Sorry for my delay in relying but I have been in bed with a cold and more or less off line for a few days.

I am not 100% sure what you mean by a permanent link but I was planning to write up a short blog entry recommending your blog to my readers. I really do think it worth reading. It gives such a good alternate view to the hooker as victim that is so common.

Regards

A

If you put a permanent link to this blog on your site, I’ll provide one for you on my “Offsite” page.

In closing I will say reading you blog is an inspiration to me and I plan to read it all.

My blog http://www.angusmagee.com (if you do not want the adress posted feel free to delete it before you publish the comment.

But there is a different sense in some of Heinlein’s female — and male — characters may be called unrealistic (note: not impossible, just unrealistic), and it’s their purity. Characters like Jubal Harshaw (from Stranger in a Strange Land), Johan Sebastian Bach Smith from I Will Fear No Evil, Maureen Smith from To Sail Beyond the Sunset… They look like walking success machines, always knowing instinctively what the best solution is to a problem, never being trapped into internal problems… They seem immune to agony, self-doubt, insecurity, uncertainty; they are roaring waterfalls of energy that never stops pouring. They are beautiful to behold… but, like Burrough’s Tarzan who could talk to the apes, who could speak English but only read French, not really a very easy-to-find type in real life.

Not that it’s impossible. You do seem to approach the Heinlein type (I had thought of comparing you to Friday but then I saw a post in which you mentioned this had already been done). I have a friend — a guy I dearly love and respect (if I ever turn gay, he’d be my pick for a lover!) who also approaches the enthusiasm and energy of a Heinleinian hero as a ‘success-machine’. And yet… if you get to know him better, you’ll see he has ‘darker’ sides that aren’t quite visible to the casual observer, sides that I’ve never detected in a Heinlein character. My impression is that if I knew you as closely as I know this friend of mine, I’d probably think the same about you. (I don’t have any evidence of that, of course, other than my own experince with people. And I say this, believe me, with all due respect to the beauty of your impressive personality.)

That Heinlein based his characters on Virginia Heinlein doesn’t make them more “realistic”: he may simply have put in them some of Ginny’s features without adding certain others (that wouldn’t be relevant for his success-via-hard-work driven narrative).