James Alan Gardner's Commitment Hour
I just finished it. I loved it, but. . . I'm going to spoil the shit out of it, which is why I'm posting here rather than on my book review blog. I can't quite decide if the book is totally fine being spoiled or if a huge part of the joy is figuring things out; I think I lean towards thinking it's fine to be spoiled, but I can't help the niggling feeling that I would not have raced through the book in a matter of hours if I had known everything I want to discuss before I started. So consider yourself warned.
---
Basic premise is this: Sometime in our near future aliens arrived and offered everybody a brand new life among the stars, no strings attached. There actually were no strings attached, and as things were pretty bad here (Gardner is vague on what sort of badness, so you can fill in the blank with whatever catastrophe is currently popular) within 20 years 70% of humanity had left the planet, causing the world economy to collapse. After 40 years of chaos, a new order rose and made a treaty with the aliens that required the aliens to leave the remnants of Earth-based humanity alone, which they did.
(These are some seriously kickass aliens, apparently, who maintain a sort of disinterested compassion towards lesser beings and have the resources to make everything utopian.)
But in that forty years of chaos, the new space-faring humans had a habit of coming back to poor backwards Earth and setting up social experiments.
Commitment Hour takes place some 400 years later, within a community that is unknowingly still one of those experiments. It was set up to explore gender, and all the machinery for that experiment is still running, so every child that is born in the town switches genders every year until (s)he turns 20, at which point (s)he has to choose a single gender to be for the rest of his/her life: male, female, or hermaphrodite.
The problem is, to make this happen you have to take a sample of bone and blood from newborns, and 150 years ago a newborn was sick on the day that the sample had to be taken, so he never got to change genders; he was stuck a boy his entire childhood while all of his friends were constantly switching back and forth.
So, of course, he grew up bitter and twisted and soon set himself up as Patriarch. He outlawed the hermaphroditic option (and forced everyone to call them "Neuts" and exile them from the society); he also made the gender roles extremely rigid, in the way they're often rigid in fantasy novels, with men having to become warriors or fishermen while women keep house and care for the children.
Gardner takes care to point out that with the option of choosing your gender most of the problems with strictly gender-defined societies aren't really that problematic -- you don't have to choose until you're twenty, so if you really desperately want to become a warrior you simply choose to be male. If you really desperately love being the nurturer to your children, you choose female. The choice that was taken away was the hermaphrodite option, but you've never actually experienced being a hermaphrodite, so it's probably pretty easy to give up.
He also shows that even though the men seem to hold the power on the surface, in actuality it's relatively balanced: the Mayor is male, but doesn't seem to do anything beyond live in the biggest house and act pompous when outsiders arrive; there's a Mocking Priestess to balance the Patriarch's Man in the religious life (and secretly they have to be married, though in public life they're usually at odds); and the real life-or-death decisions in the village are made by Father Ash and Mother Dust, the oldest man and woman in the village, and they have equal say.
He weighs the scales enough with this sort of thing so that I, as a reader, bought the assertion that people choose male or female in essentially equal numbers.
And as I was reading the society really felt like a utopia. I wanted to live there. Sure, it sucks that the Patriarch took away the hermaphrodite option -- I'm pretty sure that's the one I'd choose, because why wouldn't you want the best of both worlds? -- but it's clear that over the course of the book the Patriarch's ruling is going to be overturned (well, unless it's a tragedy). With that option in place, who wouldn't want to live in that society? There's some funky stuff with pseudo-split personalities that's a side effect of the technical methods they had to use to accomplish this feat, but the characters experience it as a near-total positive, because it gives them emotional distance from traumatic events. I finished the book going "Damn, sign me up for this place!"
But then I had a moment to think, and I discovered one enormously glaring blind spot that really bugged me.
There's no way to choose to be anything other than heterosexual in this world.
I missed it as I was reading because Gardner keeps the cast small, so everyone is conveniently paired up male-female. But the more I looked at it the more disturbed I was. You can choose your gender, yes; but from what Gardner shows sexuality appears to be entirely matched to whatever gender your body currently is. The main character is currently male; from birth he has been with Cappie, who has always been exactly his opposite gender because she was born female in the same year he was born male. They've always assumed they would either spend the rest of their lives together if they chose opposite genders or just be friends if they chose the same gender.
But why the hell can't they spend the rest of their lives together and be the same gender?!? I mean, maybe that's a change that the Patriarch also instituted -- certainly the equations are changed when you have a viable third gender (they're true hermaphrodites, they can both father children and bear them) to be sexual partners with. But there's no indication in the text that homosexuality (or bisexuality, or pansexuality, which would probably be a better descriptor given the three genders) was ever tolerated, and at the end of the book the Neuts/hermaphrodites pair up leaving the male and female characters to male-and-female sexual relations.
