The Kzin - and it turned out it was more complicated than that. The females were not really non-sentient. And the whole Kzin society and genetic traits were a result of a primitive tribal society getting hold of genetic engineering and remaking themselves in the image of their folk tales.

Larry Niven really put a twist on this by designing species with nonsentient females...

Is this one of those weird male fantasies that I just don't get, like the one about being a disembodied head in a jar?

Can you remember why the Experimentalist puppeteers made them nonsentient? I can't. I know there was some kind of evolutionary or societal consequence; Niven always does that.

I think this is more a Niven fantasy than a male fantasy. (Heck being a disembodies head in a jar is not a male fantasy either.) He was trying to come up with a plausible truly alien society. Having much more extreme biological differentiation between male and female is one way to get a species truly alien to us. Making them carnivores was another. And it is also (in spite of Niven being very right wing) a satire on a certain type of sociobiologists. As in "here's what we'd really be like if your theories werer correct">

Heck being a disembodies head in a jar is not a male fantasy either.

Based on the number of times I've read otherwise reasonable scientists and philosophers ponder on this as a "what if?" I'm thinking that it is. Not fantasy as in sexual fantasy, fantasy as in "plausible other imaginary."

I don't think it was the puppeteers that made them non-sentient. The Kzin were a pre-industrial, pre-fuedal hunter gather people enslaved by a space going race. They managed to rebel, and wipe out their owners - and suddenly they were a hunter-gatherer people possessed of space travel, genetic engineering and generally advanced technology.

So as a very male-chauvinist culture, they engineered speech centers out of their women -making them not unintelligent, but pre-verbal. (You can argue over whether intelligence is possible without speech - but this is the Niven premise, and their is some evidence that the two are seperable.)

The Puppeteers have three sexs, one of which is not intelligent, two of which are.

Based on the number of times I've read otherwise reasonable scientists and philosophers ponder on this as a "what if?" I'm thinking that it is. Not fantasy as in sexual fantasy, fantasy as in "plausible other imaginary."

OK - but horrifying - I don't think ever seen as desirable - more a horror thing. If I was Freudian I'd say it was a horror/fear fantasy of the ultimate castration - being castrated from the neck down.

Oh! I remember. He was saying that humans have already encountered the equivalent of an intelligent, alien species in the opposite sex, and that a species with nonsentient females like the Kzin would be much more patriarchal and xenophobic.

No, not a male fantasy. Niven tries to think of anything that would make a species think differently from humans: herbivorous species, parasitic, species that don't mature sexually for eighty years. As long as it's really alien, he'll try it. Though you could recognize some males you know in a kzin's reaction to the idea of mating with something as intelligent as he is.

Typo Boy is right about the Kzin history, and I got my idea from something else in Niven. (Edit: but how do you like the male fantasy of genetically engineering your females to be nonsentient?)

Oh! I remember. He was saying that humans have already encountered the equivalent of an intelligent, alien species in the opposite sex, and that a species with nonsentient females like the Kzin would be much more patriarchal and xenophobic.

Women as aliens (and only nominally men as aliens) - pretty chauvinist in itself.