Last Friday I wrote about an uncomfortable scene in Kushiel’s Dart, and I also mentioned the Robert A. Heinlein book Friday. Friday is actually one of my favorite Heinlein novels, for various reasons, but there’s something in it that I don’t like.

Heinlein was a big believer in corporal punishment — you need only read his novels to discover this. At the time he was alive, it was more socially acceptable in the US (regardless of how you personally feel about it, that is a simple fact). In Friday, when Friday (the main character) goes to visit her family in New Zealand, one of her husbands (the book also is about polyamory, which is probably why I like it so much) threatens to paddle her when she starts acting in a way he does not approve of. And, as I said last Friday (this is going to get confusing, isn’t it…), there is a throwaway sentence where the main character refers to the fact that she spanks her daughter.

Elsewhere in the book, the phrase “fat lip” is used, as if to indicate one of the characters is going to be slapped in the face (or, more likely, backhanded across the mouth) as a form of corporal punishment. Regardless of the fact that it occurs between adults, and regardless of when the book was written and what the author’s stance was on abuse versus corporal punishment, that’s still inappropriate. Even if it was more socially acceptable during Heinlein’s time (and I myself made reference to it in “The Spanking of Megan Riley”, which takes place in the late 40s or early 50s) that doesn’t make it right. And in a world that’s supposed to be more enlightened — a mid-21st-century world where polyamory is not only accepted but encouraged and celebrated — one would think we’d have found better ways to deal with conflict.

Of course, Heinlein would also be rolling over in his grave if he knew just how advanced we weren’t, technologically, as a species.