{"id":31601,"date":"2015-06-17T01:00:35","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T05:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31601"},"modified":"2020-08-07T13:15:11","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T17:15:11","slug":"qotd-heinleins-alleged-misogyny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/06\/17\/qotd-heinleins-alleged-misogyny\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Heinlein&#8217;s alleged misogyny"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>My friend Cedar, today, posted <a href=\"http:\/\/cedarwrites.com\/gold-plated-misogynist\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">about one of those lies<\/a> that \u201ceverybody knows\u201d and that are absolutely not true. Not only not true, but risible on their face. The lie is that Heinlein was a misogynist, which is not only a lie but a whole construct, an artifact of lies. And one that humans, nonetheless seem to buy wholesale.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not going to repeat the argument. Cedar made it. But I\u2019m going to quote what she said:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>When the woman who had first made the titular accusation was questioned by multiple voices in startlement, she finally admitted that she knew it to be so, because she had read it in Asimov\u2019s biography. Wait a minute, was my reply, you mean that man that Eric Leif Davin in his recent book <strong>Partners in Wonder<\/strong> wrote this about?\u201d Isaac Asimov is on record for stating that male fans didn\u2019t want females invading their space. According to the letter columns of the time, it seems that the only fan who held that opinion was\u2026 Isaac Asimov. A number of males fans welcomed their female counterparts. As did the editors, something Davin goes to great lengths to document.\u201d (You can read more on the women that other women ignore <a href=\"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/the-women-other-women-dont-see\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here at Keith West\u2019s blog<\/a>) So this woman has taken a known misogynist\u2019s claim that another man is a misogynist without questioning and swallowed it whole.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I run into this again and again. In a panel, once, questioning accusations of misogyny directed at Heinlein I got back \u201cWell, obviously he was. His women wear aprons.\u201d I then got really cold and explained that in Portugal, growing up, when clothes were expensive (how expensive. People stole the wash from the line. Imagine that happening here. People stealing clothes. Just clothes. Not designers, not leather, just clothes, including much-washed-and-mended pajamas.) we always wore aprons in the kitchen. And Heinlein was writing when clothes were way more expensive, relatively. (I buy my clothes at thrift stores. So unless it\u2019s a favorite pair of jeans or something, I don\u2019t wear aprons.) The difference is not \u201cputting women in their place.\u201d The difference is the cost of clothes.<\/p>\n<p>And this is why I don\u2019t get put on the \u201cHeinlein, threat or menace\u201d panels any more.<\/p>\n<p>But 90% of the women who make the accusation that Heinlein hated women or couldn\u2019t write women have never read him. They\u2019ve just heard it repeated by people with \u201cauthority.\u201d The cool kids. And so they can\u2019t be reasoned out of this assumption, because it\u2019s not an assumption. It\u2019s glamor. (The other ten percent, usually, were primed to think he was a misogynist and read the beginning of a book and didn\u2019t \u201cget\u201d some inside joke. Like, you know, the getting married after a tango. Which was pure fan fodder. They wouldn\u2019t have thought anything of it if they hadn\u2019t been primed. But they\u2019d been primed. They were under a glamor to see what wasn\u2019t there.)<\/p>\n<p>Sarah Hoyt, <a href=\"http:\/\/accordingtohoyt.com\/2015\/06\/02\/glamour-and-fairy-gold\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">&#8220;Glamor and Fairy Gold&#8221;, <em>According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2015-06-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Cedar, today, posted about one of those lies that \u201ceverybody knows\u201d and that are absolutely not true. Not only not true, but risible on their face. The lie is that Heinlein was a misogynist, which is not only a lie but a whole construct, an artifact of lies. And one that humans, nonetheless [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41],"tags":[1391,478,85,43],"class_list":["post-31601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","tag-biography","tag-robertheinlein","tag-sf","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8dH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31601"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59409,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31601\/revisions\/59409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}