Sorry this is so terribly late, but today I’m feeding the robot-building team at my son’s school, so before I sat down to write, I had to put four massive loaves of Italian Semolina bread in the oven. Then I had to come up with a one-paragraph pitch for Dead As A Doornail for the fourth Dyce mystery. The fourth Dyce mystery, you say? But I thought you were going indie with that.
Well, ’deed I was, but there’s this thing called an option clause, see. And if they come up to my price, I might yet write DAAD for them. I’m not doing it for 5k is all I have to say. It’s not practical. I could write a novel for Baen for 12k in the same time, so what’s the point? I have to live to. And I can do DAAD indie and have it out for xmas for all of you Daring Finds fans, only three months after A Fatal Stain. BUT before I decide or do any of that, the paragraph had to be sent out.
Then I had to send a novel to a second round of first readers, to figure out if I’m going nuts. (Long story.) And now I’m going to go make meatballs (a huge batch. It’s fifty kids! Teens.) So they’re ready to go in oven when bread comes out. (They cook in sauce.)
Why am I the one doing this while trying to work? Why doesn’t my husband do it? Well, first because I volunteered. And second because he has to work outside the house most of the time. Third because he makes more money and not because of “sexism” but because he took a degree that’s more profitable. (At least short term. My work is the retirement plan.) I can work in the house so I can fit in cooking for fifty. ALSO because I cook better meatballs. MUCH better meatballs.
Which brings us to… sexism in Heinlein. (You see what I did there?)
I am forever puzzled by the accusations of sexism swirling around Heinlein – and ONLY Heinlein of the authors of his era. But the accusations I heard at Cosine managed to be either new to me or framed in a way that was new to me.
First apparently what’s wrong with Farnham’s Freehold is that it’s sexist. (WHAT? I could list several things wrong with it, starting with the rather bitter tone of the main character. Okay, not wrong, but not my favorite book, ever. I prefer Sixth Column which does have racist hints (though Heinlein softened that by having Asian-American characters on the GOOD side) because it has a buoyant can-do tone. Again, I would not presume to criticize the master, but it will never be my favorite.) This because you know, in the book “some women prefer to live in harems.”
That sound you hear is my head hitting the desk repeatedly. Maybe if I get dizzy enough I can start thinking that way too. Look, tell me straight, are American-born-and-raised women TRULY this self-centered and filled with penis envy, or did they have to work long and hard to become this way? (Okay, update, I’ve simmered down and I apologize. I don’t mean ALL American born-and-raised women. I haven’t even MET them all. I mean the substantial portion of college educated bien-pensants who believe this nonsense.) My American born female friends aren’t this way, for which I SHOULD be grateful, I suppose. Of course, I’m selective. I try to pick people who think for themselves.
Let’s start from the top, okay? Yeah. Farnham’s Freehold, the civilizations that survived were those MOSTLY in Africa. I.e. Islam influenced. OF COURSE THEY HAD HAREMS. DUH. Double DUH with sprinkles. And of course women “liked” to live in harems. If you’re raised to believe that’s your rightful place, you believe it. I guess people here have read one too many fantasies where women in a mysogynist society suddenly, out of nowhere are heros and sword fighters and everyone follows them. Is that it? Right… The truth is Heinlein was more multi-cultural than the multi-culturalists. He didn’t as a matter of fact “clean up” other cultures. He just took them. (The cannibalism I could see them objecting to. The harems? How vagina-centric do you have to be that THAT’s the objectionable part? And the cannibalism, though I wouldn’t have put it in, is understandable/excusable in the context of a post-apocalyptic world.) Humans are infinitely adaptable, and they can be raised to like practically anything. That’s why sh*tty regimes subsist sometimes for centuries. In this same society male slaves who are too tall/big are castrated. BUT you don’t see any slave revolt so the males apparently have adapted/view it as a price of success. Should you say it’s sexist because males like being castrated? It’s as valid as saying it’s sexist because females like living in harems.
Yes, his ex-wife does love being the favorite of the local lord. I have news for you, some women do. I never understood it, perhaps because I’m put together wrong, but a lot of erotic romances and woman-porn concentrate on women in the submissive or owned role. And these are FOR women. Also, btw, I know several women who share a man and seem to think this is liberated. (It’s always a lousy man, too. Go figure.) And his wife/ex-wife is ALWAYS portrayed as damaged goods from the beginning and a serious case of passive aggression.
Don’t tell me, we’re not allowed to write women unless they’re perfect. Well! That’s going to make reading interesting. Not.
Then there was the critique that well, Heinlein was sexist because his women of the future wear aprons and enjoy being homemakers.
I have news for the generation before me. SOME women – perhaps a sizeable number – ENJOY being homemakers, at least while their children are small. In fact, this seems to be one of the major complaints of boomer females who decided that this means we’re “losing ground.” Listen – female liberation is the freedom to be what you want to be, not to be ersatz men-manque. I enjoyed being home with the kids. I simply used it to get my career off the ground. Would I have preferred it to be easier? Sure. But it was my choice to make.
As for “letting women down” or going back, again, listen, the gains made are technological and hinge heavily on the pill. The ONLY way we’ll go back is if we court societal collapse. And/or deny women alternatives so that some of them go running back into feudal servitude because it’s better than being forced to be what they’re not and don’t want to be.
And having intelligent women stay home and pursue non-traditional career paths is definitely better than the feral children raised in some of our bottom-rank child care facilities. Live with it. Besides, the same tech that gave us real liberation in the form of reliable contraceptives – well, its cousin, in electronic tech is going to have everyone working at home – if they choose – in the next ten years. In fact, Heinlein has that in The Rolling Stones. And that, IMHO is the best possible world.
