Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Heinlein definitely had some fetishes, and they came out more and more in his late stuff, but there's not much I would characterize as enthusiasm or relish in those parts of the book. Nothing even vaguely on the level of Goodkind. The characters in ST generally regard corporal punishment as effective but it's not described as in any way enjoyable, and the flogging is described as viscerally unpleasant. For my part, Heinlein's failure as regards corporal punishment was to believe what he grew up believing- that it was effective and logical, and that advocates against it were wrongheaded and mistaken.The accidental BDSM stuff is in how he enthusiastically he writes about corporal punishment. You often see this in writers with a fetish they don't know they have (c.f. Terry Goodkind).
The bugs are the ones coded as communists in ST. The text relating to genocide in ST is all in relation to the bugs (though the principle universalized a bit) and of the "if it has to come down to us or them, I choose us", but with no assumption that it necessarily has to. Certainly not in relation to the Skinnies. ST doesn't really discuss genocide or dig into those implications anywhere near to the level that, say, Card's Ender books do, but there's much more of an undercurrent of fundamental incompatibility between bugs and humans, which is part of the coding, as it's deeply steeped in Cold War context.Re: the skinnies I'd have to re-read the novel, which is not going to happen, but as I recall, their attitude is "either they change sides or we commit regretful genocide". It's far from the only SF novel from the 1940s through 1980s (and even a bit in the 1990s) where "regretful genocide" (often of a species that seems to be coded in a vaguely Asian way, or way that reflects paranoiac fears re: Asia) is advocated as virtuous or at least "a necessary evil".
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