The Psychology of Gender

Although not many science fiction fans may recognize it, a theme that is recurrent in a lot of science fiction is differences in gender psychology. It may be as subtle as an author only using males for hero’s,  or it may be very blatant such as a story specifically about the female psyche. Two works that exhibit gender psychology are Karen Joy Fowler’s story “Game Night at the Fox and Goose”, and Larry Niven’s essay “Sleeping With the Alien”.
In Karen Joy Fowler’s story, the main character is a woman who has just ended a relationship. In other words, she has just been dumped. The story takes place through her eyes, and we interpret the events that take place through her thoughts. Her thoughts about her situation, and about the fantastic things the dark stranger says, are uniquely feminine, and could not have been thought by a male character. However, in the same story, there is a male character the successfully portrays him self as a woman. He does this so well that he is able to convince the heroine to journey with him to an alternate universe where women are dominant. Her depressed state of mind let her believe that he was a woman. Although he never lied to her, she was so willing to believe him that she never took the time to look past his disguise. In fact, she never looked him in the face at all. If she wasn’t a woman who had just been dumped, she never would have fallen for his ruse.
Larry Niven wrote an essay about alien contact entitled “Sleeping With the Aliens” that was published in his collection Playgrounds of the Mind. What makes this essay fit into the topic of gender psychology is the fact that he wrote it about the differences between men and women. He described these differences as being as great as any differences that we may encounter when we first make contact with an alien race. He says that since we have been dealing with essential one alien psychology (the psychology of the opposite sex) for so long, it will be easy to deal with any other alien psychologies that we may meet in the future. This view is unique, because the popular belief is that we are not ready to deal with aliens. This belief is backed up such examples as H. G. Wells radio showing of “The War of the Worlds”. However, Niven’s hypothesis does not say how it would work in a situation where we were being “conquered” by any alien race. It only deals with our ability to understand and coexist with an alien psychology.
These two examples of gender psychology are in no way related to each other, but on their own, they are fantastic examples of how science fiction writers deal with gender roles and psychologies. The amazing part is that nether of these two works could have been written by any one other than a science fiction writer.