One point that I want to elaborate is the obvious sexism in this novel, as well as the misogyny that seems to be strongly prevalent among some of our classmates. Throughout the last few weeks as we read through Lucifer’s, female characters would be mercilessly stamped as the “epitome of uselessness” and/or a tramp. I’m not really sure what happened to some of our classmates, but it was a little funny and ironic to see certain double standards being bitterly and so mercilessly set by female classmates on basically every female character in the book.
For example, I recall an earlier blog post calling out Eileen as “useless”, which I found harsh and even a little too easy. As I recall, Eileen was quite the woman in charge once the comet landed- that is, until she became pregnant. Is it too much to ask for a woman to be a little “useless” on the battlefield when a huge fetus is growing out of her stomach? Meanwhile, characters like Harvey get slack for being a useless lump in the corner, because his wife- whom he was emotionally (Marie) and physically (Maureen) disloyal to- was killed. It’s just a coincidence that Eileen is a woman and Harvey is a man.
Speaking of Harvey’s disloyalty- you know, Maureen has been getting criticism after criticism because she’s slept around with multiple men- yes, a couple of them being married at the time. But let’s completely overlook the fact that those men are the ones who have wives, while Maureen is single and has no commitment to anyone. So of course, the woman who’s slept with multiple men = skank, while man who’s slept with multiple women = man.
I recognize that double standards will always exist in society. And yeah, it’s a fact that women are naturally physically weaker than men but it’s ridiculous to stamp the gender as useless solely because of that. Conveniently, these double standards were one of the only societal traits that didn’t dissipate after the comet hit in LH. Maybe because the novel was written in the 70’s and the authors obviously have a male superiority complex. Or maybe because males have always dominated.
Basically, someone needs to write a disaster novel where a woman is the final survivor after completely obliterating every male ass.
P.S.: I don’t hate men. I’m just trying to balance out all the woman-hating that’s been occurring all semester. Sorry if this came off a little ranty.
I can’t speak for your classmates, but from my own perspective, I think much of the bashing of Eileen and Maureen was not directed toward those characters so much as it was towards the authors for making those characters such caricatures. I didn’t interpret our discussions as women-hating; instead I saw them as these-specific-portrayals-of-women-hating.
Of course Eileen was not “useless” after she reached the Stronghold and became pregnant. But, by the terms of the novel, which set up a kind of internal hierarchy of utility, she is no longer the in-charge person she was in the first half of the novel. And by the novel’s own standard, that makes her less of a person.
We should distinguish, then, between our standards and the novel’s, between our values and the novel’s. Lucifer’s Hammer has palpable traces of misogyny and if we make fun of that, does that mean we are complicit?