Help Please! What if someone beat me to it?

[Stacey]

I can't say, not for sure, that the cow identified as Albanian. Just that he was tied up outside a butchers on the outskirts of Tirana, and struck me as a metaphor for life, admittedly a bit on the dark side.

Giving me Vonnegut vibes.

About the reference you haven't a clue to...it's the novel Voyagers by Ben Bova. Most of the characters are shallow stereotypes. Middle-aged guys lust over twenty-something women. Twenty-something women advance their careers by screwing middle-aged guys. This is early eighties sci-fi, not a 1950s soap opera.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of terrible prose today that still does this. Not just to women. And I'm not talking about erotica. As long as you do your research, you should be able to avoid committing the most atrocious errors (i.e. woman staring at herself naked in a mirror describing her breasts for the benefit of the reader, woman described as "still beautiful" when doing something totally normal like washing dishes or sweating after a run, etc., etc.).