women's Country it wasn't polite to ask about one's father, it just wasn't done, which I believe was meant to portray a rejection of patriarchy and patriarchal influence. Fine. Except that what does her central character have but the equivalent of the typical family because Stavia is Joshua's daughter, and lives with her Mother and her father, unlike probably most of the other children in Women's Country, who live with their mother and a servitor, who may or may not be their father. I found that disturbing, that Tepper would advocate for something that was supposed to be feminist because it was a new way of thinking about relationships, and then turn around and have the family she wrote about most be a typical family in disguise. > I guess I never saw the story as a call to arms, >and am somewhat shocked to learn that Tepper saw it that way. She does seem to be of that opinion given the interviews I have read with her. It just seems to be her perspective on what's wrong with the world, to which she certainly is entitled. >I thought it >was a book riding on feminist anger against the murderousness of males, >certainly. But beyond that I just enjoyed the Machiavellian quality of the >story (as I enjoyed Dune, for example, at least for the first book or two) >and the cleverness with which she told it and revealed the twist in the tail >of the story. Maybe I enjoyed it because it was a kind of reverse of male >sf, a murderous conspiratorial tale in which the women came out on top, >without really realizing that this in itself is a 'male' template? Assuming >it's more male to murder. Of course, if aliens attacked, the women would be >all too happy to have those murderous male warriors defend them, wouldn't >they? How would those warriors stand a chance against aliens? I think I'd rather side with the servitors and the council women given their skills at subterfuge etc. > How much of male murderousness has in fact been bred into them by the >choice of their mothers down the ages, to mate with warriors, in order to >improve their (the mothers' and their children's') survival? > >On nature/nurture, eugenics, biology, a lot has changed even since Tepper >wrote the book. Lee Ann's point about the poor health consequences for women >of multiple partners is very new, for example, (at least I only read of it >in the last month) so Tepper can't be faulted for condemning her breeders to >that - although of course the far more damning point that they are >effectively being raped still stands. This part I don't quite understand. They chose the men they had sex with during carnival and then they unknowingly submit to artificial insemination - that's rape? They participated in carnival, they were admitting that they wanted to try to get pregnant. As Myra says, "I might as well start sometime". > Perhaps counteracting the point about >poor health outcomes of having multiple partners, is the finding that >females in many species, including ours , routinely practice deception: e.g. >bond with the gentle, committed Daddy type to get ongoing help raising the >kids, but secretly go to the wandering, sexy adventurer (or warrior) for >sex, to get tougher genes for the kids. Bird species, previously thought to >be monogamous, do this a lot, it turns out, and there is strong evidence >humans did too in the ancestral pre-civilized environment (not to mention >today, as DNA surveys of apartment blocks have shown somewhat startlingly). Interesting - where did you read of that? Rose By the way I found your theory that it might be physiological that men do not cry as much interesting. It certainly seems plausible. -- 'As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.' Virginia Woolf ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 13:03:24 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Lee Anne Phillips Subject: Re: BDG: Gate Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU In-Reply-To: <3C88E0FA.CAD58FA5@yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 08:04 AM 3/8/02 -0800, Sandy Cronin wrote: >> So the same Eugenics that has them selecting for non-violent men has >> them selecting for murderous women, and indeed the ruling caste is >> even more skilled in martial arts and dealing death than are the men. > OK, first I must say that I haven't re-read GATE yet, but I wanted to > comment on this. To me, I can see a distinction between ruthlessness > (being able to do tough, even violent, things when they're necessary), > and the violent aggression that they're trying to weed out of the men > (short-fuse violent tempers; a tendency to solve any problem with > physical violence). If you've read the Belsarius books (David Drake and > Eric Flint; the Free library at baen.com got me hooked on them), it > seems to me that Belsarius' temperment is what they're going for in this > society; people CAPABLE of violence and ruthlessness, but very much in > control of their tempers and aggression. I haven't read the Belesarius books, but have read SciFi books such as the CoDominium series by Jerry Pournelle, and the Soldier Ask Not thread of Gordon Dickson, which would appear to have somewhat similar themes based on what little I gleaned from your post. In both, the profession of warrior is a noble one, properly engaged in and without malice or anger, which is exactly what Krishna Vasudeva said to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita section of the Mahabharata. Indeed, the horror and malaise which surround the "victory" of the Pandavas in the climactic war was precisely what is missing in Gate. Somehow, the men sent out to die deserve death in Gate, where the finest and best of the men, as well as the worst, perish in the ancient Sanskrit text. And the war of the Pandavas and the Dhartarashtras was a "just" one (on the Pandava's part at least), not the mindless and futile slaughter of the Warriors at the prompting of the Women's Country ruling cabals. Not the cold-blooded murder with little, if any, thought to grieving for these men, foolishly giving their lives for a cause they *think* is just, but which is just a pretext for death and gore. These women are the real Furies, the foul Harpies who revel in death and pain, who punish the men for the sins which they themselves thrust upon them with their curses. Does their cozy "arrangement" strike you as in any way similar to the three Great Powers in George Orwell's 1984? The intention is the same, at very least, to control the "masses," and if the women have the added purpose of a breeding program, why, who can believe them? They lie to everyone else in their world; why should they tell the truth to us, the mere readers? We can easily suspect the program to be fraudulent, since the success of it would run contrary to what we know of genetics and be folly besides, since who knows what necessary parts of what makes us human are bound up in which genes and the RNA which elaborates them? And certainly the real *effect* of their program is that a few men have many wives in their unwitting harem, and they father legions of children. Tepper doesn't actually look at this, through a trick of perception, but one knows tyranny by its fruits, not what it says about itself. We're left with a system of selective breeding in which the great majority of women are treated like cows in a herd, in which a few "bulls" and "alpha cows" rule while the "steers," the impotent (or at least infertile) male warriors are led to slaughter. After much thought, this cozy arrangement has pierced me to the heart with its denial of love, of the deep tenderness possible in both men and women, and of our common humanity. The real effect of this breeding program, this inane tinkering with the very basis of our human lives, is quite likely to be ruin for us all. We don't understand it. We don't understand life at all, and our arrogance and ignorance are as capable of destroying us with DNA as with atomic bombs. It's certainly true that our DNA doesn't contain near enough information, not by an order of magnitude at least, to account for the genetic variation within our own species, much less that between the whole of life. So every gene seems to do multiple things, mediated by unique sequences of RNA and cellular proteins that don't obey the laws of Medellian inheritance. That's probably why animals bred for certain characteristics most often exhibit genetic flaws as well, like deafness in some blue-eyed cats. So who knows what horror these women, and their male lap cats, are unwittingly unleashing upon their world? > Doesn't seem all THAT contradictory when looked at like that, to me, > at least. When I first read the book, I rather liked it as well. It was only after worrying at the holes in her story, which nagged at me like a missing tooth, that I began to see the decay at its heart. As I said, she stole most of her story from a common heritage of Lesbian Separatist myth and storytelling, so it was at first familiar to me. And since it struck a chord, since I saw the possibilities of affirmation in the work, I thought that it was there, lurking just out of reach. >> So the whole enterprise seems contradictory and doomed to failure; > If some of the "acceptable" men are in the cabal, though, then they have > to be just as ruthless as the women, so that selection isn't going > strictly along gender lines... Of course. That's why I said that the process was doomed, but you can bet that the breeding program would go on, and that the rulers have already been corrupted by their power. That's the way of things in totalitarian states. >> And there is a crypto-racism inherent in her scheme, since it would >> be easy to demonstrate that young African-American males are >> responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime and might >> therefore have to be culled even more drastically. > But this isn't addressed in the book, and it seems to me that each case > was decided individually, by the boy himself, rather than by society at > large or based on any demographic...unless you mean something different > by "culled" than "decides to stay in the men's camps rather than come > back into the city with the women"... By culled, I mean that the men they want to kill are sent, like Uriah, into the thick of battle and are so destroyed. In our present society, young African-American men are often denied the sources of pride and achievement that make them feel good about themselves. They often hang out with other, similarly-situated young men, and fall into the same traps of crime and violence. In the Gate world, these men would be sent into the thick of battle and eliminated. We send them to prison, where they make up a disproportionate percentage of the prison population, and they come out broken men, for the most part, and never escape the cycle of crime and prison, with violence all around them, that now blights the lives of many. It's true what you say, that the ones who are bullied by the other boys and men, who are cowed, and who opt out of male society to the taunts and jeers of the "real" men and boys, are spared. But are these the fathers we want for our *real* children? Men who would run away in the face of any *real* threat? I think not. While we may well be fooled by individual men, and we may be utterly stupid in our youth, by and large we look for the qualities of intelligence, initiative and courage that say, "This man would be a good father to my children." I say "we" collectively, and in solidarity with my heterosexual sisters, since I am childless in my own body. While it's true that we *also* value gentleness in men, the number of men incapable of gentle behavior is fairly small, I think, and based on many years of my own close observation. And there are few men as contemptible in the sight of most women as a coward, one who runs away in the face of danger, like the man who thought that Sharon Whipple was being raped and hid downstairs while she was mauled and killed by vicious dogs outside her San Francisco apartment because he thought the imaginary rapist might hurt him as well. Feh! But men who are abused, as well as women, experience irrevocable changes in their brains and behavior that make them antisocial, make them perpetually sick in their hearts and minds, and leads them to violence and the perpetuation of a violent culture. The only way to cure that is to eliminate social and family abuse and injustice, which we are as unwilling to do as are the rulers of "Women's Country." In fact, the Women's Country women do just the opposite. They set up every young boy to be viciously abused, in full knowledge of what the best, most gentle, of the boys will endure, and somehow manage to fool us into thinking that good men will come of such an upbringing. This is "spare the rod and spoil the child" with a vengeance and a fury beyond anything imagined by Suzy Charnas or any lesbian writer I know of. Perhaps it takes a heterosexual woman to hate and despise men quite as deeply as she seems to, since the only other work I've seen containing a similar rage was Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend, a sort of fantasy in which a woman is suddenly given the power to kill men whenever she wants to, and she does want to, oh yes, she does. