Sexualized Saturdays: Good Women Aren’t Like Other Women

As I continue to revisit the Dragonriders of Pern series, I’ve been noticing a lot of questionable things about the way Anne McCaffrey built her world. There’s the fact that dragon hormone sex is very often actually rape, or the fact that McCaffrey has no real understanding of how other sexual orientations work. Both of those might be explained away due to misconceptions of the time in which the books were written (the LGBTQ+ one, at least, has been discussed in some detail throughout the years), but there’s another issue that’s pretty prevalent in the Pern books—something weirdly fundamental.

Spoilers for the series and a trigger warning for brief misogynistic slurs below.