No reason

[james_davis_nicoll]

If you were going to nominate one bit of SF from the 1970s as the most egregious example of unself-conscious sexism [1], which story would you pick?

My nominee: Hawksbill Station, a 1978 novel by Robert Silverberg (although it is based on an earlier shorter work). Our hero states at one point that the reason he dates women is because his cleaning won't do itself.

(Of course this being Silverberg, this may be characterization, like the bit in Across a Billion Years where the protagonist goes on at one point about how some of his best friends are androids but they can't really be expected to match the best humans can offer and having state sanctions to encourage equal or at least less unequal than in the past employment of androids is silly. The protagonist is by the most amazing coincidence human).



1: Which is to say, something that was not written in outraged reaction to Women's Lib.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And yet only a few years later in Time Enough for Love there's a scene where two people in biological isolation suits arrange to hook up and then check what sex the other person is. I wonder why the change?

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

You're right, of course. RAH was influenced, I think, by his communications with Otter Zell, (or however he's identifying himself these days). I'm trying to remember which book it was that had a bunch of Satanists who were remarkably similar to the folks who run the Church of All Worlds.

Perhaps that change might have come due to the accepting nature of the Neo-Pagans?

In Stranger in a Strange Land, towards the end, one character relates a homosexual encounter to another but tries hard to differentiate it from "pansy" encounters.

Ya know, RAH remains dear to me. His work was my introduction to SF back in the early 80's, and in spite of his sexism, his homophobic rants, his self-referential characters, he is a writer I can still respect. Odd, that.

I still think "Rub her feet" is the best advice that Lazarus Long gave to the world.

That and his quote about specialization is for insects.