I don't like most of Robert Heinlein's stories, even though they generally have good plotlines, because of his rampant sexism. But everyone else is ALWAYS telling me, "Heinlein is great, you read the WRONG book, you should read THIS instead." The first book I read was To Sail Beyond the Sunset which seemed to consist entirely of some woman having sex with her relatives and thinking it was liberated. Then someone ELSE told me that Heinlein's writing had gone downhill since his stroke, and I should read something written before that. So I read Friday which seemed to consist entirely of some woman having sex with everyone she met and thinking it was liberated.

Still I was fatally optimistic. I'm always thinking, "Maybe I should give Heinlein a chance, maybe I'll find another story that I haven't read that I will actually like" and I picked up this book I found in one of my husband's boxes, and I took it to work, and there was a Heinlein story in it.

It started out with a fat scholarly guy named Potiphar sitting in a window in the "future", and he looks outside and what does he see but a woman taking off her clothes. This didn't seem promising to me. (In fact, as I read along, it got progressively worse and worse. It got so bad that I was turning each page thinking "It can't get worse, I must finish, oh it DOES AAAaaAaaaA" and being finally grateful that it was only forty pages long.)

The woman is nearly arrested, but Potiphar rescues her, by having a raincoat handy, and convincing her to tell the police and the female lawyer who is there to help her that he knows her and that they are friends. She goes along with him meekly, since she just doesn't know what came over her. It turns out she is the helpless victim of a disease where everything goes crazy in the world, as a result of some statistical trend that Potiphar has been researching brilliantly. Immediately they are on a first name basis, and she's giving him endearing little nicknames, and he makes cute little lecherous comments at her, which she doesn't understand or thinks are adorable. He volunteers to take her home to her landlady and she says "You don't look like a wolf" and then he says "Oh I am" and whistles at her and gnashes his teeth, and then she dimples at him and says "Oh! Well I'd rather wrestle with you than the landlady." She is, of course, single, a self-described "doddering old maid" at the age of twenty-five, who cooks marvelously.

At this point, I was about ready to throw the book across the room. This is what I did when I read Stranger in a Strange Land, when Jill tells Mike not to protect her if he sees someone raping her, because she probably asked for it in the first place.

Anyway, the rest of the story is filled with the guy making brilliant and keen observations predicting the end of the world, and the woman (sorry, girl) saying things like "Huh?" and "Oh!" and "But I just don't understand, Potty. What does it mean? " At one point she finds something to support his ideas, but he derides her and tells her to grow up. He also tells her to shut up a few times, and it's noted that she quiets down and does what she is told a lot, and there's also a memorable occurrence of "Quiet, woman!" Later, they run away from the nuclear holocaust (?!) and move into a cabin together. Potiphar marries them so that they can have sex. ("Now repeat after me." "Yes, Potiphar. I, Meade, take thee, Potiphar...") At one point he volunteers to help do the dishes, and she says, "No, I'll do the women's work, and you do the men's work. That's fair."

Now, admittedly, this story was written in 1952. The collection of stories the book was released in was printed in 1966. The publishers, Funk and Wagnalls, have a little problem with liberation, because on the front cover, it says "Nine superb tales of men caught in extraordinary circumstances..." and on the back "Science Fiction has come a long way since the pulps of the thirties and forties... today's reality... men and women dealing with unusual environments!"

It always seems to me that later on into Heinlein's stories, he tries to be all "liberated" and unsexist in an outrageous way, but it always boils down to "everyone can have sex with everyone else and nobody can get jealous because we're all so liberated here in the future". It reminds me of the time an elderly colleague told me that Gloria Steinem was a beautiful woman and wasn't it amazing how she had actually been in Playboy. Somewhere, they are missing the point. I could blame it on the generation gap, but it makes me mad reading Heinlein, because there's a story there, but all this crap gets in the way.