4 ms·
I remember after reading Ringworld on a friend's recommendation, saying that it had one too many alien species with non-sentient females for me. One, okay, inte
by Tossrock 9y ago
I remember after reading Ringworld on a friend's recommendation, saying that it had one too many alien species with non-sentient females for me. One, okay, interesting idea I guess, two, now you're doing a thing.
- egypturnash 9y agoRingworld: Adventurer Louis Wu visits the titular megastructure along with three amazing aliens - Nessus, the two-headed Puppeteer, Speaker-to-Animals, the felinoid Kzin, and Teela Brown, the Wo-Man.
- klipt 9y agoFor the Puppeteers, both the sperm and egg producing sexes are sapient, it's their surrogates (a different species) that are non-sapient. Doesn't seem much different to humans hypothetically developing artificial wombs and losing much of our sexual dimorphism over time. If humans gestate their young in non-sapient artificial wombs in the future, would that make us sexist?
- Tossrock 9y agoWell, except they explicitly call the non-sentient ones female (also stupid, and property), and the sentient ones are both referred to as male.
- klipt 9y agoWell that's a semantics issue. Niven might argue that since the egg-producers don't gestate the young they're fulfilling a "male" role of merely producing gametes. But I'd argue that the female role is defined more by producing egg cells than by gestation: female fish produce eggs but don't gestate their young, and we still call them female. Therefore the "male" puppeteers that produce eggs are still truly "female".
- ineptech 9y agoThe sentient ones are famously docile, cowardly and manipulative. I don't think calling them female would've been striking a great blow for progressive literature.