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alyazain an attempt to balance out my non-fiction reading imbalance (currently, 78% of my reading is non-fiction) i've been working on my backlog of fiction books to read. this is easier said than done—i'm rather selective with my fiction reading—and today's entry, Femlandia seems worth singling out as a good example of what i don't care for in fiction. calling this novel consistently bad would potentially be an overstatement of the case, but i don't like it and i would not recommend you seek it out. in writing this post, i've actually bumped it down a half-star from where i initially had it, in fact.
the blurb for this novel—which i will quote verbatim below—might already tip my hand as to the sorts of criticisms that are going to be had for this novel:
Miranda Reynolds always thought she would rather die than live in Femlandia. But that was before the country sank into total economic collapse and her husband walked out in the harshest, most permanent way, leaving her and her sixteen-year-old daughter with nothing. The streets are full of looting, robbing, and killing, and Miranda and Emma no longer have much choice—either starve and risk getting murdered, or find safety. And so they set off to Femlandia, the women-only colony Miranda’s mother, Win Somers, established decades ago.
Although Win is no longer in the spotlight, her protégé Jen Jones has taken Femlandia to new heights: The off-grid colonies are secluded, self-sufficient, and thriving—and Emma is instantly enchanted by this idea of a safe haven. But something is not right. There are no men allowed in the colony, but babies are being born—and they’re all girls. Miranda discovers just how the all-women community is capable of enduring, and it leads her to question how far her mother went to create this perfect, thriving, horrifying society.
this is because if you've spent any time learning about second-wave feminism, your takeaway from this blurb will probably be something like "'Femlandia' is going to be radical feminism taken to a logical extreme"—and you'd be correct, because that is exactly what it is. in the novel the eponymous Femlandia is essentially a rehashed-take on a lesbian separatist or radical feminist commune from the 1970s. unfortunately, the novel does not compellingly grapple with any of the innumerable purposes, problems, and political theories these communes produced.
the most obvious example of this comes when, upon arriving in Femlandia, our protagonist Miranda is forced to undergo what amounts to a gynecology exam (to prove she was "always a woman") to gain entry to the commune. i'm sure you can see where this is going, and it is played as follows:
I’m flummoxed. “You need a half-assed gynecological exam to satisfy yourself I’m a woman? Really?”
Kate frowns at me, creating lines in a forehead that was, until a moment ago, smooth as a newborn’s. “I need to satisfy myself that you were always a woman.”[...]
“Sounds pretty exclusionary to me,” I say.
Kate shrugs. “Let me ask you something. You see how we are here, right?” She waves one hand over her bare breasts. “How free do you think we would be if we started letting in male residents?”
“If they identify as women, though—”
I’m cut off before I can finish. “They can identify as a fucking hedgehog for all I care. I’m talking about what they are. Not what they think they are or what they want to be. It’s a slippery slope. You let in one, you have to let in all. There’s a reason your mother called this place Femlandia. Get used to it.”
at face the trans-exclusionary positioning the novel takes here—which is used in the story to, in effect, violate every woman upon entry to Femlandia—is fine, and in fact would be a potentially interesting as a plot device, or alternatively as a commentary on the consequences of idealizing and essentializing womanhood. the problem is the novel does not do either of these things—in fact, it barely lingers on this detail; it barely considers the social and political consequences of such an essentialist policy (one that, again, victimizes women analogously to how the world outside Femlandia does); and it barely even addresses this detail in any real way after bringing it up. instead, Miranda does just kind of get over it despite her initial protestation, and the fact that this radical feminist commune is trans-exclusionary is taken for granted from then on because there are, as far as i can tell, no trans characters in the book. this is unfortunate. moreover, it's not very good writing, and it's a missed opportunity that directly leads to the novel's biggest problem: instead of, say, trans people being the mechanism through which the consequences of this type of feminism and separatism (and where they become misandry and bigotry) are explored, we instead get a frankly unconvincing and comically villainous level of man-hatred as a substitute.
Miranda's mom Win, for example, spends virtually the entire novel talking about men as if she is Valerie Solanas. i would call this exaggeratory but she literally kills her husband for being an annoying manchild and frames it as a suicide, and then flees when Miranda threatens to call the cops on her for this. she is rather obviously a beyond-the-pale evil character and unto itself that would not be a problem, but this is done in such an extremely silly and over-the-top way that it just cannot be taken seriously. it does not help that chapter after chapter of her rationale is anvil-blunt nonsense like this (directed in this case at Miranda for not being sufficiently misandrist)—
“I’ve known women like you. Some people call you deniers; some people call you other names. No reason to get into a name-calling match, though, so let’s just say it like it is. You’re the kind of woman who thinks that because a pile of shit didn’t fall on you, there was no pile of shit. It didn’t exist, right? It didn’t come crashing down out of the sky like a dump-truck load of manure and fall on anyone else. You didn’t get groped by an uncle or a priest or your own goddamned father, so no one else got groped. You didn’t wake up one morning and discover dried jism on your panties, so no one else woke up that way. You weren’t beaten because supper was late or cold or not what your wonderful Mr. Right had a craving for that evening, so no other woman took a beating.”
