"Well, in the Handdara...there's no theory, no dogma...Maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part." Tormer's Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words,
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words.
Ai brooded, and after some time he said, "You're isolated, and undivided. Perhaps you are as obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism."
"We are dualists too. Duality is an essential, isn't it? So long as there is myself and the other."
"I and Thou," he said. "Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex..."
"Tell me, how does the other sex of your race differ from yours?"
He looked startled and in fact my question rather startled me; kemmer brings out these spontaneities in one. We were both self-conscious. "I never thought of that," he said. "You've never seen a woman." He used his Terran-language word, which I knew.
"I saw your pictures of them. The women looked like pregnant Gethenians, but with larger breasts. Do they differ much from your sex in mind behavior? Are they like a different species?"
"No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women...women tend to eat less...It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even when women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do the child-bearing, and so most of the child-rearing..."
"Equality is not the general rule, then? Are they mentally inferior?"
"I don't know. They don't often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers. But it isn't that they're stupid. Physically they're less muscular, but a little more durable than men. Psychologically -"
After he stared a long time at the glowing stove, he shook his head. "Harth," he said, "I can't tell you what women are like. I never thought about it much in the abstract, you know, and - God! - by now I've practically forgotten. I've been here for two years...You don't know. In a sense, women are more alien to me than you are. With you I share one sex, anyhow..." He looked away and laughed, rueful and uneasy. My own feelings were complex, and we let the matter drop.