and commented on how she knows the man whose spaceship she ends up in is a "real man" (I paraphrase) because he responds to the sight of her breasts. [...] and on p 87, there's this bit about "those wacky 21st century folks, thinking there aren't really gender differences in brains" which made me want to hurl the book across the room.
Arrgh, this is one of my huge issues with military SF -- I love the genre in general, but the writers are often on the same plane as your Hoyt seems to be, leaving me with gems about how "all red-blooded men" can't get enough of boobs because it's some mystically ingrained genetic trait of man-ness that even a highly-gengineered future space-faring man will still have. Because OF COURSE there have NEVER been any human cultures where breasts weren't sexualised, even back when we were just plain old un-tweaked Homo sapiens stock... Sigh.
Likewise, books with awesome military teams doing awesome military hijinks are inexplicably lacking in females, and when there is one, she's the bomb tech. Or she inexplicably falls in love with her commanding officer and has a stupid affair with him and gets accidentally pregnant but decides to keep the baby anyway despite the phenomenal publicity-storm it will bring down on them both after spending an entire book avoiding exactly that. Double sigh.
Tanya Huff and Lois Bujold are pretty much the only ones whose positions on such things I can count on (and that's only if I ignore some of the things Bujold's done)...
no subject
and on p 87, there's this bit about "those wacky 21st century folks, thinking there aren't really gender differences in brains" which made me want to hurl the book across the room.
Arrgh, this is one of my huge issues with military SF -- I love the genre in general, but the writers are often on the same plane as your Hoyt seems to be, leaving me with gems about how "all red-blooded men" can't get enough of boobs because it's some mystically ingrained genetic trait of man-ness that even a highly-gengineered future space-faring man will still have. Because OF COURSE there have NEVER been any human cultures where breasts weren't sexualised, even back when we were just plain old un-tweaked Homo sapiens stock... Sigh.
Likewise, books with awesome military teams doing awesome military hijinks are inexplicably lacking in females, and when there is one, she's the bomb tech. Or she inexplicably falls in love with her commanding officer and has a stupid affair with him and gets accidentally pregnant but decides to keep the baby anyway despite the phenomenal publicity-storm it will bring down on them both after spending an entire book avoiding exactly that. Double sigh.
Tanya Huff and Lois Bujold are pretty much the only ones whose positions on such things I can count on (and that's only if I ignore some of the things Bujold's done)...