Some Thoughts on Sex and Gender in Dune
Frank Herbert’s Dune Chronicle is a series of science fiction books that deal with multiple themes, but central to every book is the longevity of humanity as a species. The series begins in a future so distant that Earth exists only as a memory of a mythological past. In spite of this, human society has regressed to aristocracy. Technology and culture are stagnating. Civilization has allowed itself to become entirely dependent on the spice melange, a little-understood substance that can only be mined in small quantities on one highly dangerous planet. The wise can see that we are headed for disaster and a revitalization is needed. Frank Herbert views both gender roles and sexual intercourse as essential aspects of the human experience that must be optimized for our continued survival; however, his limited view of gender and sexuality hinders his exploration of the topic.
Gender
Playing a critical part in the plot of all Dune books are the Bene Gesserit, a pseudo-spiritual organization of women who have honed their bodies and minds to perfection. The Bene Gesserit take advantage of the mind-expanding properties of the spice melange to awaken their ancestral memories. In the world of Dune, the memories of one’s ancestors are contained within one’s genes. The Bene Gesserit figured out that women were capable of unlocking these memories by taking a massive overdose of melange. Those who survive this process become Reverend Mothers within the Bene Gesserit order. There are two limitations to this awakening that trouble the Bene Gesserit. The first is that the Reverend Mothers are only able to interact with the memories of their female ancestors. They are aware of the presence of male ancestors to some extent, but no one has been able to access them. The second issue is that no man has ever survived the spice agony.
The Bene Gesserit believe that awakening the full ancestral knowledge of humanity is critical to ensuring the future of the species. To this end, they begin a “breeding program”. Through generations of controlled pairings, the Bene Gesserit hope to conceive a male capable of surviving the spice agony. This male will have access to both sides of his genetic line and will become the “Kwisatz Haderach.” (This is a bit of a tangent, but the term Kwisatz Haderach is taken from a Hebrew term in the Kabbala “K’fitzat ha-Derekh”, (קְפִיצַת הַדֶּרֶךְ) literally, “The Leap of the Way,” which is used to describe traveling a great distance instantaneously and/or being in two places at once). The Kwisatz Haderach will then guide humanity to its next stage. The first three Dune books are the story of the Kwisatz Haderach, Paul, awakening his powers and rejecting his role, only to have it embraced by his son who leads humanity down the ominous Golden Path.
The Bene Gesserit are an obvious starting point for any analysis of gender and sexuality in Dune. Frank Herbert makes the Bene Gesserit, arguably, the most powerful political faction in The Empire. They wield their power subtly while cultivating a mystical reputation. The Bene Gesserit have mental and physical skills that are highly sought after by the nobility of The Empire. The Bene Gesserit offer their services as teachers, concubines, advisors, and lie detectors. In this way, they gain access to powerful players that they can influence to their own ends. The men who employ the Bene Gesserit often fail to realize that they are not the ones calling the shots.
Herbert clearly respects the Bene Gesserit and sets them up to be the physical and intellectual match of all but the most powerful beings in the Dune universe. The Bene Gesserit are defined by femininity. Their highest-ranking members are called “Reverend Mothers”. Their ability to control their fertility, down to the chromosomes of the fetus, and to personally act as the vessels through which the breeding program happens, is critical to their whole organization. Men who have some understanding of their abilities disparagingly call them “witches”.
Frank Herbert’s feminist ideas have always been somewhat undermined by a kind of “men are from
Mars, women are from Venus” mentality. Early in Dune, he positions the Spacing Guild as the opposite of the Bene Gesserit.
“We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function.”
Herbert, Frank. Dune (p. 18). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
“Politics,”
It isn’t explicitly stated that guild navigators must be men, but all navigators featured in Frank Herbert’s Dune books are men. The guild navigators also consume massive quantities of the spice and are physically transformed. Unlike the Bene Gesserit, they do not awaken ancestral memories, instead, they gain limited powers of prescience. Unfortunately, as the series goes on the guild becomes rapidly less relevant. Frank Herbert then sets up the Bene Tleilax as a dark, masculine mirror of the Bene Gesserit.
