The Female Man... was originally written in 1970 and first published in 1975 by Bantam Books. [Joanna] Russ was an avid feminist.... The novel follows the lives of four women living in parallel worlds that differ in time and place. When they cross over to each other's worlds, their different views on gender roles startle each other's preexisting notions of womanhood. In the end...
Spoiler alert!
... their encounters influence them to evaluate their lives and shape their ideas of what it means to be a woman. The character Joanna calls herself the “female man” because she believes that she must forget her identity as a woman in order to be respected (p. 5). She states that “there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective … Become it” (p. 139). Her metaphorical transformation refers to her decision to seek equality by rejecting women's dependence on men.
Metaphorical transformation. But the book cover seems to depict the physical peeling away of the female form. The browser is enticed to imagine something surgical.
Now, why was I reading that? I became interested in the word "munch" because I encountered an author who kept using the word "munch" as a replacement for "eat." I wondered if I had ever even once — in the entire 18-year history of this blog — used the word "munch."
A search of my archive turned up 7 posts — 5 of which have "munch" in the sense of the artist Edvard "The Scream" Munch.
One is a stray reference to the Girl Scout cookie Thank U Berry Munch. (I'm imagining an Obama inner monologue, there's a reference to marijuana, and so there's a nudge to think about "the munchies.")
The 7th post was part of my "Gatsby" project: "I know many of you don't like or don't get the 'Gatsby' project, in which we isolate and munch on a single, possibly turgid, sentence from 'The Great Gatsby,' more or less every day around here on the Althouse blog."
Why "munch" there? There's no actual eating. It's an eating metaphor, really a chewing metaphor. Indeed, the dictionary definition of "munch" stresses the the chewing — the mouth action — and not anything further along in the digestive process: "To eat (food) with a continuous and noticeable chewing action; to eat eagerly and audibly, or with evident enjoyment; to make a snack of."
That's from the OED — where I go to get my definitions, mainly because I love the lists of historical examples and where I found one that ended with the title that got me to that book cover:
a1425 (▸c1385) G. Chaucer Troilus & Criseyde (1987) i. 914 Some wold monche [v.rr. muchche, mucche, muche, meche] her brede alon, lying in bed and make hem for to grone....
1600 W. Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream iv. i. 31 I could mounch your good dry Oates.
1905 Baroness Orczy Scarlet Pimpernel xviii. 172 She partook of this frugal breakfast with hearty appetite. Thoughts crowded thick and fast in her mind as she munched her grapes.
1975 J. Russ Female Man 175 Munched chips, crackers, saltsticks, what-not.
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31 comments:
Carpet
But does it match the drapes?
We used the word thusly: "hunching and munching" - one of our go to adolescent sexual terms circa 1966.
Being Southerners we pronounced the word ending letter g silently.
Munch, munch, munch a bunch of Fritos--corn chips.
"Some wold monche [v.rr. muchche, mucche, muche, meche] her brede alon, lying in bed and make hem for to grone....:
This is pretty ribald, even by Chaucer's standards.
“They seek him here, they seek him there
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere
Is he in heaven or is he in hell?
That demned elusive Pimpernel”
A witch in Macbeth used the word munch quite colorfully. From memory it went”
“A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap.
And munched and munched and munched.
‘Give me,’ quoth I.
‘Aroit thee witch’ the rump-fed Runyon cried.”
Okay, I’m going to check now to see how close o got it. It’s been twenty years since I last taught Macbeth, maybe even thirty.
Here’s the script. I give myself an A.
First Witch
A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munched, and munched, and munched. 'Give me,' quoth I.
'Aroint thee, witch' the rump-fed ronyon cries.
And let me conclude the witch’s passage:
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger.
But in a sieve, I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.
IOW, failing to give the witch some of her chestnuts angered her so she had to curse her.
"The browser is enticed to imagine something surgical."
Given that sci-fi fans of the time were assumed largely to be male, I suspect that the browser was simply meant to be enticed to imagine a woman taking her clothes off.
I wouldn't call that a "feminist book cover" at all; it panders to the male gaze. I'd call it "the cover to a feminist book."
Though, perhaps you were being wry.
It’s a female wearing a female suit. There’s no man portrayed on that cover.
Used as a noun, a munch is defined thusly in Urban Dictionary:
A low-pressure, social gathering at a restaurant or pub for people into BDSM. Particularly intended for people new to the scene who might be intimidated by a play party.
"Well, if you don't feel ready for a play party, drop by the munch next week and meet some people."
I think various LGBTQ groups meet for a munch, as well.
Morpheme: unch means to compact. Munch, bunch, crunch, scrunch, hunch, punch.
My comment disappeared the first time I posted it, not sure why - - if it disappears again, I'll assume that the blog owner deleted it:
Urban Dictionary defines a munch thusly:
A low-pressure, social gathering at a restaurant or pub for people into BDSM. Particularly intended for people new to the scene who might be intimidated by a play party.
"Well, if you don't feel ready for a play party, drop by the munch next week and meet some people."
I think (not sure) that various LGBTQ groups utilize the munch to introduce people to the lifestyle.
