Herland is a terrible book, a utopian novel that alternates between summary ("through her sympathetic intelligence I became more and more comprehending of the spirit of the people of Herland, more and more appreciative of its marvelous inner growth as well as outer perfection") and Socratic dialogue ("It is a convention." "Does it work?"). The male characters are nothing but types, and the women don't get even that much depth. Patterns 7 and 15 are in full flower. Really just not good.

So, on to the content. Herland is the tale of three explorers — roguish Terry, genteel Jeff, and "scientific" Van — who hear talk of a land inhabited entirely by women and decide to investigate. Much to their (or at least Terry's) chagrin, they turn out not to be eightscore blondes and brunettes all between 16 and 19½, but rather three million short-haired, athletic women in sensible shoes, most of them middle-aged. Terry, with all the disappointment of a fratboy discovering for the first time that real lesbians aren't like the ones in porn, calls them "epicene neuters." He's basically right!

Elizabeth and I have had this on our reading list for a while, but I suggested we finally give it a look because I wanted an excuse to talk about gender essentialism. A few weeks ago I watched some interviews with photographer Jock Sturges and some of the women he photographs, and they were full of examples of the sort of thing I mean:

"I think that what might be described as the feminine in me, in my character, is the best part of me. Women, I mean, as a Darwinian, adaptive characteristic, women are intensely good at reading subtle things, whereas men are into grosser effects and care less about that, which is also adaptive, because historically, for hundreds of thousands of years when the species was younger, they couldn't care about things like that, because they had to go out and kill something and bring it back and be competitive with other males, etc. I mean, the behavioral science of all that I'm not that smart about, but I tend to care more about what women can do and do do between themselves than I do about, well, talking about sports and cars. In my own mind, actually, I find women a bit superior to us. They're a lot less likely to invade Iraq." —Jock Sturges "There are several things that I think that the male drive or the male... whatever it is that makes men men... contributes to war, a lot of strife and bad things that happen in the world. I believe that if women, or people who believe themselves to be women, ran the world, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in." —Vanessa Beverly-Whittemore

I imagined that Herland, which I'd seen billed as a "feminist utopia," would basically be out to illustrate the thesis these two are propounding — that it'd be an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of a society built on peaceful, empathic, feminine principles. And I had the mechanism right — it really could not be less nuanced in setting forth a society and saying, "Look! It's perfect!" — but, despite the title, Herland does not purport to be a vindication of the feminine. Allow me to digress for a moment. When I was a very small child, I saw a TV spot about interracial marriage, and when I asked my mother about it, she explained that some people were prejudiced against others because of their skin color and that that was very, very wrong. This jibed with the message I received pretty much everywhere else — at school, in books — that race didn't matter, that everyone was the same. And this seemed to be borne out by the evidence, as my classes were full of people of all different races and everyone was completely assimilated. Then I got to Berkeley and was suddenly confronted with the charge that the color-blindness that had been inculcated in me was itself racist, that the melting pot was just code for making everybody white, and one should not ignore the racial background of others but be hyper-sensitive to it. (Now imagine the person expounding these ideas sipping a Crystal Pepsi while doing so.)

So when I read Herland, I found myself wondering about the extent to which modern feminists (or, I suppose more accurately, early-90s feminists) would level a similar argument against Gilman. The residents of Herland may not be sexless, exactly — though they explicitly have no sex drive and reproduce via parthenogenesis — but they are said to be genderless: they have no stereotypes about how their sex should act because, having had only the one sex for 2000 years, they don't consider being female part of their identity any more than being oxygen-breathers is part of ours. But doesn't calling this utopic leave Herland open to attack from a couple of directions? I had to plow through an awful lot of readings in college and grad school arguing on behalf of distinctly feminine patterns of thought and modes of communication as an alternative to masculine hegemonic discourse... I can't imagine that those authors would take too kindly to yet another dismissal of the feminine. On the other hand, my understanding is that there are stripes of feminism that do indeed seek the abolition of gender as a concept — that believe that it's a fairly trivial matter whether your crotch is an innie or an outie and that it has nothing to do with the way you think or behave. And yet wouldn't even people who take this stance say that each individual human should be able to choose from the entire range of "masculine" and "feminine" characteristics? In Herland everyone's a tomboy. That may just be Gilman being a crappy writer but it does seem to suggest a mindset in which, just as "unmarked by race" defaults to white, "unmarked by gender" defaults to male.

So I don't know that I'd really call this a feminist utopia. The best case for it being one seems to me to go like this: (1) Gilman's chief complaint about the world was that women were shackled to home and family; (2) she created a world in which there were no homes bigger than a two-room apartment and in which women turned their babies over to professional child-rearers and went back to work; (3) profit! feminism! But I think this is missing the bigger picture. I'd say that Herland is not so much a feminist utopia as a Progressive one — capital P, as in the Progressive era. Feminism was part of Progressivism, but only part, and Gilman seems pretty clearly to have signed on to the entire package. If you ask me, the key lines were:

"Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?" "Why, no," she said. "Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them — and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us."

One of the standard arguments against utopianism is that a perfect society requires perfect people. But the Progressives didn't really see that as an objection, merely as one of their mission parameters. Surely a combination of good breeding, comprehensive education, and an healthy disdain for tradition should do the trick! And of course, in fiction, saying makes it so, so naturally in Herland these measures have effortlessly produced a society in which everyone is intelligent, practical, and kind, has no vices whatsoever, and lives in harmony and friendship with all of her compatriots. Works like Y: the Last Man and The Disappearance at least tried, with varying degrees of success, to imagine a world of women. Herland doesn't. Women bear the same relationship to the residents of Herland that horses bear to Houyhnhnms.

And to think, all that was really supposed to be just a way to segue into this.

Colin Marshall notes, in response to my article on Million Dollar Baby: "I don't think you've explained anywhere the reason the lack a of a daughter (versus that of a son) is such a felt thing for you." That's because I've never really explored the issue myself beyond a certain level. So maybe I should do that now.

There's a bit in Herland in which Van compares the perfect educational system in Herland to what he's seen elsewhere, and decides that the closest parallel is probably Montessori. I went to Montessori for a year — specifically, this one — and it was awesome. There was no formal division between class time and social time; as you bustled from one self-selected educational activity to the next — putting away the multiplication-table tiles, say, and heading over to the easels to draw — you would naturally run into some of your classmates, and you'd stop to chat. Half of my classmates were girls, and it was there, at Montessori, at age five, that I had an epiphany: girls are awesome.

Why? Oh, I could offer up any number of retrospective rationalizations. The one I put in Ready, Okay! went like this: "Girls: drawing on the blacktop with chalk, jumping rope, conversing with one another. Boys: throwing dirt clods at trees. QED." And it's not like there's nothing to this. I'm writing this in a fairly stream-of-consciousness manner, and here are three things that pop to mind:

Anecdotal evidence. Once I went with Jennifer to her stepmother's house in Long Island for Thanksgiving. Her stepsister showed up with her two toddlers, one boy and one girl. The girl sat down and played peacefully with blocks. The boy ran around the house alternately breaking things and pointing at people while croaking, "Lame-o! Lame-o!" • Personal experience. I grew up with two brothers. We were left alone in the house a lot — in retrospect, way the hell more often than would be considered acceptable today. And we fought. All the time. Just all-out, fists-flying, tumbling-down-stairs, hands-around-throats donnybrooks. I sometimes wonder whether the problems that went on to plague my middle brother didn't stem in large part from physical abuse suffered at my hands — because while I generally wasn't the one who started the fights, I was the oldest, so I always won. • Outside corroboration. Elizabeth reads a blog written by a stay-at-home dad and once sent me a link to an entry that said: I am so glad that we had a little girl. Don't get me wrong, little boys are cool and I hope we eventually get to have one, but once we saw the penisless fetus in Wood's uterus, I pulled my fist down out of the air like a golfer and said "hoo-wah!" Fear #1 had been instantly alleviated. Fear #1 was that we would have a little boy, and then another little boy, and then another, so on and so forth. This happened with my aunt, who wanted a little girl but kept having boy after boy after boy. Sometimes it seemed like there were eight or nine little boys in that household, biting at each other's ankles and growling at each other and yanking hunks of meat away from each other with their teeth. So like wolves, little boys are. So it's not just me.

But, as I've said, this is all rationalization. None of this was on my mind when I was five. I just spontaneously came to feel that the girls in my class were wonderful. I don't know why. Maybe it was just the mating architecture of my brain coming online. All I knew was that I loved to gaze at them and listen to their quiet voices. I craved their companionship, and could only get it in very tiny doses — because, once again fitting the stereotype, they were all about conspiracy and mind games. Once a bee got into the classroom and this seemed to me like a chance to talk to a girl named Beth — I could warn her about the bee. And it worked! We got to talking about bees, and how you could keep them from stinging you, and then I think we started talking about religion for some reason. This was great! I asked if she wanted to be friends. She said yes, but that she had to ask Kate. Kate vetoed the idea, so Beth stopped talking to me. Sigh. It was around this time that I took the copy of My Book About Me that I'd filled out a year earlier and, underneath where I'd checked, "I am a boy," added the annotation "WISH WHER GIRL" — not because I actually had any gender dysphoria, but because all the evidence seemed to suggest that if you wanted to associate with girls you had to be one.

And I guess it was also around this time that I started to consciously register something I knew from before my memories began — that I'd once had a sister, that there was a girl with whom I would have been associating all the time because we'd have lived in the same house. That, if she had lived, I would have had some sort of commerce with the world of girls. Probably what would have happened is that it would have taken away all the mystique! I'd have walked into my classroom at Montessori and seen the girls and thought, oh, great, more of those annoying creatures who're always stealing your colored pencils. But that's not how things worked out. Quite the opposite: not only were there no girls at home, but because I got skipped ahead in school when my family moved to California, I not only had to wait out the usual period of childhood sex segregation but also several additional years of being years younger than, and therefore invisible to, every girl I knew. A full decade passed between my Montessori days and the time I began to find myself sitting with Suzanne at her family dining table talking about life, the universe and everything.

When I write about important friendships I've had, I usually start with her. And yet, viewed from the outside, this is ridiculous! My best friend from ages seven to twelve was Ben Wu, and man, in retrospect, we were tight — we spent pretty much every recess together for five years. Then I went to a different school district for high school, and my best friends there for the first couple of years were first Mike and then Brian and Greg. Nor did I stop having male friends after I met Suzanne. In college I got along pretty well with my roommate Bret; when I came home in the summers, my youngest brother and I were pretty close. And then of course I spent a big chunk of my 20s on ifMUD trading repartee with a bunch of smart, funny guys. Meanwhile, Suzanne was just someone I worked on the paper with and occasionally helped with her homework. From the outside. From the inside, she was a girl to whom I wasn't nothing, and that meant the freakin' world to me.

And one afternoon she had to talk to her dad for some reason, so she picked up the phone in the journalism office and called his work number. "Hi, can I talk to Robert K—, please?" she asked. Someone on the other end said something. Suzanne replied, "This is his daughter." And something about that gave me chills — much more so than if she'd said, "He's my dad." Because "daughter" is a word that tends not to crop up in a house of all boys. It sounded like loan word from another, better language. And I think it was then that it first occurred to me: hey, wait — just because Abby died doesn't mean I'll never have a girl in my family... I'll get another chance if someday I have kids of my own! I can have a little girl, and finally learn what I'd missed out on all those years when there were no girls in my life, and she'll grow up into this amazing person like Suzanne, and call my office and tell the receptionist that she's my daughter, and I guess this is pretty deeply felt because now I'm crying while typing this. Or maybe that's because I'm just now feeling the enormity of the fact that due to my career choices I'll never have a receptionist. Whatever. I'm thinking it's time to stop the stream of consciousness and try to distill. Less heat, more light.

So.

Why do I want a daughter? Several reasons, most of them bad. One is that I'm not totally unconvinced of the gender essentialism I have wheeled out in the past to rationalize my preference, and I tend to favor sugar and spice over snips and snails. But this is a crappy reason, because (a) it might well be completely false — maybe gender is completely constructed, I dunno — and (b) both gender stereotypes have their drawbacks, and I'd be trying to steer my kid away from them in any case.

Another is my vestigial idealization of females. This is an even crappier reason because it only works in the abstract. I can say, as I did above, that I think girls are wonderful — to make the Aspie programming analogy, it's as if I initialize my opinion of the females I encounter with "wonderful" and the males with "indifferent." But that initial value is immediately overwritten the moment the person in question says or does anything. My gender bias isn't really reflected in my opinions of actual individual humans. If anything, it might go the other way: my childhood and adolescent heroes were male, my bookshelves are dominated by male authors, most of the people I've collaborated with on projects have been male, and so forth. A Y chromosome isn't a handicap to my admiring a person, and if you piss me off, no number of X chromosomes will rescue my opinion of you. So, yes, given the choice between Generic Daughter and Generic Son, I would take the daughter every time. But if you told me I'd have no daughter but would have a son who'd turn out like of the thoughtful, empathetic guys I've met like Stephen Granade or Matt Libby, I'd have to count myself very lucky; if you told me I'd have a daughter who'd turn out like Ann Coulter I'd have to put a gun in my mouth.

That brings us to the psychological stuff I laid out above, which I guess can be boiled down to this: I was very taken with girls pretty much from my first encounter with them, but boys and girls generally didn't play together when I was a kid (maybe things have changed now, I dunno). My sister's death meant that I would have no access to their world through my family, and because I was skipped ahead in school, by the time my female classmates started to associate with boys, I was years younger than they were and therefore remained invisible. So I spent much of my childhood and adolescence starved for female companionship, and I'm still trying to make up that deficit. This is the sort of thing I was referring to when I mentioned relating differently to my male and female students, for instance. First of all, as noted above, gender makes no difference if I don't get along with the individual kid: annoying girls and annoying boys both get filed in the "annoying student" box and are interchangeable. But I rarely have problem children anymore — I mostly get really sweet, high achiever types. So when I'm working with boys, it's a pretty good job: hey, I get paid lotsa money for helping a nice kid get ready for a test. But when I'm working with girls... all those "this is what it would've been like to help my kid sister with her homework" neurons start firing and the experience winds up being a lot more meaningful to me. So I guess that by having a daughter, having a primary, fundamental, family relationship with a girl, I'm looking for some kind of closure.

And there's another reason, which is that, in addition to all of the above, it didn't take me long as a kid to dope out that the culture thought females didn't count. It wasn't just that men held all the important positions in society — men were society. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal," I don't care what the conservative grammarians tell you — it wasn't an accident that he used the masculine noun, and he didn't mean to include women any more than he meant to include horses or any of the other adjuncts to a man's household. And this attitude hasn't entirely disappeared. We have the technology for sex selection now — why don't we use it? Because outside of Japan and parts of the West, if sex selection were made available there would be no girls born. Having kids is, at least in part, a kind of bid for immortality, but if only men are people, then only sons can be heirs. Even here you'll sometimes hear fathers-to-be talk about wanting sons to "carry on the family name." And I have to confess that at least a small part of why I would like to have a daughter is the opportunity to, in some tiny way, say "fuck you" to all that. I like the idea of being represented in the next generation by a girl. And I really like the idea of having the chance to teach her that all those destructive cultural messages are bullshit — that ovaries are no hindrance to learning math and science, that precisely zero percent of your worth as a person depends on whether you're a virgin or not, that acting dumber or less opinionated than you are is a crime against yourself. That you can be anything you want to be in life except for maybe leader of the Taliban. Obviously I would tell my son the same thing, but he'd be hearing supportive messages everywhere — if anything, I imagine I'd have to correct any notion he might develop that the millennia-long tradition of male privilege he'd inherited was anything he deserved. Better to fight it by raising a strong woman.

And besides, I have a lot more female names picked out than male ones.

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