There is a line, apparently a saying of the Mocking Priestess: "You can get what you want most in life; not even the gods can guarantee you get your second choice too." It made me laugh when I read it through; but now it bugs me, it seems facile and glib. Why should you have to choose between your gender identity and your sexual identity?
Maybe Gardner thinks one or the other of those identities is fluid enough that you can simply choose based on the one that's rigid -- so if you really, really want to be a woman, then your sexual identity can conform to only desiring men. Or if you really desire men, well, it's easy enough to choose to be a woman, right? And there's always that third gender option, to fit those people who don't conveniently want an opposite sex partner. My sexual identity doesn't work that way, but then, I live in a fixed gender, so that could just be me.
And I did say I'd want to be a hermaphrodite after all. . .
But having once started to question that aspect of the setup, I began to question it all. Would roughly 50% of the population really choose the invisible equality over the visible power? Why are the two most spectacular acts of violence commited by the two Neuts/hermaphrodites? I mean, yes, I know it's because the only reason they chose the banned hermaphrodite option is because they were already outcasts in the society, so it makes sense for them to be angry. And there's always the Neut/hermaphrodite couple providing the happy ending. . . but still. There's too much of a correlation in the text between hermaphroditism and psychopathy.
(Also, what the hell was going on with Dorr and her grandfather? I could not stop myself from reading it as an abusive (probably sexually abusive) relationship, but that doesn't seem to fit with Leeta's role in it.)
What on earth were the women of the Patriarch's generation thinking?!? I know it's sort of a staple that there's some man who comes in and imposes all these obnoxiously strict rules on an otherwise pastoral utopia. . . but all the women (and all the men who still had memories of being women) let him do that, and there's nothing in the text condemning them.
So I'm torn. My initial reaction was to love this book, because books about gender always leave me depressed, and it was so nice to think of it as a utopia. That moment of choice, the descriptions of what it's like every time you come back from having your gender switched, the way characters could slip into their other gender to play a different role when needed. . . it was all so joyful. And joyful in a way that SF futures where gender is immaterial never manages to be, because those futures invariably feel coded male to me -- they say that plenty of people choose all those things we currently code female, like child-rearing and dresses, but they never show me any of those people. They show me the action heroes dressed in pants, and yes, plenty of times those people are female, but I've never had any desire to be an action hero. (I do like pants though.)
But I suppose there's a reason books about gender always leave me depressed. Our ways of dealing with gender -- hell, even just thinking about gender -- are seriously fucked up, and there're no uber-powerful compassionate aliens coming along to free us any time soon.
ETA, 6/28: My review is up now.
---
Basic premise is this: Sometime in our near future aliens arrived and offered everybody a brand new life among the stars, no strings attached. There actually were no strings attached, and as things were pretty bad here (Gardner is vague on what sort of badness, so you can fill in the blank with whatever catastrophe is currently popular) within 20 years 70% of humanity had left the planet, causing the world economy to collapse. After 40 years of chaos, a new order rose and made a treaty with the aliens that required the aliens to leave the remnants of Earth-based humanity alone, which they did.
(These are some seriously kickass aliens, apparently, who maintain a sort of disinterested compassion towards lesser beings and have the resources to make everything utopian.)
But in that forty years of chaos, the new space-faring humans had a habit of coming back to poor backwards Earth and setting up social experiments.
Commitment Hour takes place some 400 years later, within a community that is unknowingly still one of those experiments. It was set up to explore gender, and all the machinery for that experiment is still running, so every child that is born in the town switches genders every year until (s)he turns 20, at which point (s)he has to choose a single gender to be for the rest of his/her life: male, female, or hermaphrodite.
The problem is, to make this happen you have to take a sample of bone and blood from newborns, and 150 years ago a newborn was sick on the day that the sample had to be taken, so he never got to change genders; he was stuck a boy his entire childhood while all of his friends were constantly switching back and forth.
So, of course, he grew up bitter and twisted and soon set himself up as Patriarch. He outlawed the hermaphroditic option (and forced everyone to call them "Neuts" and exile them from the society); he also made the gender roles extremely rigid, in the way they're often rigid in fantasy novels, with men having to become warriors or fishermen while women keep house and care for the children.
Gardner takes care to point out that with the option of choosing your gender most of the problems with strictly gender-defined societies aren't really that problematic -- you don't have to choose until you're twenty, so if you really desperately want to become a warrior you simply choose to be male. If you really desperately love being the nurturer to your children, you choose female. The choice that was taken away was the hermaphrodite option, but you've never actually experienced being a hermaphrodite, so it's probably pretty easy to give up.
