Society Marches On: Difference between revisions

** The absence of circumcision could be a straight example, if Farmer failed to anticipate how multiculturalism and rising immigration from Africa and the Middle East would make this practice more of a statement of ethnic identity than ever.

* Modern readers of Walter Miller's post-apocalyptic classic, ''[[A Canticle for Leibowitz]]'' may find some of the future church's views to be a bit...antiquated. This is due to the novel being written just a few years previous to Vatican II, and thus including none of its changes.

** Pretty much all of Heinlein's work is prone to this. ''[[The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]]'', for instance, despite showcasing many cultural differences in the lunar society (not the least of which is ubiquitous polyamories) portrays gender issues much as a 1950s writer would be expected to think of a post-feminist world: touching women without their permission is a major societal taboo... but it is up to the woman's ''male'' friends or relatives to protect her, and women are still generally considered unintelligent (or at least irrational or illogical) and unfit for many positions. The main reason the culture's attitudes towards women have changed at all is that women are a substantial minority on Luna. The rival Earth society, where the sexes are still 50/50 in numbers, shows female nurses giggling at having their rears pinched, rather than filing harassment lawsuits.

** ''[[The Puppet Masters (novel)|The Puppet Masters]]'' was published in 1951 and set in 2007. Although the heroine is just as tough and capable as the male lead (sometimes more so), the moment gender roles or romantic relationships come up she turns, hilariously, into June Cleaver.

* In ''[[Piers Anthony|Omnivore]]'', most of the melodrama pivots on Aquilon being torn between her feelings for Cal and Veg, her colleagues on a far-future space mission. It's blatantly obvious that [[Polyamory]] would be an acceptable solution for all three of them, yet she's too afraid of looking like a slut to become sexually involved with either man, let alone both. Maybe that's how scifi readers felt about things in 1968, but now it just seems like prudish [[Wangst]].

* Arguably averted in ''[[Atlas Shrugged]].'' While the time frame the book takes place in is deliberately vague (it seems to [[The Fifties]] with some sci-fi inventions, like Rearden Metal), the main character is a powerful career woman who courts and has sex out of wedlock with three different men--and holds this up as a sign of her empowerment, rather than something to be stigmatized by. On the flip side, the two housewives of the story have a decidedly anti-Fifties portrayal. Lillian Rearden is portrayed as a nagging parasite who tries (and initially succeeds) to control her husband with sex and is ultimately much worse off for relying on her husband's wealth than if she had forged her own way. Cherryl Taggart is shown to only be a valuable commodity to one of the antagonists when she stays docile and uninformed--her steady gain of savvy shows her become an empowered figure who her husband agonizes over being unable to control any longer. All three are quite the far cry from the docile housewife common in [[The Fifties]] fiction.

 

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