Newsflash: Hormones matter. Yes, women will go gooey over babies and want to spend time with them. It has nothing to do with intelligence or capability. It has to do with tens of thousands of years of evolution. I am probably the least maternal of women except in my mama-bear form. I never thought I’d marry or have children, see? But having Robert was a revelation. If he cried, I stopped being able to think until he stopped crying. My husband? He could shut it off. I couldn’t.
Is true equality possible? Of course. First, change the hormones. But then you TRULY have men with vaginas, and who the heck wants that. I, for one, enjoy the living daylights out of being a female and not just in the horizontal planes. The fact that I can put on make up and make male-brains gooey is my revenge for the baby thing, okay? Yeah, as Heinlein said, the game is rigged, but it’s the only game in town. Play to win.
Next up – aprons – and this is where I cry. Listen the only reason women don’t wear aprons now has NOTHING to do with female liberation. What the heck is the thing with aprons, anyway? Is it that boomer women think the world started in the fifties and therefore when they think aprons they think heart shaped and laced edged?
For most of the history of the world men and women have worn something like aprons. My grandmother lived in an apron, and btw I’d have paid to have someone tell her that meant she was enslaved. (My grandmother was a lot like the grandmother in Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series, except she didn’t smoke.)
Aprons are what people wear when engaging in dirty, clothes-damaging occupations. And the only reason I don’t wear them that much – besides forgetting to put one on – is that clothes are cheap. At least used clothes.
Even the amount of normal house-stuff I do on an average day (when not cooking for fifty) is heck on clothes. Even light cooking. Flour and water Eat some fabrics.
If you read Patternson’s bio, you’ll find that Heinlein wasn’t used to things being cheap/disposable. Also, in his future there were a lot more people, and that meant scarcer resources.
I’m not saying Heinlein was NEVER wrong. He was wrong on population. And there are decisions he made in his future history I don’t like. That’s just life. But he wasn’t sexist.
Anyone who can decide Heinlein was sexist because future women wore aprons has one of two problems: Either they took one look down at age two and have ever since been screaming in mindless rage because they don’t have what their brothers have; or they have been sold a bill of goods and bought it cost.
If Heinlein is “sexist” what do we call other writers of the period. Say, re-read Asimov’s Liar, where apparently professional women are always repressed and easy prey for males in the lab. That’s NOT sexist? But Heinlein is?
Or perhaps some movements that sell victimhood hate Heinlein’s message of individualism, individual responsibility and individual freedom. And are trying to poison the well before you drink. I don’t know… as far fetched as THAT hypothesis is – because who, making a living out of victimhood would hate for the victims to walk off the plantation, after all? – it just MIGHT be true.
“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” Robert A. Heinlein
“Let it be said that I believe in the quote above man means woman also, by the rules of anglo-saxon grammar. And that in addition to governments and church, one should also consider any MOVEMENT who tries to restrict what you read as part of tyranny in the forming. Go you therefore and dare to read and think.” Sarah A. Hoyt
According To Hoyt 
Yeah the real problem with Heinlein is he forces you to think. For yourself. By yourself. And even worse to think about things like “responsibility” and “honor”. And not being a dependent.
It does occur to me that the Heinlein is Sexist crowd should be forced to read Glory Road. Then tell me he’s sexist. Star is female, rules N universes, and can also outfight almost anyone. Part of the problem is GR is that Oscar ends up being a house-husband without any children or even a house to look after. Really they’re the perfect DINK couple.
Apart from that I’d suggest Friday but they’d scream about rape and miss the point. Or Starship Troopers where they’d scream about fascism and miss the point. Or … Oh heck they can go and read Stranger in a Strange Land where women can’t get raped anymore and life is wonderful
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Heinlein was a horrible man in the sense that like Cassandra, he has a tendency to be right (not ALWAYS. See, population, for instance.). I might never forgive him for having come up with the crazy years. In which I’m forced to live.
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Harry Stein in his book _How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy_ talked about how his wife’s “friends” were so shocked to hear that she planned to stay home to raise her new baby.
Of course, they blamed Harry but apparently it was her decision. [Wink]
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I had friends who were furious at Dan when I refused to have an abortion after my pregnancy with Robert turned very dangerous (rampant pre-eclampsia. I was in hospital every week.) Never occurred to them that after six years of infertility I WANTED that baby. I don’t think Dan and I ever even discussed it. He knew my views on the subject, and had he tried to argue, it would probably be the other way, since he didn’t want to be a widower. But my life is mine to risk, and I AM a free woman. I am free because I choose to be free.
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H. Beam Piper did a good job of writing female characters in the Golden Age. He may have used the term “girl” to refer to women but he *treated* them as equals in his stories. Equal in the sense they weren’t all superhuman and uber-competent– they had the same range of competency as the men (and they could be dumpy-looking if they wanted to!). Asimov, bless his heart, had problems writing female characters and knew it. My problem with Heinlein is he couldn’t see past the cultural assumptions of his era that he accepted subconsciously and then extended to the glorious future. If you’ve got robots and computers, why would all miners be male? I remember reading Star Beast and loving it until the end, where he wrote something about John Thomas being “master in his own home” (having enforced his no-radical-makeup rule on his new bride). Brought me up short, even at my young age. Then I noticed that while the women were intelligent (to be worthy of the men) they were not allowed to be *more* intelligent than the men (Have Spacesuit Will Travel). I still love early Heinlein, I just read him with my cultural blinders on–like I do with Victorian novels. I don’t think Heinlein meant ill, and if asked would have said he loved and respected women–but that respect was anchored in unstated and limiting assumptions. Eventually it became so noticeable in his writing I stopped enjoying it and stopped reading it (right at the pool orgy scene in Stranger in a Strange Land, actually..)
