...so I read it.
It took awhile for it to sink in that no matter what he only had 3 female characters -- My BIL says: "Only one woman, made of very thin cardboard," but I am willing to grant him the Maiden and Mother and Mistress. The creepy thing in retrospect is that the Maiden is always 12 years old, and he gallantly waits for her to grow up. Usually. The Mother is a wimpy dweeb who knits socks for her son going into Space Academy, or (as in FF) a toxic wreck who must be replaced. And of course there are no Crones.
Part of my discontent that had no name was explained when Schmidt wrote his Telzy Amberdon stories. Suddenly there was a girl! A self-activating, very bright and inquisitive 17-y.o. iirc. I must have been 15 or 16 when those came out. Then the author abruptly died.
So much of what I was looking for was simply not yet written.
But back to RAH, sis-boom-bah. Since I was very clear in my mind that what I was reading was fiction, I was somewhat aghast to discover there was a literal cult springing up around Stranger in a Strange Land. In college, someone told me he was going to emigrate to New Zealand with his water brothers and form a nest. I wondered what the actual residents of that country would think of that.
I read Farnham's Freehold with a straight face, whenever it was it came out. It feels like I was in high school. Satire? I saw nothing humorous in it whatsoever. I saw that he killed off the unsatisfactory daughter and her bastard child, disposed of the unsatisfactory wife, and literally castrated the unworthy son. He seemed to be of the opinion that it was all their mother's fault. I thought he was also maybe trying to hold a mirror up to contemporary racism, but it didn't exactly work for me.
I grew up with Heinlein -- and then I simply outgrew him and moved on. If I were to be assigned to write a paper on him at this point in my life (70) it would be scathing.
He was in his own way a very good writer -- there are things that have stayed with me all these years, and things that became catchwords among my sibs. The cat who is looking for The Door Into Summer is one of those. Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows about that, even if they never heard of RAH. So I picked up a copy at a used book sale a couple of years ago, and discovered that while Pete the Cat (Petronius Arbiter, in full) was much the same, the entire rest of the book had been -- you guessed it -- visited by the Suck Fairy.
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