Uh, yes, see, what Google does is turn up “page after page related to the subject, including many sites devoted solely to the topic”. It is difficult to come up with a coherent English phrase that wouldn’t produce such results.
I can think of any number of topics that would produce much better results than “feminist utopian fiction”, which when entered as a phrase only turns up 157 pages. “Feminist science fiction” comes up with 5,490. Plain old “science fiction” gets 7,130,000.
Science fiction is a popular genre, but the majority of the authors in the field are men, as are most readers. Science fiction by or for women is not an insignificant part of the genre, but it is in the minority. Science fiction that actually has a feminist message is relatively rare and doesn’t often attract a wide audience even among science fiction fans. But even if feminist science fiction were insanely popular, it would hardly matter here. I have read a fair number of feminist science fiction novels, and none fits your characterization of “feminist utopian fiction” as being about how great the world would be if all men were exterminated. Have you actually read a book like that? If you have, why haven’t you specifically mentioned it yet? If you haven’t, why are you so sure that they both exist and are popular?
I can believe that books like that exist, because I believe that almost any damn fool thing you can think of has been written about by someone. What I do not believe is that “hooray, we killed the men!” books are numerous or popular, even within the small subgenre of feminist science fiction. If you want to claim otherwise, you’re going to have to come up with something a little more convincing than “Google found pages that contain the words ‘feminist utopian fiction’!”
> Have you ever faced affirmative action discrimination?
No.
> If not, do you believe it does not exist?
I believe it’s pretty rare. Most of the few people who claimed that it happened to them didn’t tell very credible stories of the discrimination. I don’t find someone to be very credible if they tell me that most of the feminist science fiction that they’ve read is anti-male (because I’ve read a lot of it, and it isn’t) and if they tell me most of the female executives they know actively discrimininate against men (because I don’t know any women executives who do). If you were complaining that some one particular book is anti-male, I could believe that. If you were complaining that some one particular women has discriminated against you, I could believe that. But when you tell me that most feminist science fiction is anti-male and that most of the women executives you’ve worked with have discriminated against men, I don’t find that credible. Prove either of those assertions. Make a list of all the feminist utopian fiction mentioned in this thread and tell me which ones are anti-male. Show me a survey which indicates that most (or even many) female executives discriminate against men.
From one page I cited:
“Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy, a woman-only utopia based on science and education in which men have become extinct while women have found the secret to eternal life.”
“Herland is a women-only world where everyone lives peacefully under the guidance of an intellectual aristocracy. Herland’s peace and harmony is interrupted by the arrival of three American explorers who attempt to respond to these women, unsuccessfully, based on what they know of women in their homeland. The narrator, one of the explorers, provides a reasonable voice in contrast to the macho and romantic stereotypes of his companions.”
Then there are those book where everything is lovey-dovey and egalitarian because women are in charge. The author gives an overview of trends in contempory feminist utopian fiction:
I bolded “Women-oriented worlds” lest any of the denial crowd claim that we’re talking about male-female-equal societies.
Note that these writers are attempting to portray " empathy and identification among all society members" as a female value, the reverse being that man are not empathic, etc. Of course, this springs from the time when feminists were trying to for political alliances with established an influential minority organizations in order to piggyback on their success. What’s remarkable is that despite all the rhetoric about being more inclusive, NOW remains pretty lilly-white, and plenty of black feminists have discussed the racism they felt from white feminists.
You see, when you write fiction, you can make it all come out the way you want and sweep unpleasant realities under the rug.
The problem with that offered definition, “a society in which both genders are perfectly equal,” is that it doesn’t fit many titles that are recognized as belonging to feminist utopian fiction. It doesn’t apply to the titles in which men don’t exist, titles in which only a handful of men survive, or those in which women rule.
I don’t know if you can have an ironclad definition. It’s a bit like Impressionism, where you have post-Impressionists and others included in a broad and vaguely defined genre. The people I’ve researched are even including non-feminist works, such as the tales of he-men who set the wimmenfolk right.
I think you’re using “feminist” as a noun, while I’m seeing it as an adjective applying to the authors. A feminist dystopia will usually contain feminist thought on what would make a world horrible.
Also, I see 1984 as a totalitarian dystopia, though the references to Soviet communism are obvious.
As I’ve said, my original aim was to prove to a feminist deep in denial that this sub-genre actually exists. I know that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is taught on many campuses. To answer the question of what is taught today, you’d have to ask some of the authorities in the field or, as I did, do some net surfing. I found this page, for example showing texts (and movies!) being taught at the Department of English Literature, The University of Edinburgh.
