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]

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).