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 13:47:44 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Lee Anne Phillips Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate To Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 12:02 PM 3/8/02 -0500, Dave Belden wrote: >Please forgive me gabbing on, but I can't resist adding this. In my men's >group last night we had this conversation: Do most men in our culture not >cry easily because we are taught not to? (This is the theory I had been >going on for 25+ years). Or is it in part because testosterone inhibits >crying? (Viz. an article in the New York Times last year about a woman who >had a sex change, who was amazed to find that the more testosterone she >took, the more her tears dried up - involuntarily, as she experienced it). I I think so. I lived in Utah for several years and had the valuable experience of seeing Mormon men in their natural habitat, as it were. They highly value emotion and are openly emotional in the "Testimonies" they often give of the centrality of their religion in their lives, in the importance of their families, and other deeply personal subjects that most (many?) men would avoid like the plague, around women at least. But I read a similar story, written by a female to male transsexual, who mentioned the difference she felt in her feelings and sexuality after taking male hormones for a while. Not only did her tears dry up, she became more easily angered, and horny as all get out almost all the time. In particular, she (and I apologize for the word "she" but she was talking about how she experienced this as a woman, now living as a man, but from a woman's perspective) also said, and I particularly remember this, that her attitude toward love changed as well. It wasn't that she didn't believe in love, or didn't think it was important, but that it now took a secondary place to sex. After sex, she might think about love, but sex came first. This admission astonished me, and made me think. Based on these two experiences, I'd say both things happen. Boys are taught to "control" their tears and testosterone makes it easier. But this also destroys much of the premise of Women's Country. If men can be taught to be sensitive, but not "too" sensitive, what purpose does the breeding program really serve without simply castrating all the men? To be sure, the male servants *behave* a bit like castrati, and seem to be *assumed* by the warriors to be so, since they never express jealousy of their 24-hour access to the women, and the warriors behave like bulls, but are castrated by proxy, since they can have no offspring despite their frequent ruts. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 14:05:12 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joyce Jones Subject: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Look what's on Sunday night. I'm just finishing the book by Gregory Maguire, right at the part where they're on their way to the ball. Stockard Channing would be great as Margarethe, but the review makes the character seem all bad, certainly not the complex woman Maguire writes. I can't help it, I have to watch. I hope it won't be too horribly ruined. Joyce Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister Sunday, March 10 at 7/6c Starring Stockard Channing, Azura Skye, Jonathan Pryce, and Trudie Styler Set against the rich backdrop of 17th century Holland, this sumptuous and provocative retelling of the Cinderella myth is seen through the eyes of the "ugly" stepsister, Iris (Azura Skye), who is oppressed by her scheming, beautiful and once-rich mother, Margarethe (Stockard Channing), and her slow-witted sister, Ruth (Emma Poole). Although plain looking, Iris possesses an inner charm and intelligence that helps win her family positions as servants for The Master (Jonathan Pryce), a complex but talented portrait painter. He is immediately drawn in by Iris' charm and decides to paint a portrait of her. The result inspires wealthy tulip merchant Van Den Meer (David Westhead) to commission a similar portrait of his daughter, the beautiful but insecure Clara (Jenna Harrison). For Clara, beauty has been more of a curse than a gift. Margarethe uses her cunning to persuade Van Den Meer to marry her, and her greed leads to the ruin of his business, plunging the family into financial ruin yet again. All the while, The Master falls into a depression because of his portrait of Clara - it is so exquisite, he is certain he will never paint anything that equals it. But there is a royal ball to worry about! A prince is coming in search of a bride. Margarethe puts all her faith in a reluctant Iris to attend the ball and charm the prince. But Iris has plans of her own, as she convinces Clara to use her beauty to win over the Prince's heart. With the help of a mysterious Fortune Teller (Trudie Styler), Clara makes it to the ball and, true to the legend of Cinderella, leaves behind a slipper. As scheming as ever, Margarethe deceives the Prince (Mark Dexter) into believing the slipper belongs to Iris. A comedy of errors leads the Prince to his destined love while Iris completes her private journey, discovering her own true love, her talent as an artist and her own special beauty. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 14:47:57 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Freddie Baer Subject: Re: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit What network is this on, please? FB ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 19:04:03 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate To Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/8/02 11:02:56 AM Central Standard Time, davebelden@EARTHLINK.NET writes: << Not that even the most enthusiastic sociobiologists think that we do not learn to be men and women - they would say we do, but that the genetic and ongoing hormonal/biological influence is very great. In fact, it seems that feminism, which at one point practically had it as an a priori belief that culture was the culprit, now has no choice but to take into account biology. Not that biology has to be destiny: but if there are in fact significant biological differences between men and women, then we have to learn differently, as men and as women, how to deal with our biology, >> It's obvious there are biological differences between men and women, but it still is a basic premise of feminism, and any political movement, that biology is not destiny, that differences do not mean one group has a natural right to oppress another or a 'natural' role to play, and in the particulars of this case, that eugenics is not a means to social change and engagement of people in defining their own destinies. It is in the context of eugenics as a premise for social change that I specifically situated my remarks. 'Taking control of reproduction' , another key feminist tenent, is not likely to happen, whatever the technology available, without strong political will and organization to do that. But political strength and will is not the same as subterfuge by an elite. Or, sure , that can be done , but it's not a particularly feminist or democratic strategy. It might make some sense for the shortterm in the type of setting where this novel takes place, but at great costs (as the novel actually makes pretty evident) that are probably not going to create, in the long term, the kind of society that I (and other feminists) would want or consider 'feminist'. See another post I'm sending for other thoughts on the 'control of reproduction' issue.-Joy Martin ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 19:04:05 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate To Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/8/02 1:34:39 PM Central Standard Time, rreith@RACORES.COM writes: << I really think that the play is truly the key to understanding the novel, and I have found that it takes several readings to see what she really put in there >> I think you are right, and that's why I said in my first post about this, that I would need further rereading to really see how it all fits together. The women in the novel do indeed feel great sorrow for their sons. Right now I think there's something of a logical flaw in the story itself, in that the women are sending their sons to the warriors at possibly the worst time in their development to do so, and the only reason is, because of the eugenic program that is revealed at the end of the book. OTOH, it's not a logical flaw in the story IF Tepper is trying to makeus think about how the women, in pursuit of removing highly aggressive behavior, are in fact falling prey to a fallacy. That's why I said, if this was the first of a series, I think there'd be more development of this idea, and we'd find some of the downside of their strategy showing up in later plot development. Or, we'd have them realizing they have made some error, or we'd have outrage among women who find out what has been done; also, this society is not a democracy, and as the immediate pressures to rebuild population in a postapocalyptic world lessen, and as people move and society opens up more, I think more 'democratic' struggles would ensue. Really, I think Tepper has set the stage for further developments, which so far she has not written, that I know of. It would be interesting to see what would happen if she ever does.-Joy ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 19:04:07 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Gate to Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Some other thoughts, instigated by various points in this discussion: I always have enjoyed Tepper's work, and still do, and I think this novel was not necessarily taking a stand on how women should do anything (as I think I said, I don't think it's prescriptive, or, it does not need to be read as such, although the women in the novel have decided on how they want to deal with their postapocalyptic world- they, or some of them, have decided on a prescription) controlling reproduction or otherwise, but setting up a situation to highlight some problems. You don't have to agree with the idea of eugenics in the novel, to enjoy the way Tepper has brought a lot of ideas together to jostle our ways of thinking about things. Right now, I think this novel has made me think a lot more about separatism as an idea which was very big at the time it was written. (I don't think it's accurate to say she was unaware of homosexuality as an issue. This novel was copyrighted in 1988. Separatism, lesbian and otherwise, had already come into full flower, by that time. ) I'd say it's more of an indictment of separatism than I realized the first time I read it. Not because it presents the women as evil or murderous, which it does not, IMO (it presents them as doing what they must, as they see it, to protect themselves and make their world different from the one before it). But because separating the men and women by deliberate choice seems to lead to moral and ethical dilemmas that are possibly as bad or worse than the problems they are trying to avoid. (Of course there is not complete separatism; there are the servitors, and there are other groups besides women country.) By putting this society in in a postapocalyptic setting, we are encouraged both to consider the very real dangers of our own society, and also to consider how various changes in women's power may still be wanting in actually arriving at the kind of society we want. Also, in a postapocalyptic society, to reach a sustainable population, you'd have to do a lot of reproducing. That's why it brought to mind Picnic on Paradise for me, because that was a situation where the men wanted to try to start a