In one book, the characters discuss rape and say something like, ‘On Earth there used to be a defense for rape called ‘insanity’. In Luna, it’s accepted that someone who would rape another person has to be insane, and it gets them thrown out of the nearest airlock.’. (I think that was ‘Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’?)

It’s mentioned twice in ‘Cat Who Walks Through Walls’, once in a torture scene in ‘Friday’, and probably here and again in other books. No ‘blame the victim’ scenes.

In any case, several of Heinlein’s characters make a point of refusing to engage in intercourse with people who are indebted or in service to them, and he notably equates a customer’s refusal to pay the agreed upon amount for intercourse rape, so his attitude toward rape in fiction seems to be the exact opposite of the statement that you mentioned.

That’s not to say that he didn’t personally feel differently, but that if he did feel that way, it’s not shown in his work.

As to Heinlein’s sexuality, well. “Papa spank!”

(not that my sex life is all that different, except I’m more likely to be spanked for being an uppity, malfunctioning robot toy spider-girl than for being an uppity daughter.)

I’m not sure what causes it, but I think it might be a reaction to cognitive dissonance between their popularity, and the perception of the deserved popularity: you get similar reactions to Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling, and other popular musicians, politicians, sports stars, religious figures, etc.

Someone dislikes the work of an artist, but sees that the work is popular: instead of understanding that theirs is just one of many possible legitimate opinions, the cognitive dissonance resolves itself by making them see those who disagree with them as inferior in some way: stupid, juvenile, or perverted.

Each time they see something that disagrees with this idea, they subconsciously resist it, and by resisting, become more entrenched in their point of view.

Of course, in the case of Dan Brown, this is all entirely justified. Only the children of retarded perverts read that stuff :P

Note, Bob’s viewpoint slightly skeeves me too (speaking of his actual viewpoint as elaborated in “For Us, the Living” and not the viewpoints espoused by fictional characters) but it’s way better than the mainstream, where women are property and the only improvement in 500 years is that they are now their own property in fact (though still metaphorically male property, bearing their fathers’ names until “given away” to another male).

People should be able to put their bodies where they want to in relationship to other bodies, within the dictates of mutual consent and reasonable hygiene. Religion need not be involved or consulted, and the state should only be involved to the limits required for the continuation of society through the education of children.

(Yes, including Iron Man 2. Exercise: Name five action movies from this year. Now name one that passes the Bechdel-Wallace test. If you can; I can’t.)

“an impassioned denunciation of the review, of invasive reviews in general and of the person who had written it — who, Robert conjectured, was some effete New York bookworm who had never traveled more than a few dozen miles from his home and had no knowledge of what the real world was like“

Alas for our red-blooded writer with the touchy ego, this reviewer was the polyglot, Lithuanian-born Budrys…

I’m surprised no one in the comments has mentioned Farnham’s Freehold, which seems highly prescient these days.

who is with me on this?

http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/heinlein-robert-anson-1907-crit2_20/

Heinlein must be less interesting and influential than I thought — his reputation among geeks notwithstanding.

So does anyone here eat their dead?

Further, if you read his books, including ‘Stranger’, you see some of the strongest female characters in literature, and you’re seeing it from a guy that was born in the early 1900′s. Pretty amazing, IMHO.

Like, I want to steal the idea of clothes and a tub of money by the door from SiaSL. Nice and practical. But first, I need my own home…

To a certain extent, we always have to give writers the benefit of that doubt. But over the course of a novel, much less over the course of a career’s worth of similarly-written books, if the author doesn’t find some way to provide a different perspective than the one certain sexist/racist/whatever-ist characters have, he’s basically complicit in that viewpoint, and it’s almost certainly his own. Know how I know Tom Clancy is a defense hawk?

I wouldn’t call the female characters in Stranger strong, and certainly not in his other books, either. Take Number of the Beast, where his female characters are literally asserting military authority over male protagonists and committing Jack-Bauer style genocide when the plot calls for it. Are they strong women? No, because he explicitly makes the point that they started being strong when they decided to stop acting like women, and in both books he provides clear counter-examples of dangerously useless girly-girls. (Ditto again for Starship Troopers.)

It’s not like he was out of synch with his peers in this regard, or for that matter broader American society. Asimov did the same thing in, well, every book he ever wrote. But I think it’s a mistake to assume that what looks and walks and talks like sexism must be something else, especially since his “context” is pretty well knowable.

Thanks for the namecheck. I cheerfully invite you to read the three paragraphs immediately following it, which begin “But…”.

Science fiction writers get really pervy as they age. Stranger is interesting less for its perversity as for its sociological comments on cannabalism. Social libertarianism seems appropriate.

As a middle-aged woman, I love all the young male science fiction fans who judge sexism so harshly. Most of these guys were positively progressive for their time.

Now I must plug Cory Doctorow’s mentor Judith Merril — best science fiction I’ve ever read, with many feminist themes.

See: http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/Heinleinsex/sexintro.htm

If Budrys and Panshin had taken their analyses of Heinlein a little further, they might not have been quite so surprised by his reaction. He doesn’t come across as a man who would tolerate much in the way of second-guessing or questioning.