“Zeta smiled; she had to marvel at the hatred white men harbored for all women, even their own.” (704)

Like Megan, I noticed how the portrayal of sex for women in Almanac was very different from the scenes narrated from a male perspective. Despite the abundance of extremely graphic sex scenes that fill the book, the stories overwhelmingly feature men enacting the cruel acts, and almost exclusively men taking pleasure in them.

In minds of the male characters, the women who will have sex are devalued. Trigg, an angry paraplegic, will call the women who avoid sex with him by name, like Diane and Susan, but those who are tricked into his backseat are merely “panhellenic piggies.” (388) Also, the only female employee of Trigg’s biomaterials operation who earns recognition is Peaches, who has avoided giving Trigg sexual favors.

Only uncomfortable sex is described with insight to a female’s thoughts. Although Lecha has a pleasant, perhaps even mutual relationship with Root, it is described from his perspective. Another example of unpleasant sex is Alegría, the competitive architect who lost her career over an affair with a client. Her gratification from the relationship comes from material satisfaction, not physical, though she is obviously having sex with Menardo. Even after Alegría is married to Menardo, we hear her thoughts about despising sex with him, forcing herself to and even then positioning herself so she doesn’t have to look at him. The narrator provides Alegría’s thoughts just before or in the middle of sexual encounters with Menardo, so we are exposed to her discomfort and displeasure with sex.

It’s not as if she does not take pleasure in the act of sex itself. The narrator describes Alegría’s fantasies about Sonny Blue. The weird thing is that Sonny makes reference to having had sex with her, so the actual sex has occurred; it is not that she has only fantasized about pleasurable sex. She has had it during the events the book covers, but the narrator does not describe those acts. Why not? It’s not as though Silko seems particularly concerned about the length of her book, as it nears 800 pages, and she is not afraid of sex, as explicit torture porn and zoophilia are intimately explored. Silko seems to make a deliberate choice to keep the female characters unsatisfied.

Going back to our last discussion, where we talked about the discomfort and distancing style that is strongest at the novel’s start, I think the choice to describe sex as chore-like serves to further the effect. The women in Almanac are not very approachable, and their sex lives are only a part in that. An equally distancing technique is the names of the women themselves. For example, Zeta is merely the Spanish word for the letter “Z.” Instead of a full name the woman goes by a letter—can you be more devalued than being reduced to a single character?

Though alienation through name happens to the males too (El Feo, or The Ugly, comes to mind), the constant devaluing and denial of pleasure for women is more prevalent throughout the book.