If you don’t have the social publicity of your relationship that extended courtship and marriage provides, how will anyone know to warn you that your childhood caretakers drugged you with substances that make orgasm torturous?
That one doubled as an “argument” against homosexuality.
In any case, that’s rather remarkably bizarre. I’m trying to think of a real-life condition for which it’d work as an allegory, and coming up with absolutely nothing—at least without involving some of the more extreme forms of genital mutilation, and I doubt Card’s trying to defend those.
The idea that part of a guardian’s responsibility is to prepare their charge for the painfulness and unpleasantness of sex on their wedding night was relatively pervasive in the social media I grew up around, and I can imagine what Alicorn describes being an allegory for this (though I read “Songmaster” too many years and too many perspective-changes ago to remember it usefully, so I have no idea whether Card had anything like this in mind).
I suppose that makes a twisted kind of sense. I’d been exposed to the idea before (though I wouldn’t have called it pervasive in the cultural milieu I grew up in), but didn’t make the connection—possibly because Card’s setup doesn’t seem to work if sex/loss of virginity is ordinarily painful or unpleasant.
It’s odd to write an allegory which implicitly rejects the real-life idea it’s supposed to point to (ETA: as opposed to tactfully ignoring it). I suppose Card might be trying to write for an audience that he assumes to have already rejected it, but now I feel like I’m making too many speculative leaps to be confident of my predictions.
Oh, and don’t forget:
If you don’t have the social publicity of your relationship that extended courtship and marriage provides, how will anyone know to warn you that your childhood caretakers drugged you with substances that make orgasm torturous?
That one doubled as an “argument” against homosexuality.
What story was that?
In any case, that’s rather remarkably bizarre. I’m trying to think of a real-life condition for which it’d work as an allegory, and coming up with absolutely nothing—at least without involving some of the more extreme forms of genital mutilation, and I doubt Card’s trying to defend those.
That was “Songmaster”.
(blink)
The idea that part of a guardian’s responsibility is to prepare their charge for the painfulness and unpleasantness of sex on their wedding night was relatively pervasive in the social media I grew up around, and I can imagine what Alicorn describes being an allegory for this (though I read “Songmaster” too many years and too many perspective-changes ago to remember it usefully, so I have no idea whether Card had anything like this in mind).
I suppose that makes a twisted kind of sense. I’d been exposed to the idea before (though I wouldn’t have called it pervasive in the cultural milieu I grew up in), but didn’t make the connection—possibly because Card’s setup doesn’t seem to work if sex/loss of virginity is ordinarily painful or unpleasant.
It’s odd to write an allegory which implicitly rejects the real-life idea it’s supposed to point to (ETA: as opposed to tactfully ignoring it). I suppose Card might be trying to write for an audience that he assumes to have already rejected it, but now I feel like I’m making too many speculative leaps to be confident of my predictions.