lot of reproduction, but there was no way, given the handful of people they had left, that it would work. In Gate to Womens Country, evidently there were enough survivors to make it work, but still women were going to have to have a lot of babies. The women managed to make reproduction in that circumstance as palatable as possible, they controlled the way they lived and worked and shared childrearing etc. The novel doesn't go overboard in all the details, but we can gather enough to see that the women are relatively satisfied with the work/childbearing arrangements. Childcare etc is relatively equitable. I think it's useful to see a different vision of how a social group would survive with all that childbearing, without having the women turned into total slaves, as happened in the group that captured Stavia. And those Father worshippers weren't succeeding in sustaining their population either, they were having to resort to capturing 'outside' women. The eugenics, thrown in at the end, gives a disturbing twist. I think it's a rather bleak one. I would like to think Tepper did it to make us think, and perhaps to set up further plot development later. OTOH, in some of her novels, I've noticed she has a problem resolving the plot elements at the end, and perhaps this ending comes a little bit from that. It works, in that we can see how the story fits together with it, and it also has controversial thoughtprovoking elements, so it also works in that way. But it may also have been a way to tie things up, that could have gone in some other direction. Dunno. Stories have a way of going where they want to go, once they are started, and she may not have felt, once she got into it, she had much choice in the matter. And that leaves us looking at the good, the bad and the ugly in this society, with a lot to gnaw over. And in that sense, it's a good novel. If the women were all perfect and the ending was some niceynice thing, I'd actually feel a bit ripped off, I think. -Joy Martin ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 08:34:09 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joyce Jones Subject: Re: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ABC Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister Sunday, March 10 at 7/6c ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 22:57:51 +0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Carol Ryles Subject: Re: BDG: Gate Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > > These women are the real Furies, the foul Harpies who revel > in death and pain, who punish the men for the sins which > they themselves thrust upon them with their curses. I recently read the book "The Lucifer Principle" by Howard Bloom. By exploring the relationships between genetics, human behavior, and culture, he argues that evil is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric: An interesting and disturbing book, that disturbed me all the more with the following generalization: "Women encourage killers. They do it by falling in love with warriors and heroes. Men respond with enthusiasm. The Crusaders marched off to war with ladies' favours in their helmets all the while thinking of how the damsels back home would admire their bravery." It read like a scene from Gate to Women's Country! >We don't understand it. We don't understand >life at all, and our arrogance and ignorance are as >capable of destroying us with DNA as with atomic bombs This led me to compare rather than contrast the Holylanders with Women's Country. While the Holylanders' fundamentalism was destroying them, so too, I think will the fundamentalist behaviour of the councilwomen. When there are no men left, will the "common woman" be able to turn to the servitor, who she has been taught to consider "asexual(?)". The women can't turn to each other because Lesbianism has been eliminated. So they have only themselves. As Wendy Pearson points out in her article *After the (Homo)Sexual: A Queer Analysis of Anti-Sexuality in Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country* (In Science-Fiction Studies, Vol 23 1996 Montreal): "What is left at the end of the novel is the vision of a world that contains only heterosexual women and a kind of oddly desexed male population, often referred to in the novel as eunuchs -- a psychological if not a physiological truth -- and thus, finally, a vision of a world without any sex at all. "There is no f***ing in Hades." (As the 11 year old Stavia noted in the play) And yet are the servitors really able to control their violence? Joshua's explanation for killing Michael adds fuel to my doubts: "I needed to do it. In Women's Country we learn not to have jealousy . . . . And yet, despite it all I did," said Joshua with a shamed face. Carol. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 12:03:07 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Rose Reith Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" At 10:57 PM +0800 3/10/02, Carol Ryles wrote: >This led me to compare rather than contrast the Holylanders with Women's >Country. While the Holylanders' fundamentalism was destroying them, so too, >I think will the fundamentalist behaviour of the councilwomen. When there >are no men left, will the "common woman" be able to turn to the servitor, >who she has been taught to consider "asexual(?)". The women can't turn to >each other because Lesbianism has been eliminated. So they have only >themselves. Interesting, this viewpoint certainly works with the part where Stavia is described as touching herself in bed at night and not feeling guilty about it because it meant that she was "normal" and "womanly". So perhaps the ultimate intent is to eliminate sexual intercourse, and eventually transition to a world where women become pregnant through artificail insemination and work side by side with the men in a more neutral scenario with out all the angst of emotion involved in sexual relationships. > >As Wendy Pearson points out in her article *After the (Homo)Sexual: A Queer >Analysis of Anti-Sexuality in Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country* >(In Science-Fiction Studies, Vol 23 1996 Montreal): > >"What is left at the end of the novel is the vision of a world that contains >only heterosexual women and a kind of oddly desexed male population, often >referred to in the novel as eunuchs -- a psychological if not a >physiological truth I don't recall the servitors being referred to as eunuchs, except as an assumption of the warriors who of course had to believe that or they might have begun to question their own situation. It makes sense though that most of the women would have assumed that, since otherwise they might have blabbed to the warriors during carnival. > -- and thus, finally, a vision of a world without any >sex at all. "There is no f***ing in Hades." (As the 11 year old Stavia noted >in the play) Ahh, this is one of the things that I struggled to work out, and I have to admit, never got so succinctly as Wendy seems to be pointing out - "There is no f***ing in Hades.", is one of the quotes from the book and the other that struck me but I didn't see the connection until now, "Hades is Women's Country". I struggled to understand what that meant, and figured it really only had to do with the fact that for the warriors, they were never going to be able to abuse the women, but I wonder now if what that really means for the future of Women's Country is that there will be no sex. > >And yet are the servitors really able to control their violence? Joshua's >explanation for killing Michael adds fuel to my doubts: > >"I needed to do it. In Women's Country we learn not to have jealousy . . . >. And yet, despite it all I did," said Joshua with a shamed face. > I suppose Tepper might have included this facet of Joshua's character so close to the resolution of the story in order to show that the servitors would still be man enough to take over the emotional tasks of manhood from the warriors when the time came for them to do so??? It certainly seems as if she were conflicted about having different ways of living anyway. Tepper tries so hard in this novel to make a world where women have most of the things that they were demanding here in the real world, the medical care, the education, the right to feel safe walking in the streets, etc. And frankly from that point of view I thought Women's Country was a pretty good place. It's only after you've really thought about the lies and deception that go with the medical care, and the other things that the women have to do to achieve their goals that it becomes harder to appreciate what Tepper did manage to write for them. I suppose a talented critic could actually argue that Tepper is not feminist because she set up a story that makes a mockery of the women getting what they had asked for prior to the devastation that made their world possible. Was her real message be careful what you ask for, you just might get it? Rose Reith -- 'As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.' Virginia Woolf ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 13:26:49 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/10/02 11:15:27 AM Central Standard Time, rreith@RACORES.COM writes: << servitors would still be man enough to take over the emotional tasks of manhood from the warriors when the time came for them to do so??? >> I think what Tepper is showing is that, at least at that point, the male servitors still acknowledge they have some of the 'old' feelings and motivations, and it has not been 'bred' completely out. (And probably won't be for some time, if ever.) Joy Martin "Absolute attention is prayer" -Simone Weil ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 13:26:51 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit << When there >are no men left, will the "common woman" be able to turn to the servitor, >> (sorry, I can't find the original email to quote from) - I wouldn't say there'll be no men. There will be 'new' men, the servitors or their descendents, if the eugenics works. And possibly fewer men, at least for a while. As far as I can tell, it's an open question what might happen in terms of sex once the aggression is 'bred' out (again, assuming for the sake of argument the eugenics would work). I'm not even convinced there is no sex between the servitor men and the women, anymore than I am convinced that there is no sex between women (expressions of 'horror' at homosexuality notwithstanding. That one expression was in the context of discussing a male warrior who was suspected of forcing himself on boys as well as girls.). I very much doubt the servitors are sexless in their feelings. I don't remember reading anything saying they didn't have sexual feelings.(In fact, in the quotation where Joshua admits shame for his jealousy - the inference there is that sexual feelings are at its base.) One would infer, based on their other behavior, that servitors' sexuality would be/is far less aggressive, oneway, than the warriors', and probably sublimated greatly in other interests. And masturbation is definitely sex, just not reproductive sex. The only thing being specifically dissallowed is reproduction from sex with warriors. I just don't think Tepper spelled out everything, and it's not a requirement of any novel to spell out everything. But we can speculate about the implications of course, whether spelled out or not. Would the women (who now don't know about the eugenics) be able to love the 'new' men, or at least feel sexual feelings toward them? They are apparently conditioned to see the servitor males as asexual. Or perhaps it's just a taboo, but made to be broken. I see the goal of the eugenics as eliminating the warrior type of male, and thus the need for war.