Week 10: The Female Man (6)

 

When I read Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, the feeling that I felt most was confusion. There was a lot of jumping around and new characters being introduced all the time, so I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand the plot of the book, so all that I was left with was the ideas that were raised

A problem I had with this book was that Janet does initiate a sexual relationship with a teenage girl. There’s something to be said about how portraying gay relationships in fiction as unhealthy and inherently predatory is a damaging idea that’s led to a lot of harmful stereotypes.

The language of The Female Man was fascinating to me. It was really interesting to see the way that women could explore the ideas of feminism before there was a real vocabulary for that sort of thing. Even the very title of the book brings up the very modern distinction between sex and gender. But it was interesting to me that the actual symbol of power, the ideal form of womankind in The Female Man, if they were to be set free from the so-called plague of men, is still a male form. Masculinity is still viewed in this novel as something that women are barred from that they shouldn't be. Nowadays, gendered barriers are being broken down by the day, and there's much more emphasis on the celebration of femininity, for better or for worse.

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