Like Fleming's Bond and Anderson's Flandry, Luz is sexually active but, unlike them, not always heterosexual. Descriptions of homosexual encounters are perhaps a further social change. See Social Changes.
Monday, 16 July 2018
Grapple Guns
Like Fleming's Bond and Anderson's Flandry, Luz is sexually active but, unlike them, not always heterosexual. Descriptions of homosexual encounters are perhaps a further social change. See Social Changes.
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3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm sure grapple guns are used in real as well--including characters who climb up high walls with them. But I have wondered if movies, cartoons, and novels make such things look too easy to be quite plausible.
And I don't think all social changes will be for the better. And there might eventually be a reactions against some of them, or merely become unfashionable.
Sean
If you look at how circus performers climb, it looks easy... but it isn't.
As for social changes, note that the way people actually -behave- changes, but it changes much less than the way people -talk- about things. Or what they can say in public. And attitudes are more complex than formal rules might make you think.
Eg., Jane Addams, the social reformer who was a close political ally of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, was gay -- and fairly open about it. She and her partner Mary Smith lived together for decades and referred to their relationship as a "marriage".
But nobody mentioned it, because it was more or less impossible to do so for a whole clutch of reasons, starting with the absence of the necessary vocabulary. Gay women who didn't cross-dress were pretty well socially invisible before about 1920; people might know, but they didn't mention it.
(The situation for gay men was, of course, different and much more difficult.)
This would change in the 1920's and 1930's as Freudianism became more influential, and not for the better.
It's impossible that Teddy Roosevelt didn't realize this about Addams, since they spent a good deal of time together; and Teddy was a Victorian prude of the first water.
(Unlike most powerful men of the time he never had a mistress and almost certainly never touched a woman other than the two he was married to. He detested the 'double standard' and practiced what he preached.)
But Addams apparently didn't bother him at all.
Likewise, M. Carey Thomas, the head of Bryn Mawr College in this period was very much like Addams; so were most of of the faculty; and it was noted at the time, with some eugenic concern, that over 60% of Bryn Mawr graduates never married. Nobody breathed a word about their sexual orientation, but private letters and diaries of the time make it plain that the place was, as Luz puts it, "a singing-grove of the higher Sapphism" (besides being a very good university).
(Thomas defined marriage as "Loss of freedom, poverty, and a personal subjection for which I see absolutely no compensation.)
Parents apparently didn't care much about this -- at least if your daughter went there, you could be fairly sure she wasn't going to get extramurally pregnant. There was considerable opposition to women having higher educations at all, but that was a different matter.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I'm very glad you comment fairly often on Paul's blog, when you must be a very busy writer. And your remarks are always interesting and informative.
As regards circus performers and intelligence agents who walk up walls using grapples, I am convinced that is much more difficult than it looks.
As regards homosexuality of all kinds, yes, I know social attitudes to that sad practice can change from one side to the other. But, as a Catholic I believe it is not RIGHT and I also do not believe two persons of the same sex can "marry." That said, I also don't believe in bothering homosexuals as long as they are legally adult.
Sean
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