Heinlein Once Again

Once upon a time, pretty long ago as it happens, I contemplated writing a book on Robert Heinlein’s novels. My take on them was easy to state: the man’s perspective on almost everything in the world was vicious and rotten to the core.

 

I gave up on the project because I really didn’t fancy writing a philippic—and that’s what it would have been. It wasn’t just the outrageously condescending perspective on women that oozed from every single book, although that was sickening enough. It was also the corrosive attitude towards any established government, derived from what seemed to me the hopelessly misguided notion that the American wild west was the best time for men to be men. Kissing cousin to that point of view was Heinlein’s obvious politics of solipsism, which on a good day I could call libertarian, although it so often crossed the line into sovereign citizen idiocy—and so back to the attitude towards government.

 

But the presentation of women remained a central concern for me. Poor teen-aged Podkayne of Mars, whose only crime was her determination to be intelligent and active, gets blamed for causing the first interplanetary war. No reason, really, beyond the fact that Podkayne is a female.

 

Despite my misgivings, I decided to reread Stranger in a Strange Land. The why is kind of embarrassing, but in the interest of full disclosure I have to acknowledge that in my younger day—much much younger day, alas—I loved that book. It seemed to reflect everything that was good and proper. Suspicion of government chimed with my deep distrust of a government intent on pursuing the neo-colonial war in Vietnam. The casual disregard for conventional sexual morality struck me as just what the doctor ordered for an adolescent boy. I deeply grokked the idea that transcendence came through cultivation of the inner self, be that via Martian wisdom or, for me, via psychedelic drugs.

 

So I hoped that this book, which I had deliberately not reread when I outlined my plans for a philippic contra Heinlein, might serve as a cordial against the current Trump-induced malaise.

 

I had forgotten what an incredible windbag Jubal Harshaw is—a palimpsest for Heinlein himself. I had forgotten that the wind issuing from Jubal’s mouth traced point by point all the attitudes that I found so dismaying in his other books. I had forgotten in particular that the free sex that I had found so alluring in my adolescent years reduced itself to contempt for women, whose only redeeming quality was their willingness to be sex objects.

 

Some of that objectification is casual. For instance, when Mike, the Man from Mars, begins to understand the utility of money, “Jubal encouraged him to spend money and Mike did so, with the timid eagerness of a bride being brought to bed.” On its own such a statement doesn’t broadcast the insignificance of women, although it does hint that sexual submission, eager or not, timid or experienced, limns out the function of women.

 

But then there are passages that underscore that hint. So, one of the space voyagers who returns to Earth with Mike, is

 

pleased . . . that these women did not chatter, did not intrude into sober talk of men, but were quick with food and drink in warm hospitality. He had been shocked at Miriam’s disrespect toward her master—then recognized it: a liberty permitted cats and favorite children in the privacy of the home.

 

The women in question are Harshaw’s assistants—Anne, Dorcas, Miriam, and the new addition who comes to Harshaw’s residence with Mike, Jill—all of whom are impressive human beings, competent, self-assured, gutsy. At least they don’t chatter. But when they do, as Jill does when Mike begins to understand the human condition, they often speak as if they were Heinlein himself: “Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault.”

 

A final observation about the passage on chatter, which may make it even more disturbing. The statement, really a dip into the mind of the character, comes from Dr. Mahmoud, who has no first name, apparently, although he's called "Stinky." He is the cultural anthropologist on the voyage to and from Mars, if “anthropology” is the right term for a study of Martians. Mahmoud is a lapsed but constantly repentant Muslim. The perspective on women that Heinlein attributes to him stands for a general sense of what Islam says about women.

 

Whether or not that attribution is correct presents an interesting matter to study. But the point that makes the whole thing stink to high heaven is that Mahmoud articulates precisely the perspective that Harshaw, and by implication Heinlein himself have on women. When it comes to the clear contempt of women that Mahmoud thinks is proper, however, brave and straightforward Heinlein ducks behind the cover of Islam.

 

I may finish rereading the book. I am curious about why it seemed so necessary to me back in the 1960s, indeed why it resonated so loudly with the mind set of those years. I am hoping that Mike, the Man from Mars himself, will redeem the novel.