In order to cope with her loss, she heads for the bar, where she encounters Ian Tormey, a pilot she had flirted with in an earlier chapter. She takes him to bed after getting thoroughly drunk. “I got smashed. Just how thorough a job I did on it I did not realize until next morning when I woke up in bed with a man who was not Ian Tormey.”
This man turns out to be Ian’s brother-in-law, Freddie. Throughout the following chapters, Friday proceeds to establish an informal polyamorous group that includes Ian, Freddie, both of their wives, and several others. In addition to being polyamorous, non-procreative, and bisexual, Friday has also thrown any trace of marriage to the wind, roaming ever farther from Rubin’s circle of traditional sexuality.
Throughout the novel, Friday continues to throw traditional sexuality to the winds in favor of making her own rules and loving however, and whomever, she sees fit. Whereas Anthony attempted to create new sexual systems by creating new sexes, Heinlein’s approach is more subtle, and more successful. He makes Friday a human female. In fact, Friday is an enhanced female, and could be considered a prototypical woman. Her genetic makeup was “carefully selected to maximize the best traits of H. sapiens.”
So Heinlein seems to be demonstrating the fact that females can break out of the traditional rules of sexual orientation, the “monkey customs” of society. Likewise, Friday avoids traditional gender roles as well. She is an athletic woman—a soldier. In many instances, she physically defends the men around her. She is strong, resourceful, completely independent.
All of this makes it much more disappointing when, at the end of the novel, Heinlein undermines everything he has built and relegates Friday to the role of a “traditional” woman. For her final mission, she is asked to smuggle “a modified human ovum.” While she is supposed to smuggle the ovum in a specially concealed pouch, her employer double-crosses her. Her sterility is reversed, and the ovum is implanted in her own womb, the logic being that the child will be safer in the womb than it could possibly be in a mechanical substitute.
Through no fault of her own, Friday has become a mother. The consequences of this betrayal are numerous. Her employer has become the enemy, and Friday must find a way to escape before her ship arrives at the distant planet which is their destination. Friday breaks free of the ship and flees to a colony planet, where, by amazing coincidence and the heavy hand of the author, she is reunited with Ian, Freddie, and her other polyamorous partners.
At this point, she had numerous options. She could have aborted the child, or had it transplanted into another host. She could have waited and given birth to the child, then resumed her previous lifestyle. But instead, she chooses to become “a country housewife.” She marries another escapee from the ship. While Heinlein hints that polyamorous liaisons continue to occur, they are now quietly swept under the rug. Instead, what is emphasized is the idyllic family life and Friday’s happiness with her situation.
Geniuses make their own rules on sex? Perhaps … but in this case, those rules seem to include a period of experimentation that ultimately results in a rather traditional, relatively conservative approach. While Friday experimented with polyamory and Rubin’s outer limits of sexuality, Heinlein avoided any authorial condemnation. Indeed, the general overtone was one of approval. But throughout the novel, Friday was never truly happy. She was always insecure and lonely, up until the end. At that point, everything else is swiftly forgotten in the face of Friday’s sheer joy at her role as a housewife. Her final words, as she describes her role as a housewife, are, “It’s a warm and happy feeling.”
Apparently even a genius must conform to society’s rules of sexuality, at least if they want to be truly happy. The results of Heinlein’s thought-experiment, like Anthony’s, are disappointingly restricted. Once again, the science-fictional world of tomorrow is fenced in by the world of today. The reader gets the sense that Heinlein began to explore alternative possibilities, but in the end, he gave in to societal pressure and contributed to the idea that the only truly good sexuality is that which is approved by the dominant majority.
But this was not a novel about sex. Sexuality was merely one piece of the futuristic world Heinlein created for his readers. As such, the more complex and subtle details might have been overlooked. It might be better to examine a novel such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which sexual issues are the very basis for the story.
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Left Hand of Darkness differs from the books previously discussed in several ways. First of all, gender and sex are more central to the story than in Anthony’s or Heinlein’s works. Le Guin wrote this novel because she “want[ed] to define and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of gender; in [her] life and in our society.” Whereas Friday and Cluster portray sexuality as the backdrop for a story, in The Left Hand of Darkness, sexuality is the story.
The novel takes place on Winter, a rediscovered colony world on which the human settlers had been genetically altered, resulting in a world of hermaphrodites. However, the colonists are not true hermaphrodites. They spend five-sixths of their lives in an androgynous state in which they display muted characteristics of both sexes. Approximately once a month, individuals enter kemmer. At this point, the sexual drive becomes overwhelming, and the individual must seek out another person who is also entering kemmer.
“When the individual finds a partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is further stimulated … until in one partner either a male or female hormonal dominance is established. The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly, foreplay intensifies, and the partner, triggered by the change, takes on the other sexual role.”
If someone becomes pregnant, they remain in the female role until the child is born. But beyond that one instance, sex is completely random. Someone who is female in one kemmer could easily be male in the next. As in Cluster, sex becomes a fluid term, one that can not be used with any permanence or stability.
The focus of the novel seems to be Le Guin’s exploration of fluid sexuality. As a result, the sexual act has a more prominent place in the world of Winter than it does in our own. Everyone receives one week off from work each month for when they are in kemmer. There are public kemmer-houses where sex is freely available. Drugs can be used either to artificially induce kemmer or to postpone it indefinitely.
At its root, what Le Guin’s novel accomplishes is the creation of a world in which sexuality exists without the baggage of binary opposition. No one is either male or female. Everyone is both and neither.
One of the results of this unified sexuality is the breakdown of gender identity. No longer is there a unified group of traits that is assumed to correlate with biological sex. Instead, most of the characters described display both “male” and “female” traits. The exception is Genly Ai, a male visitor from another planet. By using Ai as a narrator, Le Guin is able to continuously and effectively question societal assumptions about gender identity. She takes the bordered worlds of male and female and swirls them together into an inextricably intertwined knot.
In describing his landlady, Ai says, “He was so feminine in looks and manner that I once asked him how many children he had…. He had never borne any. He had, however, sired four. It was one of the little jolts I was already getting.” This is a complex portrayal because it contains several contradictory dynamics. On the one hand, we read the novel through the eyes of a gendered character. As a result, he describes Winter and its inhabitants using gendered terminology. A truly androgynous society would be less likely to have described the landlady as feminine. This seems to undermine Le Guin’s efforts to avoid oppositional sexuality.
At the same time, it enables her to emphasize the lack of oppositional sexuality. Ai’s perspective lets him point out what is different. He examines and ponders the differences rather than accepting and ignoring them, as a native would. In this way, the reader also gets to experience Ai’s jolts of culture shock.
In the end, unfortunately, those jolts are not enough to offset Ai’s gendered filtration of Winter. Because characters are described in sexed terms, the reader begins to identify them as being of one sex or the other. The exceptions tend to come across as abnormalities rather than as a viable, “normal” pattern of life. Despite the somewhat shocking revelation that Ai’s landlady has fathered several children, Ai, and therefore the reader, still tend to regard the landlady as female.
Perhaps this is inevitable. No matter how well-portrayed the world of Winter may be, the readers of The Left Hand of Darkness still come from a dominantly two-sex society. Anything they read will be interpreted in terms of their own experience. As reader response theorists point out, “the audience plays a vitally important role in shaping the literary experience.” Any effort to present a radically different culture will be restricted by the cultural background of the audience.