Manny's Reviews > I Will Fear No Evil

So, earlier today, I was talking with Choupette (apropos Houellebecq) about the fact that men and women have different perceptions of sex. As I said, there are good biological reasons why it has to be that way. If you're potentially capable of producing thousands of offspring, with only a few minutes of work invested in each one, your mind is just hardwired differently from the way it's going to be if each baby takes nine months of pregnancy, followed by a painful and dangerous birth and then years of looking after the child. When you consider it, it's almost inevitable that women see men as irresponsible and sex-obsessed.

That discussion reminded me of Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, a book I loved as a teenager but really haven't thought about in years. For people who haven't read it, the basic plot is that you have this old billionaire who decides he'll cheat death by having his brain transplanted into someone else's body. He has a super-hot young PA that he kind of has a very abstract thing with (he's no longer in shape for any concrete things). Not only is she stunningly gorgeous, she's also a really nice person.

Due to a bizarre series of accidents, she gets killed the same evening he's going to have the transplant operation, and his brain ends up in her body. When he wakes up and finds out what's happened, he goes a bit crazy; he's been in love with her, and it's too much to handle. He starts fantasizing that she's still somehow there, and he can talk with her. It's never made clear whether this is pure fantasy or not. He/they decide to live his/their life according to his idea of how a hot young 20-something chick ought to live it.

Looking at other people's reviews here, Chris complains that the book contains way, way too much sex. Denise, on the other hand, complains that she really shouldn't like this book so much, but somehow still does. (Interesting, by the way, that the negative review comes from a man, and the positive one from a woman). I'm more inclined to side with Denise. I think it's what Orwell called a good bad book; for all its faults, the psychology isn't unrealistic. A man who somehow ended up in a super-hot woman's body probably would spend most of his time having sex with everyone! He might honestly believe that that's what the body's original owner would want him to do; it's less obvious she'd agree with him. In a way, Heinlein's saying some reasonably interesting things about how hard it is for a man to see the world through a woman's eyes, even though the situation is set up to give him the best possible chance to do so.

I was also reminded of a joke I saw a couple of years ago in the British magazine Viz. If you haven't seen it, it's a strange beast; the humor is ostensibly as crude and stupid as possible, but under the surface is often remarkably sensitive and sophisticated. The joke came from a fake sex advice column. In the letter, supposedly from a male reader, the guy complains about the fact that his girlfriend sometimes refuses him sex. "If I were a girl," he says, "I'd be up for it all the time. Oral, anal, you name it. She says that if I were a girl I'd want to be treated with more respect. Which of us is right?" The (supposedly male) advice columnist replies "You are right and your girlfriend is wrong." It's quite funny when you think about it!