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Sabrina,
With all due respect — All miners would be male because it’s dirty, difficult work. Traditionally that’s male. Yes, women can do it, but you’re talking about gen-modded or outliers
And SIGH on HSSWT. HOW IN LIVING DAYLIGHT can you read that and think Peewee is dumber than Kip? She’s younger, but she’s much smarter — a wild genius, in fact. See what I mean about bill of goods? Go read it again. I’ll wait. It’s you who have blinders on.
As for the orgies and free love…. Oh, please. That was the sixties, and they were a continuation of a trend from the twenties at least (I’ve been reading a lot about the period between the wars, including biographies.) THEY THOUGHT that humans would free themselves of all “animal” stuff like jealousy and enjoy sex without guilt and severally. Stranger reeks too much of the sixties to be my favorite, but for the record, it was NOT in limiting assumptions, but in imagining humans were angels. Male and female. If you read carefully there’s a certain amount of bisexuality baked in that cake. I suspect the thing about Mike not being gay was put in to avoid being crucified in that day and age.
PLEASE remove your indoctrination blinds and read Heinlein again. Was he wrong on some things? Sure he was. Human. He might be “daddy” but he’s not G-d. Was he “limiting women?” PLEASE. One of the things I disagree with him on is his WORSHIP of women. I tend to like men better. But that too might be biologically rooted.
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In fact, he explains that the lasers are too heavy for the average woman. If you’re going to say they could be gen modded — in a penal colony????? And besides, gen modded women to have the muscles of men aren’t women. They’re men with vaginas and occasionally breasts.
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I have read it. With respect, I have done dirty, difficult work, for months at a time. Didn’t die from it, still have full function in all my fingers and toes ;-) Yes, I’m female and always have been. Not gen modded or of “unusual” genotype. I routinely lift more weight at the gym than most of the men, because a) I have the build for it and b) I’ve been lifting for a while. Yes, there are MANY women who do competitive powerlifting and can lift more than ME. I have no problem with aprons, for the record. Please don’t discount my experiences–it might not have come through but I am not attempting to discount yours at all. Just saying if there is “choice” but only one allowable option, there really isn’t a choice, is there?
I like a good orgy as well as anyone (checks to make sure Mom is offline …) but there should be (cough) something for everyone. I didn’t see what all those smoking hot women were getting out of the swimming pool scene, really! I wasn’t shocked, I was BORED. That was the unforgivable sin in my eyes. Good grief, a boring orgy?? Where were the smoking hot guys for them to play with? That’s a pretty one-sided liberation. Yes I know the 60s were all about experimentation. Why couldn’t a smart guy like Heinlein experiment in a direction that wasn’t so very well-trodden? Why not speculate about future cultures where women weren’t actively discouraged from being strong/lifting weights, and they discovered they *could* be strong enough to lift lasers? (Which I also have experience with …) I get it, you want to defend Heinlein from some pretty silly accusations. More power to you. My very minor point was Heinlein *was* hampered by the culture of his time and it showed. He’s not evil. You aren’t evil (at least not about Heinlein…). I’m only evil on alternate Tuesdays.
Peewee was very smart but she wasn’t in charge or making the plans, was she? Yes, younger. But not smarter. She knows things but her actions don’t improve her situation and she has to be rescued, instead of doing the rescuing. Please, don’t put me in the bin with the Apron-Haters!
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Sabrina,
I think you may have a few wires crossed, here. Dirty, dangerous work is one thing. Dirty dangerous work in a penal colony… The people in charge will segregate or they’ll have serious discipline issues. That’s simple human nature – and that’s before you take little things like bathroom facilities into account. Yes, I’ve been the only female in a dirty, dangerous job.
I’d disagree that he was hampered by his time. He was a product of his time, and like any visionary had blind spots relating to that. Once again, that’s human.
Oh, and Heinlein did speculate on cultures where women weren’t discouraged from anything (Friday, among others). He speculated on what might happen if there was no genetic reason for the incest taboo. He wrote women in charge in Number of the Beast, among others. Oh, but those are his “dirty old man” books, so I guess they don’t count.
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I may have missed a title here, skimming comments too quickly, but so far as I know the only penal colony with mining in any RAH novel is in Moon, da cobber? A penal colony about which it is asserted the transportees had a M/F ratio of around 20:1?? And you think the only reason for mining being a pretty much entirely male job is the work is hard and dirty??? I theenk maybe it is because women were too precious a resource to risk.
As for aprons, I could assert a male ancestor of mine always wore an apron at work … and nothing else except a thong. AND it was leather. Yumm. But I don’t actually know whether any of my ancestors were blacksmiths.
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I enjoyed all the early Heinlein I read. His women were quite strong in the way that could be accepted at the time he was writing. He had to sell, after all. (Gene Roddenberry said he had to fight to get female crewmembers on the Enterprise in Star Trek, and that was the 1960s). I found Heinlein’s women way better than most and have fond memories of many of them.
But, while I haven’t read the book in question, I have read interviews with women in Islamic countries and they don’t seem to be wild about living in harems one bit – and I’ve read enough history to know that at best, most women accept a reality because they had no choice, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it. When I hear that “women enjoyed living in harems,” my admittedly-too-sensitive-radar in these matters suspects dirty-old-man syndrome. I’m not wild about later Heinlein females, after he discovered sex, and calling his later female characters sex objects was putting it mildly, as I recall. They turned me off Heinlein. But that was the sixties, too, and he wasn’t alone. I try not to judge things out of their time.
