… have been attested to by several of the people on your side of the argument.
So, anyone want to track Lamia’s post and see which groups she has criticized – then ask her if she has read everything by them? I mean, if she is going to get so strident on this topic, it must be a rule she has always obeyed, right?
Wonder of wonders.
He said he wasn’t convinced the TONE was anti-male, Lamia, please pay attention. But he did say:
Sounds to me like the old feminist “women good, men bad” cant.
So are you denying that “Houston” is anti-male? Of the three men depicted in the story, one is useless, one is a rapist, and the other is a violent religious fanatic. Do you contend that’s not anti-male? Let’s hear you explain how this story is not anti-male.
That might be a bit of projection there, Lamia. The longer the thread goes on, the more people acknowledge anti-male themes.
As Ura-Maru puts it, “Is there misandry in some SF or fantasy written by women? Sure. There’s also misogyny in some written by men.” You however insist on standing there with your finger in the dike, to hold reality at bay.
I do have to give you praise for typing so well with blinders on. I imagine you must peak out just enough to see what you want, then slip it back into place.
Even in the quote you use, Andy, Lamia expresses doubt. You, however, refuse to admit you’re wrong. It’s fascinating, because there’s nothing whatsoever to your argument. I really can’t decide whether you believe this stuff, or if this is just your idea of fun.
I haven’t seen anyone here say a word about anti-male themes in Herland…except for you, and you’ve never read it. You obviously didn’t even read the quote YOU pulled off the Web about it, since you couldn’t come within a half-century of guessing when it was written.
**
I don’t know if it is or not, I’ve never read it. Unlike you, I don’t like to make bold assumptions about things I’ve never read. Remember?
**
An author can write about characters without those characters being intended to represent their entire sex. But this is an advanced literary technique only familiar to those of us who actually read books, so I’m not surprised you are unfamiliar with it.
There is not one word of criticism in that post. I merely confirmed that the comic Mr. Evil Breakfast asked about did exist, and added what I have heard about its premise. I said nothing at all against the comic itself or its creators, and was quite clear in stating that my description of its general content was not based on firsthand information.
But it wouldn’t have proven anything if I’d trashed “Rape Man” to heck and back, because “Rape Man” is but a single comic. One comic does not constitute “lots of groups and sources”. Remember that phrase? It’s the one you used. You said I must have criticized “lots of groups and sources without reading everything they put out”. Not “any group or source” (and one comic barely even fits that description), but “lots”. So to prove me wrong, you’d have to find not one, but lots of groups and sources I’ve criticized without reading everything they’ve put out. And you won’t have any luck there, Mister Cyberstalker.
However, once again, as I have quite carefully explained already, your mistake in this thread is not in criticizing a genre that you haven’t read all of. It is in criticizing a genre you haven’t read anything of. No one could expect one person to read every single book in even a small genre of fiction. But before you attempt to engage in any sort of serious literary discussion on the subject, you might want to read maybe…one. Or better still, the “mere” half-dozen or so that you’ve hypocritically sneered at DanielWithrow for reading.
If you keep posting in a thread after you asked to have it locked they sometimes doubt the sincerity of your request. If you don’t want a thread to continue, you have to stop contributing to it.
“So invoved”? I posted maybe four times in a thread that ran to five pages. And I stopped reading it around page three, IIRC.
I’ve got a lot of spare time. I post to a lot of threads on subjects about which I’m not passionately concerned.
Like I said earlier, it was mostly due to your poorly framed OP than its content. And I did apologize for it.
I’m a peculiar kind of guy.
Yes, it is, although I’d have to be a pretty dedicated sock to rack up 5,000 posts under my “fake” name. Not sure why you think I’m a sock in the first place, though.
Allow me to re-phrase, then: no one who is selling the Protocols would claim that it is anything other than anti-Jewish. Wether they feel that being anti-Jewish is a form of racism, and wether they feel that racism is acceptable are seperate issues. On the other hand, the people defending the books in this thread are generally denying that the books are anti-male.
