azurelunatic | Heinlein Women (crosspost from the list)

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Heinlein Women (crosspost from the list)

When growing up, I noticed that the ideal Heinlein woman was smart, bisexual, horny, good with children, an expert markswoman, prepared for every eventuality, and capable of mastering anything she tried, very quickly.

I wanted to grow up and kick, ah, "anatomy" like Friday, be householdy and practical like Janet (was that her name? The other woman in _Friday_, the one with the two husbands), make love with the skill of all the Heinlein women known to be skilled in the art put together, be all-around resourceful and twisty-minded like Hazel, and continue kicking anatomy with serenity like Cordelia after I found the gang of heavily armed Amazons (or male equivalent) who would love me freely and forever. With the Martian training of Mike Smith, the information manipulation retrieval, and analytical skills of Mr. Spock, the diplomacy of Miles, and the grace, beauty, brains, and technical skill of Lt. Uhura.

Heinlein women were an excellent role model to me when growing up. It will be interesting to re-read from an adult perspective. I have noticed that some of my favorite books when growing up (M*rc*d*s L*ck*y) did not age particularly well. Someone onlist said of that particular author, some years ago, that some authors have an axe to grind; this author takes the axe and bludgeons you about the head with the dull side... I've found that increasingly true with some of her books, especially those specifically targeted for a younger audience. I'm hoping that at least Friday will stand up to the test of time. I found that Gillian became less interesting after learning Martian; Anne became more interesting.

As an interesting and amusing contrast to the stereotypical attitude from a completely male-dominated society, until the age of ten, I believed with all my little heart that boys could not grow up to be teachers, because they were not smart enough... Somehow my father was an exception, just as smart as a girl.

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...because this is the sort of discussion more productively had with a few people than with a mailing list.

There are some good things about the "adult" version of the Heinlein Female (he has characterization issues), which you've listed. In addition, they're less bound by the sexual mores of the time.

Some of the bad things, some of which have been brought up on list (looking back at these, most of them are actually complaints about his grasp of the social sciences and his characterization in general):

They live to serve and fawn over men. Usually fairly subtley, sometimes (Sharpie) not.

They're manipulative bastards.

They're always horny, always willing, interested, and able in having sex with any of the good guys, and almost never have any bad consequences of sex. Never get sore, never feel antisocial, never are just not interested in somebody that way. To be fair, his Male seems to be this way too, taking into account his homophobia.

They're all extroverts, as are all the incarnations of his Male. This can also be put down to H's characterization ability. You generally need some extroverts to carry a story, but having everybody be extroverted is overgeneralization.

(goes along with the manipulation) I really dislike the "poor little men can't be trusted with anything important or it'll break their heads" attitude. Misandry is as annoying as misogyny, and I think Heinlein's attributing this attitude to women may actually be both.

His non-sex Female character (ie, in the juvies) is either a generic mother stage prop or lives to be married. "Oh, I'd rather marry the ship captain and take care of all the babies" Ick.

His "adult" characters get married and do the water brotherhood thing at the drop of a hat, to complete strangers.

I need to look up Deety's measurements again. I remember her waist measurement was 19", her bust was 38" (?) and she was something like 5'7" and 135 lb. As a black belt. With substantial mammary development. With those tits and that muscle, even if she had no other body fat, she should weigh something more like 180.

Wanna start a discussion? Especially since some of these (like the "no bad consequences" one) may simply fall under wish-fulfillment, like the way all of his characters live effectively forever and are incredibly healthy and ...

BTW, try to find a copy of _Number of the Beast_ with the pictures. I should try to find other work by that artist. Pretty.

In no particular order:
Dear GOD, Number of the Beast with pictures? Say it ain't so? Perhaps one of my least favorite Heinlein books of all time, it made me want to claw my eyeballs out. I finished it - Heinlein does spin a good yarn, even when I can't stand it - but I swore I'd never read it again. Don't make me break my promise by telling me there's a version with pictures. That breaks me. ;)

A lot of Heinlein's female characters -do- fall under the category of wish fulfilment. The topic of Heinlein women is something that people can, and do, go around endlessly about. (God, I feel old; I've seen mailing lists all but wrecked when taken over by this very discussion.) That's not to say that the discussion shouldn't happen, or can't be fun, especially when people can remain civil about it.

