Ya know what? We guys don’t get it either. I mean, boobs don’t actually do anything that should interest anybody over the age of two. Nevertheless, when I spy a babe with a bulging pair of sweater-puppies, it’s like the nips just shot out two Hellraiser hook-chains and snagged my temples. Who can explain it?!
Perhaps an adult. 
Egg-laying Martian women with big knobs…wonder why ERB decide to make the Red Martians monotremes? I mean I understand the necessity for the fun bags, otherwise John Carter would never have any reason to talk to Dejah Thoris; but why the egg-laying?
It makes her exotic without being overly weird. And maybe Burroughs wasn’t into pregnancy.
Well, an egg presumably wouldn’t grow any bigger after it was laid . . . so a Martian woman would still have to go through the whole process of growing a seven-pound fetus, inside a shell, in her uterus, and then lay it in a process no less painful or difficult than live birth . . . and then, after all that, she’s gotta sit on this damned egg! (Unless she’s a princess and can afford an incubator.)
Come to think of it . . . every sufficiently detailed artistic portrayal I’ve seen shows Dejah Thoris with a navel . . .
IIRC, all the egg-laying Martians used incubators. Passively solar heated, I think they were.
Well, except that the bulk of the egg’s mass is food for the developing embryo, so it can be inherently squishier than a human infant’s braincase, and the shell itself needn’t harden until after it’s laid, so egg-laying might be slightly easier…
But it’s still highly odd that John Carter should be physically capable of impregnating Dejah Thoris. Borrowing a line from Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, Carter should be more capable of breeding with an ear of corn than with a Martian of any colour.
Personally I see no reason why the Gorean social order should be viewed as one whit more childish, silly or contemptible than the Barsoomian, although Norman could have done with some of his too-frequent, too-lengthy rants snipped out.
You’re right. Still, the egg would have to be at least as big as a human fetus – just like a chicken’s egg is at least as big as a chick, even though the embryo is just a fertilized red spot on the yolk at the time the egg is laid – so where’s the advantage? (Except for birth-control purposes! No need for pills, just a good stomping foot! 
)
The difference is, Martian women aren’t grovelling slaves to their men, unless their men happen to be Bad Guys (and even then the enslaved women don’t appear to like it). The Good Guys put their women up on a pedestal and worship them. Equally contemptible from a modern post-feminist perspective, perhaps, but it did not seem so in the Edwardian period.
The important difference between Gor and Barsoom is that a “proper Gorean” male is essentially a rapist, whereas a “proper Red Martian” is essentially a Victorian/Edwardian gentleman. That, and ERB was a far better writer than John Norman and didn’t pollute everything he wrote with reams of psycho-philoso-drivel justifying his scabrous attitudes.
IOW the Martian men are effectively grovelling slaves to their women, driven from pillar to post at the glare of a spoiled bitch’s eye.
Something over 97% of Gorean women aren’t grovelling slaves to their men, although they’re not the ones you hear about; it is repeatedly stated that there are approximately forty free women to one slave. Barsoomian gender relationships are at least as fucked up, if a former enemy can say to John Carter that her present actions are dictated by love for him, and he can be repulsed and horrified until she explains that she doesn’t refer to her own love for him but her admiration for the love shown by Dejah Thoris. It’s mediæval courtly love blown out of all proportion; at least Norman makes out a case for treating each other in an honest admission that we are still, biologically speaking, Palæolithic hunter-gatherers.
That’s a distortion. Within the protection of, say, the laws of her own city, a Gorean woman is to be cherished and respected, and rape of her is a serious crime. There’s a case reported in Guardsman of Gor where a FW went around dressed as a slave for shits and giggles, and got treated as such by three horny young men. Their punishment was to be slung out forever with the mark of Cain on them - almost literally, for Gorean cities aren’t big on accommodating outlaws. But for the mitigating circumstance it would have been impalement.
I already admitted as much about the rants, but John Carter is pulp writing, no better. I caught up with a fair bit of it within the last year or so. Burroughs’s ability to scores points for making up an awful lot of imaginative stuff doesn’t make him any less of a hack.
Oh, I see…since it’s slaves they’re raping, that makes all the difference.
An interesting point: I consider both Burrough and Norman to be pretty good prose stylists when they wanted to be, but both had weaknesses in the area of characterization and both wrote using what are today unpopular sexual relationship models … Burroughs because he wrote with the prevailing mores a century ago, Norman deliberately choosing his own over mainstream tastes.
Sounds like there’s a thesis paper in there for some lit grad student somewhere …
In Gorean society, yes. You have to understand, Scumpup, these are made-up stories about made-up people. Nobody here is arguing for a return to real chattel slavery.
I think Frank Cho’s Dejah Thoris model linked to earlier would be about perfect in terms of clothing, or lack of it. I don’t think Pixar will follow that model, though, as much as I wish they would.
According to this page, when a Martian woman (apparently red or green alike) lays an egg, it is roughly the size of a goose egg. During its time in the incubator, it grows to be about two and a half feet in diameter. The page notes that ERB didn’t account for the growth. One supposes that, like our own plant kingdom, the additional mass comes mainly from gasses absorbed from the atmosphere and a relatively trivial amount of mineral material absorbed from the soil.
I’d veto Vin Diesel, but Daniel Craig would be great provided he doesn’t mind running around in a pair of metal briefs, a harness, and a cape.
Agreed. Hey, after he played with his @#$%^! toes in Casino Royale, I think he can manage a metal speedo.
I picture John Carter as looking pretty much like Daniel Day Lewis looked in The last of the Mohicans.