I can make a personal judgement about it based on secondhand sources. People do that all the time. I’ve never read, say, The Bridges of Madison County, because from the reviews I’ve read of it, it sounds incredibly bad. However, I wouldn’t enter a thread discussing Bridges and offer an opinion on it based solely on those second hand sources, and I certainly wouldn’t start a thread attacking it without having at least attempted to read it first. That would be intellectually dishonest. At the very least, I would preface any comments I had to make about them with clear disclaimers that I had never read it myself, and was merely repeating hearsay.
Admittedly, I might reference The Protocols in a thread whose focus wasn’t discussing the texts themselves. I might tell a particularly anti-semetic troll to “go back and masturbate to the Protocols somemore,” or some such. But that’s because this book has a wide reputation as being racist: wider than its actual readership. I’m willing to accept the consensus of everyone I know who has read it that it’s a work of vicious racism. However, there is no such consensus about the works you’ve cited. Many of them I’d never even heard of before. And I only have your word as to what they contain, which is based not on a primary reading of the works in question, but on your interpretation of someone else’s interpretation. I don’t want to go back through this thread, but I don’t think you’ve even found a reviewer who takes your view of these books. You’ve merely found a few summaries of what happens in the books, and determined from the summaries that they must be anti-male.
I ventured no opinions on the S.C.U.M. Manifesto. I merely asked in what context it was being studied in classes on feminism. It seemed possible (perhaps even likely) that it was being taught in the same way one would teach Mein Kampf in a class on 20th century history: as an important influence on the subject, but not a positive one. At no point did I challenge your interpretation of it as anti-male, or even wether or not if it was actually being taught on college campuses.
First of all, I’m not taking umbrage. This is a literary debate, as far as I’m concerned, and getting pissed at someone for not liking the same books I like is pretty stupid, IMO. And, like I said, I don’t really care about the anti-feminism dimension you keep trying to bring into it.
Really, I don’t. At least, not to the degree that you clearly do.
:smack: Cut me some slack: like I said, I’ve never read the story.
I do. And I know what you have hidden under your mattress, you dirty, dirty boy.
Why didn’t you include it? Why does the gender of the author reflect wether or not the book has an anti-male basis? Considering some of the accusations you’ve leveled at male posters in this very thread, surely the story being written by a man would have no impact on its appropriateness in being included in your OP, no?
Why not? Seriously, why not? Science fiction has all sorts of what-ifs. Why assume there must be an agenda behind these particular sf stories?
Sure, it raises an eyebrow. But a suspicion does not a value judgement make. I can understand reading a summary of one of these books and thinking, “Gee, that doesn’t sound good.” I can even understand deciding not to read the book based on that initial impression. Where we part ways is in trying to argue that these books present a particular argument when you haven’t taken the time to personally check and see if that’s actually the argument being made. Why should anyone enter a debate with you under those circumstances? What could they possibly gain? It would be like trying to discuss music with someone who’s congenitally deaf, or nuclear physics with an Art History major. You don’t have enough knowledge to make meaningful contributions to the debate.
Where did I claim you claimed to be an expert? I said you presented yourself as “beng knowledgable.” In other words, you presented yourself as actually knowing what you are talking about. You did this simply by starting the thread and offering an opinion on the subject. If someone starts a thread saying, “Tomatos are yucky,” one assumes that at some point, the OP has actually tried to eat a tomato. It took you the better part of an entire page just to admit you hadn’t read any of the books you mentioned in the OP.
Considering the size of the genre, six books is somewhat widely read. And it’s more than you’ve done, so you really shouldn’t be casting aspersions here. It’s only hurting your credibility. Such as it is. Also, assuming you meant “invent” and not “invite,” where have I deliberately misquoted you in this thread? Or does that just go back to the “expert” thing?
Well, at this point I’m more on their side than on your side, because they’ve made much stronger arguments, and were able to carry on the debate without resorting to ad hominums.
They’ve admitted it about one short story: the Tiptree story. You’ve been arguing that these stories are pervasively anti-male. Of all the other books you’ve mentioned, not one of them has been shown to have a distinctly anti-male basis. At least, not by anyone who’s actually read them. Even the Tiptree story is ambiguous: the people with the clearest memories of the story dispute it being anti-male, and I don’t have any particular reason to believe that they are lying, your accusations to the contrary not withstanding.
