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'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.