#05: Woman's tongue

I am a man.

This is the opening sentence to Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1992 essay, ‘Introducing Myself’.

Ursula K. L Guin was an American novelist. She is most famous for her works of fantasy and science fiction, but her 60-year literary career traversed many genres and forms. She was born in 1929 and died in 2018. Last Tuesday would have been her 95th birthday.

Le Guin cared about gender. Her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness is considered the most famous exploration of androgyny in science fiction. It takes place on a planet called Gethen, whose human inhabitants only adopt sexual attributes once a month during a period of high fertility, without knowing if they will assume a male or female role. “The king was pregnant” is the novel’s most famous line.

Radical as the premise then was, feminists criticised The Left Hand of Darkness for its lack of female perspective. The human narrator was male, and Le Guin used male pronouns he/him for the genderfluid Gethenians, which the feminists argued reinforced a male default.

Le Guin took the feedback seriously. The protagonists in nearly all her early works of science fiction were male, and she began asking herself why she had not questioned this sooner:

“So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun, so that’s who I am. I am the generic he [...] That’s me, the writer, him, I am a man.” — ‘Introducing Myself’, 1992

When I was studying foreign literature at university in the early 2010s, the generic ‘he’ pronoun was still the default in literary criticism. Most of my professors, including the women, still used it. There were rumours that some might mark you down for using ‘she’ or ‘they’ instead. Students dabbled with caution.

Then there was the literature itself. After the first year’s compulsory syllabus, we were free to specialise within a range of great authors. In those three years that followed, I didn’t study a single woman writer.

Goethe, Heine, Hoffmann, Fontane, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Breton, Char, Ponge, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Proust, Musil, Rilke, Kundera, Barthes, Derrida.

My literary canon. All men.

I didn’t notice at the time. I didn’t question that my degree revolved around men, what men wrote, what men thought. Like Le Guin, the thought didn’t really cross my mind.

Canons matter. They shape a shared moral-intellectual culture, teaching which traits are honoured and which others, by virtue of their absence, are rejected.

Since leaving university, the culture I’ve been most immersed in is Tech. Tech also has a canon. According to Stripe founder and CEO Patrick Collison, the following works cover the most influential ideas on the industry:

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
Seeing Like a State
The Dream Machine
The Sovereign Individual
The Beginning of Infinity
Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman
Softwar
Ashlee Vance’s Elon biography
The Mythical Man-Month
Mindstorms
Masters of Doom
Skunk Works
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Thinking in Systems
Superintelligence
The Whole Earth Catalog
Zero to One
The Hard Thing about Hard Things
Founders at Work
Showstopper
Dealers of Lightning
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Paul Graham’s essays
The Rise and Fall of American Growth
The Big Score
Finite and Infinite Games
A Pattern Language
The Selfish Gene
The Lean Startup
Marginal Revolution
Revolution in the Valley
Uncanny Valley
LessWrong
Slate Star Codex(/ACT)
The PayPal Wars
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The Diamond Age
What the Dormouse Said
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Titan (on Rockefeller)
The Power Broker
Gödel, Escher, Bach

The list is telling. We find works of speculative or science fiction, books outlining general principles in physics, mathematics, or cognitive science, texts outlining operating principles and business strategy of successful startups, narrative histories of successful startups, and biographies of important men. Of these 42 works, only three are solo-authored by women.

This is not surprising given that empirically-minded men dominate the tech industry. Much like Le Guin could have looked at the male-dominated literary canon in the 1940s and concluded that a young woman with a humanities degree had nothing to offer the science fiction world, one could read Collison’s list and assume that a woman like me, with a humanities degree, has little to offer the tech industry. (We cannot be what we cannot see.)

Fortunately, I did not make that assumption—I’ve spent a decade in Tech. But getting through the door is only the beginning of the story. Once you’re in, you have to decide who and how you want to be, and it’s taken me some time to exist in a way that’s true to myself and my womanhood.

At the height of the Lean in movement, women in tech were repeatedly told their success (and by extension, their feminism) hinged on being more assertive. Speak up more, state ‘don’t ask,’ claim your wins, take up space, stop apologising. In other words, be more like a man.

I internalised the assertiveness dogma for a long time. I deleted my sorrys and shortened my sentences. Culled the exclamation marks. Learned to make more decisive decisions. On the one hand, it felt empowering—attempting to be so self-assured—but just as a new side of myself was emerging, another was quietly shrinking.

Things changed when I started reading more writing by women. I can’t remember exactly when or what triggered the domino effect, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.

Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Ursula K. Le Guin, adrienne maree brown, Claire L. Evans, Annie Dillard, Monika Jiang, Joan Didion, Laura Marling, Rebecca Solnit, Jeanette Winterson, Amy Key, Julie Philips, Olivia Laing, Zadie Smith, Alicia Kennedy, Haley Nahman, Mandy Brown, Sari Azout, Maria Popova, Hanna Thomas Uose, Lucy Jones, Deborah Levy, Niamh Gordon, Amia Srinivasan, Ettie Bailey-King, Anne Carson, Anu Atluru, Aminatou Sow….

It’s taken decades; I had to look beyond the canons in front of me, but I found them. I finally found them: great women, past and present. And for as long as I choose to reflect on their ideas, I get to be brought into being by their words. This isn’t a canon. It’s a lineage.

“Have I ever tried to write as who I am, in my own skin instead of a borrowed tuxedo or jockstrap? Do I know how to write in my own skin, my own clothes? Well, no. I didn’t know how. It took me a while to learn. And it was other women who taught me.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘What Women Know’, 2010

My essays ‘The erotic power of agency’ and ‘Pilgrim’ exist because of the words of Audre Lorde and Annie Dillard. They also exist because of jeanette winterson, who told me my perspective mattered; and because of adrienne maree brown and Mandy Brown, whose works led me to Le Guin.

All of these women’s words have rooted themselves in my body. I can feel the roots spreading, and I like what they are growing: a renewed love for the subjective nature of human experience and the glorious ambiguity of most things. The pressure to be definitive, objective, and assertive is dwindling as a result, and I think that’s a good thing.

Many women I know tell me they want to write but feel held back by internal critique or fear of judgment. I tell them they should write anyway—the world can’t afford their silence.

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

That’s what I want — to hear you erupting. You young Mount St Helenses who don’t know the power in you — I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you’re writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgement or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations. I want to hear you. Speak with a woman’s tongue. Come out and tell us what time of the night it is! Don’t let us sink back into silence. If we don’t tell our truth, who will? Who’ll speak for my children, and yours?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Bryan Mawr Commencement Address’, 1986