LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
Will Creating an Androgynous Society Solve Gender Roles?
The depth of misogyny
According to a recent study from Pew, the economic recovery from the COVID-19 recession has led to surprising outcomes. In fact, the recovery has been almost the same for men and women. But if you dig a little deeper into the data, you will see some disparate results in employment recovery for men and women without a high school education.
In this demographic, women’s presence in the labor market decreased by 12.8% from 2019 to 2021, compared to a 4.9% decrease among men. Although we can’t provide an authoritative reason why this is happening — besides vaguely gesturing towards patriarchy — we can take a good guess: Women without diplomas are overrepresented in the personal service sector, which has been severely impacted by the pandemic.
Our economy, you see, is segregated. Men in the United States produce things, but women serve. I was struck by this report when it flew into my email box last week because I had just finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which is a novel about an alien society without gender — a society where these kinds of problems do not exist, and also an apt thought experiment that asks us: Why? Why are men and women still being treated differently in the 21st century?
(If you read this far and haven’t read the book, don’t fret. I won’t reveal any significant spoilers here.)
Published in 1969, the same year as Stonewall, The Left Hand of Darkness reads as a prescient foretelling of contemporary discourse on the fluidity and non-essentiality of gender. In the introduction to one of the newer editions, Le Guin tells us:
“Yes, indeed the people in [my book] are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous, I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are.”
Although prescient for its time, the book is more than a story about gender fluidity. Of course, the plot is excellent fare. It’s a story about political intrigue, adventure, and the struggles of fellowship. But the underlying tension, as I read it — a cis man constantly in the act of deconstructing dead ideas inherited from bygone decades — is an elucidation of the effects of internalized misogyny.
Genly Ai, the book’s main character, is an envoy from the Ekumen, an allegedly enlightened “league of all worlds” that looks to gain the trust and participation of potential new planets. Genly is tasked with convincing the planet Gethen to join this society of worlds, but it is not an easy task for the human diplomat. Gethenians, you see, are very different from us, biologically and culturally.
As intersex people, they have both male and female sexual organs (albeit ones that are impotent most of the time). Once a month, however, they enter a phase of sexual activity called kemmer, and Gethenians are induced to find a mate. When they do, they take on the sexual roles of male or female, and the necessary organs “engorge” to facilitate the activity.
It is considered perverse in Gethenian society to prefer one role over another, and in this sense, most child-rearing Gethenians are both fathers and mothers at different points in their life. Although perhaps it is better to say words like “father” and “mother” do not apply to them. Their roles are not assigned to people based on gender, or based on what function someone fulfilled during sex, or based on who gave birth and who fertilized the eggs, or in anything of the sort.
This is the world that Genly, a cis man, finds himself trying to understand in The Left Hand of Darkness. We quickly learn he is ill-suited for the task. Not because Genly is a terrible person, mind you, but because the cultural and social mores of his own society have been too deeply inculcated in him.
Indeed, this is a major theme of the book — even Genly himself realizes it. But what he fails to grasp is that he is also an unsuspecting misogynist, and his misogyny is responsible for much of his difficulty.
He remains incapable of understanding Gethenians as feminine, or as even containing the potential to be feminine, and instead defaults to the view that all Gethenians are masculine (at least until they take on the feminine form during kemmer). This aspect of misogyny should sound familiar. Perhaps you have seen it if you have ever referred to a doctor (without saying their gender) and watched as someone defaulted to using masculine pronouns to describe them.
Indeed, this is quite common in our cultures. In a 2019 study from the UK, researchers found that a vast majority of people automatically assume the word ‘doctor’ refers to a man. You can imagine how this kind of internalized misogyny could disrupt a diplomatic mission. But Genly’s misogyny goes further.
As a first-person narrator, Genly only applies the concept of femininity (in the form of nouns, pronouns, or adjectives) to Gethenians sparingly, and when he does use it, it is almost always derogatory. Genly’s caretaker in the capital city of Erhenrang is his “landlady,” and they earn this distinction largely because they talk too much — a fact shown to us by the presence of an ellipsis and the cutting off of dialogue.
In another part of the book, Genly attempts to describe the differences between men and women to a Gethenian. His description couldn’t be more revealing.
The Gethenian asks if men and women are like a different species. Genly tells us, “No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life.” But it gets worse.
“[Women] don’t often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers,” he continues. “But it isn’t that they’re stupid.” Even in the enlightened society of Ekumen, where peace and prosperity have been mostly achieved, significant inequality exists along gender lines. And for this reason, Genly is utterly incapable of coming to terms with Gethenians. He tries to pigeonhole each of them into his conception of masculinity, but they are not men.
It took me a while to realize how deep that misogyny goes, and it goes much further than the character.
Many early critics of the book misread the misogyny of Genly entirely, thinking it was the fault of Le Guin. In a 1971 review, famed sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem wrote that Le Guin “has written about a planet where there are no women, but only men… the male element has remained victorious over the female one.”
Obviously, this is a critical misreading of Le Guin’s book. Indeed, much of the chauvinism of Genly Ai has been planned by the author — a series of breadcrumbs she left for the knowing eye. The primacy of masculinity is the point.
But some of these reviews ask us to go deeper, and they are right to do so. If you look close enough, you will notice that some of the misogyny arises from Le Guin’s own internalized biases. And although this is no strike against her (as these biases are impossible to escape from entirely), it provides us with a fascinating take on the literature.
We may find Le Guin’s bias by examining one of the most relevant critiques of the work: Its problem regarding pronoun usage. Gethenians are almost always referred to as “he” or “him.” When this criticism was leveled against Le Guin at the time, she replied, “I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for ‘he/she.’ ‘He’ is the generic pronoun, damn it.” She later recanted in the 1994 edition of the novel:
“I believed then that the masculine pronoun in English was genuinely generic, including both male and female referents. This is a pleasant and convenient belief. Unfortunately, the more you look at it, the less credible it becomes… ‘He’ means what it says.”
The critique, as well as Le Guin’s realization that ‘he’ is not generic usage, serve as an illuminating addendum to the book. It tells us why Genly’s chauvinism is so believable. Internalized biases and prejudices exist so deeply that they can materialize even in the most conscious among us.
And to return to where we started, perhaps Le Guin’s change of heart can also help us understand why modern society is still trapped in reliving (or recreating) the same old gender distinctions. Internalized misogyny is not something you can simply remove with a wave of the hand. It requires work — a constant willingness to reevaluate and deconstruct.
As Le Guin knew so well: We needn’t create an androgynous society to move beyond gender roles. We are already androgynous, or as she puts it, at least we already are “at certain odd times of day in certain weathers.” Perhaps we only need to learn to be willing to see it more often.
Jan 22, 2022
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