Trope?

[asterroc]

Is it a common stale sci-fi trope to have a supposedly sentient alien race actually have only males be sentient and females are bestial breeding stock, or is it only Orson Scott Card (the Piggies in Speaker for the Dead) and Larry Niven (Kzin and Puppeteers in the Ringworld/Man-Kzin Wars universe) who are guilty of it? This sort of things is really the worst possible example of how many authors assume males are standard and only put in females if they're making a point.

Are there any cases of the reverse, a supposedly sentient alien race where actually only the females are sentient and males are bestial breeding stock?

Relatedly, does anyone remember enough about Anne McCaffrey's Catteni (Freedom's Landing series) to recall much about Catteni females? I've a distinct impression that either their females were also non-sentient, or at best they weren't mentioned as being anything special. Certainly the protagonist female wasn't anything special, with her battered woman syndrome that's taken for entirely normal.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

i thought with the piggies females could be breeding stock or sapient but not both, because the procreation process was fatal for the female and happened in the larval stage, so females who matured to the sapient stage existed but only by virtue of not having participated in the reproductive process.

as for an example of a sorta-reversal, what about social-insect-type aliens where all the thinking is done by the queen (like Card's buggers)?

i know of one story where somebody at one point advances this as a theory about a newly encountered species, but turns out to be wrong, but the turning out to be wrong aspect of it is sort of spoilers, so i shouldn't say more.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Having just re-read "Speaker", I interpreted the book as that the Wives were also slightly less intelligent than the Mothers, but I could be mistaken. But even if I'm mistaken, it is still demeaning to women, reinforcing the stereotype that women can either breed/raise a family, or be intelligent/have a job, but not both.

Were the Bugger workers male or female? I didn't think they were given a sex, but I could be mistaken. But you're right that the reproductive males were not intelligent and only the females were. Thanks, that redeems Card somewhat for me. (Not that I disliked him just now, just a bit disappointed, but I still love his work.)

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, hive-like races do tend to have that structure. There's one in McCaffrey's The Tower and the Hive series, which is about as sexist as the rest of her work. The Hive aliens don't really make up for that, because even though the females do all the thinking and all the work, they're violent and evil, whereas all the super-powerful human females are subservient to their male lovers. Damia's lover, actually, started out weaker than her, and by necessity grew to be as powerful as her.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

McCaffrey was a feminist for the 1970's, writing about strong women who fought hard to maintain their own independence of men and to find their own individual places in the world. Unfortunately she never got past that (modern feminist works would either have women equal to men from the get-go, or else have strong women fight hard for all women's rights) and even regressed for the Catteni series. Todd McCaffrey at least isn't as blatant about it.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i'm pretty hostile to Card's social and political views generally, including his views on gender, but i'm not sure how any one portrayal of a single fictional species can have the weight you're attaching to it, in the absence of a broader sense of the author's overall approach to these things. i mean, there's nothing to prevent a species from having these kinds of extreme sex differences, and exploring the possibilities of such a species in a science-fiction setting doesn't need to be any kind of straightforward statement about the gender politics of the human population - the whole point of having fictional alien races is that we can explore ways things could in principle work, but don't among us humans.

[q10.livejournal.com]

although males in piggy society get a substantially better deal than females, having to die and turn into a tree before you can start a family doesn't sound so great either.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

The whole point with the piggies is that they don't see becoming a fathertree as dying, and it's not, really. It's another stage of life the transition to which happens to look (to a human) as though they're dying.

[allandaros.livejournal.com]

I think I've seen it in one other author's work, but I wouldn't say it's a common trope by any measure. (It wasn't the Moties in Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_, which I had started to think it was.)

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Try Joanna Russ's The Female Man as antidote to the trope.

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

I recall female Catteni as being generally fat and stupid. If they are sentient, they are definitely of a lower order of intelligence than the males. The males have near-complete control over females' lives. Also, only males ever become Mentats. It's been a while since I've read the series, but my basis for this is Zainal's brother's wife.