[Actually, this assumes women never would make war. Again, another false assumption (IMO).] Does that mean eliminating sex or the interest in sex? Doubtful, even if we agree on the questionable assumptions that the eugenics would work. Conditioning isn't eugenics. And of course, I don't even know if it's successful conditioning. It's the socially acceptable way to mate, it seems, in the current Women's Country. For what that's worth. I'd also say some of the 'asexuality' of the servitors - or women's feelings towards the servitors - has a lot to do with the incest taboo, the general abhorence of sex between family members . Not that there aren't violations of the incest taboo, but it does put a damper on sexual feelings for the majority of people. (Just as an aside: the incest taboo appears to have somekind of biological basis.) For adult females in the houses where servitors are newly arrived, this wouldn't hold. But for children growing up with servitors, it would hold. I also thought there were hints that Stavia and Corrig might have some growing sexual interest in each other (esp once she'd been shorn of her infatuation withChernon). So much of this is hints - not spelled out in the story (and if it was, god knows how long the book would have been), but nevertheless, included enough to make us wonder. It's definitely true at the time of this novel, this society is emphasizing a great deal of childbearing, in order to build the population to sustainable levels (also partly because they keep killing off so many warriors in the semiartificially induced wars,which they feel is necessary for their society's future). But there are also beginning population pressures, esp. if starting new cities a. involves new encounters with other, possibly hostile like the Holylanders, populations, b. if the ability to produce certain goods with limited resources is making it difficult to meet the needs of the current population (referring to the sections describing difficulties in producing enough antibiotics, etc.),and c. if habitable land is very limited (depending on the extent of the radioactive desolations). So soon enough we would see some conflict over the amount of reproduction, one would expect. And the values underpinning that amount. The women do have the ability not to reproduce, so they will be able to stop. The problem, from the novels perspective, or the setting of the novel, is or might be, how the need to slow down reproduction will conflict with the need to keep up the subterfuge with the warriors (and the women who don't know about the eugenics and the values they have about reproduction) and how that will impact the eugenics program (and how long the eugenics is likely to take to be effective). Joy Martin "Absolute attention is prayer" -Simone Weil ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 22:59:47 +1100 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Julieanne Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 02:18 PM 8/03/02 -0500, Rose Reith wrote: > There is also the >whole section in the play where Hecuba bemoans the fact that she >could have killed Talthybius, because she had hidden the knife in her >skirt, but then she felt that if she killed him she would be killing >some woman's son and that woman would end up grieving over him. >Instead she and her daughter-in-law end up watching him throw the >baby, Astyanax, off the cliff wall, so she feels that she is damned >for not having saved her grandson and would have been damned if she >had killed Talthybius. Either way she is damned, so shouldn't she >work toward what might have been a better future rather than not >acting at all? >I really think that the play is truly the key to understanding the >novel, and I have found that it takes several readings to see what >she really put in there. I agree that the play is critical. I have now read Gate 3 or 4 times, the first time just after it came out. The 2nd time some years later, was just after reading/studying a feminist analysis of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey and it was then I recognised Tepper's play in the Gate, as being loosely based on the Illiad & the women characters. I must admit I found the Illiad a rather bleak and horrifically gory story...Freddy Kruger eat your heart out:) The constant raping and murdering of the women characters, with these long monologues of glory to their own deaths etc...is rather nauseating. And thats interspersed with even longer detailed scenes of Achilles sadistic violence on the battlefield... But the women's fate in the Illiad is often glossed over, and beatified - the rape, murders etc are nearly always without exception accompanied by the women's own voices extolling the virtues and 'honour' and "sacred blessedness" of having been "chosen" for being killed, raped and enslaved etc .....Briseis (who is only briefly mentioned in Tepper's play) was taken as captive ( war 'booty') after the death of her husband at the hand of Achilles - and she is passed around Achilles camp, and in the middle of being gang-raped declares at great length her love for her master Achilles...and how "ennobling" it is to be a slave of such a great man!....The storyline goes on and on about how great her 'loyalty' to Achilles was, (and scholarly treatises for millennia have extolled the story of Briseis as exemplary of great 'loyalty'.....( doesn't mention that as a kinless woman and enslaved war captive her very survival depended on pleasing master......) In Tepper's version, Iphigenia says to Achilles when he mentions Brisies's "loyalty" - says something like "perhaps she was begging for mercy and her life, and not speaking of love, lust or loyalty at all"... Iphigenia for example, is often skipped over by classic literary boffs because she is a "minor character" - she is the 14 yr old daughter of Agamemnon who is tricked, lied to (as well as her mother) and then quite horrifically 'sacrificed' by her father to placate some wind goddess or other, so the Greek ships which had been becalmed, could sail again to the war at Troy. The blood & guts is very detailed...but like sadomasochistic pornography ..... Iphigenia is presented in the story as having "wanted" such a fate. There is a pages and pages long speech by Iphigenia about how honoured and blessed she feels by being sacrificed in this way, how her 'loving sacrifice' will win the war for the Greeks....and she is the "true heroine" etc etc - indeed, classic scholars mention a minor religious cult for some centuries based on Iphigenia as the ultimate Virgin Goddess..... According to the Illiad, the only good woman is a dead woman, and one who went "willingly" to her fate.... As Iphigenia says in Teppers play in the Gate " ...they say we wanted it....and the poets help them do it"... In the Illiad, Iphigenia was sacrificed for the Greeks, signifying the beginning of the Trojan War with the launching of Greek ships. Polyxena is Iphigenia's Trojan counterpart. Polyxena, however, was sacrificed in Troy, signifying the end of the war. Achilles was apparently so smitten with the young maiden princess Polyxena that he told Priam (the Trojan King, her father) that he would try to form a peace between Troy and Greece in return for Polyxena. However, Achilles stated that Helen would still have to be returned to the Greeks. Priam refused to give up Helen, but stated that if Achilles could make a peace, he would give him Polyxena. Polyxena sent for Achilles and asked him to meet her and her brother, in the temple and she assured Achilles, they would complete the marriage arrangement there. Achilles came and Paris, (her brother) shot Achilles in his vulnerable heel. As he died, he asked his fellows to sacrifice Polyxena at his tomb after Troy was defeated, in order to "complete the marriage in the afterlife".... Just like Iphigenia, Polyxena is tricked and lied to in order to get her to go to the sacrifice willingly.... and again, Polyxena waxes forth lyrically at great length about her wondrous fate....I prefer her description of her death in Tepper's version about loosened bowels and urine-stained legs and begging for her life... My personal favourites of the Illiad were Cassandra and Penthesilia, the latter not mentioned in Tepper's version, and the former only as a minor character. Cassandra was sister to Polyxena and a priestess I think....anyway, she was approached by Apollo for a quickie or whatever and Cassandra said No..to a God no less:) For that crime against Man/God she was punished with the "Curse of Apollo"... being that she was cursed to "forever to speak the truth, but never to be believed"...hence as we see in Tepper's version (as in Homer's Illiad and others) she does prophesy *ad nauseum* about holocausts and wars etc...and was considered a madwoman.... Penthesilia was the Amazon Warrior Queen...and fighting on the side of the Trojans in the war, and most accounts have Penthesilia and her amazon bands as decisive warriors in the Trojan war, with long, long detailed epics of the battle between Penthesilia and Achilles... She was eventually defeated, but according to the Illiad ... Achilles was so besotted with her beauty, that he spent several days performing public & ritually ceremonial necrophilia on her body... ironically, its presented as "love" and 'honour'...its really bizarre...I've always found it strange that the Illiad and similar horrific sado-masochistic epic stories have been claimed as "Classic Great Literature' for millennia.... But anyway...back to Tepper and the play in the Gate.... my take on the theme and why it was performed every carnival, was the points around all women being sisters, and all equally damaged under male domination and "eagerness" for violence, it didn't matter whether you were Greek or Trojan, (as it doesn't matter if you live in Marthatown or Tabithaville etc) ..doesn't matter if you are a Queen or shepherdess, an honored wife or maiden daughter, a warrior or sacred priestess, loyal to menfolk or betrayer... and secondly that death is far better than living in the "living hell" that is created under male domination.... in other words, Women's Country is Hades, because just like death, it is the only place free of male domination and male violence. Achilles can hurt no one in Hades/Women's Country. But one of the few things I liked about Gate, is that Tepper shows how the majority of people just don't "get it"...and think its just a cute comedy etc... just a carnival ritual entertainment, up there with puppet shows & dancing dogs etc. For so much time had passed, the meaning had been lost to most. Like modern day Easter eggs and Xmas trees, we also have for the most part, forgotten the significance of these symbols, but continue to practice them anyway:) But its obvious it is important to Stavia's personal story - with her flashbacks, relating the themes of the play to her experiences with Chernon and the Holylanders, and so on. Susannah's suicide note saying she wanted death because she didn't want to be "hit no more".... she went to the only "women's country" she could access. >>On nature/nurture, eugenics, biology, a lot has changed even since Tepper >>wrote the book. Lee Ann's point about the poor health consequences for women >>of multiple partners is very new, for example, (at least I only read of it >>in the last month) so Tepper can't be faulted for condemning her breeders to >>that - although of course the far more damning point that they are >>effectively being raped still stands. The health consequences of multiple sex partners on women's sexual health has been known for some decades, but not widely publicised. Particularly in relation to cervical cancer & some other conditions, much of which is caused by sexually transmitted disease - eg. HPV infections. Its just that as a communicable disease, something like 80% of women have no symptoms with HPV or such mild symptoms that they never know they were infected, and resulting conditions may take decades to appear. So by the late 60s when condoms went rapidly out of fashion as a contraceptive, (replaced by oral contraceptives), the rates of cervical cancer (previously extremely rare) sky-rocketed. To the point, where most Western countries today have massive publicly funded cervical cancer screening programs. In Tepper's Gate, I personally didn't have a problem with the secret artifical insemination in conjunction with the carnival sex rituals...I saw it as a part of the whole...ie. the need for secrecy was paramount, and its this need to "keep the secret" at all costs that gives Stavia and Morgot and others such grief, the need to "keep up appearances" and lie to their friends and their daughters. I don't think they liked encouraging young girls to be sexually active, and reproductive....but it wasn't "forced" in any way...it was just encouraged, strongly perhaps - but no woman was ever forced. And they had to declare their intention of wanting pregnancy or not, hence the contraceptive implants etc. And it may not have been emphasised by Tepper, but there was a lot of variety in terms of sexual activity. Some women weren't very sexually active, (and if they'd known they were to be artificially inseminated anyway, they