By way of some light reading, I picked up Gordon Dickson’s novel Dorsai! Now, I know the book was published in 1959, so I didn’t expect for it to be particularly … progressive in its thinking about women. And, being Military Science Fiction, I knew that it was even less likely to treat female characters with any decency. I was unprepared.
“It is Woman’s ancient heritage to appreciate something without the need to know.”
“Surely you see that the oldest and greatest of the female instincts is to find and conserve the strength of the strongest male she can discover. And the ultimate conservation is to bear his children.”
Oh, so woefully unprepared.
It’s a problem, really, which hasn’t really been addressed even in modern science fiction novels: women tend to be woefully presented, weak, oversexualized, simply props for the manly men who actually have the adventure. Why should this be? It’s not as if the readers want female characters to be so mistreated. Do these authors believe that readers expect this? Do these authors believe this about women in real life? Or are these authors just as sexist as their characters?
I know, there are exceptions to this behavior – but they are exceptions, rather than the norm.
So much for light reading. Back to Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and / or Bruno Latour. Definitely not light reading.
-D
Well…unfortunately I do believe that is the way women were thought of during most of the times in history. As just one very small example of the Southern Baptist view of women: that the “submission” of women to men is the only “blessed” norm…