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

[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.