might have chosen to forgo the carnival sex rituals!) or even remained faithful to just one partner for years, some didn't like carnival and didn't bother except when they wanted to get pregnant, or skipped several in a row...and although Stavia was unusual, she wasn't an exception in leaving it rather later than average. As she mentions in her student years in Abbyville, she had joined in the merrymaking in the taverns at several carnivals, but never found one that took her fancy. Until such time as their weeding out of the worst males was achieved, it was absolutely necessary to keep the secret and have everyone "live the lie" so to speak - my heart went out to Morgot, the 'special' servitors and all the others 'in the know' more than the unwitting masses, because it was absolutely necessary for Morgot to go through carnival and "play the part" with Michael etc - and for the 'special' servitors to "play their part" at all times..without fail..... I could even see the council women discussing such things, like who would 'play the part' of the nympho changing partners every 2 hours during carnival, who would play the part of the faithful partner loving her one man for life, or pretending to curry favour with the more powerful men in the garrison and so on...and as Morgot mentions to Stavia, the need to keep up appearances with other women, by having friendships outside the council, no matter how much it hurt to keep "living the lie" for the good of all... And drama was considered an important art to have for the council women...and Stavia throughout talks about how the "actor Stavia" had to take over from time to time. This is another theme I see with the carnival play, always presented by the council women etc. But at some future point (if they succeeded) - the secret would be no longer necessary, and the women could choose as they will, both who sired and how they sired their kids...... and also the men 'servitors' would no longer have to 'play their part' either - there would be no need for them to 'pretend' anymore. One of my quibbles with Gate relate to the stereotyping of characterisation, a common dislike I have in many of her novels.... her characters are often very shallow and implausible to me. Like the gypsies were so stereotyped, cartoon cut-outs of the frolicking giggling hookers etc...*blech*.... And particularly the servitor characters, they weren't drawn very well, and we see too little of them. One clue that resonated with me, was when Stavia agrees to meet Chernon and tells him he has to "pretend to be a servitor, and do as I tell you, especially when others are around".... and we see the servitors constantly acting out parts, the 'special' ones with telepathy or other talents etc - were constantly having to play the part of gentle pansy or basically "whatever it took" to keep the secret safe etc......but its unfortunate they weren't drawn in more detail, to see them relaxed when alone and without the need to 'play the part' in order to 'keep the secret'. >> Perhaps counteracting the point about >>poor health outcomes of having multiple partners, is the finding that >>females in many species, including ours , routinely practice deception: e.g. >>bond with the gentle, committed Daddy type to get ongoing help raising the >>kids, but secretly go to the wandering, sexy adventurer (or warrior) for >>sex, to get tougher genes for the kids. Bird species, previously thought to >>be monogamous, do this a lot, it turns out, and there is strong evidence >>humans did too in the ancestral pre-civilized environment (not to mention >>today, as DNA surveys of apartment blocks have shown somewhat startlingly). This is common amongst mammals - males are the redundant gender. Mammals, by definition, bear live but very immature young, which require long periods of continual infant care - which make that investment of adult energy absolutely mandatory for species survival. One mother with infant(s), will not be able to care for herself & offspring alone. Even two adults would find it impossible. Mammals, with only a handful of exceptions, are "herd" beasts, they clump together - safety in numbers. Monogamous pairings are rare amongst mammals, and life-long monogamous pairings are rarer still. Monogamous pairings for mammals is often species suicide. The fact that female mammals are built and designed to be primary carers of offspring, means they are also built and designed for far better survival rates than males. Amongst mammals, thats the "natural" trade-off for high sexual dimorphism. The natural gender ratio amongst most mammalian species is weighted very heavily towards females over males, usually around 60:40 to 75:25.....In mammals, males are meant and designed by Nature to die off in far greater numbers. Nature is wasteful, producing far more males than needed for species survival - as a 'Back-up Plan B" - a redundancy mechanism - when the species or population group's survival is threatened amongst mammals, the natural over-production of males becomes useful and necessary to repopulate quickly with a diverse gene pool. This can be seen in populations which become in-bred and are in danger of dying out. One of the first signs of too much in-breeding over generations, is an over-production of males. Many cat and dog breeders know this, when they get more well-endowed males than usual in a litter, they know they have to start breeding out. In human studies of isolated in-bred populations, these are also often abnormal males - these boys are sexually precocious reaching puberty very early, short and stocky in stature, low IQ, poor sight/hearing etc .....but HUGE testes of healthy normal sperm, producing 5 times the average. Nature's last ditch back-up plan B - or redundancy mechanism - when a mammalian population group is threatened with extinction due to in-breeding (or other things like massive die-off or sterility), produce mobile sperm-banks with few brains, compact energy-efficient bodies, the minimum necessary to maintain physical life and no more, with all biological energy funnelled into huge sexual organs maturing at an early age, designed for no other purpose than breeding through a relatively short life-span - But during non-emergency times, there are many mechanisms around for this Natural 'culling' of "excess" males. Male-dominance fighting, often to the death, is the most well-known, but 'exile' is often practised in Nature too. These 'loser' males tend to hang on the fringes of the typical mammalian 'group' social structure. They are opportunistic, constantly watching and "waiting for the right opportunity", they are aggressive, self-interested more than socially co-operative, existing very much grab-as-they-can whether food, warmth, shelter or quickly mating with females when the opportunity arises, when the alpha males aren't looking or busy elsewhere I guess:) Again, they are Nature's 'back-up' to prevent in-breeding, a few alpha males siring all offspring would cause in-breeding problems. It is in the female's biological self-interest (and the population or group as a whole) to have offspring by different sires, so yes, it is common for females in Nature (usually those who already have one or more offspring) to gravitate to the fringes and mate with one of the "loser" males - for the good of all:) These males in Nature often have short and desperate lives, given the need for opportunism in their 'exile' from the 'core' group or social structure. Since males, being naturally expendable, tend to die off in larger numbers - mammals tend to be majority adult females with some young. Also, mammals tend to be of low fertility - not all female mammals get pregnant every season or on every opportunity - there is often a portion of adult females who never bear young, or even mate. They never tell you this on Discovery Channel though. Can't have women thinking that remaining childless is not only natural but biologically sensible. Elephants are interesting for this sort of social construction, as an adaptation in response to the mammalian natural gender ratio imbalance. They like other mammals have around 20-30% of females as non-young bearers, who are primary herd/community defenders, not the far fewer adult bulls. They are long-lived and also have post-menopausal females. The myths of bands of amazonian warrior-women are a natural extension of what is common in nature. Homo sapiens was a very weak species, and still is, in a purely biological sense. Evidence suggests that our species came close to being erased on several occasions, our numbers were very low until after the last Ice Age. Early societies during the long Ice Ages, were not exactly well-fed, with relatively short lifespans, conception rates low, miscarriage rates high, and infant mortality very high and probably a significant number of female adults were temporarily or permanently barren. In-breeding would have been a serious problem with such low population numbers and being geographically isolated by the bitter climate etc. Its also been suggested that our higher rates of fertility compared to other primates, were an adaptation to the crushing conditions of the Ice Ages in the non-tropical regions - whereas they are higher in tropical regions because of the heavy disease toll. All able-bodied adults would by sheer necessity be involved in sustaining the whole community, including childcare, foodsource maintenance, & defence. Monogamy would have been death for us all.... and we wouldn't be here to argue about it. Cooperative behaviour is selected for, you chose to cooperate, or fuck off and die alone:) When you have a natural gender imbalance weighted to favour females, its females who tend to be the most cooperative in such situations. But also, such crushing environmental conditions would have meant that 'culling' of males was naturally counter-productive, as all able-bodied adults were necessary for group survival under harsh conditions. Behaviour adapts to environment. The post-Ice Age period with warmer, better climates, and the introduction of permanent crops etc meant huge population increases - our higher fertility selected for in harsher climes, was now a liability, and a return to the natural over-production of males. A return to culling excess males, or "exile" or "exclusion" from the reproductive gene pool was probably re-instated but perhaps not very successfully? The adaptive Goddess was replaced by the God, who valued sons for all men perhaps? In humans, many societies have also adopted methods of exiling, or excluding young men - temporarily or permanently just ways of removing the natural "excess" I guess - a social adaptation to a natural event. Some societies send their men off for weeks, months, sometimes even years. I can see them now, these poor exiles sitting around their lonely camp-fires - of course, its all Mum's fault, (or Nature, or the Goddess etc). Some societies have mock battles, small-scale ritual wars, or games, and competitions to 'cull' the males. Some have even speculated that infection rates from ritual circumcision would have ensured some deaths, or at least infertility within the male population. Greer speculates that all-male celibate priesthoods, and male warrior castes, the medieval idea of 'Journeymen' in trade and merchant Guilds, unable to mate for many years etc - originated in this concept of exile or exclusion of "excess" males from the community, as a kind of socially constructed 'role' or a 'place' for these 'excess' males. Civilised people don't send members off to die anymore, or live on the fringes forced to a grab-as-can (sex or food etc) existence. With plenty to go round - but well..we have to give these individuals *something* - so we give them a socially constructed role to give them a reason for existence and continued community support. By voluntarily removing themselves from the reproductive pool, their 'sacrifice' for the sake of the communal good etc - they were given community support, food, shelter and some level of social status, privileges of access to females, and social recognition in return. One scenario, is that over time, these once-exiled 'loser' or 'excess' males grew in number, being designed by Nature to be 'emergency back-ups', designed to be opportunistic, aggressive and survival oriented, no longer dying off, they not only grew in number, they also grew in social status, expanded their social privileges and power bases, and evolved these male socially constructed institutions and social systems over the centuries as bastions of male supremacy. Tepper doesn't show it very well, but it wasn't just relating male aggression to the war-machine she was discussing, but the whole power-trip of "control" of all natural resources, women, children, food production etc, that the warriors (and the Holylanders) were interested in, the men would have wanted more steel production for example - if they were in power they would have pushed for such resources, at the expense of say, for example- the women's gardens, or arts and crafts etc - and Tepper showed this common element in those two major bastions of male supremacy, the religious and warrior guilds/castes. Tepper also takes this biological scenario to a naturally logical, (if somewhat unpalatable to most of us) conclusion - if Natural mechanisms of 'culling' the natural excess of aggressive control-freak males no longer exist, then women, (and their male supporters) will have to do it instead. Enough of my soapbox! Cheers - - Julieanne:) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 08:48:52 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/12/02 7:13:39 AM, jalc@OZEMAIL.COM.AU writes: << The 2nd time some years later, was just after reading/studying a feminist analysis of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey and it was then I recognised Tepper's play in the Gate, as being loosely based on the Illiad & the women characters. >> It is helpful to read Euripides' play Iphegenia in Aulis. I think Tepper used the play more than Homer. best, phoebe w ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 10:36:05 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Saille Warner Norton Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: <177.4f15333.29bf6144@aol.