Actually, based on margin’s further comments in this thread, that’s incorrect.
I believe I made it abundantly clear that I was merely repeating other people’s interpretations of the alleged anti-male basis in the Tiptree story, not offering my own. Because, once again, not having read the story, I have no business interpreting it.
Because I do care about literary debate, and you are exceedingly bad at it.
Yeah, like I said, not something I care passionately about. I never saw your cite, as far as I can remember. I’ll check back in that thread later, but the thing’s what, six pages now? I’m not hugely interested in slogging through all that just so I can chastize someone for not properly chastizing someone else.
You know, I think you’re trying to make some sort of point by repeating this over and over. But I’m not sure what it is. I’ll sleep on it and get back to you.
Look, aren’t most of those quotes thirty years old or more? Maybe you had a point in the seventies, I dunno. I was still in diapers back then. You haven’t shown that these quotes are still relevent to modern feminism, or that the attitudes expressed by those women are reflective of their current attitudes. Twenty-five years ago, I was a big fan of strained carrots. Now, not so much.
Sure, they count when talking about the feminist who made that particular statement. It’s when you start saying, “This means that all feminists believe X” that your argument falls apart. And, again, if someone went up and dug up every stupid thing you said when you were in college, they could probably make you look pretty bad, too. What have these women been saying lately?
I don’t. Although as my last two paragraphs show that I’m willing enough to argue just about anything, if I’m bored enough.
I don’t like to toot my own horn, but you will not, generally speaking, find many people on the boards more honest than myself. Not that I’m all that virtuous: I’m just a shitty liar. Really shitty. Of course, I doubt you’ll to believe me. You already think I’m a liar, why should you think I’m being honest when I insist that I’m telling the truth?
> I’ve tried. I asked that the thread be locked on Wednesday,
> when Margin carried her flame war from the Pit over to here.
> The moderator, if he’s there, does not seem to be responding.
Asking that the thread be locked is irrelevant to what I was talking about. If you have some reason to think that a poster is a sock puppet, you should E-mail the moderators (all of them, not just one of them). And then you shouldn’t discuss it in the thread. The moderators have ways to determine if someone is a sock puppet. You don’t. Locking the thread is irrelevant to this. The moderators will throw off the board any posters that they determine are sock puppets. Within a thread you can question a poster’s facts or logic, but you can’t make accusations about whether they are following board rules like only having a single account. It’s the moderators’ job to enforce those rules, not yours.
It’s my opinion that Andy really should have read, at least a number of, these books before beginning to criticize them. And in any case that it’s fiction, people should be allowed to experiment with different worlds without being held to the same high standards as if it were political theory. I don’t think it goes to show much of anything about feminism at all.
But to go with OP on whether some of these books showed extreme anti-male bias.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to claim that The Handmaid’s Tale, the only book in the list I have read, can be said to contain the, unspoken perhaps, assumption that all men (or most men) worked for or silently wanted the extremely misogynistic state (specifically the protagonist’s thoughts on her then husband Luke). This is a fairly misandric basis – also it’s quite a number of years ago I read it, so I might not remember too clearly.
On the other hand it’s not hard at all to find plenty of, if not misogynic, then at least very condescending interpretations of women / men relationships in SF. Larry Niven springs to mind here. No need to classify them Masculinist Utopia.
On another note. The only book I have read where all women were wiped out (The White Plague, Frank Herbert) was very much a dystopian kind of thing. Men at least, don’t dream anything but nightmares of a world without women.
I never read Handmaid as anti-male. I saw it more as anti-fundamentalism, really. It is not, after all, as if a society that treats women like that has no precedence in the real world. Look at Afghanistan. I read it as more of a “It could happen here, too!” story than an “All men are scum” story.
The one book that I have read from the list that I would definately classify as misandrist would be “The Gate to Women’s Country.” Sherri Tepper seems to have some issues.
