The Women Men Don't See, James Tiptree aka Alice Sheldon

[Diana Moon Glampers]

JAMES TIPTREE, JR.: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ALICE B. SHELDON BY JULIE PHILLIPS. NEW YORK: ST. MARTIN'S PRESS. 480 PAGES. $28. BUY NOW


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"The Women Men Don't See" is Tiptree's signature story. The first-person narrator might as well be Tiptree himself. A deskbound CIA man, the character Don Felton is a tissue of clichés, a fabrication as fake and as familiar as any sub-Hemingway male who ever stepped out of the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. This world-weary but still-game fellow is on his way to a fishing vacation in the Yucatán. The chartered plane he shares with a woman and her daughter goes down in a storm, and the predictable survival scenario starts to play out. On the ground, Don's manly patter of dammit and god-awful and don't be a fool lulls us with a sense of normalcy that is soon to be upended. The rescue vessel, when it comes, is a UFO. Don wants to capture or kill the aliens. The women Don has failed all this time to see, Ruth and Althea Parsons, have another idea. They would rather go with the aliens than stay with Don and his kind. To Don's "For Christ's sake, Ruth, they're aliens!" Ruth replies, "I'm used to it."

Such stories gave Tiptree a reputation as a male feminist. One of the neatest ironies of the Tiptree identity came when he was invited to participate as the token straight male in a fanzine forum called "Women in Science Fiction." Tiptree's contributions provoked Joanna Russ to say that he espoused ideas "no woman could even think."


http://www.bookforum.com/scholz.html



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[stilltrucking]

Though she never acted on the impulse, Alice once wrote "it was always girls and women who lit me up.*"" In her twenties, she went out of her way to sleep with black men, and wrote, "My contact with negroes . . . has refreshed all my early African memories." And Tiptree explained in an essay that the xenophilia and exogamy in his stories might owe to having spent his "formative years surrounded by the socially-wrong-colored buttocks and pubes of Aliens you mustn't touch." Alice's marriage to Ting was affectionate but, after a few disastrous experiences, apparently platonic. So the appearance of sex in a Tiptree story—and there is plenty of it—almost always presages some catastrophic Liebestod.

*Perhaps, as Phillips suggests, Alice's formidable mother had repressed the part of her daughter that eventually emerged as Tiptree, but certainly it was Mary Bradley's death that put an end to the impersonation.

ibid