I think literally all truly catastrophic events in the book were caused by females acting like immature children. They don't really suffer any consequences of their actions - nothing comparable to the magnitude of their sins - others do.
It's an extremely antifeminist trilogy and clearly intended to be so. The alternative apt title would be 'How feminism destroys civilizations'.
I don't think there's a spoiler tag on HN, so I wrote it as vaguely as it can be without spoiling the story.
(please note I'm just describing how the book is, not making a statement about feminism)
I totally agree, it gets more weird as the trilogy advances as well. I really liked the basic premise, but at some point it becomes painful to read how in the far future all the men look like women and that's why humanity is weak.
I didn't get that impression. More of a "people are idiots", which felt weirdly realistic (in the same way as the portrayal of Julia Bliss Flaherty in Seveneves was essentially the sad but realistic image of a politician I come to expect). I guess you could see antifeminism in either, if you really go in looking for it - but that says more about reader's preconceptions than about the book itself.
Given the cultural context of the book and the author, "humans are fuckups" is a fully justified worldview, IMO (even though I'd prefer more "humans are awesome" literature; Liu Cixin's trilogy was really depressing).
In Seveneves, any negative portrayal of any particular woman was massively counterbalanced by the narrative of, ummm, the seven Eves. What female character in 3BP trilogy balances the disastrous actions of Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin, the two most consequential female characters?
Granted, the disastrous action of Ye was somewhat offset by the inspiration she gave Luo Ji. (In the long run, she was still responsible for the deaths of billions.) But Cheng is something else entirely. The plot of a book is entirely up to its author. The time scale portrayed is many hundreds of years. It would have been possible to have conjured up a male character to take at least one of the several treacherous and/or civilization-destroying actions Cheng took. Maybe the character of Wade could have been that, but in retrospect even this clumsy caricature of an amoral reptilian white American CIA asshole always made the right choices with respect to the survival of humanity.
I really enjoyed the trilogy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have this specific flaw (and several others besides). Reading antifeminism is not the reader's fault; it's right there in the text.
It's an extremely antifeminist trilogy and clearly intended to be so. The alternative apt title would be 'How feminism destroys civilizations'.
I don't think there's a spoiler tag on HN, so I wrote it as vaguely as it can be without spoiling the story.
(please note I'm just describing how the book is, not making a statement about feminism)