Where the Bene Gesserit use subtle manipulations and seductions to produce carefully bred individuals, the Bene Tleilax use blunt genetic manipulation. The Tleilaxu have turned the female portion of their population into horrific incubators called “Axlotl Tanks.” The Tleilaxu masters are all men. They have created sterile, shapeshifting “face dancers” to serve them. In the Tleilaxu, we have the ultimate misogynists.
Herbert prefers the leadership of the Bene Gesserit to the Bene Tleilax, though they must work together against a common enemy in the later books. In positioning the Bene Tleilax and The Spacing Guild opposite to the Bene Gesserit, Herbert plays into a common bias that men tend to be more scientific and logical whereas women are more observant and intuitive. Herbert may be aware of this and is doing it intentionally. After all, the Bene Gesserit’s domain is politics and Herbert worked in political speechwriting and clearly had a strong interest in politics. And of course, there is Paul.
“You didn’t want a son!” he said. “You wanted a Kwisatz Haderach! You wanted a male Bene Gesserit!”
Herbert, Frank. Dune (p. 317). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
She recoiled from his bitterness. “But Paul….”
Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach, the male Bene Gesserit, capable of awakening all ancestral memories and guiding humanity to a new age. To achieve this state, Paul must master both the blunt masculine role of a battle commander and the more subtle Bene Gesserit arts of observation and self-discipline. In Frank Herbert’s world, men are more inclined toward certain aspects of the human experience and women are more inclined toward others; however, the full spectrum of human experience, both the masculine and feminine, must be incorporated into the Kwisatz Haderach to unlock their superhuman abilities. When Paul transcends his humanity, he is also transcending gender.
But Paul is a failure. Paul is the first to see what must be done to preserve humanity but rejects the path. Paul’s love for Chani blinds him. The love of a man for a woman grounds him in his humanity. To become the savior of humanity Paul would need to separate himself from the species. He would need to abandon his role of husband and father and become something truly alien: an incarnate God. This is something that his son, Leto II, comes to understand. Unlike his father, Leto II embraces The Golden Path.
Paul’s shoulders sagged. “You cannot,” he whispered. “You cannot.”
Herbert, Frank. Children of Dune (p. 516). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
“I am a creature of this desert now, father,” Leto said. “Would you speak thus to a Coriolis storm?”
“You think me coward for refusing that path,” Paul said, his voice husky and trembling. “Oh, I understand you well, son. Augury and haruspication have always been their own torments. But I was never lost in the possible futures because this one is unspeakable!”
“Your Jihad will be a summer picnic on Caladan by comparison,” Leto agreed.
Leto II combines his body with the sandtrout, becoming something other than a human. He will slowly metamorphose into a sandworm-like creature, living for thousands of years. During that time he will put humanity through hell. He’ll also put himself through hell.
“The Bene Gesserit believed they could predict the course of evolution. But they overlooked their own changes in the course of that evolution. They assumed they would stand still while their breeding plan evolved. I have no such reflexive blindness. Look carefully at me, Farad’n, for I am no longer human.”
…
“I will use you well, that I promise,” Leto said. He leaned forward. “Did I not say I’m no longer human? Believe me, cousin. No children will spring from my loins, for I no longer have loins. And this forces my second treachery.”
Herbert, Frank. Children of Dune (p. 601 – 602). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There is a double reason for this focus on Leto’s descendants and his lack of loins. On one hand, it shows how his new breeding program will differ from the Bene Gesserit’s. On the other, it shows his own sacrifice. Paul failed because he found Chani. He had his other half and would not sacrifice her, not even for all humanity. Leto will sacrifice his humanity, and his inability to have intercourse or produce children is the most potent symbol of that sacrifice. He will be forever alone.
