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

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

Stand On Zanzibar, which I love but is really horribly sexist. The young women who I think are said to be 'on the circuit' who move in with men in return for sex with both the original man and their room mate. And the otherwise mostly sympathetic white researcher feels able to complain to his black room mate about said room mate's preference for white women.

It's the only Brunner I've reread since I was a teenager and it put me off reading any more. A classic case of women not being actual people.

[(Anonymous)]

As to the first part, yes, and very much so. As to the second, both complain about their roommate's choice of women:

"Prophet's beard, Donald, if I'd known you had a thing about dark meat I could have had my pick of --"

Only after this comment does Donald mention that all of Norman's women are Scandinavian, and advises him to try an Italian for a change "Frankly I think you're in a rut".

Norman later muses on his obsession with Scandinavians, and concludes:

"Allah be just to me, I'm a worse prisoner of historical circumstance than the oldest Red Guard in Peking!"

As far as I know we don't find out the cause of Donald's preference. In fact as the novel starts he isn't in a relationship (assuming that word can be used to describe this sort of thing) as he's rather pining for the last one, who is portrayed as the only truly independent woman ever to live in the apartment


William Hyde

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of this sort of thing was going around in post-Sexual Revolution social SF. They were doing the usual thing of extrapolating some then-current trend in a linear or exponential way, and the particular trend under examination (for reasons that are not hard to guess) was promiscuity rather than feminism. So everyone in the future is a swinger, but women are still chattels, they're just chattels that men tend to share or swap instead of hoarding them.