I can't think of any Star Trek races off the top of my head who fit the nonsentience trope, although there are a few of whom we only ever see males (Jem'Hadar come to mind--I'm not even sure female Jem'Hadar exist, I don't remember exactly how they reproduce). Then there's the androgynous J'naii, whose sole purpose was to send a heavyhanded message about homophobia and acceptance...all of the genderless J'naii were played by female actresses.

And of course there's the Orions, the males of whom tend to be gangsters and crime lords, and the females of whom have, previously to the recent movie, only ever appeared as sex slaves, so that Gaila, a brilliant female Orion engineer in the recent movie, is frequently referred to by fans as an "Orion slave girl" even though SHE'S OBVIOUSLY A FREE PERSON. The vast majority of fanfic about her has her being an escaped slave. I've even come across a few where her relationship with Kirk "fixes her", heals an entire childhood of abuse by teaching her how to love again or some bullshit like that.

Twi'leks from Star Wars are rather similar to Orions, come to think of it. They even have the same range of skintones. The males tend to be violent, greedy and/or corrupt (Bib Fortuna, the guy from Jabba's palace, for instance) with some notable exceptions (Nawara Ven, a thoroughly decent lawyer), and the women tend to be slave dancers. The only exception I can think of is Aayla Secura, a Jedi who is unnamed except in fandom. She's the one who dies on the jungle planet in Episode III. She also appears in the battle on Geonosis in Episode II.

I don't know about only being breeding stock, but there was an awful first-season TNG episode called "Angel One" where the males were second-class citizens, and objectified the way human women are. The "rebels" living in caves didn't treat each other equally, either; it was just a case of the women deciding to be subservient and letting the men rule over them.

Now that I think about it, keeping males as breeding stock seems very familiar. I must have seen that somewhere. I just can't remember where. Or maybe I'm just thinking of Queen of the Damned, where she wanted to kill off all the men (because men cause all the problems in the world) and just keep a few dozen around for reproductive purposes.

[weirdlilfaechld.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm wrong since it's been quite a while since I've read the Star Wars books but I thought when it came to Twi'leks and selling their children to slavery gender didn't really matter. I do know that there were several male slaves (working slaves and sex slaves), even though they didn't exist in the movie and that beyond childhood both genders got equal respect whether they were once a slave or not.

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any SW books that had Twi'lek children that I can recall. I do remember an adult woman on Ryloth in The Krytos Trap whose sole purpose was to dance and be objectified. She was a former slave and was free at the time we saw her, but her lifestyle hadn't changed much--she basically went from being a sex slave to a voluntary sex worker. It's a valid lifestyle choice, but we don't see any male Twi'leks who are former slaves and chose to continue the same occupation after they were freed.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ryloth#Life_of_Enslavement

Even Aayla Secura was a slave for a while, apparently.

[q10.livejournal.com]

also Le Guin's The Matter of Seggri (collected in The Birthday of the World) depicts a human(-ish) civilization in which women have all the power, and men are generally not regarded as persons, although we're given every indication that this isn't a result of any cognitive difference between the sexes (it's supposed to be at least in part a result of a genetic peculiarity that keeps males a fairly extreme minority in the population).

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

The Freedom's Landing series was actually kind of scary. Seriously, WTH was with the "I can only do X when I'm passed out" trope? _Twice_?

There are several (at least) examples of alien races that I've encountered in which the females are at least the only ones that are ever seen, and several more in which the females are dominant. Niven's chirpsithra (Draco Tavern stories; males absent), Heinlein's Venerians (in _Space Cadet_ and others; males absent), and Brin's qhueuen (in the Uplift second trilogy; females dominant) come to mind immediately; I'd have to go stare at my collection to come up with more.

Card's sentient buggers were all females, IIRC.

[cnoocy]

The graphic novel Clan Apis by Jay Hosler takes place in a society where females do all of the work and have all the power, and males are only kept as breeding stock. But it's not science fiction, it's scientific fiction, written by a biologist. It's about honey bees.