—that is simply not a compelling or convincing caricature of a radical feminist, or any coherent political belief besides blind misandry. it would not be convincing even if Win were just a husband-murderer and Femlandia an unusually misandrist women's commune, because the logic she uses wouldn't even justify that level of action on her part. but not content to just be a husband-murderer, Win's Femlandia is upheld by a grotesque, poor-man's-Omelas system—that Win signed off on, to be clear—wherein they abuse male children and young adults as a subhuman breeder class, fit only for their semen and otherwise treated as feral livestock, to perpetuate Femlandia in the absence of male residents. there is literally no logic that could justify this (or the evil it represents) and Win hardly even tries to do so narratively, instead upholding it through brainwashing and coercion.
the effect of this is that it collapses what could be a nuanced (or at least reasonably complex) story into a one-dimensional one—Win is just a monstrous person with no redeeming qualities and no understandable belief system. she is a frankly sociopathic character whose actions in the narrative amount to taking vulnerable women under her wing, secluding them, playing upon their worst traumas, and making them into her loyal subjects. making her into a narrative manifestation of feminism with these traits is, needless to say, something that must be executed with care—care that is not really taken here and which, as a result, makes it concerningly easy to read this novel as explicitly anti-feminist. i might even go so far as to say that, because Win is so explicitly misandrist and man-hating—an avatar of what "excessive" feminism might look like—that an anti-feminist reading is the default reading you would come away with here.
a friend of mine put it like this while i liveblogged this on Discord: "thinking generously this story has a place but i don't think the author has thought about it beyond a gross caricature of the ideology." in a lot of ways this novel's narrative is, at least in what it's trying to say, not much better than a 336-page Virgin vs. Chad meme. i do not like it when a novel reads this way.
i particularly do not like it here, because there is a lot to genuinely critique about radical feminism (especially modern radical feminism), political separatism, trans exclusion, and all the other things this novel tries to touch on with at-best mixed results. the lengthy article "On Wimmins Land" by Sasha Archibald comes to my mind here, with its voluminous paragraphs about the triumphs, but also the troubles, of separatist feminist communal life and the political theories upholding it:
Establishing rules was a quagmire. How best to collectivize labor when some participants had mobility issues? How to share childcare when not all women wanted to care for young children, and not all mothers wanted to cede control? Drug-use was central to some women’s spiritual practices, but a drug bust would bring policemen to the land. Some thought it wise to have guns — commonplace in this part of Oregon — while others were adamantly opposed. Zealous efforts to achieve fairness tended to sharpen the perception of unfairness, and anarchist-minded land-dykes never entirely agreed that rules were necessary. [...] Cabbage Lane started a monthly Singles Week, during which the names of lovers-to-be were drawn out of a hat. Residents at WomanShare used Tarot to decide who would sleep in what bed on a given night, while others maintained ménages à trois. Communal masturbation was not uncommon, and loud lovemaking declared one’s right to pleasure. [...] Men were unequivocally banned from women’s lands, but the question of when exactly a boy becomes a man constituted one of separatism’s great quandaries. Some collectives allowed male children under eleven years old, some none at all, some one male child but no more, and some drew the line at breastfeeding — after weaning, male infants had to go. [...] Trans women were perceived through the distortions of cis-gendered bias, and commonly characterized as men who were using disguises to penetrate women’s attempts at privacy. Some factions espoused outright transphobic violence.
and i think a better novel would grapple with these sorts of things instead of constantly lingering on a character's belief that "[...]men were animals. She would have called them pigs but found no reason to insult a perfectly good pig with the comparison. Hyenas, maybe. Jackals. Anything wild that ran in a pack and looked out for itself first. But not anything that could be considered cute, edible, or useful." or that character's hatred of dresses because they reinforce patriarchy or—to reiterate—that character's Omelas-like system that uses male children as breeders.
so it goes in fiction. there is necessarily a great deal of shlock and slop out there and to be a part of this mass is not the worst crime. as i said to start out, though, skip this one. or if you find my descriptions compelling enough to explore for yourself—and also want to read a novel i consider a trainwreck—go check it out of a library i guess. maybe Dalcher's other books are worth financially supporting her for; this one is not.