Turning on the Girls
By Cheryl Benard
Washington Square Press
Copyright © 2002 Cheryl BenardAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743442916
Excerpt
Lisa returns to her office, fifteen minutes late and not very happy. Pushing aside a stack of books and slumping into the chair, she locates her prompter. She stares at her compuscreen and at the paragraph she was working on before lunch; no, it has not miraculously turned brilliant during her absence. She picks up a book from the side table; it is a copy of Pauline Réage, Story of O. Lisa throws it hard, it flies forward and hits the door. Being a paperback, it fails to make the kind of satisfying thud that a hardback would, but even so it has made a noise, and the door opens. A young man sticks his head in, inquiringly. "Coffee?" he asks.
Okay, time out, I need an introduction and I might as well put it here. The first thing you have to know is that, in my story, women have just taken over the world.
My main character is going to be Lisa, whom you have just met, and she will work for the Ministry of Thought, Department of Values and Fantasies, Subdepartment of Dreams.
The female persons who are now in charge of everything believe that a revolution has to change your thinking, otherwise, before you know it, you will be right back where you started from. So they put a very large staff in charge of women's brains and how to, you know, kind of launder out the sediment, iron out the kinks of centuries of oppression.
Well, oops, come to think of it, I guess they wouldn't like my metaphors, laundry and ironing. See how these things creep in? See how you automatically think in domestic terms when you think about women?
But back to Lisa. Lisa works for one of the many bureaus dedicated to the mammoth task of mental revolution. She is supposed to help straighten out the warped thinking, the retrograde dreams and politically incorrect fantasies, of her gendermates. Specifically, Lisa has been assigned to work on sex. Which doesn't sound so bad, I wouldn't think. In fact, though, as we will discover, working on sex is no bed of roses. Not when your boss is Nadine ("the Nazi") Schneider.
But I fear I am getting ahead of myself. You, of course, are still asking yourself, "Goodness me, how did women happen to take over the world?"
I can see that you won't just let me assume this happy scenario. I can see that you are going to force me to give you some kind of explanation of how it came about. It won't be a very likely story, I can tell you that much right now. You're just going to have to swallow it, suspension of disbelief and all that. You're just going to have to indulge me on this one, otherwise there's no story, and you'll never find out what happens to Lisa, and worse yet, you won't get to read all those excerpts from the pornographic texts which make up her working life, and with which I intend to spark your interest throughout the book.
And furthermore, I want to say that if you are going to let George Orwell get away with a bold premise, and Aldous Huxley, then you should extend me the same courtesy, I really think. If you are going to let barnyard animals be in charge of the world, then women shouldn't be that much more of a stretch.
Now, changes in power, even from one gender to another, are not an entirely absurd idea. Although I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this one, frankly. Nonetheless, numerous academics, especially fanatical radical probably lesbian feminist ones who will never get tenure, believe that such a gender-related shift in power happened at least once before, that things used to be matriarchal until one day the guys said hey, screw this, we're bigger than them, and made a revolution.
The matriarchal period of human history, herstory, whatever—Nadine would undoubtedly make me say herstory—is generally described by nostalgists as being really very nice, with lots of overweight, berry-gathering herb-brewing ladies in charge, ladies who made statues of themselves that have names like the Venus of Willendorf, which you can now see in a museum in Vienna, in the Naturhistorisches Museum, which I have been to, and it is a pathetic place full of moth-eaten stuffed wolves and dusty dead snakes with all their scales gone, and should you find yourself in Austria, I advise you to give it a miss and go skiing.
But anyway, in the descriptions, matriarchy sounds—except for the part about women being fat, of course—a great deal like Southern California, with lots of psychic energy zooming around and everybody really in tune with, you know, nature and their bodies and stuff. The men are said to have meekly gone along with all of this because they believed women could make themselves have babies all by themselves, by magic, whenever they felt like it, and if you made them mad the human race would die out or, worse, they would specifically get rid of you in particular, because they were just keeping you around out of the kindness of their hearts and for your entertainment value. Actually, the revolution is thought to have started when the guys somehow figured out that, hey, on the topic of making babies this was not quite the whole story.
My point is, I could probably develop a remotely plausible story for how the power shifted back, since some paranoid people think this is happening already anyway. But then I would have to write a really well-researched historical tome, which would be about a thousand pages long, and who do I look like, James Michener? I don't think so.
So let's get past the part about taking over the world, and the most painless way to do that is going to be for you to join me in imagining a cataclysm. It could be an environmental disaster, it could be a war, it could be some kind of international terrorist extravaganza, it could be a total economic collapse, it could be all of the above, and I ask you to imagine that as it begins to unfold, people feel there has been a colossal bit of global mismanagement and poor judgment on the part of those in charge, who happen to be men, and that maybe it would not be such a bad thing to let a different gender take a shot at it, women, for example. Actually, all of this could happen sort of incrementally, with more and more really competent and ambitious women gradually inching up higher and higher and looking better and better compared to the male power-holding individuals of poor judgment, bad morals, a lack of regard for the law, an affinity for purchasing extremely expensive instantly obsolete weapons systems, a penchant for involving themselves in highly embarrassing public sexual escapades with interns and press secretaries, and a thundering lack of interest in the well-being of the normal people they are supposed to be working on behalf of. Let's imagine that everybody starts to get seriously annoyed about this, until all that's really required for women to take over is a nudge. Let's imagine that the mind-set of a fresh young millennium, and a combination of the above disasters and annoyances, provide the nudge. And if you want a longer version, you can read the novel Dryland's End, which chronicles in exhaustive detail how women come to power, but I warn you that it is BO-RING and, on top of that, has a sad ending.
So why don't we do it my way and just say that here we are, and women are in charge of a fine, upstanding, democratic, justice-and-equality-oriented, security-minded, peace-seeking social order, which they call the New Order, and are striving to erase all signs of what came before, which they call AR, which stands for ancien régime and shows how erudite they are.
Now, it's not that easy to set up a new order. There is much to do, just to keep things running and to prevent a backlash. And you've got to change everything: the schools and the toys, the books and the language, the television programs ... everything. The rules. The world. The women. The men.
Now, some of you may be familiar with men, and may have an opinion on how easy that last part of the enterprise is likely to be, and just how enthusiastically we should expect men to go along with a program designed to trim their sails, rinse the starch out of their shirts, renovate, domesticate, demystify, democratize, and overall improve them. I mean, yes, it's a full-fledged government program, but is it that different from what women have been trying to accomplish for centuries on the more modest scale of homegrown cottage industry? I'm skeptical. But let's wait and see. Maybe they'll surprise us.
Continues...
Excerpted from Turning on the Girls by Cheryl Benard Copyright © 2002 by Cheryl Benard. Excerpted by permission.
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