Men value the private world, but their thoughts tend to focus more on the public world.  Women value the public world, but their thoughts tend to focus more on the private world.  I’m thinking about that today because, by happenstance, I came across an online review of a science fiction adventure novel written in the ‘sixties.  In my teens I read that stuff obsessively.  It’s genre fiction, like crime, mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and Westerns.

Curiously, the reviewer had no objection to the obsession with “super” humans which overshadowed the sci fi of that period, surviving and thriving in today’s transhumanist movement.  What he did complain about -- and we find this often in online reviews -- was that although the lead character was “larger than life,” the women in the novel were “competent for the most part but basically non-existent."

I guess he preferred the sort of story in which Jane is just like Tarzan, but with cleavage.  This a bit like protesting that the women in Jane Austen’s novels were three-dimensional and endearing, but that the men were just stage props.

Let us be honest:  Adventure novels are about achieving things against obstacles in a world which is much more absorbing to most men than to most women.  Domestic novels are about building life – yes, there too against obstacles -- in a world which is much more absorbing to most women than to most men.  And that’s okay.