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 08:48 AM 03/12/2002 -0500, you wrote: >In a message dated 3/12/02 7:13:39 AM, jalc@OZEMAIL.COM.AU writes: > ><< The 2nd time some years later, was just >after reading/studying a feminist analysis of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey >and it was then I recognised Tepper's play in the Gate, as being loosely >based on the Illiad & the women characters. >> > >It is helpful to read Euripides' play Iphegenia in Aulis. I think Tepper used >the play more than Homer. Well, I'd think so, since the play didn't exist in Homer's day and age. ;) It's more likely that Euripides based his play on Homer's works... I'm interested in reading the feminist analysis of Homer that's mentioned here. Can you post details of this work? Thanks, Saille ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 14:45:54 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/12/02 1:35:21 PM, saille@SWNGRRL.COM writes: << Well, I'd think so, since the play didn't exist in Homer's day and age. ;) It's more likely that Euripides based his play on Homer's works... >> Yes, but he gives it a twist or two. best, phoebe w ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 08:38:41 +1100 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Julieanne Subject: Re: BDG - The Gate Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20020312103405.00b535f0@floating.idyll.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 10:36 AM 12/03/02 -0800, Saille Warner Norton wrote: >I'm interested in reading the feminist analysis of Homer that's mentioned >here. Can you post details of this work? I'm sorry Saille, it was a one semester study class run as evening classes at my local University on Women in Classical Literature, most of the reading material was hand-outs,translations, discussion notes, references etc prepared by the course presenter. It was some time ago now too - in 1991. But we looked at the stories of Iphigenia and Helen and Cassandra *et al* in various versions over time, starting with Homer and moving through to Shakespeare. But, the main point was that whilst details of the stories changed over time, for example, the heroes became more heroic & noble albeit with flaws that become major themes in later retellings of the epics, the worst of their cruelty and the gory details were removed, and Polyxena for example is sometimes presented as sneaky betrayor of Achilles, other times as innocent dupe of her brother (and Penthesilia disappears altogether very early) - no matter the twists or variations on the theme, the women still all die horrible deaths or other equally damned fates, and are often presented making long pretty speeches about how terrific ( or *deserved*) the experience was:) As Tepper's version mentions - I think its Hecuba saying "Damned if we do, Damned if we don't".... - J ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 22:57:05 +0100 Reply-To: divadiane9@compuserve.de Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Diane Severson Subject: Re: Illicit Passage Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: Dave and Janice (and anyone else still interested), I really like Dave's idea of Gillie as a secular saint. And in your email you make a very good case for it! I have to admit that it never would've occured to me that one could think of her in that way. But the points you make made me think, yeah! I can see that! People are made saints after they have died and they must have performed a certain number of miracles. Obviously, Gillie wasn't doing anything for the glory of God, but I think that many of the things that she did, through her ability with computers, seem like miracles. At least many of the miracles which real saints have supposedly performed are no less explainable. We can't really decided if she died or not, but the other characters in the book are convinced she did, and died heroically as far as many people are concerned. As far as her voice is concerned, I think that one is in fact led to believe that you've heard her voice. But it's always her sister who quotes her directly. It's still just a filter and who can know what Gillie *actually* said in those situations? If I remember correctly, it was only Gillie's sister who quoted her directly. It would have been interesting to hear other characters quote her, kind of like the Gospels?!? Sorry, Dave, for so little so late! DIane > 6) Gillie is a saint. A larger-than-life role model of virtually > superhuman power. Currently Reading: The Dispossessed, U. LeGuin Recently read: Chocolat, Joanne Harris 3/5 Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston 4.5/5 Illicit Passage, Alice Nunn 4/5; Siddharta, Hermann Hesse (deutsch), 4.75/5; The Masterharper of Pern, A. McCaffrey, 3.5/5; The Dolphins of Pern, A. M., 3.5/5; A Woman's Liberation, ed. Connie Willis, 3.5/5; ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 21:00:01 +0000 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Angela Barclay Subject: Re: Illicit Passage Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit I think your notion that Gillie became a saint (or martyr) is a distinct possibility. It struck me that Gillie *Wardale's* entire raison d'etre was the war and when it appeared she had (virtually singlehandely) won it, she needed to move on- to another life, or another world. Angela, who is definately still interested ---------- >From: Diane >Dave and Janice (and anyone else still interested), > >I really like Dave's idea of Gillie as a secular saint. And in your >email you make a very good case for it! I have to admit that it >never would've occured to me that one could think of her in that >way. But the points you make made me think, yeah! I can see >that! People are made saints after they have died and they must >have performed a certain number of miracles. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 00:51:36 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: BDG: The Gate to Women's Country Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed I first read *The Gate to Women's Country* in 1989, less than a year after it was published. It was a revelation. Perhaps because I was unhealthily preoccupied with my own romantic disappointments at the time and had as yet read little feminist SF, I ignored the problematic elements of the book, focusing instead on the authorial drubbing of men who so clearly deserved it, in the book if not in reality. Call it catharsis. I'm in a very different place now than I was then. I didn't expect to like the book this time. It so clearly stacks the deck, its biological determinism is ridiculous and yes, it erases homosexuality almost entirely. It had served its purpose once; it was history. But I was wrong. Upon rereading, I found it disturbing, but more despairing than angry, more doubtful than righteous. The Council have good reason to do what they do, Morgot and Stavia are sympathetic characters, but in Tepper's fictional world there are only two paths open to them: death or damnation. It's a bitter, but compelling world view, at least to me. Which isn't to say that the book's faults are unimportant. In fact, they may be its most interesting features. The handwaving explanation of how homosexuality has been eliminated, for example, makes the book's anti-sex agenda very clear. "There is no fucking in Hades," Iphigenia says in the canonical Women's Country play, the final line of which is, "Hades is Women's Country." (A curtsey to Carol and Rose, who already pointed this out.) This is a story of romantic desolation, betrayal and unhappiness. I was struck this time by how much of the book is about Stavia's doomed relationship with Chernon. The reader is shown early on what a rotter he is, but Stavia is left in the dark for the most part until her horrifying experience in Holyland, when it is finally made plain that without the strict social controls of Women's Country, Chernon would be just as monstrous as the Holyland Elders. The progress of their relationship is like a slow-motion car wreck, the opposite of a romance. And very significantly, the sex, when it finally comes, is bad. The message seems to be that "infatuation" and sexual feelings are irrational and dangerous, that women must learn to turn them off or face destruction. There is a complication, though. At least some members of the Council, if not all, have special relationships with their servitors. These men, far from being eunuchs, struck me as almost comically idealized romantic figures. They are strong, smart and sensitive -- to the point of being psychic! -- and have passed the most rigorous test of commitment possible: against all odds, they have come back to Women's Country. In light of all this, I expected there to be more investigation of how these exceptional men fit into the women's lives, romantically as well as economically. But there was very little, so little that some readers don't even notice the sexual aspects of these relationships. (I refer doubters to Chapters 5, 19 & 34 regarding Stavia and Corrig, and Chapter 34 for Morgot and Joshua.) Why is this? I think the answer is that it would have upset the author's purpose to directly portray *any* romantic fulfillment, homosexual or heterosexual. The focus here is disappointment, the bad relationships that scar you, psychologically, and in Stavia's case physically, forever. This is Hades. Let us not forget it. The play is crucial to this understanding. Julieanne and Phoebe mentioned *The Iliad* and *Iphigenia at Aulis* as source material, and both are applicable. But the closest match is *The Trojan Women* by Euripides. The setup is the same: the Trojan war is over and the women of the city wait outside its broken walls to be assigned as slaves to their new Greek masters. The sacrifice of Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles, the murder of the infant Astyanax, and the assignment of Cassandra and Hecuba, respectively, to Agamemnon and Odysseus, occur in both plays. Euripides' version, no less than Tepper's, is an indictment of the atrocities of war, particularly as it affects women. But the ghost of Iphigenia, Tepper's invention, argues much more baldly than any of Euripides' women the responsibility of men for these horrors, and the kinship of all women in the face of it. And Hecuba, in her version, carries a knife in her skirts. The problem is clearly stated for all who are in the know: we, as women, understand that men are the perpetrators of these ghastly crimes, that they brought about the desolations; we, as women, must act to ensure that they can never do so again, even if it means our own damnation. And it does. The Council call themselves "the