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Laurie, if you dig around a bit, you won’t have trouble finding Islamic women who will tell you that burqa and hijab and things like not being allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia are desirable and liberating. One of my best friend’s daughters converted to islam — just as she graduated from a Women’s Studies program, I swear to Gods — and has tried on several occasions to sell me on this. I’m not buying, but what’s important is that she is.
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I don’t know much about harems, but it seems to me that they represent an essentially female-dominated sub-culture within an ostensibly male-dominated uber-culture.
Think about it – one guy is going to want sex only so often, especially when it is available for the asking. And the harem members otherwise have plenty of free time (and are ONLY harassed by the dominant male, not by all men in the society) and relatively low requirements (they ain’t doing the housework or serving as field hands.) From what I know of female small-group dynamics it seems likely that any complaints about harem life arise from the impositions inflicted by the dominant wife, not the husband.
Might be entirely wrong, but it strikes me as being as valid an interpretation as t’other. Clearly the harem is a viable social institution (for that matter, so is slavery) whether I approve or no — it occurs too widely in human culture for it to be otherwise.
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Like a lot of things in human society, harems arise from inadequate resources. One of the main drivers for social arrangements is the remarkable metabolic burden of child bearing. If a resource-poor society indulges in free love or even universal pair-bonding, the women are likely to be continually pregnant. That not only grows the society rapidly, likely exceeding the available resource base, it also weakens the women, making it more likely that their babies will be weak or somehow defective.
Harems take a lot of women out of the continual rat-race of child bearing, meaning that they produce fewer babies, but that the ones they do produce are stronger, more likely to survive, and less likely to have birth defects. The two major downsides are lack of genetic diversity, because more children are the offspring of fewer fathers, and the resulting surplus of males, which has a lot of knock-on effects, the most prominent one being a concentration on violent forms of competition for status. Those downsides ultimately result in an effective ceiling on the achievement of a harem society — which is, in fact, what we observe in such societies today.
In my (so far only) book, I introduce a variant upon harem society. The women in it know nothing better, so find contentment within that context; when offered a liaison with a man from outside it some of them decide he represents an opportunity. I am amused rather than offended by the people who criticize the situation as being an example of Romantic Love.
Regards,
Ric
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On a tangent to your tangent, when I asked my favorite African (my husband) about harems in tribal villages, his response was focused on the other end of the spectrum – that harem life originated out of resource scarcity of men able to support wives and living long enough to do so. Between mischance, disease, hunting for dinner, defending the tribe and its cattle, going off in cattle raids against other tribes, and the perpetual low-level tribal war over grazing rights and watering holes, men have a much higher death rate than women.
He was quiet for a moment, then grinned broadly. “Of course, now that we are so much more civilized, it doesn’t matter as much. But men are always loath to let go of any power and possessions.”
PS – Bought your book on the strength of Sarah’s one-line recommendation – liked it, look forward to the next one!
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Sounds like I’d enjoy meeting your favorite African. He seems to have his head on straight, and could fill in a lot of the gaps in my direct knowledge.
Separating out “cause” and “effect” is hard, because in reality it’s a syndrome, in which effect feeds back to become another cause, and ’round and ’round it goes. He and I are saying pretty much the same thing, I think; I’m just focussing on a different part of the cycle as the “start” point. The basis, as I see it, is still reducing the number of pregnancies a woman has, so that she stays healthy and the babies she does have are more likely to be healthy themselves. The harem results in a surplus of unattached males, who are available for conflict; that creates its own necessity, as other tribes follow suit. Looking at it that way is useful in my world building. That doesn’t mean it’s 100% correct. I don’t think anybody is 100% correct about anything, and that definitely includes me.
Thanks for the good words about my book.
Regards,
Ric
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“Harems take a lot of women out of the continual rat-race of child bearing, meaning that they produce fewer babies, but that the ones they do produce are stronger, more likely to survive …”
Eh? What if in this harem society, it’s the survival and eventual dominance of your male offspring that determines your status, and ultimately how big a share of the harem resources you get? Damn few of your competitors’ sons will live to see puberty in that case. When this western outsider looks at it, she doesn’t see contentment–even for those brought up in it–but a rather savage and Darwinian competition. Fought by women, which means it’s a great deal uglier than anything men can visualize.
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From the society’s standpoint this assures the most capable males (for some values of capable) rise to dominance. Hell on the women, hell on the other kids, but in subsistence cultures pretty much everything is hell.
When analysing any cultural attribute the proper focus is not on how segments of the culture are affected but on how the overall society is advanced. For example, primogeniture allows all royal siblings to eschew battles for precedence and saves the ascending ruler the trouble of depriving the culture of the genetic contributions of His siblings.
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Precisely.
The problem Kali notes is, in fact, real — there are several such situations cited in The Thousand Nights And A Night, for instance. In most cases it was/is handled by getting children, male and female, out of the harem as soon as they could/can function. The problem was therefore mostly confined to the harems of the elite, the Sultans and such, whose kids couldn’t mix with the hoi polloi for reasons of status. That leads to some exciting (and generally lascivious) stories.
Enough. Discussion of such matters is often complicated by concentration on one aspect, especially one that doesn’t match the way we do it (which is Right, by definition, eh?), to the exclusion of the overall system’s effect.
