SF was born didactic! It originated as a teaching medium-which is why its potential to actually effect some changes in people's attitudes is infinite… - Joanna Russ

much of our mass literature, television, and movies encourages violence against women even more subtly and pervasively than pornography...If pornography is bad because it tells lies about women, is it any worse-or even any different-from the rest of the culture? Patriarchal ideology and culture are nothing but lies about women. I think we often forget this simply because it's so absolutely pervasive in everything from clothing to the design of houses to the structure of cities (anti-children and anti-women).

The "old dykes" who boast of their friendships with gay men, the women who cluster round pro-feminist men (real or otherwise) radiating gratitude and praise, the Lesbians who talk endlessly about their attraction to men and their "bisexuality," when the psychology of genuinely bisexual women is quite different, all who allow fear to impress them morally or make them lie to themselves, who keep in their hearts not affection, not even concern, but adulation of the heroic, normative, central sex-all these are betraying themselves and other women. To lose the connection to fundamental theory and to evaluate discrete bits of personal behavior as feminist or non-feminist (whether they're male or female), is self-destructive and dreadfully confusing. Feminism isn't a grab bag of all the good and nice things in the world (as some, albeit a very few, feminists sometimes seem to think) and patriarchy isn't a collection of personally nasty behavior and all the bad things in the world. Nor is feminism a set of rules for virtuous living. To believe the former leads to helplessness in the face of institutionalized patriarchy and believing the latter leads to otherwise intelligent women boggling about absurdities

For women, there's simply no easy way of finding some kind of fulfillment. The whole idea of going from your own world to an alien world makes sense only if you're not an alien in your own world. It's very hard to feel at home here when you're not. So women either don't go into space-you're either there or here but without much traveling in between-or you came from there and now you're here, but what the hell are you doing here?