Ursula LeGuin, despite being a feminist, is NOT misandrist. I remember reading “Four Ways to Forgiveness” right after reading “The Gate to Women’s Country” and thinking that HERE was an author who could deal with ugly male-female issues with grace and truth rather than hate and polemics.
Is it agains the board rules to question whether someone is a “sock puppet”?
I know they don’t want us to suggest peope are t-wording, though I don’t remember the other stricture. The thought occurred to me because you act like you have a dog in the fight and claim you do not.
quote:
So you reserve the right to judge a book based on outside comments made about. You admit you haven’t read “The Protocols” either, I take it. The author of that book has never been identified, hence could not plead guilty to any such charge. Yet you can judge it based on outside comments made about it.
On what authority do you make that statement?
And on what authority do you speak for organizations as diverse as the Klan, the Nation of Islam and garden-variety conspiracy theorists?
Then you will allow me to make a personal judgment on a title I noted in the OP: "Donna J. Young’s “Retreat, As It Was!” tells the tale of a world before men. In some of its descendants an x chromosome is damaged, resulting in offspring with malformed sexual organs and a more aggressive nature. … "
This is a classic man-bashing theme. Perhaps you have heard of feminist Germaine Greer’s comments “I have a great deal of difficulty with the idea of the ideal man. As far as I’m concerned, men are the product of a damanged gene.” There are similar beliefs expressed in The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, which I’ve excerpted below.
I say that portraying the entire male species as the product of a “damaged” chromosome is the equivalent of portraying blacks as genetically inferior. If I heard a description of a story portraying blacks as not have evolved as far as whites have from our ape ancestors, then whether I had read the story or not, it wouldn’t thunder and lightning to make me see the racism in that concept.
My thread didn’t begin by attacking anything. Most of the post is made up of quotations from websites by fans of these books. Once again, I posted it solely because a certain person claimed that this entire field of fiction was a figment of my imagination.
I won’t bother to skim through your corpus of work on this board to see if you’ve ever commented on socialism, apartheid, or McCarthysism without reading their core philosophies, or made comments about G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, or Slobodan Milosevic without reading the treatise they have written. Or whether you have condemned, say, Jimmy Swaggart without ever listening to a single broadcast that sorry old huckster made. People do do this all the time. The hot-under-the-collar crowd on this thread aren’t really upset about that. They are upset about the conclusions I drew. If I had said “These books sound like wonderfully empowering and inspirings works without the least bit of man-bashing in them, uh-uh, no sir, not a speck,” they would not be up in arms about whether I had read them.
When have you even known feminists to protest, or even acknowledge the existence of, anti-male philosophies in feminism?
The excerpts I posted in the OP are from people who enjoy this type of thing, not from critics. They would have no motive to portray them in a bad light.
Similarly as some people have heard the premise of the Rape Man comic book and decided it was misogynistic. Valid or not? Would you say that a hero could go about raping women and it’s not hostile and not mysogynistic?
The S.C.U.M. Manifesto was excerpted in a feminist anthology, “Sisterhood is Powerful,” by robin Morgan, the self-same Ms. Magazine editor who says that man-hating is a viable act.
By the way, the S.C.U.M. Manifesto begins thusly:
**"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.
It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples." **
As you can see, there again is the theme of calling men innately defective and calling for women-only worlds via reproduction without men. And I’ve noted in the OP similar recurring themes of reproduction without the male in feminist utopian fiction.
You can read the SCUM Manifesto here. It is only about 11,000 words. It would be interesting to hear your opinion on what section of this document might be acceptable to present in a feminist anthology.
And if you know anything about Robin Morgan, who compared men in general to Nazis, you know that she was not including this in any way to discredit feminism or analyze extremism. Morgan is one of those feminists who has repeatedly denied the existence of man-bashing in feminism.
Remember, “Sisterhood is Powerful” was a polemic for women’s studies courses.
Also, I know of no course that “teaches” Mein Kampf.
quote:
As a matter of fact, I had heard of AHEM! “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” during my web search. However, the author’s pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. made me think it was written by a man, so I didn’t include it. I later learned – not here – that the author was female, Alice Sheldon.