Damned Few" and stage the Iphigenia play every year to remind themselves of their purpose and the danger of becoming what they abhor -- and to grieve for what they have done. In some respects, they have simply reversed the power dynamic. Women are now the architects of every man's fate, and horrible bloodbaths are orchestrated on a regular basis. The key difference is that the women make their decisions rationally rather than passionately, and they feel guilty afterward. I agree with Sandy and Lee Anne that this is similar to the portrayal of officers in much military fiction, not to mention movies, television, etc. It is a major weakness of *Gate* that Tepper does not acknowledge that war, as waged by men, is often quite as calculated and removed from the experience of the front line as the Council's version. Instead she presents as a case study the Trojan war, perhaps the most ridiculous and wasteful conflict ever recorded, which in its particulars is likely almost complete fiction! Not exactly the most ironclad evidence for the impetuous bloodthirst of men. Of course, there are also the actions of Chernon, his mentor Michael, and the despicable Barten to prove the case. But here we come up against another weakness of the book. These men are conditioned to be warlike and aggressive throughout their most formative years. How responsible are they, really, for the way they turn out? Suzy Charnas in *Walk to the End of the World* and Ursula Le Guin in "The Matter of Seggri" are much more nuanced and humane in their treatments of this question. But given the eugenics theme of *Gate*, I guess personal responsibility isn't much of an issue. Each man is in essence a dove or a hawk, and his time in the garrison proves which he is. It is all a matter of Fate. And Fate, in turn, applies to the women as well: "Myra's leaving Morgot's house had been inevitable from the moment Myra met Barten. Not that Barten had intended it or Myra foreseen it or Morgot known it would happen. No one knew, but it was inevitable just the same." (chp. 6) This book is a tragedy, all right. For men, for women, for everyone. And, appropriately enough, it ends in tears. ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: Tool -- Lateralus "...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 21:31:39 +0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Sherlyn Quek Subject: Re: BDG: The Gate to Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Hi, I'm a new member to this list. ^_^ So please forgive any strange newbie behavior I might exhibit. ^_^; I'm doing this book for my college s/f course, and just finished it a few days ago, so it's been an insightful experience reading some of the responses about the book on this list. I enjoyed reading TGTWC. Although the beginning was slow, the pace started picking up, and the twist at the end, although somewhat predictable, was interesting. Since my tutors haven't started lecturing about it, I'm a bit lost and would appreciate any help/explanations. Some questions I would like to ask/discuss: 1) What are the special institutions and ordinances in Women's Country? The novel does mention certain ordinances such as forbidding "women's" knowledge to the men, but never really seems to discuss them in depth, something which I would like to have seen explored. I suppose the whole "sending males to the garrisons" could be considered a special institution, as well as the Councilwomen ... are there any others that I missed? 2) I would also like to have some opinions about how the Iphigenia play relates to the main plot of the novel. How does it parallel certain events in the story? (eg. men justifying their oppression of women as "they wanted/deserved it") The whole idea that "Hades is Women's Country" because women don't have to make choices between "dead and damned" because "there's no love and nothing to betray" ... how true is that? The Council women are still "damned" for their eugenic tinkering which infringes on individual rights ... the line women "can't be killed again" because they're "already dead" is somewhat paradoxical in its message about women gaining freedom from the terrible treatment of men. Yes, women are freed from being "touched" any more from men ... but that's only because they have suffered to the point that they're already "dead" ... There doesn't seem to be any solution to the problem ... I'm a bit slow today ( full day at school :P ), so anyone who'd help me connect the dots would be greatly appreciated. ^_^ - Iris the New Newbie _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 17:44:22 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Phoebe Wray Subject: Re: BDG: The Gate to Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/14/02 8:42:17 AM, vanilla_waffles@HOTMAIL.COM writes: << ) I would also like to have some opinions about how the Iphigenia play relates to the main plot of the novel. How does it parallel certain events in the story? (eg. men justifying their oppression of women as "they wanted/deserved it") >> Seems to me there was a discussion of this a year or so ago on this list. It may be in the archives. best, phoebe ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 09:15:25 +0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Sherlyn Quek Subject: Re: BDG: The Gate to Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Thanks for the information, but I searched the archives(in previous Tepper novel discussion)and couldn't really seem to find anything. (Anything more specific would be greatly appreciated.) Anyway, I would still like to have some response about my questions ... maybe about the first one (on ordinances and institutions in TGTWC) if the second has already been discussed. :) - Iris The New Newbie >From: Phoebe Wray > >Seems to me there was a discussion of this a year or so ago on this list. >It may be in the archives. >best, >phoebe _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 21:57:44 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Rose Reith Subject: Re: Gate to Women's Country Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: <172.4d0bff2.29bcff6b@cs.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" ><< When there > >are no men left, will the "common woman" be able to turn to the servitor, >>> (sorry, I can't find the original email to quote from) > > - I wouldn't say there'll be no men. There will be 'new' men, the servitors >or their descendents, if the eugenics works. And possibly fewer men, at least >for a while. As far as I can tell, it's an open question what might happen in >terms of sex once the aggression is 'bred' out (again, assuming for the sake >of argument the eugenics would work). I'm not even convinced there is no sex >between the servitor men and the women, anymore than I am convinced that >there is no sex between women (expressions of 'horror' at homosexuality >notwithstanding. That one expression was in the context of discussing a male >warrior who was suspected of forcing himself on boys as well as girls.). I >very much doubt the servitors are sexless in their feelings. I don't remember >reading anything saying they didn't have sexual feelings.(In fact, in the >quotation where Joshua admits shame for his jealousy - the inference there is >that sexual feelings are at its base.) One would infer, based on their other >behavior, that servitors' sexuality would be/is far less aggressive, oneway, >than the warriors', and probably sublimated greatly in other interests. And >masturbation is definitely sex, just not reproductive sex. The only thing >being specifically dissallowed is reproduction from sex with warriors. I just >don't think Tepper spelled out everything, and it's not a requirement of any >novel to spell out everything. But we can speculate about the implications of >course, whether spelled out or not. Thank-you, you've said this far better than I seem to be able to articulate. This is far more like what I got from the book. There will still be male - female relationships, but the men of their future will be men who have goals and interests that are far more compatible with the women's goals - safety, health, education etc. Not power and glory based on triumph in battle over guys from other towns and villages. In a way I suppose Tepper's story is rather simplistic in its assumptions about how much the warriors will fall for with respect to sending them out to fight warriors from other towns based on rumors of attacks, especially since the men are also talking to each other back channel through spies and the cooperative groups they use to travel about the country side - like the group that are despatched so efficiently by Morgot and Joshua on their return from the meeting with the women of Susantown, that was made up presumably of men from each of the other garrisons plus the Marthtown man who got away to go back and tell Michael and Stephon of the women's secret weapons. It seems bizarre that the warriors can be manipulated to go out and kill themselves in war so easily. But she is using the Greeks and Trojans as a model, and they were all too willing to run out and fight for the defense of their idea of honor, so there is something of a point to that belief. > >Would the women (who now don't know about the eugenics) be able to love the >'new' men, or at least feel sexual feelings toward them? They are apparently >conditioned to see the servitor males as asexual. Or perhaps it's just a >taboo, but made to be broken. I see the goal of the eugenics as eliminating >the warrior type of male, and thus the need for war. Well that is speciafically a goal - Morgot and Stavia discuss how "there will be no more wars, no wars at all... no trumpets, drums and ... no penis worshipping ( In reference to the "erection suitable for a parade ground" - the monument upon which blooded warriors swear their oaths). The goal is to eliminate war, and the assumption (I guess) is that women would not choose to wage war if they were removed from the influence of men. I guess we are supposed to assume that Myra would not have been turned if she had not been influenced by Barten at the request of Michael and the other commanders. But we are also told that Myra's father turned out not a suitable sperm donor, and was probably also Chernon's father, so we know his influence from beyond the womb (genentic donation) so to speak was not a good thing. >[Actually, this assumes >women never would make war. Again, another false assumption (IMO).] Does that >mean eliminating sex or the interest in sex? Doubtful, even if we agree on >the questionable assumptions that the eugenics would work. Conditioning isn't >eugenics. And of course, I don't even know if it's successful conditioning. >It's the socially acceptable way to mate, it seems, in the current Women's >Country. For what that's worth. I really think that eventually the society is supposed to be one of decent women and decent men whose goals are the well being of all members of society. I guess the problem is that that's also a rather plain, somewhat boring or neutral - vanilla sort of society. Chances are without great passions they will not have great art. Or perhaps Joshua's partially uncontrolled streak of jealous rage toward Michael is supposed to represent the idea that we can have people who control themselve most of the time and only become dangerous when they truly need to, need being more than just to defend some arbitrary notion of honor... need being more related to safety of the larger group?? > >I'd also say some of the 'asexuality' of the servitors - or women's feelings >towards the servitors - has a lot to do with the incest taboo, the general >abhorence of sex between family members . Not that there aren't violations of >the incest taboo, but it does put a damper on sexual feelings for the >majority of people. (Just as an aside: the incest taboo appears to have >somekind of biological basis.) For adult females in the houses where >servitors are newly arrived, this wouldn't hold. But for children growing up >with servitors, it would hold. I also thought there were hints that Stavia >and Corrig might have some growing sexual interest in each other (esp once >she'd been shorn of her infatuation withChernon). So much of this is hints - >not spelled out in the story (and if it was, god knows how long the book >would have been), but nevertheless, included enough to make us wonder. Yes, to the point that for me I don't wonder, I think they do have a full fledged