As I was writing yesterday’s post about Friday, I was reminded of the ending and the beginning. Spoilers follow for a book published in 1982, so read ahead at your own risk. Also, TW: rape.

What you need to know about Friday the character is that she is a courier, who gets whatever she has to where it needs to be by any means necessary. She works for a corporate spy organization. She is also an artificial person — still human, biologically, but genetically engineered to be stronger and faster than normal humans. In the book, artificial persons are discriminated against. Now you’re up to speed.

After completing a mission, Friday is on her way back to the complex where she lives and works when she is captured and tortured for information. Even though she gives the entire truth right away (as she was instructed to do if threatened with torture), the villains don’t believe her. Part of the torture is a gang rape perpetrated on her, during which she rather dispassionately decides that the easiest path forward is to pretend that she likes it (there’s a whole thing about Friday and her attitudes toward sex throughout the book). Either before or after, I forget which, she is shackled naked to a bed but one of her captors allows her to use the bathroom first.

Fast-forward to the final act, when Friday is on the starship Forward. She’s being followed by other spies, and one of them turns out to be Pete, one of the guys who was part of the rape scene (which, by the way, wasn’t overly explicit, although it did take up a couple of pages). To my immense surprise — and I didn’t remember this from the first time I read the book — Friday decides not to kill him because he was nice to her — he let her use the bathroom, instead of facing the humiliation of wetting herself. The guy, Pete, also says he was uncomfortable throughout the rape, although he did go along with it because the villains would have supposedly punished or killed him for not doing it — and he was punished for allowing Friday to use the bathroom as well. Friday decides that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, and she joins forces with Pete to escape the Forward onto a human colony world. Eventually she meets up with some friends from earlier in the book and they, along with some others, form an 8-way marriage. Legally, Friday marries Pete, and they live happily ever after in their poly family.

I’m sorry, what now? Friday just blanket forgives Pete for being part of a gang rape where she was the victim? Because he was “nice” to her, or reluctant to participate in the rape? Because he helped her escape the starship? Because, like her, he is an artificial person (which she finds out during the escape process), and they have to stick together? I cannot imagine a single woman that I know being okay with eventually marrying someone who was involved in an involuntary, non-consensual gang rape of her person. As someone who has had their consent violated in the past (almost 20 years ago now, and only with some pretty heavy therapy have I come to terms with it), I simply cannot conceive of any scenario where I would live happily ever after with my attacker.

Heinlein was writing fiction — the book is clearly a fictional story — and I suppose, fictionally speaking, if you don’t have the same social mores about sex that normal humans do you might come to terms with what happened to you a lot more easily. But I still believe that Friday would have killed Pete the moment she could get away with it, instead of inviting him to join her poly family. I certainly would have, even with my more enlightened attitude toward sex and social mores surrounding it.

Heinlein was a great writer in a lot of ways, but sometimes he makes me shake my head and wonder what he must have been like as a person. Because those two parts of Friday — the beginning and the ending — mar what for me is a fun adventure story that glorifies polyamory.