Is it? Someone else has put forward the definition of “feminist utopia” as “a society in which both genders are perfectly equal.” Somehow, I sense you would disagree with this definition. Rather than simply state that the defintiion is self-explanatory, perhaps you could offer your definition of the term?
I suppose this is semantics, but wouldn’t a feminist dystopia be an oppressive society ruled by women? When people call 1984 a communist dystopia, they aren’t implying that it’s a bad society to be a communist in, they’re saying it’s a bad society because of communism. Properly speaking, a feminist dystopia would be a bad society because of feminism. A book like The Handmaid’s Tale would really be a masculinist dystopia, as it portrays a society that is oppressive because of men. Well, like I said, just a minor semantic point.
Again, which of the novels that you listed in your OP fit into which of the categories in the quoted section above?
Are they? I don’t think you’ve shown that to be true. Example: You mention Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, apparently as an example of anti-male feminist fiction. (If this isn’t the case, I apologize. As I’ve said, I found your OP to somewhat ambiguous) However, the book is anything but: the “all-female” world is primitive and barbaric. Literally: one of the major subplots involve an all-woman barbarian invasion of (also all-woman) settled lands. Another character is a hunter who makes her living hunting down the last few sentient, aboriginal inhabitants of the planet, and using their body parts as tools and clothing. (You really don’t want to know what she made her purse out of). You might not have meant this as an example of anti-male fiction, but the fact that you included it at all in a list about feminist utopian fiction, when there is absolutely nothing utopian about it, makes me question how many of the other titles you mention ought to properly be included in this thread.
If it explored, say, how wonderful it would be if certain minority groups ceased to exist, we’d probably call it racism. When feminists write about all men ceasing to exist – it gets on a syllabus.
[/QUOTE]
Maybe, maybe not. It all lies in the execution. There’s a short story, “Love’s Last Farewell,” by Richard Bamberg, where a “cure” for homosexuality is discovered. The story’s basically a conversation between the last living homosexual and a young reporter. The reporter has a lot of reasons why the “cure” was a social good, none of which are really refuted in the story, but the author makes it unmistakably clear that the “cure” was nothing less than genocide, even if no one was killed to effect it.
Similarly, I wonder how many of the novels that present an all-female world that is “better” than the current one are necessarily promoting that as social policy, or are instead trying to present a “peace, but at what cost?” scenario. Probably not many, but it’s not a decision I would want to make without first hand experience of the individual text.
And, all of that aside, which specific work of anti-male feminist fiction is being taught in colleges? You’ve provided a list of novels, and a conclusion, but you haven’t shown that any of the novels you listed support that conclusion. Which specific books have you read that lead you to the conclusion that anti-male sentiment is a significant portion of feminist speculative fiction? **
[/QUOTE]
[qupte]As I’ve said, my original aim was to prove to a feminist deep in denial that this sub-genre actually exists.
[/quote]
No, your intent was to deflect attention from your lack of a cite to prove your claims about feminism in general. I’m still waiting for that cite, Andy. Oh, and now that we’re on the subject, do provide me with a cite for where I claimed this sub-genre does not exist.
I have read Herland. You, apparently, have not, or else you wouldn’t be forced to borrow a summary from someone else. But as someone who has actually read the book, I can say with confidence that it does not “advocate the idea that society would be improved by the removal or reduction of the male population”. Herland advocates all kind of social changes, but the removal of men is not one of them. The all-female society is all-female by accident, not design. The women there do not have any desire to keep men out, but their country is geographically isolated so they cannot leave and no one else can come in. They see the loss of men as a historic tragedy, and they are happy to encounter the male explorers who finally do discover their country. One of these explorers (the “macho” one referenced above) eventually attacks a woman and is ordered out of the country as punishment, but the other explorers are welcome to stay – and one of them does.
The novel’s heroine believes that a society with two sexes has the advantage over a single-sex society, and when the male narrator voluntarily decides to leave she goes with him. She intends to return to her own country later and present a report on what she has learned of the rest of the world, so they can decide whether they want to formally open communications with other lands. (This issue had not come up previously, as the all-female country was so isolated no one else could contact them.) The leaders are reluctant to do this not because they are afraid of men, but because they are afraid of the diseases and social problems that the explorers have told them exist in the outside world.
**
I think the description fits a heck of a lot more books than your definition of feminist utopian fiction as being about a world that is perfect because there are no men.
