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.

[allandaros.livejournal.com]

I think I've seen it in one other author's work, but I wouldn't say it's a common trope by any measure. (It wasn't the Moties in Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_, which I had started to think it was.)

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Try Joanna Russ's The Female Man as antidote to the trope.

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

I recall female Catteni as being generally fat and stupid. If they are sentient, they are definitely of a lower order of intelligence than the males. The males have near-complete control over females' lives. Also, only males ever become Mentats. It's been a while since I've read the series, but my basis for this is Zainal's brother's wife.

I can't think of any Star Trek races off the top of my head who fit the nonsentience trope, although there are a few of whom we only ever see males (Jem'Hadar come to mind--I'm not even sure female Jem'Hadar exist, I don't remember exactly how they reproduce). Then there's the androgynous J'naii, whose sole purpose was to send a heavyhanded message about homophobia and acceptance...all of the genderless J'naii were played by female actresses.

And of course there's the Orions, the males of whom tend to be gangsters and crime lords, and the females of whom have, previously to the recent movie, only ever appeared as sex slaves, so that Gaila, a brilliant female Orion engineer in the recent movie, is frequently referred to by fans as an "Orion slave girl" even though SHE'S OBVIOUSLY A FREE PERSON. The vast majority of fanfic about her has her being an escaped slave. I've even come across a few where her relationship with Kirk "fixes her", heals an entire childhood of abuse by teaching her how to love again or some bullshit like that.

Twi'leks from Star Wars are rather similar to Orions, come to think of it. They even have the same range of skintones. The males tend to be violent, greedy and/or corrupt (Bib Fortuna, the guy from Jabba's palace, for instance) with some notable exceptions (Nawara Ven, a thoroughly decent lawyer), and the women tend to be slave dancers. The only exception I can think of is Aayla Secura, a Jedi who is unnamed except in fandom. She's the one who dies on the jungle planet in Episode III. She also appears in the battle on Geonosis in Episode II.

I don't know about only being breeding stock, but there was an awful first-season TNG episode called "Angel One" where the males were second-class citizens, and objectified the way human women are. The "rebels" living in caves didn't treat each other equally, either; it was just a case of the women deciding to be subservient and letting the men rule over them.

Now that I think about it, keeping males as breeding stock seems very familiar. I must have seen that somewhere. I just can't remember where. Or maybe I'm just thinking of Queen of the Damned, where she wanted to kill off all the men (because men cause all the problems in the world) and just keep a few dozen around for reproductive purposes.

[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).

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

The Freedom's Landing series was actually kind of scary. Seriously, WTH was with the "I can only do X when I'm passed out" trope? _Twice_?

There are several (at least) examples of alien races that I've encountered in which the females are at least the only ones that are ever seen, and several more in which the females are dominant. Niven's chirpsithra (Draco Tavern stories; males absent), Heinlein's Venerians (in _Space Cadet_ and others; males absent), and Brin's qhueuen (in the Uplift second trilogy; females dominant) come to mind immediately; I'd have to go stare at my collection to come up with more.

Card's sentient buggers were all females, IIRC.

[cnoocy]

The graphic novel Clan Apis by Jay Hosler takes place in a society where females do all of the work and have all the power, and males are only kept as breeding stock. But it's not science fiction, it's scientific fiction, written by a biologist. It's about honey bees.