relationship. He holds her in his arms when she is hugely pregnant ( how does she sdescribe her self?? like a huge jenny ass?, I think she says). When she returns from the Holylanders he tells her they will have 2 other children besides Chernon's son Dawid. One will be named Susannah for the woman who tried to protect her... I definitely thought those children were theirs together, although because of the feminist influence, or I should probably say, the anti-patriarchal influence, paternity cannot be acknowleged. And there I suppose is something that I would have problems with (because I am so thoroughly an old fuddy duddy) - Stavia really seems to love Corrig at the end there, and yet in order to have those children she would have had to particippate in carniva for intercourse for intercourse's sake in order to justify the pregnancies to the outside world - the other women in women's country who believe that that is how it happens. After all, I would think that if Stavia did not participate someone would notice if she subsequently became pregnant. Tepper never talks about that, and I would think that that actually would be difficult to do when you are not a hormone crazed teenager any longer. Actually after all the pain Stavia has endured, it seems to me that it would be truly challenging to make the effort to do what needed to be done to get an assignation set up etc... though I suppose with enough beer maybe it would be easier??? Gee, from my own perspective I think I have finally found something I can't justify with feminism or "just because Tepper wrote it that way".... Rose, who apologizes for the delay between when this reply was begun and when it was actually finished and sent to the list. I have been really busy - obviously. However I am really enjoying this discussion because of having read the book so many times, and because it was the first of its kind that I read. I really liked the idea of women making an effort to start over and try to make a different world from the one the men run. -- 'As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.' Virginia Woolf ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 21:31:46 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Rose Reith Subject: Re: BDG: The Gate to Women's Country Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Iris, if you read the novel there are parts where Stavia talks about having to memorize the ordinances, and about what is forbidden. It seems pretty much that you need to infer from the reading what is in the ordinances, since they are never explicitly spelled out. There is definitely an ordinance against giving men books on women's subjects; that's a big part of the plot early on. Another ordinance(s) must have had to do with the way the education is organized, I.e. the memorizing of various ordinances that had to be rewritten from memory with all the punctuation perfect for example, along with the rules about each woman (or citizen if we include the servitors) having an art, a craft and a science. The section in which Stavia talks to the gypsy prostitute, Vonnella, has some info on the ordinances, as does the section about Stavia's education when she and Myra are talking about the upcoming carnival weeks still being months away. There is allusion to the rules of the ordinances in the section where Stavia and Morgot are riding in the wagon with Joshua and they see the badlands in the distance. And even at the end there are allusions to the ordinances when the whole story is resolved, so to speak, while Stavia is recuperating. As far as the Iphigenia play, in one of my readings I focused on reading the piece of the play and then checking for how it mattered to the previous or the next part of the story, because I wondered if the play was foreshadowing the story or vice versa. For the most part it seemed that the play did the foreshadowing, but I seem to recall there were also some parts where the story foreshadowed the play. One significant part is pointed out in the text when Stavia breaks down at play rehearsal when she is supposed to speak the lines about "they killed him too", which are in the play but are also spoken a few pages later (5 or so) by Myra refering to Barten's death. As I said in one of my earlier posts, it really helps to read the novel multiple times to pull out the specific little tidbits that make it so remarkable. Luckily it's a fairly short novel, and Tepper's writing is fairly straight forward - she says what she means, and means what she says - so it's easy to read and reread. Another thing I did to help understanding was to go back and read the play all of one piece, omitting the novel between the parts. That made a difference in understanding the way the parts of it hung together, and how Hades is Women's Country. Rose >Thanks for the information, but I searched the archives(in previous Tepper >novel discussion)and couldn't really seem to find anything. (Anything more >specific would be greatly appreciated.) > >Anyway, I would still like to have some response about my questions ... >maybe about the first one (on ordinances and institutions in TGTWC) if the >second has already been discussed. :) > >- Iris > The New Newbie > >>From: Phoebe Wray > >>Seems to me there was a discussion of this a year or so ago on this list. >>It may be in the archives. >>best, >>phoebe > >_________________________________________________________________ >MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: >http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx -- 'As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.' Virginia Woolf ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 00:36:09 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: Gate to Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/14/02 8:59:06 PM Central Standard Time, rreith@RACORES.COM writes: << I guess the problem is that that's also a rather plain, somewhat boring or neutral - vanilla sort of society. Chances are without great passions they will not have great art. >> I don't think I'd even go so far as to say that. It's interesting to me, actually, how much we- meaning everyone who has been discussing this - thinks that there will be this blandness, or that the men won't be men, or...well, the longer we discuss it , more examples come out. Leaving aside all the questions of would the eugenics work, is it right or wrong, etc., what's interesting to me is that this keeps coming up - the notion that if men weren't so aggressive, if women weren't in conflicted relationships with men, and so forth, life would not be very interesting. To me life seems plenty interesting without that, and in fact, all that stuff makes it really difficult to fully realize all the other parts of our lives. In particular, making art, at least in the heroic individual artist championed in Western civilization, has been so much more difficult for women, and also many other types of cultural accomplishment, because of having to spend so much time and energy dealing with male aggression, role conflicts, etcetc. (Not to mention just the time and energy spent in all the traditional forms of women's labor, which men didn't participate much in.) Anyway, not to harp too much on this, but it's interesting to see how much anxiety still exists at the idea of a more egalitarian society. I'm not talking particularly about the criticisms of the difficult ethical questions in the world Tepper has created, but the little leaps we keep making from her text, to various things we read into it. Or into the world we imagine as likely to come after her setting. Why would we think it would be bland? Why would we think there wouldn't be men? Why would we think there wouldn't be sex? I don't even think it would be 'without great passion'. It's as if we're assuming that passion comes from oppression, or at least unequal relations. I felt the story was bleak, at least on my second reading. They are still throwing the babies over the wall, so to speak. How can that not be bleak? But they are also at the dawn of a new civilization. City states, only one of which we are introduced to in any detail (I was really curious about what the industrialized city - Annaville I think it was- would have been like.), and all the parallels to the early foundation of Western civilization in the Greek citystate. What comes next would be a very open question. On the one hand, the foundation in the eugenic policies could be the worm in the core of the apple. On the other hand, well, if the eugenics worked and created new people, who knows? In a way I think the eugenics is kind of a red herring. Similarly I think the elimination of war is kind of a red herring. But that's partly because I think you create new people by creating different social and power stuctures, not by genetics. Or, genetics seems extremely iffy to me, because of the complexity of humans; you don't really know what you are selecting for, and so, it is simplistic. But on another level, and the play really makes this seem like the better reading to me, the genetics is just a kind of symbol for the creation of something new (not a real scientific argument for it). The play's the thing here, I agree, and the idea of reading the play separately is one I've thought to do, but have no time to yet. One thing that keeps niggling at me is the line where one character says to another, "it's SUPPOSED to be a comedy", chiding the other (I think it was Stavia being chided) for taking it so seriously. Of course we learn most people don't know all the secrets of Women's Country. But the play is not about the secrets. The play is about the horrors women suffered at the hands of men, and their only refuge had been death. Their only freedom was in death. But now, the play is supposed to be a comedy. It's satirizing the former world, the very stories that the former world told themselves. Well, there's more there, which I haven't totally excavated yet (and won't til I reread the play, I think). But is the joke on the former world ? the present world? Or both? Or...well,as you say, there's lots in that play. And the interweaving of the play and Stavia's story, past and present, is not only a nice structure for the book, but also what creates the message (the medium is the message to some extent). Or at least, that's the direction I'm thinking. Joy Martin "Absolute attention is prayer" -Simone Weil ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 00:36:12 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: Gate to Women's Country Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/14/02 8:59:06 PM Central Standard Time, rreith@RACORES.COM writes: << Stavia really seems to love Corrig at the end there, and yet in order to have those children she would have had to particippate in carniva for intercourse for intercourse's sake in order to justify the pregnancies to the outside world - the other women in women's country who believe that that is how it happens. Aft >> Yes, it seems like this is where her new self will be rubbing up against Women's Countries traditions. But it may be she could fake an assignation,especially since she's one of the councill who knows what's going on. Still, what about other women who have the same feelings but aren't in the know on the secret? Also, other people have figured out what's going on with the secret. The magician had it figured out, mostly. No one tried to get rid of him, although he was of course keeping the secret. But you are right, we're asked to believe that most people will not figure out what is going on, the the warriors won't figure out they are being manipulated, etc. Not terribly convincing. The main reason we are convinced at all is because the story is really Stavia's story of personal growth and change. Because we are focused on her story, interspersed with the play, we suspend disbelief longer than we probably would have otherwise. Another thing that didn't really convince me was when they tell Stavia they've decided to let her in on the secret (in so many words) 'because she's been through so much' (or something to that effect). Well, no actually, it's because Tepper wants us, the readers to know. The more I think about this eugenics twist, the less I like it. Not just because of arguments about its ethical or scientific validity, but because of the way it resolves the plot. It feels forced . But it does give people a lot to argue about.:>) Joy Martin "Absolute attention is prayer" -Simone Weil