Well I have nothing useful to add here except that you all are continuing to firm up my desires to stay the HELL AWAY from anyone who claims to be a feminist.
Oh and also I loved Left Hand of Darkness, but I always see it as a gay love story.
Oooohkay. Andy, if you’ve not read in the field, I don’t see that you have much useful to add to the conversation – other than posts accusing me of lying. Very nice. (Learn the difference between theme and trope, incidentally, to understand why your accusation falls flat). Other people, however, seem to have at least a vague familiarity with the subject at hand, so the conversation (minus Andy) is worth having.
As for true utopias, I’m not sure what the criteria would be. Would Ecotopia, a novel in which ecoterrorists use the threat of nuclear weapons to secede from the United States and subsequently set up an idyllic society, count? What about The Fifth Sacred Thing, in which the only real threat to the idyllic society of San Francisco is from the Evil Military Dystopia in LA? Even the utopia in Woman on the Edge of Time is threatened by some absurd dystopia, although that’s an underdeveloped aspect of the book.
I generally think utopian novels posit what the author considers an ideal social arrangement. This doesn’t mean that nobody ever suffers – it simply means that the society itself doesn’t further suffering.
It’s interesting to see Lumpy’s and Wendell’s different accounts of Tiptree’s Houston, Houston, Do you Read?. Wendell makes it sound like the closest example yet of an anti-male feminist utopia (and even he thinks it’s more a philosophical exercise than a screed), but Lumpy says that the utopian cloned women’s “big issue with the astronauts wasn’t their being male but whether to go back to a society where every human was a unique prototype instead of a ‘time-tested model.’” Given the little I’ve read of Tiptree, and the considerably more I’ve read of her era of SF, I’d be surprised to find out that the author was on the side of the (female) clones here. Can anyone talk about the tone in the story – is the society of clones really set up as superior to what we have now, or does the story ultimately have a Triumph of the Individual ending, like so much cold war SF?
Ursula K. LeGuin became a prominent feminist author, true. However this developed slowly over the years. In her early writings she was not yet a feminist in the way that, say, Joanna Russ in The Female Man was writing feminist science fiction.
My understanding of The Left Hand of Darkness is that it is an attempt at humanist science fiction, not feminist science fiction. Yes, certainly, the core of the book is about examining gender roles in our society. But that does not per se make it feminist.
You can see the devlopment of her trasformation better in her Earthsea series, which starts out in the 1960s as a standard male rite-of-passage power-trip action-oriented saga, but twists almost 180 degrees into anti-hierarchical, female-character-based, non-action-oriented philosophical observational pieces with her most recent sequels.
LeGuin is simply a brilliant writer, but also one who has changed style, subject, and personality since she began writing in the early 1960s. You have to appreciate and understand this change to properly look back at her early books.
I read “Houston, Houston, Do You Read,” and found it spooky as hell.
The plot: Three male astronauts from the 20th century encounter the Archtypical Space/Time Warp Thingy, and are propelled into the distant future. They make contact with an Earth ship, and are invited to board, because their air and food are running out.
Gradually, living among the future astronauts (one of whom is a boy,) they become aware that the human race has drastically changed. A plague has made masculinity lethal. Reproduction now happens by cloning.
The boy astronaut is in fact a woman, who’s been bulked up by androgen treatments. “Andies” are specifically tailored for jobs requiring physical strength.
What’s more, while they’re learning about the new feminine society… the women have been studying THEM. They conclude by dosing the men with a drug designed to temporarily cancel their inhibitions, to see what they’ll do.
One of the astronauts simply weeps for his family, and mumbles aloud about how hopeless this new society seems. The women assure him it isn’t hopeless; they think it’s great, largely because they’ve never known anything else. They find the historical records of men and male-female relationships largely incomprehensible.
One of the male astronauts attempts to rape one of the women. He is prevented from doing so.
The third male astronaut – the mission commander – pulls a pistol out of somewhere and attempts to take command of the women’s ship, on the grounds that God has specifically brought him to this point in space and time to lead these lost women back to the proper way of things (the women don’t seem to have or understand the concept of religion), and reestablish a Christian religion and state. He is disarmed.
The first astronaut then has a dialogue with the women… in which it gradually becomes clear that the women’s society works, and is stable. What would happen if they allowed these men to enter it? Plainly, two out of three of them have mental problems that the women’s society is simply not equipped to cope with. What happens if masculinity is reintroduced into this stable, perfect utopia?
