The Female Man

I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man; I think you will write about me as a Man from now on and speak of me as a Man and employ me as a Man and recognize child-rearing as a Man’s business; you will think of me as a Man and treat me as a Man until it enters your muddled, terrified, preposterous, nine-tenths-fake, loveless, papier-

You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers—the web is world-wide.

Whileaway is engaged in the reorganization of industry consequent to the discovery of the induction principle. The Whileawayan work-week is sixteen hours.

No Whileawayan works more than three hours at a time on any one job, except in emergencies.

I'm a Man-Hating Woman and people leave the room when I come in it. Do they do the same for a Woman-Hating Man? Don't be silly.

What I learned late in life, under my rain of lava, under my kill-or-cure, unhappily, slowly, stubbornly, barely, and in really dreadful pain, was that there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.

His contribution is Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist.

I think it had something to do with the knowledge you suffer when you’re an outsider—I mean suffer; I do not mean undergo or employ or tolerate or use or enjoy or catalogue or file away or entertain or possess or have. That knowledge is, of course, the perception of all experience through two sets of eyes, two systems of value, two habits of expect

Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work.