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.