Breasts, and book 7

[derien]

I'm so envious of this woman! Divorcing my breasts - Liza Nelson (found via daegaer, thank you! :)) Nutshell: Some precancerous lumps were found in her breasts and she got to have a double mastectomy with reconstructive surgery using the fat from her stomach! So, small breasts and flat tummy all at once - WANT! Gosh I hope those mammograms they keep sending me back to will find something. Is that horrible, to wish that?

Book #7) "Podkayne of Mars" - Robert Heinlein. Podkayne is a teenage girl who wants to be a space captain.

I should say that I think Heinlein was doing his best to be forward thinking about race...

You don't realize, as a reader, that Podkayne's Uncle is a Maori until at least a third of the way into the book, when she overhears some prejudice people talking about him. Previously it's not mentioned because the book is in the form of her diary and his skin color is not something she notices. And then later it's revealed that she considers herself Maori, too, even though she has blonde hair.

First, it's told from the POV of a teenage girl. He doesn't do teenage girl very well. Smart girl, can do higher maths, and has to keep her brilliant, money-mad and socially unfettered eleven year old brother (Clark) in line, but she's such an annoying twit. Wants to be a spaceship captain, but later begins to rethink her ambition when she discovers that "babies are fun!" (More of Heinlein's completely unsubtle propaganda that women have a biological calling to be baby machines, and that raising children is what they should do above all else.) Her mother is a very successful engineer, but goes into all-baby-all-the-time mode when she suddenly finds herself with triplets, but then at the end Uncle is upbraiding Father for having let Mother go off and be an engineer and ignore Podkayne and Clark. When in fact their fate at the end of the book seemed to have nothing to do with the parents or their parenting style, and the only way in which we really see the parents ignoring the older two children is in paying too much attention to the new triplets.

I hate to even bring up how horribly he infantalizes this girl. In times of stress she suddenly starts talking baby talk and wants to sit on her Uncle's lap. This is getting into this fucking creepy older man/young girl incest shit that Heinlein loves to pull, and I hate it, but even more I hate when he makes it "normal," that under stress the woman becomes all child-like. At the end of the story even her little brother is patronizing of her - it's in character for him, and possibly she doesn't get annoyed because she's been worried about him and distracted by their whole situation, but it's still annoying as all hell to me, and as someone who had a brilliant and possibly evil little brother who could out think me at every turn I would still recommend standing up for one's dignity and demanding he not swat you on the butt. That's just wrong.

And then there's the two different endings, both of which are in this book - the ending he wrote and the ending the publishing company forced him to write. In his ending he kills her off, but for no particular reason. I mean, possibly so that Clark will have a reason to grow up and stop being the evil little boy, but it's not like she's doing anything heroic, it's just stupid, and she didn't really have to die. In the re-write it works just as well to have her just have been injured. But I can't figure out why he still insisted on making her be just as fucking stupid in the re-written ending. All I can think is that in the end he really hated her for her wimpy, soppy, infantile-but-playing-on-her-hotness behavior as much as I did.

Okay, wait, in fairness I should point out that her 'evil' little brother also develops a fondness for babies, and an aptitude for getting them to stop crying, so it's not all completely one-sided. Perhaps I am too hard on the guy.


Yeah, anyhow. Must get a move on before I forget to eat breakfast like I did yesterday. And then I drove to work and there were all food songs on the radio station I switched on, because it was Fat Tuesday and there was a big cooking contest down at USM.

Comments

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

I don't like the sound of this Heinlin guy ONE BIT from what you write about him.

[derien.livejournal.com]

There's so much to get annoyed with about him! But his good points - he really was ahead of his time as far as race and relationship ideas. He was the first person bold enough to actually write stories that openly featured people in polaymorous relationships, and at the time when he started writing it was pretty much unheard of to have a black guy and a blonde girl in the same family in a story. In "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" the main character goes to Earth for a short while and manages to get thrown in jail for 'indescency' because he showed off a picture of his family to someone - it was a line marriage, alternating male and female, so he had a bunch of wives and co-husbands, and about every race represented, because on the Moon everyone considered themselves one people, they made no distinction of skin color. But Heinlein couldn't imagine that such a change would come about in the culture at large, on Earth, apparently, so on Earth things were still as he knew them in the 50's.

And Eor always points out to me that the women in his books often pretend to be meek and following orders, until they suddenly are not, and then they just quietly go off and do the smart thing and save the main charcter guy's ass. Also, that they are often much smarter than the guys, especially in maths. Apparently every woman in all his books is a representation of his wife, who he thought was just amazing and wonderful. But he had a huge blind spot about the basic nature of women, and he thought that all women basically had the same impulses and desires.