I’ve noticed this sub-genre in sci-fi that I have decided to call “No Man Can Look Inside Without Going Insane.” It posits women as having access to some sort of mystical power that allows us to pass into places of chaos or intuition and not go crazy.
I was struck by this phenomenon last week when I saw my first Peter Davison Doctor Who. He was the Fifth Doctor – the one from 1982-84 who wore a celery corsage. It was a four-part arc called “The Kinda.” The titular people were natives of a jungle planet who seemed to all be male (not unusual in TV representations of groups) and strangely mute and passive. When we finally meet some female Kinda, we see that they can talk and aren’t as passive as the men. They are alarmed to see the Doctor and some other off-world males have invaded their jungle. One of the off-world lieutenants has a paranoid fear of the jungle “getting in” with its “germs and seeds” and taking over their outpost. An old Kinda seeress gives a young woman a box and tells her to give it to the off-world men. Every man who looks inside the tiny box finds it empty, but then experiences some sort of telepathic link with the members of the Kinda and promptly goes insane. It is the very contaminant the off-world lieutenant feared. When the Doctor manages not to lose his mind and instead locates the female Kinda from his telepathic experience, the old seeress declares with awe, “No man can look inside without going insane!”
The Kinda story reminded me a lot of a Middle Grade sci-fi book I read called The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, published 2008. It’s from the POV of a 12 year old boy named Todd who lives in a town of all men (at first I didn’t think this was a deliberate choice, but rather a male author’s worldview) where everyone can hear everyone else’s thoughts. It’s unpleasant as most men in town seem to have anger management issues and are paranoid about others knowing what they’re thinking. When Todd 
runs away and finds another town where there are woman, he discovers that women on his planet don’t suffer from this telepathic broadcasting. The women of his hometown were all killed because the men were driven insane by the knowledge that they couldn’t hear the women’s thoughts.
It also reminded me of Frank Hebert’s Dune, published 1965. Paul Atreides, heir of a noble family, is the only man to drink the poisonous, prescience-giving Water Of Life and live. He tells the head of the mystical Bene Gesserit Sisterhood who are the only others who dare attempt it, “You are afraid to look into that dark place. If you have the courage to look there, you will find me, staring back!” His mother, a member of the Sisterhood, was ordered to bear a daughter, but knew her husband wanted a son and so bore him one out of her love for him. Paul Atreides is the man who was supposed to be a woman and as a result, he becomes a messiah.
I love that these narratives point out differences in women’s fundamental relationship to the world, and suggest that poorly understood phenomenon can be deeply powerful. But I’m also really wondering what this magical quality is that women have and where I can get some. I guess I forgot to ask for it when I picked up my “woman card.” In my experience, “women’s intuition” simply amounts to paying attention to those around you and reading their body language. Perhaps these narratives turn on the idea that men, trained to protect their ego above all else, can’t access certain types of mental abilities until they give up that ego. Sometimes you are not discreetly you. Any woman who has ever been pregnant would know what that feels like. Such ambiguous borders between Self and Other can be very destabilizing to someone whose self-worth is built upon their independence or on their ability to physically overwhelm any Other which threatens them.
L.A. Kuemmel 
This is an interesting exploration of how sci-fi often portrays women as having unique abilities and insights.
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