Well no, since the whole basis of the story is that the aliens are regarding them as insentient life.
Also, I’m not sure humans are all that enlightened now, let alone when the story was written.
The aliens are regarding them as insentient life because their clothes have all rotted off them so that they’re naked, for reasons I’ve forgotten though the rot-causing organisms are part of it they have no tools with them, and they’re found fighting each other. The aliens have no idea what the fight was about ; so their conclusion that the humans aren’t sentient has nothing to do with human sexism.
The idea that women have a choice who to marry was not a new one at the time.
I briefly looked at the beginning of the story online. Not only don’t they have clothes but they don’t even have fire: it rains so constantly that there’s simply no plant matter dry enough to try to light.
Yeah. And because of all the moisture there’s really active mold or equivalent, which is what happens to all their clothes.
That part of the setup I don’t have any problem with. (I don’t remember what happened to their tools – maybe they had to leave their ship in such a hurry they didn’t take any?) But I don’t think they even needed to add in the fight; and if they did, they could have come up with a less stupid and less obnoxious reason for having one. Hell, they could have been having a practice boxing match for sport.
There’s also the bit where the men have “adopted” the little mouse-like creature as a pet, but the woman is terrified by it and insists the men “do something about him - at once!”
There’s only so much you can blame on the time. A woman would have written a very different story, even in the 1950s.
I’d forgotten that part.
And quite a lot of men would have also written a different story, even at the time. I’ll grant that the time accounts for its having been published in that form.
The passengers were led away from the ship by one or two of the crew tending them while the rest of the crew worked to keep the ship’s reactor from exploding. They failed.
Yes! I remember reading that, years back.
IIRC, the lizard people did not use fire but they loved warmth. One character dies in a fire, but basks in the “lovely, lovely heat” as she dies.
Vaguely recalled short story: set in a beyond-Loony-Left future Britain, it details the travails of a man suffering from progressivism gone mad. The only part I remember clearly is that the man was struggling to raise a daughter whom prenatal exposure to a drug had caused her to grow up to be an utterly imbecilic oversexed bimbo. She eventually gets indentured/sold to a Middle Eastern harem, a life she’s actually suited for. This story might date to the Thatcher-era conservative backlash.
1985 by Anthony Burgess
This is a novel, but it seems clearly to be what you’re thinking of
The very one, thank you!
Probably she wouldn’t be, actually. A harem is a whole lot of women who only get access to one man for all of them, and that one only when he feels like it.
According to a report which I trust, F-F relationships were common.
As a systems engineer, that hits awfully close to home.
Thing is, you could pretty much switch “human” for “brain cell” and make a similar argument for “the individual understands nothing”.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
But I think the underlying sense of “she wants lots of sex, so she’s suited to be sold to a harem” was “the whole idea of being in a harem is that you’ll get lots of sex with the harem owner.” If true at all, probably true only briefly.
Short story. Interstellar travel finds a hive/swarm creature; two human researchers move in and mess with the pheromones to make the hive entities do useful stuff. The hive hatches an intelligent drone to deal with the interlopers. The key line is “I’ll miss our conversations” (or similar).
Swarm by Bruce Sterling
SDMB says that was one minute, but I think I answered quicker than that
Okay, now you’re just showing off.