And in TMisHM's Luna, women toally have the power when it comes to sex. There are so few of them, it's ladies-choice, all day, every day.

But grandpa still gets the droit de seigneur.

I understand the whole "propogation is the ultimate biological imperative" argument of RAH's, and for species survival, this is true. I'm just saying that there's more to marriage than biological imperative. And RAH just gets all end-all-and-be-all smug about "women breed, men protect, and if you don't belive this, you're an idiot."

Wow. you are making me hate Heinlein and I've never even read him.

I like lots of Heinlein, I really do, but a lot of things piss me off.

The thing is, Heinlein is a product of the turn of the 19th century trying to be sexually progressive. He thinks he's daring because women get to take the initiative and sleep around if they want to. That's racy stuff for 1950. It's just that the century zipped past him.

So, it's sort of a communal "it takes a village" approach with the word marriage and some seniority rules attached?

Does overpopulation as a potential threat to survival ever enter the equation?

(Stipulated: there are individuals, both sexes, who prefer to live alone. This is racially self-correcting.)

It's the word "racially" in this that confuses me. Was he attributing the preference to a racially genetic trait?

Aurelia, racially, I think is meant not as what race are you, but racially correcting, like correcting within the entire human race.

So, it's sort of a communal "it takes a village" approach with the word marriage and some seniority rules attached?

Right. It's a gedankenexperiment. What happens if you do Australia all over again, but this time without the Christianity and with women having the right of sexual refusal? Heinlein's thesis is that you come up with lots of alternate forms of marriage, most of them polygynous.

I think he meant racially as in "human race". But I'm guessing.

Does overpopulation as a potential threat to survival ever enter the equation?

He does a spiel about Mathusian theory in TSbtS, um, and in a lot of his stories, overcrowding is a main reason humans colonize the Moon, and go into space in general. And in I Will Fear No Evil, people get assigned how many kids they're allowed to have.

But he implies that the people who follow the Luna-type marriages are Just Too Smart to overpopulate.

EDIT

MALTHUSIAN theory

And in I Will Fear No Evil, people get assigned how many kids they're allowed to have.

Also in Podkayne of Mars. Whose point, according to the unabridged edition, was that Silly Girls Shouldn't Expect To Have It All. I think I'll stick to the abridged edition, ta ever so.