A Response To Maggie McNeill: On Heinlein And Sexual Outliers

So, this happened:

@AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 ...a lot of men as being like a real-life Heinlein woman.
— Maggie McNeill (@Maggie_McNeill) February 8, 2015

@Maggie_McNeill @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 *Do* such creatures exist in the wild? Always hated Heinlein's female characters.
— Rob McMillin (@scareduck) February 8, 2015

@scareduck @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 Of course they do. I'm one and so was his wife, Virginia, on whom they were patterned.
— Maggie McNeill (@Maggie_McNeill) February 8, 2015

@Maggie_McNeill @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 Sure, but rarer than hen's teeth. Heinlein's female characters always (1/)
— Rob McMillin (@scareduck) February 8, 2015

@Maggie_McNeill @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 struck me as male fantasy. Nothing like any women I knew. (2/2)
— Rob McMillin (@scareduck) February 8, 2015

@scareduck @AllyBrinken @TrancewithMe @FranklinH3000 I'm not sure if the implication that I'm a male fantasy is a compliment or an insult.
— Maggie McNeill (@Maggie_McNeill) February 8, 2015

A few words there. First, it's not unreasonable to assert that Robert Heinlein's female characters are entirely rare (to the point of near extinction) amid the universe of women. Women have consistently lower sex drives than men, taken as a population, and form two-thirds of asexuals. It's not so much that outliers don't exist as their extreme rarity. Heinlein's obsession with such women did a good deal to turn me off of his fiction as entirely too implausible.

Take insult, if you wish; none was intended. Life, for any real grownup, is about learning to live with things as they are, not as you wish them to be. Obviously, your experiences are real, and happened, and denying them would be pointless and silly. But for most men, the sad reality is they must contend with women for whom sex is a thirteenth or even thirtieth priority, and its place in line goes down even further upon becoming a mother, and with age more generally. Humans are a package deal; you don't get to pick the exact set of flaws and virtues you're going to live with in a spouse. So, yes, for a lot of men, a woman of equal libido is a grand fantasy — but there it remains, mostly.