Personally, I run about 50/50 on his characters, male OR female. Some of his characters are even reasonably good role models. A lot of them feel rather human, if viewed through a cultural lens that can make me feel ill-at-ease.

Heinlein was at the peak of his form as a short-story writer, though. He had less time to show us his characters. It forced him to be tighter with his characterizations, which left less room for annoying traits.

All of my favorite Heinleins are the shorts. Most of the 'future history' stories fall in this category. Lifelines, Man Who Sold the Moon, Roads Must Roll... All things that I've read, enjoyed, and would real again, and (though it's been quite a while for most of them), they're all works where the characters are relatively un-annoying.

But you get into his longer works.. Number of the Beast, and Stranger springing immediately to mind, though Time Enough For Love really annoyed me in some ways, too, and... Gah. He uses most of the same tricks that stood him in good stead in the short stories, only they don't scale well.

Sorry if this is coming off as a little incoherent, but..well.. I'm a bit incoherent tonight. Time for an early bedtime.

The "pictures" I referred to aren't really illustrations. They're sort of a mathematician's acid trip with random naked women in them, at least at the beginning of the book. They degrade as the book continues. It's possible to look at the pretty pictures while ignoring the text. (I like reading the text, but had issues with much of its content.)

I agree with you on Heinlein being fun to read, even while he's being impossible ("There are four sorts of people: real men, who carry guns and can be shot at; policemen, who carry guns and can't be shot at; wimps, who can't carry guns and can't be shot at; and women, whose job it is to be decorative, fought over, and occasionally fainting" <-- my summation of the world in _Beyond This Horizon_ (I think), explaining why I had to put the book down before I went and strangled a random male)

I'm not sure if you were trying to say this or not, but one of the reasons (imo) he's better at shorts is that the reader expects less detailed characterization and no growth in short stories. I personally like _All You Zombies_ best. Really though, many people write better short stories than he does. Nancy Kress and Greg Egan spring to mind. (Yes, I'm bookpushing)

I'd heard that he'd had oxygen deprivation problems towards the end of his life, which is when he wrote most of his weirdest and thickest novels.

Female in question, actually, does wind up kicking more ass, after the guy gets over a few of his bits of masculinist perspective. ...Rather, she kicks ass in spite of.

Asimov's short stories are to be delighted over, though some of his longer works failed to get my attention.

Sorry, it's been a while since I read the book and I read it in chunks (because I didn't particularly want to try to kill any of the guys around me. I was at CTY at the time). Forgotten most of it. I do remember that part of the general point was "an armed society is a polite society". I live in LA and can easily say Bullshit to that one.

Asimov can be fun, but I much prefer psychological sf. Minds are fundamentally fascinating, especially when you try to take them apart.

Brains....

Well, if everyone in the armed society were armed, *and* everyone agreed to adhere to the "Gentlebeings Code of Armed Conduct", in the logical sense of "and"...

...The second half is more the problem, I fear.

And the fun with Asimov is the taking apart of *his* brain! Braiiiiiinnnnssss...

But if everybody behaved, we wouldn't need guns. Having the implied threat of "be nice to this person or they'll shoot you" is not going to help anything. Our current system handles diverging definitions of "nice" with nothing more than annoyance.

I think we'd do better by focusing on basic kindergarden values: politeness, sharing, not doing things just to annoy other people, trying to understand what other people want and don't want, etc.

If everybody just got along...

The trouble is the "diverging values of 'nice'". When everybody assumes that everyone thinks just like them, that's where troubles start to creep in.

He died, IIRC, as a result of a brain tumor. _Number of the Beast_ was written fairly close to his death.

And, yes, that's pretty much what I was trying to say, re: short stories. I'm just not very coherent this week.