Early Sci-Fi was a decidedly male entertainment. Naturally, the feminists did what they always do when they come upon a Men's Club. They demanded to be let in, and then they demanded that the rules be changed, so that it would be a Women's Club. Anything else would, of course, be "unfair".
I read a LOT of Sci-Fi in the 70's, and the name Joanna Russ is quite familiar, although I can't recall reading anything she wrote. Far more memorable was the work of James Tiptree Jr. Tiptree had an astonishing imagination, and a gift for vivid, compelling prose. It very slowly dawned on me, that there was something peculiar about the way Tiptree viewed sex. Like, the story where the aliens arrive, and they look quite human on a TV screen, but when they land, it turns out the females are over nine feet tall, and they start raping all the Colonels and Generals they encounter, 'til their jealous males, who are the same size as ours, blackmail them into coming back onto the ship. Or the one where aliens wishing to remove a revolting infestation from an otherwise habitable planet release a virus into the Earth's atmosphere which causes human males to attack and kill human females. It all began to make more sense when I learned her name was actually Alice Sheldon.
In grad school in the 70s,in a marketing class we had a guest lecturer from an ad agency w no worked on the frito lay account.
They were currently running a campaign promoting the chips as the "munchiest"
They wanted "crunchiest" but crunchiness can be measured. They would have had to test all brands and prove theirs was most crunchy.
Munchiest is meaningless. Dole could promote Bananas as Munchiest.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Gmta, Howard. My first thought too. Especially given the book cover and subject
The feminists finally got their "female man." He just won a women's swimming meet.
I read a lot of good and bad vintage sci-fi for fun...kind of a hobby.
I especially love the trashy cover art.
Philip K. Dick write a short story called “The Pre-Persons,” about a society where children up to 12 could be killed by their parents. He wrote it expressly as a protest against abortion. He claimed that Joanna Russ was so angry at that story that she threatened to punch him.
Ann, Ann, you forgot the Scottish Play ... "A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap And munched, and munched, and munched ..."
'Philip K. Dick write a short story called “The Pre-Persons,” about a society where children up to 12 could be killed by their parents.'
Sounds like the Democrat position of today.
He really was prescient...
Almost forgot about the Munchkins Lollypop Guild.
It's interesting that you link Joanna Russ with munching, given the slang term for lesbians, which I won't write here.
She was a very angry woman, and it seems like she had her indignation permanently dialed way up to 11.
Some of the characters in that book could be distantly related to Baron Munchhausen.
I remember reading Joanna Russ back in the 70's but hadn't thought of her in years and can't remember a thing about her books. I did just purchase "The Butterfly Kid" from the same era to re-read. I remembered the giant blue lobsters and the reality pills and thought I'd like to read it again. I don't have the same impulse for Joanna Russ at all.
Joanna Russ was a feminist scold before feminist scolds became fashionable. The really did not care for men.
Cordwainer Smith had Norstrilla, a story of a planet made impossibly rich by producing an immortality drug. That society had a judgement of 18 year olds to determine their usefulness to society and killed those who did not measure. Kind of like getting the thin envelope from Stanford.
Jupiter said...
“I read a LOT of Sci-Fi in the 70's, and the name Joanna Russ is quite familiar, although I can't recall reading anything she wrote. Far more memorable was the work of James Tiptree Jr. . . . It very slowly dawned on me, that there was something peculiar about the way Tiptree viewed sex . . . It all began to make more sense when I learned her name was actually Alice Sheldon.”
____________________
Yeah, “Tiptree” was a brilliant author who sometimes wrote stories with utterly disgusting content. When her story “Houston, Houston, do you read?” was nominated for the Hugo, I spent a lot of time deciding debating whether to vote it first or second in the novella category. It was an incredibly good work that made me want to vomit, and I ever after regarded her as the moral inferior of Hitler and Stalin.
BTW, the story tied with “A Rose by Any Other Name” by Spider Robinson, which I voted in first place.
Russ was also kinda weird, but rather less so. E.g., Larry Niven’s story “How the Heroes Die” opens with a guy on the run from arrest. Said guy was a marital arts enthusiast who had just killed another man with one punch, because the deceased propositioned him. In the magazine, the story had an illustration of the man so muscled and so fierce looking that someone who glanced at it while Russ was reading it thought it was an “alien monster.” Russ thought the killer should have been drawn as physically weak and effiminate!
But I recall a satiric short-story of hers, “Dragons and Dimwits,” that parodied the “Thomas Covenent” series. It makes me laugh just thinking about it, and is collected in her book Zanzibar Cat. I remember liking her novel Picnic on Paradise.
Apocryphally, the title of the book was inspired (negatively) by a quote from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. The character Jubal is trying to explain the distinction between Martians and earth men to Mike, who is human but was born and raised on Mars and finds Earth ways confusing:
“What is ‘Man’?”
Jubal groaned. Mike could, he was sure, quote the dictionary definitions. Yet the lad never asked a question to be annoying; he asked always for information—and expected Jubal to be able to tell him.
“I am a man, you are a man, Larry is a man.”
“But Anne is not a man?”
“Uh… Anne is a man, a female man. A woman.”
(“Thanks, Jubal.”—“Shut up, Anne.”)
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