![]() ![]() Older male writers of the 20th century do have the half-excuse that ‘it was different in those days’, but Heinlein was an active writer well into the 1980s, when social awareness and change had been on the agenda since about 1970, and sensitivity to these matters was out in the world. Examples abound, most of them devastatingly analyzed in Farah Mendlesohn’s The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. ![]() Worse, he was a racist in an identical way. Not unrelated to this, he was a rampant sexist, the sort of man who praises the superiority of women while inadvertently revealing that deep down he is full of prejudices and controlling instincts. About genuine sexual feeling or activities, Heinlein is coy. The book is full of lubricious references to them, and other women’s parts, invariably objectified. Famously, to those who managed to get through an interminable book called The Number of the Beast (1980), he describes a kiss in the voice of a young woman: ‘Our teeth grated, and my nipples went spung!’ Nor were these the only breasts and nipples under discussion. Thereafter an instant expert, he wrote novel after novel brimming with it, much of it laughably theoretical and, well, wrong. Heinlein appears in his late fifties to have come across a how-to book about sex. Like someone who has bought a first computer, then reads the manual from front to back but never actually gets around to switching the thing on, Robert A. ![]()
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