Because someone might have pulled the argument that a man can’t be a feminist.
quote:
And none of those conditions preclude the existence of men. All of those could take place while men were alive. My question is, why have them die off in the first place? And why show that women’s lives are so much better without men?
I assume that feminist fiction has an agenda just as I assume socialist fiction has an agenda, or episodes of “Davey and Goliath” have an agenda.
However, I am probably more versed than you in extremist feminist thought. The ideas of Germaine Greer and Valerie Solanas are reflected in many of these stories – the idea that men are defective, innately and unavoidably violent, that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” that women would achieve a better world by reproducing without men and bearing only female children, and so on. I did bring to the assessment a knowledge of the extremist thought. At the danger of invoking Godwin, let’s look at some of the art of the Third Reich. If you are familiar with National Socialist philosophy, you can recognize those themes in its art without being an art expert. If you knew the plot of the play was that Jews are bad, you wouldn’t have to sit through the entire thing to confirm it’s anti-Semitic. I looked at these plots and saw them giving a fictional treatment of anti-male themes I was already aware of.
quote:
Perhaps you are confusing me with DanielWithrow, who claimed to be “at least somewhat widely in the field,” though it was revealed that he had read about six books.
Perhaps you meant to chastise Daniel for making a false claim of knowledge. But instead of doing that you invited a false quote from me and then berated me for a claim I hadn’t made.
On what authority do you know how many books of this type there are? And I also note that the ones he referred to came from a narrow span. Hardly a cross section. Yet he claimed to be “somewhat widely” read.
Check out his latest contributions to the Feminazi thread. The number of books he’s read is growing by the hour. He got caught puffing himself so he could pontificate.
You admitted on the other thread you had never heard of The SCUM Manifesto. I had, and many similar titles. I brought to the table an understanding of extremist, anti-male feminism. Others on the thread do not wish to admit that male-bashing even exists.
It would seem that where there was smoke, there was, indeed, fire.
I say again that if the theme of a story is that blacks are genetically inferior and inherently violent, and that whites reach utopia when blacks somehow disappear (even if by accident) that the animosity is self-evident. And just who would be willing to got to bat for that kind of story? Once again I might have underestimated the power of denial.
Then read my quotes from margin – especially where she says its a figment of my fevered imagination.
You mean … about as old as a lot of the titles I reference?
Then it couldn’t start, because I’ve never said that. I have said “feminist have done such-and-such” when, indeed, the people who did it were leading feminists representing large organizations or teaching college courses. This then gets into the tired little word game where feminists say “how can you say that all feminists say that?” and I reply, “Show me any who objected to the anti-male feminists who said that?” and the feminists reply “You’re an oppressor.”
I think it’s fairly clear, and I seem to recall interviews with Margaret Atwood that clarify (though I’m not going to dig up any cites), she didn’t just set to create any old fundamentalist society, but specifically an extremely misogynistic society. E.g. I think exploration of female repression was the central element, not fundamentalist society per se. Also the story is based in America (Not Afghanistan), and she seemed to have taken some current trends in American society and extrapolated very much beyond what I found they could bear – perhaps the part of the book I found most unconvincing. I think the book would have been better had she severed all ties with current society, but I suspect that would have negated some of her reasons for the book in the first place. I agree that the misandrist angle I sensed is far from the driving part of the book, but I do think it’s there as an undercurrent. (For instance in the protagonist’s thoughts on Luke, the designated (and only?) good man, whom she suspect of having secret likings for the female repression.
Talking about semantics:
1984 is far from a communist dystopia (though both Stalinist as well as Nazi and capitalistic inspirations are quite evident). One of the points of the book is that the party has moved beyond such (to them) pathetic designations and restraints. It is simply crystallized totalitarianism taken to its extreme.
I’ve read most of Tepper’s books, and I’ll agree that she’s got issues. She’s got issues about religion, the environment…some of her views seem pretty extreme to me, and I don’t agree with all of them. But issues with men? Why do you think that?