He also shows that even though the men seem to hold the power on the surface, in actuality it's relatively balanced: the Mayor is male, but doesn't seem to do anything beyond live in the biggest house and act pompous when outsiders arrive; there's a Mocking Priestess to balance the Patriarch's Man in the religious life (and secretly they have to be married, though in public life they're usually at odds); and the real life-or-death decisions in the village are made by Father Ash and Mother Dust, the oldest man and woman in the village, and they have equal say.
He weighs the scales enough with this sort of thing so that I, as a reader, bought the assertion that people choose male or female in essentially equal numbers.
And as I was reading the society really felt like a utopia. I wanted to live there. Sure, it sucks that the Patriarch took away the hermaphrodite option -- I'm pretty sure that's the one I'd choose, because why wouldn't you want the best of both worlds? -- but it's clear that over the course of the book the Patriarch's ruling is going to be overturned (well, unless it's a tragedy). With that option in place, who wouldn't want to live in that society? There's some funky stuff with pseudo-split personalities that's a side effect of the technical methods they had to use to accomplish this feat, but the characters experience it as a near-total positive, because it gives them emotional distance from traumatic events. I finished the book going "Damn, sign me up for this place!"
But then I had a moment to think, and I discovered one enormously glaring blind spot that really bugged me.
There's no way to choose to be anything other than heterosexual in this world.
I missed it as I was reading because Gardner keeps the cast small, so everyone is conveniently paired up male-female. But the more I looked at it the more disturbed I was. You can choose your gender, yes; but from what Gardner shows sexuality appears to be entirely matched to whatever gender your body currently is. The main character is currently male; from birth he has been with Cappie, who has always been exactly his opposite gender because she was born female in the same year he was born male. They've always assumed they would either spend the rest of their lives together if they chose opposite genders or just be friends if they chose the same gender.
But why the hell can't they spend the rest of their lives together and be the same gender?!? I mean, maybe that's a change that the Patriarch also instituted -- certainly the equations are changed when you have a viable third gender (they're true hermaphrodites, they can both father children and bear them) to be sexual partners with. But there's no indication in the text that homosexuality (or bisexuality, or pansexuality, which would probably be a better descriptor given the three genders) was ever tolerated, and at the end of the book the Neuts/hermaphrodites pair up leaving the male and female characters to male-and-female sexual relations.
There is a line, apparently a saying of the Mocking Priestess: "You can get what you want most in life; not even the gods can guarantee you get your second choice too." It made me laugh when I read it through; but now it bugs me, it seems facile and glib. Why should you have to choose between your gender identity and your sexual identity?
Maybe Gardner thinks one or the other of those identities is fluid enough that you can simply choose based on the one that's rigid -- so if you really, really want to be a woman, then your sexual identity can conform to only desiring men. Or if you really desire men, well, it's easy enough to choose to be a woman, right? And there's always that third gender option, to fit those people who don't conveniently want an opposite sex partner. My sexual identity doesn't work that way, but then, I live in a fixed gender, so that could just be me.
And I did say I'd want to be a hermaphrodite after all. . .
But having once started to question that aspect of the setup, I began to question it all. Would roughly 50% of the population really choose the invisible equality over the visible power? Why are the two most spectacular acts of violence commited by the two Neuts/hermaphrodites? I mean, yes, I know it's because the only reason they chose the banned hermaphrodite option is because they were already outcasts in the society, so it makes sense for them to be angry. And there's always the Neut/hermaphrodite couple providing the happy ending. . . but still. There's too much of a correlation in the text between hermaphroditism and psychopathy.
(Also, what the hell was going on with Dorr and her grandfather? I could not stop myself from reading it as an abusive (probably sexually abusive) relationship, but that doesn't seem to fit with Leeta's role in it.)
What on earth were the women of the Patriarch's generation thinking?!? I know it's sort of a staple that there's some man who comes in and imposes all these obnoxiously strict rules on an otherwise pastoral utopia. . . but all the women (and all the men who still had memories of being women) let him do that, and there's nothing in the text condemning them.
So I'm torn. My initial reaction was to love this book, because books about gender always leave me depressed, and it was so nice to think of it as a utopia. That moment of choice, the descriptions of what it's like every time you come back from having your gender switched, the way characters could slip into their other gender to play a different role when needed. . . it was all so joyful. And joyful in a way that SF futures where gender is immaterial never manages to be, because those futures invariably feel coded male to me -- they say that plenty of people choose all those things we currently code female, like child-rearing and dresses, but they never show me any of those people. They show me the action heroes dressed in pants, and yes, plenty of times those people are female, but I've never had any desire to be an action hero. (I do like pants though.)
But I suppose there's a reason books about gender always leave me depressed. Our ways of dealing with gender -- hell, even just thinking about gender -- are seriously fucked up, and there're no uber-powerful compassionate aliens coming along to free us any time soon.
ETA, 6/28: My review is up now.