1. She thinks being physically weaker makes you an inferior human being.

2. She is aware women are physically weaker, because she isn’t a drooling idiot. (This belief may be subconscious.)

3. She thinks women are inferior human beings.

QED.

Pervasive authorial affirmative action and distortion of the histograms of reality is one of the biggest reasons, in my opinion, that most modern fiction sucks. What is particularly frustrating is seeing authors who know better doing it anyway. And, my God, doing it anyway when you’re self-published?

(And it’s not just the strength of course, but the attitude that matters.)

In the course of writing my novel I’ve gotten to know some other authors, and read their books. Two in particular are relevant to this discussion. They’re both self-published, with one and two books respectively. Both military fiction set in the not-too-distant future. These guys aren’t beholden to vast lefty publishers. They can write what they want.

All three books are enjoyable, well-written, and have intelligent and clever extrapolations of current technology. All also have gender-integrated military arms in their stories. And I really can’t get around that. It constantly jars me out of the story because I am aware of the facts in the last two posts here, and my knowledge of how women and men act when they’re in close proximity, well, it leads me to think that it wouldn’t be good for morale overall.

I got into a discussion with a friend over the Bechdel test. The only way a lot of modern SF writers would ever pass this would be to have female marines discussing ordnance, which really makes them functionally male characters and kind of defeats the point.