Human societal ethics and mores are evolved in exactly the same way physical characteristics are, except that Lysenkoism is a real force — change the society somehow, and its successors will inherit the changes. What that means is that societies change to adapt to the challenges in their environment, and some of the adaptive behaviors look very strange to those who haven’t had to respond to those particular forces. Imagining that things that look bad to us were simply invented by villains and imposed for their own satisfaction is stupid egotism. That doesn’t mean some societies aren’t better than others, but watch out for the definition of “better”, and don’t expect changes to come fast, especially if the pressures that resulted in the behavior(s) you don’t like are still present.
Regards,
Ric
Regards,
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Actually, this assures the male with the most ruthless mother rises to dominance. And it’s to her benefit to retain control of him for as long as she lives. As to whether it’s to any society’s benefit to be ruled by a vicious woman with limited education, ambition, and horizons, history has its examples, and they’re not pretty.
And yes, I can look at cultural practices of the Other and make a frowny face, even those practices are ultimately to a society’s benefit. In this case, the benefit is preventing excess women such as widows from starving. It’s better than burning them to death, and not as good as giving them a tittle of property to support themselves with.
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However they evolved, when you look at real women today in polygamist cultures, the status of the women is always far far lower than the men, lower than similar societies that are monogamist. Women are far more likely to be treated as property. When you read accounts by women in these societies, they aren’t happy with it. There’s little hope of romantic love, there’s little chance at any deep pair bonding, and very few women who love a man are going to be fine seeing him with another woman. They accept it because they have no choice.
As far as Heinlein, my point is that he’s really writing male oriented sex fantasies. I don’t have a problem with male oriented sex fantasies, but I’m a straight female and they’re a turn-off for me, particularly the usual female sex robot characters. (Women have their own versions that I expect would turn off a lot of men, btw.) I don’t mind someone writing a story about a polygamist society, even a positive one, but if you tell me all the women love it and would choose this, I’m going to roll my eyes and put the book down.
Heinlein wrote some pretty great women in his early books, though. Someone told me he had a severe medical problem, like a stroke, that gave him a personality change and that’s why the later books are so different.
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Er, Laurie? Did you actually read the posts you’re replying to? The point in those posts is that when the women in the polygamous societies have no idea there are any alternatives they tend to make the best of their situation. It’s a rare person who can’t find some source of contentment if not happiness in even the most appalling circumstances. Human nature, donchaknow?
Heinlein did not write “male oriented sex fantasies”. He’d probably have made a whole lot more money if he had. Females who like sex with a man they care about is hardly unusual. Writing about females who like sex with a man they care about does not equate to “the usual female sex robot characters”.
Oh, yes, and there’s a difference between “women who don’t have much choice find ways to be content and to tell themselves this was what they chose” and “all women love it and would choose it”. You don’t seem to be able to see it.
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No, Laurie. John NORMAN wrote male oriented sex fantasies. Unless you presume all men are bisexual, Heinlein’s idea that bisexuality was healthy (Number of The Beast) is a very odd way to the human heart. Please. Saying “I don’t like him” is fine. Saying “He wrote male oriented sex fantasies” diminishes YOUR intellect, not his work. He was doing his best to project what society would be like when sex was completely divorced from reproduction. We’re heading there fast. It’s a necessary exploration. BUT OTOH it discomfits Mrs. Grundy and her daughters, doesn’t it?
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I’m sorry, Laurie. That was unwarranted of me. OTOH your comments tend to be otherwise cogently reasoned (even if the premiss sometimes fails) and you could say “male oriented sex fantasies” was unworthy of you. Look, Heinlein might have shocked you in the seventies or eighties, but he’s less graphic (and less daring) than most REGENCY romances published now. I swear. (Often, but that’s besides the point.)
One of the things you have to understand, though, is that I LIKE late Heinlein not for reasons having to do with sex, but having to do with how humans relate. Yes, a lot of it, particularly as relates to orientation is silly “canelization” is a seventies psych term. But he wrote in that time, so… The sex in Heinlein didn’t even register as sex to me as a young girl, because I was reading a lot of the new wave which is a lot more graphic but doesn’t get called on it because they’re “progressive” I guess.
And you know, every author will have books/series/phases in his/her career that fans don’t like. Or some fans don’t like. I hate Pratchett’s Death cycle, for instance. But just because you don’t like some of Heinlein, you don’t need to BURY him.
Anyway, sorry. It was an unwarranted comment on my part and sort of gut level reaction to what struck me as an unwarranted insult.
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It took me a very long time to reach the age where I grasped the difference between “I don’t like this” and “This is not good.” To return to my earlier point about Heinlein, I definitely believe that many of his critics start at “This doesn’t work for me” and travel to “Here is why it shouldn’t work for anybody.”
The perfect novel has not been written (well, there is one, but it was published in 1813 and nobody has matched it since.) ANY author, no matter how capable, will have characteristic tics, flaws and blind spots. It is probably not a good idea to focus on these as reasons to dislike writers or their works. It certainly isn’t productrive to engage in interwebs arguments over whether or not Heinlein (or any author) hated or loved women. Authors write to an audience (at least those wishing to make a living at it do) and they can only push an audience so far — any SF fan ought be able to name a half dozen “unbelievable” characters who are based on real people, dialed down to believability. It makes as much sense to blame the audience as the author, so let’s do neither.
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RES,
honestly, my issue is that I get put on panels — and once on the Tor online symposium — where everyone else has agreed Heinlein is — take your pick — racist, homophobic or sexist, MOST of the time without having read him and OFTEN by comparing him to current day norms and prejudices. This p*sses me off, and it has to come out somewhere.
EVEN if I didn’t like Heinlein, that type of brainless group “think” brings out the worst in me.
