(Or: Everything I Needed to Know About Sex, I Learned from Science Fiction.)
I have a special fondness for Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan, who has got to be one of the best science fiction heroines ever, even coming as she does from a book series full of phenomenal women. Elena, Taura (the genetically engineered “wolf girl”), Elli Quinn, Kareen, Lady Donna (who later... no, I won’t spoil it...), Ekaterin... I love them all. But Cordelia Vorkosigan (nee Naismith), along with her other attributes, has the makings of a damned fine sexologist.
Cordelia Naismith gave up her captaincy in the Betan Astronomical Survey for life with Lord Aral Vorkosigan on feudal Barrayar, a planet which she says “eats its young.” I am certain the sexually backward citizens of this patriarchal planet would benefit from a hefty dose of her progressive Betan perspective! Perhaps Cordelia could use her influence to create the planet’s first comprehensive sex education program—staffed by sex therapists and surrogates from Beta Colony, of course!
The Countess was last seen sitting pretty as Vicereine of the planet Sergyar, so I doubt that Lois McMasters-Bujold, author of the brilliant Vorkosigan series, would push her into yet one more midlife career change. (Leaving Betan Survey and becoming a Vor Lady and mother was bad enough.) But though Cordelia recedes somewhat into the background as her son, Miles, takes over the series, she still lights up the page—and challenges assumptions—every time she gets back into the story line.
Fictional Barrayar is a lot like Earth. It’s militaristic, sexist, heterocentric, rather fundamentalist, and culturally and technologically behind the rest of the Galactic civilization, due to centuries of isolation from the other colonies. On the other hand, Beta Colony is a free-thinking, liberal, egalitarian member of Galactic civilization and is a cultural reservoir of many of the futuristic ideals I’ve enjoyed in much science fiction. Barrayarans, however, recoil at what they view as the permissiveness and decadence of Betan (and Galactic) ways. Conservative Vor Lords view Cordelia with suspicion, if not outright loathing.
Frankly, I’m also fed up with living on a planet which eats its young, treating a goodly proportion as expendable, as commodities, or as cannon fodder. I’m ready to go Galactic at the first opportunity, maybe without even leaving Earth!
A Woman’s Place is in Outer Space
I’m a science fiction and space exploration enthusiast from way back. I was so nuts about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that I read the unabridged editions of Jules Verne books in third grade, which got me some raised eyebrows from the school librarian. And of course I devoured science fiction throughout my teens.
During the heyday of punk, I was making wearable art out of clear vinyl, cut up Chinese newspapers, colored electrical tape, burst balloons and other residues of civilization as we know it. I was organizing fashion shows, created the ad hoc “Society for Mandatory Modern Dress,” and had a lot of fun. Science fiction books and movies were major influences. I was designing for the apocalypse even before Mad Max came along. In fact, my fashion manifesto for the show I put on at the Mabuhay Gardens read something like “garbage worn as fashion because that’s all that’s left...” Deep, huh?
A short NASA film, featuring orbital and re-entry footage, took me in a whole different aesthetic direction. I created a series of space costumes based on the stages of space flight. And then Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series came along and basically blasted me from one stage of life to another. Goodbye, punk apocalypse. Hello, epiphany of the future!
Upshot was, I began to move in space activist circles. I even had a job interview with the Planetary Society in Pasadena, snagging a giant hole in my brand new flesh-toned nylons at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where we’d gone to meet with Carl Sagan (one of the Planetary Society founders). “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “We need someone with good secretarial skills who is devoted to the cause.” And he looked up at the ceiling, as if he could stare right through it to the dizzying immensity of the Cosmos itself. I looked up too.
More upshot. Didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure I could handle living in Los Angeles. Instead, I helped organize a couple of Planetary Society events, including a Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) symposium at Flint Center during De Anza Day. Then I co-founded the Hypatia Cluster, a feminist space group for women, along with two other intelligent and intrepid redheads. Our slogan was “a woman’s place is in outer space” and we referred to outer space as “the feminine frontier.” So what if we were sometimes accused of being “lesbian, vegetarian goddess worshippers?” It was okay. Most of the space guys were just happy to be around some chicks for a change... which could get a little cloying sometimes. I kind of gave up my space colony dreams when I realized the kind of roommates I’d have...
You can find a small account of Hypatia Cluster doings, which were chiefly educational, in "Reaching for the High Frontier - The American Pro-Space Movement, 1972-1984" by Michael A.G. Michaud.
The apex of my space activist career was giving a talk at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, during Women’s Week. This was shortly after the first Shuttle disaster, and after that, everything began to unravel, including our group.
The tie-in to sex is that at the same time that we were working to create a feminist movement in space (and we were really among the first to do this), we were also working on gender concepts such as “the feminine dynamic” (as opposed to that old female=passive thing) as well as other archetypal visions of the female-bodied explorer. And lover. Looking back, it all seems very tantric, balancing the “thrust” of energy with the consciousness of collaboration, drawing “earth mother” energy up into the “sky father’s” realm. Da kine...
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