The story is open-ended. Some of the women discuss the idea of breeding a limited number of males, and raising them as members of this new utopia, experimentally… but it is also implied that the safest thing to do would be to kill the men and be done with it.
It should be noted that the TONE of the story isn’t anti-male. The women are portrayed as sensitive, compassionate people… but they aren’t fools. How do they contain and deal with a rapist and a religious fanatic? They haven’t the slightest idea what to do about them, how to treat them, much less integrate them into their society… and does “maleness” imply a tendency to DEVELOP these traits? Hell, if nothing else, males are simply bigger and stronger than women, and are dangerous for precisely that reason…
I couldn’t help but feel the story was kind of flawed, though. It doesn’t imply that men are evil, so much as simply doomed to be idiots and villains by nature. By the same token, it states that women are calm, rational beings who, given the chance, could forge a utopia (complete with space travel) without half trying, if the thuggish, clumsy men weren’t in the way. And everything would be peachy, and there would be no war or evil or anything.
I cannot help but feel this is crap, frankly. I have met quite a few feminists, and many of them were simply highly intelligent females with an interest in women’s issues.
Others were simply women who felt that their gender was getting the shaft, and wished to alter the status quo towards an equal footing.
…and some were what I’d call “feminazis.” This does not imply that all females are calm, rational, sensitive, compassionate beings, if you ask me.
It was an interesting story, though, although it, too, was what I’d call a product of its times – it fits rather nicely into that time frame that was previously discussed in this thread.
Oh, one important note: the men never actually ENTER the feminine society. The entire story takes place aboard the women’s spacecraft, on a slow orbit headed back for Earth. All we learn about the New Earth society is by discussion among the characters.
LeGuin is too smart and too good a writer to pigeonhole, and she writes on several levels at once. The Left Hand of Darkness is about feminism, mysticism, an action-adventure story, and probably other things I haven’t noticed.
I agree, coffeecat, that it’s difficult to pigeonhole Le Guin. In one interview with her, she was asked what the central theme of her stories was; she unhesitatingly answered, “marriage.” I was very surprised by the response, but when you take into account her interest in Taoism, it makes more sense.
And to help Andy out, I’ll reiterate that I’ve read a Marion Zimmer Bradley book that seemed to describe a pleasant society in which men were subjugated. I was about thirteen when I read it, so my memory of it isn’t very good. But Bradley, shitty as she is as a writer, is beloved by a fair number of feminists, and if you squint just right, her Darkover books might conceivably be an anti-male feminist utopian series. (I could easily be wrong on this, however – as I said, it’s been about sixteen years since I read the book).
Several of Sherri Tepper’s books feature dystopian patriarchal societies (apparently inspired by the Taliban here on Earth) in which women are horrifically oppressed. Interestingly, at least one of her books (Sideshow) also features a dystopian matriarchal society that worships a mother goddess, calls all men “boys”, and treats them like slaves. This society is presented just as negatively as the patriarchal one in the same book. It’s not a big section of the book, but having to travel through the matriarchal region causes problems for some of the story’s heroes and seriously imperils their quest to Save the World.
Lamia, was Sideshow the book in which Tepper sends an author to Hell for writing books that are too gory? I’ve only read one of her books, and it really cheesed me off, not least because of her rather vindictive fantasies against the Stephen Kings of the world.
No, I think you’re thinking of Beauty. I believe that’s the only book in which she does such a thing. I thought it was a bit ooky too, although in fairness to Tepper Hell is portrayed as having all kinds of people there who don’t really deserve eternal damnation, and the heroine does manage to free their souls.
Cool – thanks! It’s been about four years since I read that book, and the damnation of the horror writer was the main thing I remember from it (other than not liking it very much); I appreciate the clarification of how that went down.
Good point. I believe Sir Thomas More coined word “utopia” from Greek to literally mean “no place,” underscoring that an ideal society exists nowhere.
Utopian fiction of all stripes is often meant as a polemic to argue for certain values or ideals, as well as to postulate the flaws that would cause the utopia to fail. Thus when certain feminists write of certain utopias in which men do not exist – especially if it is the return of men that cause the utopia to fail – they are expressing an inevitably anti-male belief system.
All right. After I noted the theme of women-only societies and Ms. Magazine adopting an Amazon mascot, you said:
Granted you were misrepresenting what I said so you could attack the strawwomyn, but you claimed that the works I referred to existed only in my “fevered little imagination.”
Again, you misrepresent my comment on feminist utopian fiction in which the male half of the human race disappears. But here you pin it to my “personal experiences” rather than the actual existence of such works.
