While writing the previous post, 1976, I was aware that the clueless male sexism I was describing continued for many years afterward, and indeed, is still alive and kicking today—though much of it has grown less clueless and more malicious. I referred to Robert A. Heinlein’s novel, Time Enough for Love, published in 1973. Many of Heinlein’s later works feature guru-like old men mounting very young and very grateful women, and honestly, I can’t remember if my queasy memories of these variations on a theme are principally from Time Enough for Love or from his 1970 novel, I Will Fear No Evil. I gave up reading Heinlein after those two weighty products of one-handed typing, and I can’t bear the thought of slogging through either of them now in order to check.
Tag: Sexism
1976
On September 3, 1976—the day Viking 2 touched down successfully on the surface of Mars—I bellied up to a registration table in a hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, to receive my name tag and program book for MidAmeriCon, the 34th World Science Fiction Convention. I was seventeen years old. Other than Jennifer Vozoff, with whom I had held hands on the school bus three days running when I was in third grade, I had not yet had a girlfriend.
I was a devoted reader of science fiction, but I had never been to a science fiction convention. Standing outside the Imperial Ballroom, waiting to get into the Opening Ceremonies, I looked around at the attendees, mostly male, and thought, What a bunch of unattractive geeks and social outcasts. (I would discover later that many male science fiction fans think this when first encountering other male science fiction fans.) The fellow I mainly recall had the signature unwashed, scraggly hair and was playing parodic tunes of his own invention on a portable keyboard powered by his breath. Whenever he removed the flexible hose from his mouth, a quarter cup of saliva would dribble over the mouthpiece. He called himself Filthy Pierre.