In The Gate to Women’s Country, as in her other work, Tepper presents male villains, but she also presents male characters who are as good as the best of the female characters – and certainly far better than the worst of the female characters! She doesn’t shy away from showing women behaving badly. She tries to understand some of the factors that might cause people, both men and women, to do bad things. And, perhaps fearing that even with all this the deck might seem stacked against the men in this novel, she even grants some of the men a beneficial supernatural ability that none of the women in Women’s Country have.
Is it because the society is run by women that you think the book is misandrist? As the heroine of Women’s Country discovers, her female-dominated society isn’t as utopian as it might seem on the surface. It’s certainly much, much nicer to live in than certain neighboring cultures she encounters, and the leaders of Women’s Country are at least genuinely well-intentioned, but their policies bring suffering to citizens of both sexes. In the name of the greater good, these women leaders do many of the same things feminists condemn current, real-world male leaders for doing. They even deprive the citizenry of their reproductive freedom in order to advance their own agenda!
The society in Women’s Country might someday hope to become a utopia, but it’s obvious that the way there won’t be short or easy. Heck, the book ends with the heroine and her father weeping for the hard fate of their people.
SF started out as being fiction for men. No women need apply. In the stories themselves, females were generally only mentioned as someone’s love interest, or possibly mother. In the rare instances that females WERE something other than someone’s wife, girlfriend, sister, or mother, they were usually quite unattractive and frustrated at not being able to catch a man. See Asimov’s Susan Calvin(?) (it’s been a LONG time since I read the Robot stories). Generally, women were just window dressing, scenery, a background to the REAL characters, who were all men, or at least males. This started changing in the 60s and 70s. Some male writers tried to include women in their stories as characters, instead of sex objects. In my opinion, most of them failed miserably. Female writers, who had been using either their initials or androgynous or outright male names, started using their own frankly female names during this period as well.
When I was growing up, I was considered EXTREMELY odd because I was a girl who liked science fiction. Hard science fiction, at that. I didn’t like the often-present assumption in the literature that females were not worthy of being main characters, but I read the stuff anyway. I’d say that while women were present in these stories, they were not really true characters. They were present only as sex objects, to reproduce the race. Very few stories had women do anything significant in them…women fetched coffee, did the cleaning, etc. They did NOT contribute ideas.
> There is only one moderator listed for Cafe Society.
If you don’t get a reply from the moderator of Cafe Society, you can E-mail the moderators of the other forums.
Lynn Bodoni, I think you exaggerate slightly when you talk about the lack of male characters or readers of earlier science fiction. When I was reading science fiction back in the 1960’s, it was considered slightly weird for anybody to read any books outside of classwork. Being a science fiction fan was only slightly weirder than that, and being a female science fiction fan was only slightly weirder than that. But this may only be a matter of us having grown up in different environments with different attitudes toward reading.
It’s true that I feel very uncomfortable now reading the science fiction of the 1940’s and 1950’s, given how sexist it is. But it’s typical of the sexism in the whole society back then. It’s not as though science fiction was responsible for the sexism of society.
I should make it clear that, while I don’t think any of the “feminist science fiction” mentioned in this thread is anti-male, I don’t think some of it is particularly good as literature or as a cogent comment on society. But then I don’t think a lot of science fiction is particularly good as a cogent comment on society. I find it almost laughable how much of the science fiction I read thirty or so years ago did such a poor job of predicting today’s society.
Lynn raises an interesting point talking about the anti-women bias of early SF.
I mean, look at that little-known work of utopian SF, Asimov’s Foundation. Surely its society predicated on scientific principles of predicting human behavior is as utopian as Tiptree’s women-only society.
Yet in the course of the book, I believe there are two women who appear. One of them is useless and has no dialogue; she walks into a scene to model a scientifically-advanced dress, and then walks off-screen. And the other is a caricature of a shrew: she’s got about a page of dialogue in which she establishes that her husband is a wuss, and then she’s out of the novel.
It’s not specifically a men-only society, but there are as I recall no other female characters whatsoever in the book – and it’s a book with a lot of characters.