Also, I’m turning fifty at the end of this year and I’m starting to think that in the course of the normal life cycle of a female, I’m lessening my ability to suffer fools gladly. Hopefully I can get through the next five years without berserking-out at a con, but it would really help if people stopped trotting out the same OLD, flawed arguments, because I ain’t no saint, and I’m getting less so by the month.
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S.H., you’ve my sympathy. I’m further along that slope and can assure you the fools become no easier to suffer, it is just that eventually you give up any hope of being able to smack them upside the head hard enough to jar their brains back into function mode. But nobody is putting me on Con panels as a ritual sacrific … (ahem) as a token Heinlein defender.
I maintain that disrespecting RAH says more about the disser than about Heinlein, and the only appropriate response is to congratulate their ability to parrot ill-understood ideas about which they’ve obviously no comprehension. YOU CANNOT REBUT THEIR COMPLAINTS. As Thomas Sowell reminds us, “A man cannot be reasoned out of a position he did not reason himself into.”
Therefore the only appropriate response is to embarrass them for advocating such idiocy. To quote General George S. Patton: “When everybody thinks alike, nobody’s thinking.”
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“You can make something idiot-proof, but eventually someone will just make a better idiot.”
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women in a mysogynist society suddenly, out of nowhere are heros and sword fighters and everyone follows them
Joan of Arc! …which is more along the lines of: some people just break all the rules. >_> And get killed for it. :(
I figure that… There’s sexism all around. People are steeped in the particular forms and potencies it takes in their times. (And it’s not simple, either. E.g., is a dominatrix female-superior, or is she pandering to the male submissives? Which is a question meant to illustrate the Complex Situation, not to be answered!!! >_> ) The interest lies in how much people rise above what they’re steeped in. Sometimes there’s real gems. Sometimes there’s real head-meet-wall moments. Sometimes they’re in the same book, the same page, the same paragraph, the same sentence.
Heinlein reflects the era he grew up in, and the privileges he got from being who he was at the time (and the drawbacks), and his experience with his… wives, plural, as I recall? (Sequentially, not concurrently.) The last of whom was apparently uber-competent, and, if I recall correctly what I’ve read, could not have children, which saddened her.
So if I were going to accuse Heinlein of anything, it might be that a number of his female characters were drawn a little heavily from his wife, rather than reflecting more of the bell-curve of female competencies and personalities. And I wouldn’t accuse real loudly, ’cause stars know, I might have a few major guy characters floating around who are drawn rather heavily from my husband… *cough*
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Good heavens, you’re exactly right. I don’t know if this is well known, but I talked to Ginny in the last… five? Six years of her life. I have met smart people. Many of my friends are geniuses and my kids qualify by test (My husband too, but it’s in math, so I can talk to him on the other stuff.) Ginny was WITHOUT EXCEPTION the most brilliant and best read human being I ever talked to. Needless to say it would influence his view. And like you I get a little tired of trying to measure to that standard, when I read his books. I was always afraid if he met me he’d look down on my far from perfect self…
On the “serial multiple wives” — I think Grace in Farnham’s Freehold is drawn from his second wife. Hence people thinking he’s mysogenist for having her in there. “BURNED” is not the same as mysogenist.
I’m not sure I’d talk of privileges attaching to his time, though. Seriously, I’m not. No, “male privilege” is always a slippery thing and I think a construct. To the extent the past is knowable, yes, men his time got some uplift. If you wanted to work as a woman, you were consigned to some odd stuff. Ginny, with an engineering degree, worked for a time as a typist, for instance. BUT we have no idea how privileged we are in relation to people in his day, period. One of the things that got me in the Patterson bio was that Heinlein and one of his sisters used to fight over a pillow. A pillow for crissakes. Because there weren’t enough to go around. Picture THAT. Even for the woman (me) who was born to a house where there was no bed for her, and who was therefore forced to sleep at her grandma’s till her parents built the “new house” when she was six (unless my brother slept at grandma’s, in which case I got to sleep in his bed) something no family today would consider a viable arrangement, his childhood seems INCREDIBLY deprived. The past is not just a different country, it is VERY very poor.
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Oh, as part of this. She was his first reader/editor. She read all his stuff. When people say things like “He couldn’t write women” — rolls eyes — they’re saying she didn’t know what it was like to be a woman. Because, listen, when I write guys and it’s not right? My husband tells me. Ditto with women — which I’ve done a few times. So…
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You’re right, of course – these days too many people fail to appreciate, by historic norms, how truly wealthy we are. Men used to own two collars, not two shirts, for chrissake! The effects of mass production of cheap consumer goods are profound beyond description.
As to “male privilege” — well, it often came with significant offsets, and arguing the point is pointless. A favourite line from The Right Stuff applies here: “We’re busy arguing pussy when the problem is monkey.” Until rather recent history life, even for the “privileged” was nasty, brutish and short. Not even the Egyptian pharaohs enjoyed the lifestyle of modern Welfare recipients, much less the bourgeoisie.
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Oh, I’m sure he had various privileges — relatively able-bodied (had all his fingers to write with!), male, etc. — and I’m sure they came with drawbacks, and that he had experience with different non-privilege situations, too.. What the exact form those took, pro and con, is not something that I’d worry about debating, personally. I mean, it might be an interesting topic for a panel or something, to try to determine where his personal blind spots were (for lo, humans tend to have blind spots as a template disad; we need the points to buy other things…), but neither do blind spots make someone eeeeeeevil. (Not to mention that privilege has about a zillion different axes. …plural of axis, not axe.)