Sexuality
Human reproduction has always been at the heart of Dune’s plot. Again, the Bene Gesserit and the Bene Tleilaxu act as opposite sides of the coin. The Bene Gesserit consider the reproductive act to be a sacred and essential part of their breeding program. No matter how repulsive the sperm donor is, sexual intercourse must be the manner of insemination.
“By artificial means only. That’s my offer.”
Herbert, Frank. Dune Messiah (p. 180). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The Reverend Mother closed her eyes to hide his face. Damnation! To cast the genetic dice in such a way! Loathing boiled in her breast. The teaching of the Bene Gesserit, the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad—all proscribed such an act. One did not demean the highest aspirations of humankind. No machine could function in the way of a human mind. No word or deed could imply that men might be bred on the level of animals.
“Your decision,” Paul said.
She shook her head. The genes, the precious Atreides genes—only these were important. Need went deeper than proscription. For the Sisterhood, mating mingled more than sperm and ovum. One aimed to capture the psyche.
To the Bene Gesserit, human beings conceived through means other than sexual intercourse are a violation of the proscriptions of the Butlerian Jihad. To create human life as one would create machine “life” is an affront. The Bene Tleilaxu exist on the extreme opposite end of this spectrum. They are genetic engineers who view the genetic code as the Language of God, which only they can speak.
No other people have mastered the genetic language as well as have the Bene Tleilax, he reassured himself. We are right to call it “the language of God,” for God Himself has given us this great power.
Herbert, Frank. Heretics of Dune (p. 65). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The Tleilaxu have all but eliminated sexual intercourse from their society. Tleilaxu society is comprised of three classes of human beings: The Masters, The Face Dancers, and The Axlotl Tanks. The axlotl tanks are what remains of Tleilaxu women. They have been reduced to incubators for The Masters’ genetic experimentation. Herbert was not subtle. The Face Dancers are non-binary shapeshifters, and they are sterile. Herbert hints that this reliance on artificial reproduction has robbed the Tleilaxu of their full spiritual inheritance.
“Not Face Dancers. They are mules, sterile. But their masters can breed. We have taken a few of them but the offspring are strange. Few female births and even then we cannot probe their Other Memories.”
Herbert, Frank. Heretics of Dune (p. 95). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Combined with the earlier quotation in which the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother explains that it is not only the genes but the “psyche”, that they wish to capture when creating new life, this inability to probe the Other Memories of the few Bene Tleilaxu females that they have managed to breed suggests that sexual intercourse is required to preserve the Other Memories. The spiritual role that sexual intercourse plays in Herbert’s science fiction series is almost at odds with his more cynical message about religion.
The Honored Matres are introduced in the final two books written by Frank Herbert. Like the Bene Gesserit, The Honored Matres are an all-female organization who have honed their bodies to perfection. Like the Bene Gesserit, they are masters of physical combat and sexual seduction. Unlike the Bene Gesserit, they do not have access to Other Memories. This is not because the Honored Matres do not engage in sexual intercourse, it is because they lack the spice melange. The drug they use as a substitute seems to foster anger and arrogance in exchange for heightened focus rather than a heightened awareness that comes from the spice. Lacking the combined wisdom of generations past, the Honored Matres have developed techniques of sexual domination that the Bene Gesserit consider to be a disastrous mistake.
Honored Matres have developed the ability to sexually dominate another person’s mind. Essentially, they make the other person addicted to a sexual experience that only they can provide. This breaks the Bene Gesserit’s cardinal rule of never becoming the objects of worship. The Bene Gesserit have learned from their Other Memories that humanity has a bad habit of killing its Gods.
Heretics of Dune sets up a new conflict in what was intended to be a trilogy. It establishes the Bene Gesserit as the inheritors of Leto II’s Golden Path. It introduces the Honored Matres as a threat, returned from The Scattering. Chapterhouse Dune will further develop the Honored Matres and give us hints of what happened out there and that the Honored Matres are, in fact, fleeing a greater threat. Throughout this planned trilogy, Frank Herbert doubles down on the sex. He paints sexuality as both a weakness, through which we can be exploited, and a bonding ritual, through which we can fully connect to others.
