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

[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.