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Parts of this message can be found in the following threads:
>From: Lesley Grant <lgrant>
>Subject: cherryhlist -- forwarded with author's permission
>Date: Sun, 14 Feb 93 14:38:03 GMT


From: zink@panix.com (David Zink)
Subject: Re: The the great ongoing misogyny/misandry discussion

In article <1993Feb5.170620.15147@nastar.uucp> phardie@nastar.uucp (Pete Hardie) writes:
>I see.  Both _Thendara House_ and _The Shattered Chain_ are later than I was
>reading.  I stopped reading the Darkover series about 1983, and even those
>were non-new paperbacks.  Can you remember any examples of lesbian
>relationships in the earlier books?

Some of my mother's Marine Corps buddies are Lesbians of around MZB's
generation, and thus I have been exposed to a lot of older, but hard-core
feminists (& mom was raised by two women, one of them an engineer).

My impression of that whole generation, especially the writers MZB and LeGuin,
is that they were just too sullied by the culture they grew up in to ever see
women and men as just fellow human beings, in the sort of impartial way to
which I am accustomed.  MZB's writing, especially pre-Thendara Darkover, are
among the most sexist (and unwittingly misogynist) things I have read.  It
is actually painful for me to read them, and even more painful when female
friends try to present her to me as a feminist writer.  The idea that female
sorcerors have to do drugs to enjoy sex, while reminding me of one of the more
charming and truer bits of Annie Hall, also makes me grit my teeth in
embarassment.  While I'm sure you can defend it with ``but that's the way
her magic works,'' I'll still bet you'd find, could you probe what's left of
her mind, that the decision was not made with any thought to the social
implications.  It just seemed like the way things would work.

Not to criticize too heavily though; despite their failure by modern
standards, most of the old SF writers were notorious feminists and
anti-racists by the standards of their day.  But SF stays in print a long
time, and it shows.

I think the least sexist writers around are the newer ones, especially,
say, Cherryh, Varley, and Delaney (not new at all, actually).  C. and V.
are mid-seventies writers, Delaney has been around a long time mostly
because he started young.  I am trying to remember what his sixties books
were like; certainly his mid seventies ones (say, Dhalgren and Triton),
which I have read recently, are non-sexist as all get out.  Mind you,
Triton protrays some of the most sexist societies and people you will find
anywhere, but on the other hand they are each sexist in their own fashion,
so you just don't have that taint of unexamined sexist assumptions you find
with most people who grew up before 1970.

I can't say I read everything (or even anything) with a view to grading it
for sexism; these are just my impressions based on which stories just beat
me about the head and shoulders with their 'isms, and which ones struck me
by managing to catch sexist assumptions I was not aware I was making.

So many of the newer writers seem to have so little inherent sexism, that I
think it is becoming a dead issue.

I should point out that Cherry's stuff is sometimes actively feminist.  For
instance, and this is something I thought obvious, but judging from past
traffic it really needs to be pointed out:

Male Hani are not what you think they are.  So many times I have heard them
described as essentially useless, mating machines.  Quite the opposite is
true.  Male Hani are just as capable as female Hani, however their society
trains them to function in certain sorts of roles, in a certain sort of
fashion, that makes of them sex objects and little else.  This is a quite
obvious parallel of certain human societies I can think of, though, of
course, with the sexes reversed.  The crew of the Chanur are gradually
learning that males can remain calm in stressful situations, that males can
dream of something besides making a home, and that they deserve a place in
the business world.  Who knows, perhaps that Hani glass ceiling will be
raised; perhaps someday a male will captain his own ship.  It won't be Khym,
but it might be one of his children.

What I like about Cherryh is the way she slips the knife in so that most of
you don't even see it.  Look how many of you are terribly sexist about the
Hani (as sexist as they are), and yet the only evidence you have is that of
female Hani.  Terrible the way Cherryh's lack of a priveleged narrator
does that to you.

As for creating twisted female characters, I am amazed that people can
reference Cyteen without noticing that the Elder Ariane is among the most
vicously twisted characters Cherryh ever wrote.

	-- David Zink