![]() ![]() Of one of her short stories, “When It Changed,” which mourns a lost female utopia, the science-fiction novelist Michael Coney wrote, “The hatred, the destructiveness that comes out in the story makes me sick for humanity. . . . This reputation was not entirely unearned, though it was sometimes overstated. In her heyday, Russ was known as a raging man-hater. When Le Guin asked, elsewhere in her statement, if the idea was that women “write John Wayne’s wet dreams with the sexes reversed,” she was probably thinking of Russ’s just-published novel “ The Female Man,” which features both an all-women planet, on which women engage in duels, and a sex-segregated planet in a state of permanent war. Le Guin was not targeting the symposium at large but two participants in particular: Delany and the science-fiction author Joanna Russ. If even people in science fiction can’t do that, can’t look forward instead of back, it’s bad news for the women’s movement, and everybody else. ![]() We stop whining about what awful things I have done to women and what awful things men have done to me, and then compensating by daydreaming about retaliation and the Perfectly Guiltless Society it’s time we try to start intelligently and passionately and compassionately considering, proposing, inventing, and acting out alternatives. ![]()
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