Writers have been sharing insights and wisdom with their audiences for longer than I’ve been around. Longer than this country or printed books have been around. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
One problem is that it’s easy to become heavy-handed and write what I call a “Western Union” story (“This story sends a powerful message.” “If you want to send a message, send it Western Union.” — a quip credited to several different producers). The message may be good but it drowns out the storytelling. For instance, while I usually like Robert Jackson Bennett’s work, his novella Vigilance tackles school shootings, deepfakes and politically slanted TV news with such a heavy hand it makes a sitcom Very Special Episode look like a masterpiece of subtlety.
Western Union is worthy of a post in itself but what I’m looking at here is another problem: the writer’s clever insight isn’t really clever.
Some years back I started on the cult classic Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Early on, the authors explain we could solve many of our problems if we understood that everything we do is the result of being primates. One character wants to go home, read a skin magazine and masturbate because he has a primate sex drive. Dante’s Inferno is a primate fantasy: trap your enemies in a hole and fling poop on them. See how it all makes sense?
No, no it doesn’t, which is why I stopped reading and never went back. Our sex life is not a primate sex life, nor is our behavior explicable just by us being primates, nor is Dante’s poem a primate fantasy. Primate sex lives are not one-size-fits all: bonobos, chimps and gorillas, for instance, all relate to the opposite sex differently. Other primates are similarly diverse.
Possibly this sounded reasonable in the 1970s when the trilogy first came out. As Lucy Cooke says in Bitch, primatologists used to think there was a universal primate template marked by aggression and male domination. Since then, we’ve learned better. But even allowing for that, the Dante line is still idiotic.
Another example comes from Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road. The 1963 novel has twenty-one year old veteran “Scar” Gordon on a cross-dimensional quest with the beautiful Star and canny scientist Rufo. Scar completes the adventure, marries Star but learns that while she cares for him she’s also been using him. He walks away but eventually reunites with Rufo for more adventures along the glory road (a metaphor for adventuring, not a literal location).
During one conversation with Scar, Star tells him that Earth’s sexual mores are unique in the multiverse: marriage and prostitution are both based on “the incredible notion that what all women have an endless supply of is nevertheless merchandise, to be hoarded and auctioned.” In a healthy society without sexual hangups women could provide men with all the sex they need — how screwed up is Earth that relationships don’t work like that?
As my old dungeon master liked to put it, Heinlein is not playing his intelligence here. First off, marriage is not at all equivalent to prostitution. Marriage is a long-term arrangement with a lot of obligations (even though the parties don’t always honor them); prostitution is a one-off transaction after which both parties walk away with no strings. That’s part of the appeal of sex work for some men, the freedom to get their rocks off without any obligation to buy dinner, talk afterwards, express affection, etc.
There’s a deeper flaw in Heinlein’s argument though. Even if our society got rid of all the slut-shaming and let women sleep with anyone they wanted, most women (probably none) wouldn’t want to provide men with an “endless supply” of sex. That would require an endless supply of men to turn them on and that doesn’t exist. Even if a man enters a bar full of women who are horny and want to hook up, that doesn’t guarantee he can a)find a woman who wants to hook up with him, specifically; b)that he’ll find her attractive enough to want the same; c)that she wants to have sex in the ways that scratch his particular itch. Hence sex work.
Either Star’s arguing that sex is fun regardless of who your partner is (I find this dubious) or that even if it’s not fun, women should provide “service sex” to someone who can’t get laid — just lie on their backs and think of England, as the old phrase goes. Heinlein’s displaying a smug sexism by confining this rule to women when men also have an endless sex supply — sure, our penises may grow weary but we have fingers, we have tongues … Heinlein doesn’t even consider that. He may have thought this was an edgy argument but it sounds like the fantasy of a randy goat who wants sex with lots of women.
There are ways to make a bullshit insight acceptable — not in the sense they get me to accept the premise, just making it work for the novel. In Poul Anderson’s War of the Wing-Men, for instance, the conniving trader Nicholas Van Rijn sends his alien allies into battle while staying away from it himself. He tells his two-fisted sidekick that generals never go to the frontlines because if they get killed, the army loses its brain and thereby the war.
This was thought-provoking when I first read it but I realized later it’s nonsense. As historian John Keegan points out The Mask of Command, good military leaders go to the front for multiple reasons: their culture expects it, or they need to get a feel for how the battle is playing out. Good generals also appoint subordinates who can assume command in their place.
That doesn’t bother me because van Rijn is a conniving weasel: he’s not offering a true insight, he’s offering an excuse. The point of the novel is that while his sidekick imagines he’s saving van Rijn with his muscles, the trader is saving him with brains. Smarts accomplish what brute force can’t.
Similarly, the argument made by multiple comic book villains that being a villain is the smart choice — you’re either a wolf or a sheep and they choose not to be sheep — is baloney. You can choose to be the guard dog protecting the sheep, as superheroes do. Or you can choose to be a non-predator that can defend itself: porcupines and hedgehogs aren’t aggressors but they aren’t helpless pushovers either. But I don’t expect insights from villainous lips, I expect self-justification and that’s what this is.
And sometimes I’ll give the story a free pass because I like the insight, even if I don’t believe it. Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time was a boring anime series but at one point there’s a quote to the effect that “It’s said a man who’s lying to you will avoid your eyes—when a woman lies, she meets your gaze.” I doubt that’s true but for some reason I like the lin. I’m not inclined to fuss about it.
#SFWApro. Glory Road cover by Clyde Caldwell, don’t know the others.
Yeah, you could have pretty much written this whole column about Heinlein. He was definitely not as clever as he thought on a whole bunch of topics. I’m reminded of a talk about SF utopias by author Chris Beckett that I attended some years ago, in which he pretty much summarized the key flaw of Heinlein’s lunar libertarian utopia in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” in a single pithy sentence: “It would have all been taken over by gangsters almost immediately.”
And unfortunately he became addicted to pontificating as he grew older. Glory Road showed it was starting as early as the early 1960s.
Robert A. Heinlein, using the pseudonym of John Norman, did write further on women without hang-ups, fulfilling men’s sexual desires in his Gor-series.
(Yes, I know… Being facetious here. But a number of Heinlein’s books gives me the same sense of ick as the Gor books).
Makes me glad I could never get into Heinlein because Gor is a lot of ick.
His ‘books for teenagers’ are ok space romps, but when it comes to his ‘you know what the great advantage of an extended life span is? I get to have sex with my great-great-great-granddaughter!’ it gets skeevy. I’ve got the feeling that Heinlein basically was a rightwing guy who looked at the hippie movement, and thought: “Easy nookie! Gonna want me some of that!”
He seems to have jumped on the train before that — Glory Road and Strange Land are both early 1960s — but he wouldn’t be the first middle-aged man who fantasized about that sort of thing. Just one of the few who could translate it into fiction.