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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing _that_ weird in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is there? Long time since I've read it, but I think some sort of polyamory was about as out-there as it got. If they can make a docudrama about FTX (and they will) they can make that :)

Even some of the others... I mean, they made the Handmaid's Tale, and that's way more distressing than most of Heinlein's Weird Sex Stuff.

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I read it within the last couple of years and found the following really weird:

- Objectification and sexualisation of very young women. The main character's marriage-group has a wife who is around 14 or 15. When she dies, there is this disturbing quotation "an explosive bullet hit between her lovely, little-girl breasts." There's a quotation elsewhere that says "She was possibly twelve, at stage when a fem shoots up just before blossoming out into rounded softness."

- Men are portrayed as desperate, lonely, and possessive, and are only prevented from brutalising women by the threat of violence from other men who are just as possessive. There is a bizarre social ritual in which men show their "appreciation" to sexually attractive women by looking them up and down and doing a lot of whistling.

- Women are portrayed as dumb, petty and manipulative. They are often eager to abuse their sexual power over men. The only part that women play in the initial revolution is to parade seductively in front of Authority guards in order to distract them.

- Alienation of homosexuality. It describes men as "turning to other men" if times are bad, but does not countenancne the idea that some men are genuinely (perhaps only) attracted to other men.7

I'm not sure if the actual content is as weird as GoT, but here's the kicker. In GoT I got an impression of "here is a women being objectified, isn't it awful". In MiaHM I got an impression of "here is a women being objectified, isn't it wonderful and totally natural".

Good point! Heinlein was not known for being subtle on topics like this.

I can’t figure out if he seemed to be a sex crazed maniac because he had a lot of sex and drugs, or a sex crazed maniac because he never got laid. Probably the latter. A lot of the other attitudes follow…

One of life’s little mysteries.

That, anyway, is not a mystery.

Heinlein had a medical condition that progressively blocked blood flow in his brain. He increasingly needed themes that would increase his blood pressure to be able to write at all. He finally got surgery.

Yeah, fair, it was very much Of Its Time (and I'd forgotten some of this; haven't read it in a long time...). That sort of thing can be adapted out easily enough, in general, though; most old sci-fi is going to have some of it. Removing the polyamory entirely would be more difficult, but _that_ probably isn't necessary.

Yeah, a lot of sci fi of the era was at best dismissive of women as actual people. But some authors were nevertheless pretty good, like Zelazny or le Guin (of course). Even Frank Herbert - the Gesserit may have been kind of evil but at least they had ambitions and power.

Was there anyone who wasn’t at least mostly evil in Herbert’s work? Haha

Even the Atreides were full on ‘the ends justify the means’, if they did nominally have ‘the good of mankind’ as the goal. Those are the most terrible dictators though.

Hmmm, arguably the Fremen were not particularly evil. But I take your point.

The Fremen also embraced a certain amount of "ends justify the means" (mostly in the unseen bit between books 1 and 2); it was ultimately Paul's _fault_, but they very much went along with it.

I’d argue an interplanetary Jihad resulting in the deaths of billions of innocents has at least a decent smidge of evil in the prosecuting of it, regardless of who started it.

I lean toward giving the author the benefit of the doubt here.

In the context of the societies being portrayed by the books, these behaviours may be normalized. The same goes for within the context of the personality of particular characters.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the author agrees with them. Personally I'd prefer that authors in general be free to write fiction without having their creativity diminished by worrying about whether a reader is going to think that the author holds the same view.

Yes and no. You can sometimes take a decent guess at an author's inner motivations by looking at repeated themes. Heinlein was notoriously fixated on sexuality, and increasingly on child sex and incest as the years went on. MiaHM is apparently one of the tamer reads, though I have basically given up on him after reading three of his novels.

Another classic trope of his is the "hyper-competent" man, who is incredibly self-assured, is smarter and can do everything better than the average person. Hard to say exactly what drives this, but my guess is it's either a superiority (I'm better than these fools) or inferiority (I wish I was better than these people) complex.

I agree, for some authors it can be hard not guess at their state of mind after reading several of their books.

The hyper competent man trope is fairly ubiquitous, maybe part of what drives this one is pandering to the target audience.

It’s also pretty convenient in a story - the protagonist (if said hyper competent) doesn’t hit roadblocks they can’t overcome eventually, regardless of what they run across.

And who wouldn’t want to be hyper competent in everything?

You might want to re-read the Moon is a harsh mistress, then look at what’s going on in large portions of society that aren’t the west coast bubble.

Matriarchal, multi generational polyamory is going to be a bit weird for half+ of society, and it’s not easy to remove that without completely rewriting almost the entire book and it’s characters.

I mean, a bit weird, sure, but, again, they made Handmaid's Tale. And Game of Thrones. And two completely separate drama series about the Borgias! (I gather the HBO one _was_ bowdlerised a bit, but still.) If people can manage those, they can manage a bit of polyamory.

Like, it might not be for everyone, but there have been many commercially successful TV dramas with more disturbing sexual content than Moon is a Harsh Mistress. (Now, some of his other stuff...)

Uh, I think you’re not getting my point.

GoT style sexuality (including incest in royal families, widespread prostitution, etc.) used to be pretty normal. As in, literally up until a century ago.

A handmaid’s tale (minus the massive infertility issues) is basically harem/sex slaves, which is still going on right now, and has been for most of human history near as I can tell.

The writers know how to push buttons to make that titillating and ‘tehee oh my’ type controversial, which gets eyeballs, without bringing a banhammer down on themselves.

Most heinlein (with moon as a harsh mistress being one of the mellowest!) is more in the alienates-too-many-mainstream-groups category. The large polygamy groups led today are all patriarchal, and would start lashing out at anything matriarchal. Matriarchal groups right now are pretty solidly anti-polygamy, etc.

Star ship troopers might be in the wings for a remake though, with the authoritarian bent society seems to be taking lately, but I doubt the ‘free sex’ angle would play well with the ‘rah rah fascism’ angle. Those two groups currently aren’t as well aligned. And near as I can tell, it would be even harder for people to understand satire than last time, so good luck with that angle.

And no one knows how to turn it into clicks/butts in seats reliably.

So it doesn’t get the kind of attention from writers/producers/money folks. That’s all it is.

PKD has a niche that does reliably put butts in seats, and doesn’t have the same baggage, so it does.

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