I'm not sure if the oxygen deprivation was related to his death or not. I'll have to try to remember where I found the mention. I remember thinking of it as a decently authoritative source. Hmm.

A brain tumor would explain some of the more dreamlike qualities in _Beast_. "And then we all went to Oz and then the spaceship talked to us and then we went *whoosh!* and almost knocked over all the little people and then it was real scary and then we met everybody and said hi and had sex with them and stuff!"

Okay, random doublechecking. He has Deety "sprawl on her belly" in the Wonderland scene. Women that chesty don't do that. She's got a 95 cm bust, a 48 cm waist, is 170 cm tall and weighs 59 kilos. Translating into the English system, that's 38" bust, 19+" waist, 5'8", and 130 lb.

Somebody had been playing with his granddaughter's Barbie dolls again, I see... ;)

Okay... according to http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/rahfaq.html he never wrote anything (that was published) while he was dealing with oxygen deprivation.

He died of emphysema in 1988.

Okay, never mind. Bad memory of mine.

Well, in Wonderland, you don't have tits, you have "a bosom". Remember?

I bet masturbation, even, just wouldn't happen there.

Well, yes, but a bosom that's twice as big as your waist still takes up room. I don't have any dolls on hand to try it, but if you put Barbie on her front, I don't think she's lying on her stomach. Humans do have more flexible spines and maybe bosoms don't hurt as much when squashed as breasts do, but it still seems odd.

I really strongly doubt masturbation, sex, nudity, etc would happen in Wonderland. Babies might magically appear somehow, although I don't remember any.

(Oh dear. I remember reading a description of some improbable female character or other as "having been hit in the back by a brace of torpedos". This is combining with silmarian's Barbie idea to produce the idea of toys with reversible breasts. You press them and they pop through to the other side. Eep.)

Well, *I* lie on my stomach all the time.... carefully, as not to pinch nipples or fully squash breasts, but I do flop on my tummy.

Must measure breasts vs waist when I get home.

I do too, but I'm not very busty. Most women seem not to, especially on hard surfaces like concrete dorm floors. You're curvy though, so you work as a counterexample. Hmm. Okay, objection withdrawn.

Well, concrete dorm floors would strike me as more cold-uncomfortable than hard-uncomfortable.

Not really. SoCal, remember? That plus the layer of industrial-grade ugly carpet kept their temperature reasonable.

Oh, carpet. There I was, thinking bare concrete.

You can get away with having it plot-driven, in other words?

Pretty much. Really awful of either will kill a book, but mediocre characters can be saved by a great plot, and vice-versa.

I liked Number of the Beast fairly well, though the end was ... jarring. Would have liked to have been at that con, though...

"...And he built a crooked house..." and "Our Fair City" are my two favorite short stories.

I introduced the Heinlein thread to the list. ...Let's hope it withstands it. I think Cat Who Walks Through Walls and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress are his best full lengthers. John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless feels like an alternate-world sequel, a few generations later, to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

Yes, I hate Heinlein's pushes to wrap everything up together. I much prefer the way Octavia Butler does it. All of her storylines could be in the same world, and there are vague hints that a couple cross, but they don't really interact. They're about different things and set in a world with more than fifty people in it.

I liked _Moon_ and _Starship Troopers_. I don't think he portrayed a male-heavy society terribly accurately, but I've never lived in a closed one before or one based on the...70's? Whenever that was. The stilyagi+queen setup was dead on, but the examples I've seen have been far more pathological than he thought. There do exist women who want to meet strangers without the obligatory pause for drooling. Etc.

I like the way Diane Duane's intersect. We get a glimpse of The Tale of the Five in The Wounded Sky; we get a glimpse of Deep Wizardry in Dark Mirror.

Shawn was pissed at her writing when he read Dark Mirror after he'd read the SeaQuest, because he was under the impression that she'd snitched the dolphin character from that universe. I showed him the copyright dates and tried to show him Deep Wizardry. He got pissed at me.

I'll have to check out _Growing Up Weightless_...

MIAHM is probably my favorite full-length of his. Nummy reading.. And, really, my first exposure to poly.

