With all the talk about RAH rejecting the sexual mores of the society he was brought up in, and his championship of strong women characters, such as Sister Maggie in If This Goes On (Oh! I'm sorry! I meant to write: ITGO), I just had to post this snippet from Beyond This Horizon (BTH), which I am laboriously re-reading:

"Heedless of her struggles he picked her up and carried her to a large chair where he seated himself with her on his lap. He pinned her legs between his knees, forced her arms behind her back until he managed to get both her wrists in one of his fists. She bit him in the process.
"With her thus effectively immobilized, he settled back, holding her away from him, and looked at her face. 'Now we can talk,' he said cheerily. He measured her face with his eye, and slapped her once, not too hard but with plenty of sting in it. ...
"'What do you intend to do with me?'
"'Talk to you. Yes, and I think I'll kiss you.' ...
"He took a handful of hair and snapped her head back. 'No biting,' he warned, 'or I'll beat holy hell out of you.' ..."

Just think if Hamilton Felix had tried to treat Caroline of Tunnel Through the Sky or Mary of The Puppet Masters that way. Be missing a digit, methinks, and maybe not one from his hands. Or feet.

For what it's worth, these excerpts are unchanged between the original 1942 Astounding version and the 1948 book version - I just checked. The scene may simply have been Heinlein's idea of Felix and Phyllis "meeting cute" - he doesn't even learn her name until the next page!

Pretty cringe-worthy stuff.
I am aware that Heinlein occasionally made use of stereotypes, just as many popular writers do. Another RAH work in which females don't necessarily come off shining is The Star Beast, which I believe was pretty far ahead of its time in terms of racial tolerance, at least for chidlren's books. It was published roughly around the time I was in kindergarten and just being exposed to Little Black Sambo.

Umm -- yeah. That was only "sexy" because of the high amount of sexual repression in 1942 and 1948. Consider The Fountainhead, also published in 1948,

Watch "Red Dust" from the early thirties with Harlow and Gable. Gable slaps her; she says to do it again, she likes it.

Go to today and see how many contemporary women like to be dominated to the point of physical abuse in the bedroom. I would bet it's the most common female kink, by far. When you add the ones who fantasize about it without ever actually wanting to do it, the numbers go way up from there. What male abusers don't get is that the women want to choose which guys do it to them, making it consensual. The psychological theory is that if the male is in complete control, the woman doesn't need to feel guilty for her erotic response to what's going on, getting around her lifelong training that only bad girls enjoy sex. Plus she's getting the "appropriate" punishment for her naughty thoughts. But, as Woody Allen said so eloquently, "If sex isn't dirty, you're doing it wrong."

Just how would one notice a comeback in that sort of thing?

A couple Heinlein(ian) points on this:

1) The reality of "human nature" is not infinitely malleable; female sexual submission (not social, legal or intellectual inequality) is at least partly wired into the human nervous system. Attempts to eliminate it will only succeed when humans truly reengineer themselves.

2) Especially in Time for the Stars we see the idea that in the future the social spiral may come back around to a set of neoVictorian norms. Neal Stephenson developed the idea in The Diamond Age plausibly, not that the whole world goes in this direction, but a group linked around the world forms an association. Naturally, they're very successful because duty, work and deferred gratification are winning ideas in the reality of social competition.

Not what I meant - but if you want to pursue this I suggest we step Outside (the original name for the Speakeasy...)