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[kateorman]

Feminist SF, especially feminist SF set in future utopias or dystopias, sometimes handles homosexuality well and sometimes handles it badly. I'm reading The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper, and I've just come across a bit where someone explains that they routinely cure homosexuality, which, as people knew even before the apocalypse, is

Comments

[lillibet]

I've seen that in a number of SF works. It's one of the theories of causation. And in the case of that book, I think it was mostly a way of simplifying the gender picture, which is somewhat necessary to her world construction. Tepper drives me slightly nutty because I find her to be a good storyteller, but her sexism is ickily seductive.

Here's an interesting thought chain--probably impossible to prove one way or another: say it were true that homosexuality were caused by a spike in testosterone in the mother at around the sixth week of pregnancy (that's when the people who propose this theory seem to think it happens). Testosterone spikes in women are caused by stress. Now, when do women figure out they're pregnant? Separately, and based entirely on anecdotal evidence, an overwhelming proportion of the people I know who were adopted are gay. So--if there were actually a causal relationship among these hypotheticals--would that mean that by advocating against abortion and for adoption, anti-choicers are advocating for more gay people? Wouldn't that be a kick in the pants?

[kateorman]

LOL