Interesting point that he might’ve put a non-sympathetic female character in who was drawn from reality, too. I’m sure there’s plenty of characters written by any number of authors, who’re drawn from someone the author knows…
And also an interesting reminder of the first reader/editor bit. I wonder if there might’ve been a certain amount of editorial bias going on. Being female doesn’t, after all, bestow the ability to telepathically access the life experiences and attitudes of all other women! She might’ve succumbed to the very common “if it’s true for me, it’s true for any [member of group I identify with; in this case women]” assumption, for all we know, and actively encouraged a certain amount of “uber-competent women who want to be mommies more than anything” as the default “Heinlein woman.” (Or she might not’ve. Lacking a time-window, who can say?)
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It is a funny (for certain values) fact of human nature that we tend to overvalue the privileges of others while undervaluing our own advantages — reverse that for hurdles: our mine were nearly insurmountable and demonstrate great character and fortitude while yours were trivial and easily overcome. My mountains, your molehills.
Certainly he had some privileges; after all, he got to attend Annapolis while women of his age cohort were denied. OTOH, based on what I recall of his experience there he might be inclined to argue over that being a privilege.
As to the First Reader analysis, I think the logic chain is: “this is true of me [and certain of my friends] so it is true of some women”, rather than “it is true of me therefore true of all women.”
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Yes, it is an often overlooked factor of bias to present only positive representations of a sub-group. And what people choose to challenge often illuminates aspects of themselves they would more wisely keep obscured.
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Why not speculate about future cultures where women weren’t actively discouraged from being strong/lifting weights, and they discovered they *could* be strong enough to lift lasers?
I am always bemused at criticism which amounts to “why didn’t the author write a different book?” I can remember a slew of criticism of Niven&Pratchett’s The Mote in God’s Eye because they placed it in an essentially feudal political universe. Why, the plaintive query, didn’t they think of things like “lords of labor” or something apparently more in keeping with how someone else wanted to imagine the future. I mean, write your own book; don’t expect others to write it for you.
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Niven & Pournelle wrote “Mote in God’s Eye,” I believe. *checks spine of the copy on my shelf* Yep.
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Beyond all that that on the moon the scarcity of women made them precious, so why WOULD they do the dirty, dangerous work. The feminism that goes “I too want to be abused like a man for no good reason” has always puzzled me a little, but then, I’m not a masochist.
And LOL. Your fingers autocompleted the P as Pratchett, but the combination has me grinning. I love all the authors involved but it’s still funny.
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I’m not sure how Pratchett would have written the Watchmakers, but I am certain it would make for great reading.
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I am inclined to think that much of the Heinlein criticism first arose from a dislike of his writing, and that the critics then looked for reasons to support their dislike.
Look, he was not only the field’s preeminent author, he was the writer who dragged the genre out of the ghetto. Anybody wanting to make their chops went after him, not mid-list SF writers. You wanna build a rep the big dog is the target. There be reasons why Heinlein was the subject of the first (and most numerous) critical analytical essays.
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Actually it’s a little more subtle than that.
Whether or not he felt that way privately, Heinlein’s work is resolutely internationalist. It assumes that individual sovereignties would be subsumed into the United Nations or some other world Government. That’s shown most baldly in Rocket Ship Galileo, but note that when Kip and Peewee get back from their excellent adventure, they meet with the Secretary-General of the UN, not the President of the US.
But — and it’s a crucial “but” — his depiction of the resulting society looks a lot like America extended (and improved in some ways). If you read the descriptions, the high school class in Tunnel in the Sky includes a somewhat-astounding variety of ethnicities — but people who don’t read closely might be excused from noticing that, because the students’ behavior is entirely whitebread, Midwestern bobbysoxer. Not a single Marxist firebrand in the bunch, which even contemporaneously was a suspension-of-disbelief item on the same order as the existence of the Gates.
That was and remains a direct slap in the face to that faction of Academia that, among other things, admired the USSR and considered the advantages of distributed capitalism over strong central planning to be the result of “unfairness”. In those days that faction was strong and growing, but had not yet achieved full dominance; it needed issues to polemicize upon, and Heinlein was a fairly easy target because it was relatively easy to pick bits out of context that could be inflated as failures of “progressivism”. Your example is an excellent one — RAH repeatedly made the point that many of the distortions in Lunar society resulted from the extreme sex ratio, but if you slide over that it’s easy to complain about, e.g., no female ice miners. If you will examine the situation closely, you will find that almost all the people making such out-of-context criticisms do so from an academic background or point of view, which takes the Progressive Narrative as axiomatic and ignores or deprecates any countervailing evidence.
This is not to say that dissing Heinlein was an important objective per se, but every polemicist needs a subject, and given that there were (and are) a lot of polemicists around <fx: buffs fingernails> every possible avenue could be and was exploited.
It’s actually quite encouraging to see analyses of Heinlein that contradict that set of views. It may, in fact, be possible that the two-generation dominance of pseudo-Marxism among academia and the elite may be coming to an end.
Regards,
Ric
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Oh Bog.
Personally, I find statements about authors like “Heinlein was sexist” to be so loaded with crap as to not be taken seriously. I don’t see how anyone can know if an author is sexist or not, short of actually asking them directly, and alas ol Bob is not around any more to take our questions. Assuming that one can accurately measure Heinlein’s (or any other author’s) intent based solely upon their fictional stories might make for a great panel at a con, but it is a steaming pile of poor logic.
The thing is, we don’t know why an author really wrote a character the way they did. We can only guess. They might be expressing the social norms of their time, they might be intentionally making a sexist statement, or they might have written the character another way and had it changed by their editor. Also, there are certain characters that are required to be “ist” by the very nature of the story.
