Considering the number of times the Buffistas punch it, I'm surprised it's still a button at all.

It's more of a haematoma than a true button, at this point.

You know I don't want to defend Niven about anything. Put it this way - he is so far to the right I prefer Heinlein.

Nonetheless on this issue - yes his idea of a species eliminating sentience in one gender is squicksome. It is supposed to be. They Kzin enslave (and on occasion eat) humans and other intelligent creatures. Niven was trying to come up with a plausible way an intelligent space-going species could evolve into something like this. His answer was that they couldn't - it required genetic engineering. And why would an intelligent specieis engineer themselves in that direction; he couldn't come up with a rational reason for that either - so came up with an irrational reason - a male-chauvinist group of hunter gatherers suddenly given space travel and genetic engineering decides to re-engineer themselves to live up to their hero-myths. (Think of what the ancient Greeks might have done suddenly given genetic engineering, or the Aztecs or Consquistdors.) And Bestys point is taken into consideration. One of the things that makes the Kzin mean is that they all fantasy about sex with a woman Kzin with the power of speech, and of course (with exceptions in a couple of short stories) can't have one. And it does affect child rearing. (Kzin women are intelligent even if they can't speak -so they are able to do the "hands on" chores of child raising - diaper changing, feeding ans such.) But the long term trope of the Kzin story is their rehabilitation as a species - basically the gradual reversal of the trap genetic engineering reinforced by militaristic culture has gotten them into.

I'm sorry if I hit a hot button, ita. I certainly wasn't aiming at you. I just have issues with a great deal of gender theory & therefore don't want to rehash and/or simplify other people's arguments, particularly when I have issues with it myself. I also firmly believe it is not my place to get you to agree with me. I have no problem with you not seeing the-mind-can-exist-in-a-vacuum argument as a gendered one.

There is a certain history of woman being associated with flesh/sin/temptation, so the drive towards pure ration, the brain with no fleshy encasing, can be seen as a drive to eliminate the feminine. This could be what's setting off some squickometers.

I wasn't trying to get you to convince me of anything. I just feel I've missed an entire boat of either acculturation or education by having absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I can't even see (and I'm not talking believe, I'm talking see) the basis of that position, and it makes me feel intensely stupid.

I'm with ita here. In terms of this being gendered I'm not agreeing or disagreeing. I just don't see it - have never encountered the idea before. If you don't want to post on it can you link? Or recommend a book readable by someone without a great background in feminist theory. (I've read a lot of Bell Hooks and Dierdre English plus Barbara Ehrenriech and Katha Pollitt and of course some of the feminist classics so by background is not zero, but damn close.)

Egad... urg...

I refuse to take the blame for any intelligent person feeling stupid here. Not calling anyone stupid, not encouraging it either. I'm just saying that I think the whole philosophical question has a great deal of ideological underpinnings (not saying one side is right and one is wrong), many of which are at least tacitly and sometimes explicitly linked to gender.

I guess for an idea as to where to start on theories that tend to gender the body as female and the mind as male, I dunno, Plato and Bacon, maybe throw in a bit of Aristotle? Not that I personally would want to reread them. But I guess I'd start there, then turn to the feminist rereadings of them. Evelyn Fox Keller's Reflections on Gender and Science is a pretty straightforward, if simplisitic (and by now wildly outdated), reading of the traditional dualism.

Burrell, were you to accept blame, you'd have to be creating it. I assigned nor assumed none.

But now I have somewhere to start resolving the blank space.

Burrell, were you to accept blame, you'd have to be creating it. I assigned nor assumed none.

Okay. No blame. I can handle that.