Frank Herbert died before finishing this trilogy. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have written a two-part conclusion based on Frank Herbert’s outline. In their conclusion, the threat that the Honored Matres have fled from is a thinking machine that escaped the Butlerian Jihad. I don’t have many nice things to say about the Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson Dune books. However, I do think that in broad terms, this is the ending Herbert was building toward. There are hints throughout the series that the dogmatic proscriptions of the Butlerian Jihad went too far. Humanity cannot put its head in the sand and pretend these things do not exist. We must deal with them.
Crucial to our ability to do that, and to remain human, is one of our most powerful bonding experiences: sex. I suspect that Herbert was trying to make some kind of point about how the human ability to join “as one flesh” is a significant advantage over the machine method of communion and reproduction. Unfortunately, that point would go unmade.
Queer Erasure
There is no easy way around this topic. For a man so committed to sex as a theme, Frank Herbert had a massive blind spot when it came to the sexual experience of a significant portion of humanity. The only sex that is taken seriously in Dune is heterosexual intercourse between fertile cis-men and fertile cis-women. There are numerous examples in which Herbert dismisses the humanity of so-called “mules”. At the same time, Frank Herbert viewed homosexual encounters as immature, at best.
“Duncan,” Moneo said, “it’s perfectly normal for adolescent females as well as males to have feelings of physical attraction toward members of their own sex. Most of them will grow out of it.”
Herbert, Frank. God Emperor of Dune (p. 442). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
“It should be stamped out!”
“But it’s part of our heritage.”
“Stamped out! And that’s not . . .”
“Oh, be still. If you try to suppress it, you only increase its power.”
At this point, I need to mention that I do not share Frank Herbert’s views on homosexuality as being more “adolescent” than heterosexuality. Any successful romantic relationship between consenting adults requires a high level of maturity no matter the anatomy involved. It is disappointing that Frank Herbert wrote a story in which so many characters must embrace practices that are distasteful to the dominant culture to awaken their higher consciousness, while simultaneously dismissing experiences that he found personally distasteful.
God Emperor of Dune is basically a series of Socratic dialogues. In the conversation above, Duncan Idaho is an out-of-date man arguing with the modern and sophisticated Moneo. While both men represent aspects of Frank Herbert’s experience, I believe we are meant to take Moneo’s side in this argument. Moneo views homosexual intercourse as harmless, but juvenile. It is less than heterosexual sex. This is a shortsighted take for someone who seeks to take the literal “God’s Eye View” of the human species.
Lack of Conclusion
I once said on the podcast that Frank Herbert writes like Chat GPT if it was trained exclusively on erotic novels and political speeches from the 1960s. I stand by that comment. One of my favorite things about Herbert is his aloof writing style. His attempt to tackle human sexuality in such a dry style and through the lens of political philosophy is, at times, ridiculous to read.
I believe that Frank Herbert was building to some sort of point with his second trilogy. In the absence of a conclusion, many of the sexual themes seem gratuitous. I would like to give Herbert the benefit of the doubt and say that he was not just a horny old man who went off the rails. At the same time, I think he was underprepared to write a trilogy in which sexuality and gender play such large roles. The content of Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune makes me worry that Herbert placed too great an emphasis on his personal experience and not nearly enough on the broader experience of all humanity in his conception of sexuality and gender.
While I do think it would have been far better than the conclusion that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson came up with, I doubt that Frank Herbert’s conclusion would have been satisfactory. I find some of the ideas about sex as a bonding experience and the mixing of gender roles within one being to be very interesting. I would love to have heard more about that in Herbert’s unique science fiction context, but I also believe that Herbert’s biases blinded him to the true Golden Path.