Well, there some people who are instant water brothers. OK, maybe not quite that instant.

votania and I knew each other for a few months before we got married. Um, that is to say, moved in together and combined households. Yeah. Um.

But, you're right, water brotherhood is not to be offered to a complete stranger. But Mike could grok to the heart of someone, though perhaps not quite in fullness even in the beginning, though he was naive -- Martian training will do that to you.

The sexual behavior, except Brian at the end with Maureen there, was completely idealized. Gives one an artificially good standard to base it on. ...Probably not the best one for me to have based me on, especially given Shawn. Cat, what the fuck are you doing? You're breaking the laws of physics, you know... I swear, we should have named the fuzzball Pixel, not Shamash.

I think I liked Hazel Stone the best, and Friday. Hazel being just plain competent, and the Data-like innocence of Friday. I wasn't quite so thrilled with Friday's willingness to settle down with kids, but I'd bet that this wouldn't be the end of the story, not after Friday's girls all grow up enough to want to be space captains...

I suppose I'm blending how Heinlein wrote them with how I want them to have been, especially as the bulk of my collection is back home in Alaska. *sigh*

Mike could grok to the heart of someone That goes under "wishful thinking" in my list. I don't think it's possible, without the ability to run a total simulation. Partially, sure. I've been working on my "telepathy", which for me is reading body language, social webs, and personal/group space, so I'e been thinking about this off and on. Yes, I've scared some people with the accuracy of some of my predictions. Thing is, some of them are off, and some of those are always going to be off, because people change. (Some of mine are just off because I'm not terribly good at this. In particular, I get suckered in by charm. I'm working on this.)

The idealized sexual behavior gives people false expectations, which could lead to suckiness, rather like the lifebonding/herald rant. People should know that sometimes you have to work things out. Like all of the quotes from various authors about the idea being the easy part and actually writing being the hard part, being lovey-dovey is easy, but making a day-to-day relationship work does take actual effort.

Stories idealize in my head too. Sometimes I like the effect. Sometimes, like when I want to read the wonderful story I remember, I hate it.

Wishful thinking, yes, but this is billed as science fiction. What doesn't strike me as realistic is the way that certain people respond immediately to Mike, later on. Been working on my telepathy as well.

Spooky/silly moment the other night when I said something to

marxdarx, lips only, and he actually heard (or remembers having heard) me actually saying it aloud.

Oddly enough, I've been managing to use one of Aral's bits of advice (complete surrender in the war of love to win) along with Heinlein's "how to keep a man" advice ... the good bits. It feels like Heinlein advice in my head, at least. Combine that with Cordelia's overanalysis and "Communicate, dammit!" and it just might work.

It's been working, so far, with Adam (modulo the usual complete miscommunication bombs) as soon as he realized that I actually wanted him to *tell* me what was going on.

...and furthermore, until having actual experience with kiddies, I wanted to get married and have some.

...Now, having seen the unromanticized version, I'd rather adore other peoples' kids from a distance. A long, sanitary distance until they're old enough to begin to teach naughty jokes to, thanks much.

Huh, I've actually gone somewhat in the opposite direction. Then again, I grew up around kids. I'm one of the oldest of the kids of my parents' friends. When I was younger kids were vaguely interesting for a while, but then they'd scream or need diaper stuff or need naps or just be difficult and then they weren't my problem after more. I've become more interested in them as I've gotten older, although I'm still not rabid over them the way Heinlein women seem to be. ("Must -- breed -- now. Biological -- clock -- frozen at Playboy centerfold.")

That's one of the things that still concerns me about Cordelia, but from her background, I at least have a vague inkling of an understanding. If you've had the manic drive to reproduce supressed all your life, you'd want to have lots of kids to make up for that, especially if there's room to.

I might think that Cordelia would play doting grandmama and set up householding on Beta, once Aral dies, and allow Miles' kids to be fostered out there with her, once they're old enough to start squabbling.

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Heinlein Women (crosspost from the list)

Responding here instead of the Bujold list...

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Exactly.

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Wonderland

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