I know exactly what I'd do after a couple of shots (make that around a third of a bottle) of Patron Tequila (with lemons and salt of course), which I shared with my then friend "Gawk" (don't ask!) in Cleveland, Ohio, around midnight in the dead of winter back in 1976. Snow was on the ground. I was bundled up in a long wool skirt and my big Mexican rebozo over a huipil, my typical costume that winter. I later gave that rebozo to my friend Nola, who was a dancer and complained of the cold, and I've never seen one like it again. I'd bought it in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, where most of my Mexican relatives live, and these things tend to be regional. I don't regret it, though, as we'd been friends for a long time, both having been in love with the same woman at one point, but she managed to beat my time, as they say. Kathy, on the other hand, taught me how to ride a motorcycle, which I did for years. I made the papers when I went to visit, just the once, as it's a long drive through very hot desert, as La Gringa, the exotic prima with the striking blue eyes and long blonde hair. My aunt, Blanca Rosa, is a local landowner of note, so her cousins were enough to make the front page. That was ok, although it's not the most flattering term, as I had a cousin, Billy, then four years old, who they called "El Diablo." It was true. He bit me on the ass once, when I foolishly turned my back on him.

Anyway, after a few shots and shouts, Gawk and I traded a few kisses, heavy with tongue, but then Gawk decided to kiss the dog, and even drunk I don't kiss anyone who kisses dogs, at least with tongue, so I left him to his own devices and wandered inside.

There, my friend Sarah and I got to arguing over who was the better jacks player in school, which wound up with us demanding that some of the guys go out and buy some cheap jacks sets from the local all-night pharmacy and staging an impromptu jacks contest in which I was mopping up the floor with Sarah when a tall black man walked through the door wearing a stunning camel-hair overcoat and a snappy fedora and exclaimed, "Jacks! I've played me some jacks!" and demanded a seat on the floor.

He was from Detroit, which should have set alarms ringing in my head, but I was a bit fuzzy still. I think he may have been part of an organised gang of jacks hustlers, as his hands had obviously never handled tools nor performed manual labour. He had the biggest, but strangely slender and delicate, hands I've ever seen on a man, and he quickly trounced both Sarah and myself, so I went out onto the porch and sat with a woman I'd just met who had a bottle of wine that tasted like bubble gum, with whom I went home, only to discover that her place was as filthy as you can imagine, with incredible clutter, open tins of bean dip and corn chips spilled out on the floor, and an incredibly ugly and huge clay sculpture with medusa grass on top of it, inscribed, 'I could have forgotten her, but then she spoke to me of Albion Moonlight in a voice as soft as incense.'

She wanted to have sex. I didn't, any ardour I'd previously possessed having been overcome by second thoughts, although the sculpture and quote were a definite point in her favour, since I knew what the phrase referred to, even drunk.

I've read the Lensman books, and you're right; I didn't like them at all, as they were all horribly sexist and patronising to women. The Skylark series was better, I thought, with somewhat bolder women characters, but still a little creepy. The Gor series is even more execrable than Dune with its rapid decline into puerile semi-pornography, and I couldn't finish even one of them, so you're dead on about that as well. Surprisingly enough, I rather enjoyed the *idea* of Barsoom, and rather fancied the bloodthirsty Thuvia and her ilk, although they wilted disappointingly in the presence of an Earthman, for which, I think, we must read "white man," given the general context of the times. That issue is my objection to all the books you mention, as well as Dorsai and Dune, the misogyny and sexism at their heart.

I don't drink, as a general rule, not then and not now, but have been more than tipsy on a very few times in my life, on two of them winding up kissing questionable men, which was a warning to me not to pursue this course of behaviour. Evidently, my standards lapse alarmingly with my higher brain functions depressed.

The tequila was the result of a bet, which I can't recall either winning or paying, so maybe we both forgot, and which had started out with Gawk and I drinking straight shots (think, the scene in the Indianna Jones film where Marion Ravenwood is running a bar in Nepal and drinks the ugly bandit under the table), shouting out random curses and exhortations in Spanish (Gawk had also grown up in California, so knew the lingo) between every new trip to the well, and I was doing well, I thought, until Gawk started kissing the damned dog. I guess I lost, so maybe Gawk was the one with the foggiest memory. He did look cute, though, romping around in the snow as if he were a dog himself. It's a sight I won't forget.

Funny, I can still remember most of that party as clearly as if it were yesterday. I had a mad crush on Sarah, but she was straight as an arrow and had a boyfriend besides. She moved out to California some years later, and we got in touch, but our unshared pasts got in the way of continued friendship. Hessler Street was an odd sort of place in those days, and all sorts of young people formed an uneasy alliance based mostly on who threw the best party on any particular night.

The upshot of which is that I'm a wild and crazy kind of woman, and I *really* liked Marion. Too bad she wasted her life on that rascal Dr Jones.

Cheers,

Puddin'
--------------------
Well, Jones, at least you haven't
forgotten how to show a lady a good time.
--- Marion, from Raiders of the Lost Ark

How to use a rebozo:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~elly/rebozo/

I had a cat, Dangerous Downtown Dave, who loved to ride around in mine, tied exactly in that way.

This is what Jacks are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacks

I was, and still am, to some extent, very good at tasks requiring manual dexterity and quick thinking, although my fingers are a little numb these days, after my little injury.

I didn't like the fact that Jessica, an adult trained in the ways of the Bene Gesserit, managed to lose her head completely as soon as they faced real danger, whilst *Paul*, evidently because he was holding the Magic Wand, kept his. I also didn't like the Honoured Matres, who are overcome and "topped" by a Real Man as soon as he happens along. That was in Heretics of Dune, I think, but similar incidents annoyed me all through the books I read. I moderated a woman's SF/F book discussion group for many years, so am fairly widely read in the genre.

I agree that there are many SF/F titles whose (male) authors are even more icky, but I don't read those at all. I did read Rainbow Credenza, by J. Neil Schulman, but it was fatuous as well as disgustingly sexist.

>> Other direction...

Well, a number. Daughters of a Coral Dawn is a good example, Katherine V. Forrest manages to kill off *all* the men (except for a few handy gay men, who the women keep as pets and for taking out spiders) by the third book of the series, which doesn't sound like all that much of a bad idea by then, and The Hadra or The Red Line of Yamald, which features bands of women who come to an accomodation with men, as long as they stay on their side of the line.

>> Codswallop...

It means nonsense, though I'm damned if I know why.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codswallop