Oh good, this thread has now tilted in a direction that I know something about. I just did an author report for my Young Adult Literature class on Anne McCaffrey, whose science fiction books focus so much on personal relationships and so little on technology that she is often associated with fantasy. (I may be oversimplifying slightly). One of the interesting things I found in reading interviews with her is the sense of amusement she seems to have over the amount of credit she gets for changing the world of science fiction. McCaffrey is justifiably proud of her Hugo and Nebula Awards, and even more so of being the first author to have a science fiction book be on the general New York Times Hardcover Bestseller lists (The White Dragon, 1978) and even more pleased to be the first Science Fiction author to win the Margaret A Edwards Award for general excellence in writing for young adults. (The last has a special place in her heart because it proves that if you tell a good enough story it doesn’t matter what genre you write in, which vindicates the choice of a genre that her ex-husband never thought was literary enough). However, I think that she feels that the amount of credit she sometimes recieves for being a groudbreaking author is over-stated. At the time that she began to write science fiction, there were other women out there(admittedly, often like Andre Norton, using male names or initials). Also, McCaffrey enjoyed reading science fiction, she just got tired of non-existent or decorative female characters. She really got started writing in the era of Star Trek(The original series) at a time when more women were coming to read Science Fiction but were not interested in the male, technology-oriented stuff which mostly had been produced to that time. As the field of potential readers grew, and as those who had been reading it became tired of the cardboard characters that were common, it was inevitable that books which focused more on people and their relationships would be written. Anne McCaffrey appealed to people looking for relationships in science fiction, but I think that she would deny sole responsibility for its existance.
McCaffrey’s first published book * Restoree* (1967)was intended directly as a humorous spoof on the tendency of female characters to need rescuing. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book in question, merely McCaffrey’s comments on it and comments from a book of criticism of McCaffrey’s works.)
( sorry no cites, but if you are curious, ask me and I will provide them on Thursday if nothing unforeseen happens, my professor is in posession of my notes)
It’s a looong time since I read it, but isn’t the protagonist in one of the later books a girl? She had a typewriter she could speak to or something, and travelled with an escapee dwarf from the planet with the mind tinkers (Asimov’s idea of heaven I guess - sounds like hell if you ask me). Anyway Asimov’s (or the other comparable authors) stories aren’t hardly driven by riveting character illustrations. I don’t think a dearth of female characters necessarily translates into an anti-women bias – especially when characters, male as females, are far from the centre of attention.
Some further research led me to author Sally Miller Gearhart, who has written feminist utopian fiction and tracts of feminist philosophy. Gearhart is one of those utopian writers who envisions reducing the population of men through various means.
`The Future–If There Is One–Is Female’ is a work that advocates reducing men to 10 percent of the population. “The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.”
Gearhart also wrote the sci-fi books “The Wanderground,”
“The Kanshou,” and “The Magister.” Here’s a capsule description of one:
Gearhart’s philosophy is supported by Professor Mary Daly, who resigned from Boston College rather than allow men in her women’s studies courses. Daly said: “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.”
Daly has long advocated for research intoparthenogenesis to dispense with men. Her book, “Quintessence” is half-science fiction novel, half bizarre manifesto in which she explicitly lays out her views. Daly herself is a character in the book who visits a utopian continent where – thanks to the influence of Daly’s books – a lesbian elite reproduce solely through parthogenesis.
Daly elaborated on her views in an interview with What Is Enlightenment magazine. (emphasis added)
WIE: In your latest book, Quintessence, you describe a utopian society of the future, on a continent populated entirely by women, where procreation occurs through parthenogenesis, without participation of men. What is your vision for a postpatriarchal world? Is it similar to what you described in the book?
MD: You can read Quintessence and you can get a sense of it. It’s a description of an alternative future. It’s there partly as a device and partly because it’s a dream. There could be many alternative futures, but some of the elements are constant: **that it would be women only; that it would be women generating the energy throughout the universe; that much of the contamination, both physical and mental, has been dealt with. **
WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article, “The Future—If There is One—Is Female,” writes: “At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race.” What do you think about this statement?
MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.
Lest anyone say that Daly is a lone nutcase, let’s note her position at Boston College, which she lost not directly because of her anti-male views but because she broke college rules by not allowing men in her class. Also:
