“We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don’t it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.” – Jessamyn West.
At first glance, some might dismiss The Women of Our Occupation by Kameron Hurley as mere feminist diatribe, wishful fantasy of the highest class. They might find this role-reversal story about a world where women now act as the ruling class and men slowly losing their rights and privileges as passé.
Indeed, I wasn’t sure at first what to make of this story when confronted with dialogue exchanges such as this:
“We all battle dragons,” she said. “There’s no shame in losing.”
“There’d be no battle,” I said coldly, “without the dragons.”
“There will always be dragons,” she said. “It’s only a matter of who plays the dragon, who plays the sheep. Which would you rather be?”
Was the story suggesting in those brief lines that women should rebel against men and conquer them in the most extreme form of feminism, replacing patriarchy with a matriarchy bordering on Fascism? Was this story then pro-Fascist? Was it suggesting that true equality is impossible?
These lines create a beautiful ambiguity, a story told with language rich in meaning, if not one with terrifying implications. This story could easily be read as promoting all of those things: a sort of, they did it to us, now it’s there turn mentality. Or maybe it could be read isolated from a Feminist context completely. No elaborate teasing is needed to identify the male characters as metaphorical terrorists, and perhaps read this as an Anti-Bush story or a Pro-Bush story.
I have often said it is dangerous to dismiss a story because it challenges your world-view or politics. I have seen many a Feminist, many a conservative, many a liberal, many from another culture or race guilty of this act. “Oh, this story is too anti-Semitic, this story is too racist, this story is too sexist, this story is too liberal…” I like to believe a good story is a good story no matter what. Good stories question assumptions or beliefs, and it is that very ability to do so that makes them good stories.
You would be missing out by judging the point too quickly; pardon the cliché, but you miss the substance if judge a book by its cover. On first read, this story frightens, it wrenches butterflies into your gut, even makes you a little nauseous. On a second read, this story unveils it subtleties and nuances, offering more in the way of understanding and enlightenment. On a third read, you begin to notice the fact that you’re actually spending your precious hours reading this story for a third time.
The themes transcend beyond those usually found in traditional role-reversals, caring less about masochistic fantasies of revenge by subjugating the formerly advantaged group to the same mistreatment that the lesser-status group experienced throughout history, and more on sympathizing with a nameless male protagonist as he suffers under such repression. The story depicts one of the most believable “rape” scenes I have ever read in fiction. There is less attention to violent details or anguished screaming, and more attention to the confusion of emotions, the uncertainty of how one should react while this is happening, and the unspoken embarrassment that follows and exists during the act. This one scene in many ways defines the feel of the entire story. The social consequences are understated throughout the narrative; no one makes grandiose speeches about sexuality or gender, everything feels organic, under-the-surface, tense but not explicit, providing a realistic glimpse of the everyday invisible forces of gender roles at work and forcing us to experience it alongside the character.
Yet, it would be a mistake to claim this story gives women a pass. The real point of the story for me is the complete opposite. The ambiguous dialogue above gains context when juxtaposed against the extremely important rape scene. There is a reason the author writes this story with sympathy towards the nameless male character, rather than the conquering females. Women aren’t really women in this story. They are “big women with broad hands and faces smeared with mortar grit” who “reek of the dead”. The author probably doesn’t believe women are incapable of competing with men physically unless they are big; no, a more thematic explanation can offer an explanation for this ubiquitous description. On the one hand, the story mixes qualities of both genders to challenge the idea of gender-role assignments. On the other hand, the fact that all the women are big seems like an absurdity even in the realm of the fantastic that calls attention to itself, reflecting our expectations of masculine conquerors with these females conquerors who have replaced the men in power. They are fascist “feminists”, if such a term can truly be applied without becoming an oxymoron; Fascism being the ultimate hybrid of racism and masculine chauvinism. This story is a warning to women, perhaps even more than it is a story that criticizes the terrible atrocities men have inflicted upon women or the way gender-roles shape us. This warning invokes the words of Nietzsche when he says: He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
For all the strength of the story’s language and themes, it does hit a few sore spots. I couldn’t help rolling my eyes every time I re-read the story and came across the paragraph: “But I knew the way to conquer the women. When I was old enough, I would marry them. All of our men would marry them, and then they’d belong to us, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be.”
