Why aren't there genderless women anymore? you ask. I think that you
will find that genderless women and non-sexual lesbians have fell by the
wayside for a very important reason.
Most of the "bad guys" (the sexist, anti-gay people :) (probably some
of the "good guys" too) have ignored the sex and/or sexual orientation of
characters when it wasn't shoved in their face.
Melissa Scott said at WisCon this year that she had consiously added sex
(lesbian sex) to her stories so that readers couldn't ignore the sexuality
of her characters. Apparently it is not enough to say that a character is
a lesbian (or a woman). The fact must be driven home with sex and/or
gendered female characters.
Note that the non-gendered, non-sexual characters may be better for we,
the chosen, or coverted ones :) However I think we are seeing a complex
compromise of writers and readers.
-- Joel VanLaven
On Fri, 23 May 1997, farah mendlesohn wrote:
> On Wed, 21 May 1997 08:15:46 -0400 sue hagedorn wrote:
>
> >
> > Once I discovered Heinlein's juveniles, though, I was thoroughly
> hooked.
> > Yes, even though the "hero" was almost always male, they were
> good stories
> > of adventure and courage. As I read, I usually consciously just
> changed the
> > sexes around! Even today, DECADES later, in times of extreme
> stress my
> > "comfort" books are Citizen of the Galaxy or Tunnels in the Sky. I
> don't
> > know that today, though, I'd recommend starting a young girl out on
> > them--there's so much available now with intelligent heroines!-
>
>
> My problem with this is that of the many novels with girls as heroes I
> have read, there are remarkably few where the girls are free from
> gender in quite the same way that boys are allowed to be. To hark
> back to an earlier off subect angle, this is why the girl stories from
> the 30s were so good. The type of childhood they wrote about was
> one in which girls were to be asexual. This doesn't seem to be
> allowed anymore.
>
> Farah
>
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