For instance, I wrote a novel with a protagonist that is a catholic priest. Because he is a sympathetic character, I wrote him as a “good” guy. Based on that novel one could assume I was catholic, a believer, and/or supportive of the church; none of which is true. I didn’t write this character because I felt a particular way about the church, I wrote this character because that was what the story required to make sense.
One of the beauties of fiction is that it makes a great mirror to ourselves, but not every story is a great mirror for everyone. I’m okay with people saying they don’t like a particular book, or author. One should always be able to express one’s opinion. Heck, it happens to me quite often. Saying you don’t like a book or saying a book didn’t work for you is purely subjective, but subjective works on a personal level. Its okay to be subjective about yourself because you are the local expert on the subject. Saying you didn’t like a book because the author is sexist is just as subjective, only now you are blaming the author instead of pointing your fingers at the proper target; yourself.
And don’t get me started on “Have Spacesuit – Will Travel.” Grrr.
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Well, I get particularly annoyed people are blind to THEIR OWN bias. Which they are. Our current books are painfully peppered with misandry, far more than any golden age book could be said to have misogyny, but … speck in neighbor’s eyes, mote in one’s own… you know…
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Well, heck, when it is your own bias it is the result of analysis, facts and and commonly held knowledge. Duh.
Heinlein was not a perfect writer nor a perfect human being. Neither are his critics. OTOH, he was probably the most important* SF writer of a period covering at least three decades (debate amongst yourselves) and, almost single-handedly made SF a significant literary field. (It is not unreasonable to dispute this, but there is no other writer about whom one could even make a case.)
While his critics may justifiably argue he has feet of clay, that is in part because they can see no higher, not even coming up to his knees. I do not take seriously the complaints of the ankle-biters.
*And yeah, how you define “important” is part of the debate. I am a baseball/sabremetrics fan of longstanding and can assure you that the answer to “Who was the greatest hitter” depends on how you define “greatest hitter” more than any other element.
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see, my vision is much simpler — do I agree with everything he wrote? Oh, h*ll no. For one I disagree with him on population. (One of my hobby horses is the growing conviction net population is already falling and the rest is lies, damn lies and statistics. Do I have proof? Heck, no. But I have anecdotes and hunches.) BUT — when I learned about SF/F, I read him, enjoyed, and stood in wonder in front of his creations. And now, three decades plus on, when I’m an author with 21 books under my belt (about half sf/f) I stand in exactly the same place, staring in wonder at his creations and knowing that if I live a hundred years and work very hard I might ONE DAY be half as good. (Okay, I flatter myself. MAYBE a third as good.) AND that’s where I am. How can I point the flaws in the Mona Lisa, when all I can do are metaphoric stick figures?
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Exactly.
When I read his work I find things that really do not fit anymore in today’s world, but must have fit back when he wrote them. These are usually the little things: a description of cooking or the way his characters use a computer. To me these are the all on the thin surface layer of a story, like the tough skin on an otherwise soft tomato. The underlying structure; the plotting and character development, is still bold, beautiful, and sweet.
Just like you cannot read Shakespeare without the footnotes to clue you in to all the political double entendres of his day, some of Heinlein’s work will eventually need the same treatment. But I suspect we’ll still be reading him well into the future because the meat of the story is still just as firm. Will he last anything as long as Shakespeare? I couldn’t even begin to guess. If his stories remain relevant to our children, and our grandchildren, then yes, he’ll have a heck of a chance.
Nothing can compare to to the artistic work one discovers in their youth. The bands are better, the foods sweeter, the girls (or boys) prettier, and the authors richer and more moving. Such imprinting coming as it does when our emotions are raw and everything is new. As such they can be quite powerful. I would never in a million years attempt to compete against them, or for that matter attempt to place a more modern work next to them. The words of Heinlein, the way he tells a story, they way he builds his characters, have so woven their way into my core that I simply cannot be objective about his work. It is both a source of strength to me, and an achilles heel. A blind spot based on love and caring.
Besides, the Mono Lisa’s been done already. There’s no need to visit that path again, especially where there are so many new things to paint.
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Heck, even I occasionally wear an apron. No laces though!
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I confess to not being a huge Heinlein fan, and have only read about a half a dozen of his books, but Farnham’s Freehold was far and away my favorite of those I’ve read, if I thought they were all like that I would own everything he wrote, instead of just picking up the cheap ones I see in a secondhand store to see if I like them. Starship Troopers read like a really good outline to me, but I got to the end of it and was still waiting for the good part. On the other hand probably his most famous (read controversial) book was Stranger in a Strange Land, and to me it was a bore, I had to try two different times to get clear through it, and probably the only reason I did is because there are so many references to it in books by authors I really like, and they make a lot more sense if you know what they are referencing.
Just because he isn’t one of my favorite authors doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good author though, and it definitly doesn’t mean he was sexist. I wonder what those critics that call him sexist and racist think of Edgar Rice Burroughs? If Heinlein bothers them so much, ERB must have them frothing at the mouth (and it might be best to not even mention John Norman in their presence;))
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LOL – I had contemplated citing ERB’s Tarzan books in this regard but had to refresh my memory. Certainly ERB’s depiction of many African tribes could support an argument of racism, and I would even be willing to defend the thesis of his racism — but in regard to the Aryan race, not any African race. Against all negative depictions of the African natives must be set his portrayal of the Waziri, the noble and admirable African tribe among whom Lord Greystoke lived.
OTOH, his portrayal of “civilization” shares much with Gandhi’s response to a inquiry about his opinion of Western Civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”
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