Good story, and this was very likely one of my earliest introductions to any sort of consensual non-monogamy ideas, but gender role and sexuality issues bother me.

As seems to be the case for Heinlein’s work, his gender roles are very much in line with the popular culture of his time, with manly men in charge and women as support. Even here, where some of the women arguably push those boundaries a bit, it’s generally only in fairly safe ways. And of course, though the sexual politics of non-monogamy do lend to occasionally touching on the possibility of homosexuality, at best it’s brushed aside as unlikely, at worst, mocked and treated with disgust.

Heinlein continues to be something of a source of frustration for me now — I can see why he’s regarded as highly as he is in the field, while simultaneously being appalled at how his work reads through the lens of modern sensibilities.