I also like that the author briefly explains that the women came in their dreams, but felt she didn’t do enough with the dream motif. The few times she mentions the dream motif, it feels like an afterthought, something that isn’t carrying enough of its weight in the story, yet something that also feels like it is integral. It might’ve been interesting had she used it one more time towards the end in which the women start entering the boy’s dreams, suggesting that now there is no place for him to escape because it all belongs to them, but it is always an undesirable task to write the story for the author or suggest what they should have done instead of what they did.
Still, all of these are truly minor quibbles, and the good far outweighs the bad. This is a story that lingers in the mind long after the final word, one that forces you to think and consider for days after; in other words, it’s a story that has all the qualities that make a classic.
Go read the story at Strange Horizons: The Women of Our Occupation
I take it you’ve seen the regendered version of the story? Maybe the line about conquering the conquerors by marrying them makes a bit more sense when you see it flipped over?
I have, indeed, seen the regendered version. Just because you change the gender, however, doesn’t change the substance of the particular line. It says what it says, no matter what gender says it.
Like most reviews I am only giving my reactions to the story, and my interpretations — basically my own perception.
Do you feel I am missing something important? For your reply seems to suggest so.
It amuses me that the regendered version includes Kameron Hurley’s copyright statement. Like that stopped them…
Dr. Phil
I guess I don’t understand what made the marriage line a sore spot, then!
No, reading your review again, I don’t think you really missed anything. Maybe added in too much, instead…? Like the “extreme feminists” interpretation. I’ve seen that a couple times now. And while the construction necessarily makes that a valid interpretation of the story, I got the idea that the you were maybe more on target when you were talking about the sympathetic male protagonist — that the story was written as a “simple” gender flip primarily as a mechanism for getting the reader to stop and invest a little extra interest and sympathy in the male narrator.
To me, the re-gendered version is the heart of the story — it does a wonderful job capturing generically the feeling of being a woman living in Palestine, or Iraq, or any other occupied region. But we’ve maybe grown desensitized to that story? The gender flip makes it strange and exotic and new again, and the added interest really lets the reader get sucked in and FEEL what it’s like to be conquered and defeated and raped and humiliated and powerless, with no way at all of undoing what’s been done.
Hmmm, I think it comes back to my own life experiences. Not that I’ve ever been married before.
For me marriage is the most beautiful thing possible when it’s done right. When two people, true soul mates, come together in the ultimate affirmation of love, not because they want to control each other, but because they can’t imagine not being together, not being married, and not spending the rest of their lives together.
Coming from the lips of a male it suggests to me that the whole purpose of marriage is to conquer and control women, that the whole concept is a social construct for that purpose. Regendered and coming from a female, it suggests pretty much the same thing but reversed.
I also have aesthetic objections to it. The line seemed so over-the-top, so heavy-handed, compared to the rest of the story. I honestly couldn’t picture a real person thinking like that, in those exact words.
Sure, we’ve all heard the cliche sexist in some movie or story say: “What that damn girl needs is a husband to tame those wild urges and radical thinking.”
But I really honestly couldn’t picture someone thinking in private: “But I knew the way to conquer the women. When I was old enough, I would marry them. All of our men would marry them, and then they’d belong to us, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be.”
And it is pretty much equal to a thought as this is first-person, which lends itself to internalizing a story.
That also doesn’t sound like something a conquered person would say. Just look at the language being used: “Conquer”/”Then they’d Belong to us”…
Can you honestly picture an Iraqi women going, “I know how we’ll conquer these American invaders, we’ll marry them! Then they’ll BELONG to US?” Definitely not the language one would expect in that situation. I would expect something more along the lines: “Maybe if I marry these soldiers they’ll leave us alone and everything will go back to normal.”
Certainly it’s the same spirit as the lines, but worded differently and in a very different emotional tone. Basically, you can’t really separate the line from a gender-orientation.
The way it is worded actually sounds like a feminist artificially throwing words (thoughts, in this case) into the mouth of a male character as opposed to the rest of the story that sounds more natural to me. So like I said, I have aesthetic objections to the line. That’s all.
To dr. phil
The regendered version was not written by someone else. It is a tool which will change the gender pronouns and names on any website you type in.
http://regender.com/index.html
Thanks for posting about this. I finally got around to reading it and I really enjoyed the story and the interview.