History Main / Gendercide

* The anime OVA ''Anime/{{ICE|2007}}'' takes place InAWorld where all men died after the space station Mir unexpectedly crashed into the ocean while still carrying experimental toxic substances. [[GirlsLove Yuri]] ensues, obviously.

As of late, the sub-genre has also started getting more scrutiny because any plague that specifically targets XX or XY individuals is going to end in ''some'' proportion of trans people getting hit. This can carry its own UnfortunateImplications, ranging from the general genocide of trans men and/or women to the idea that biology ultimately decides gender. Even works that go for a more supernatural answer to the gendercide may sweep up trans women with cis men, or vice versa.

* Infanticide has a long history. Back before birth control - i.e., before the twentieth century - people dealt with unwanted children in one of two ways: abortion, which was common virtually worldwide, and getting rid of the baby after it was born. In Europe and its offshoots, this took the form of giving your baby to an orphanage or a guild, or simply leaving them someplace that someone might pick them up. Whether the child lived or died - and at least nine out of ten babies abandoned in this way ''did'' die - was irrelevant, because their parents [[ThouShaltNotKill had not, technically, committed infanticide]]. In the (Indian) Subcontinent and East Asia, they gave them (honourable) death. Of course, there's many a case of parents throughout Eurasia ''meaning'' to dispose of their unwanted child, only to find they just can't do it; related to this, there are countless cases of the adoption of unwanted babies by those unable to have (more) children themselves.

* The anime OVA ''Anime/{{ICE}}'' takes place InAWorld where all men died after the space station Mir unexpectedly crashed into the ocean while still carrying experimental toxic substances. [[GirlsLove Yuri]] ensues, obviously.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague'' episode "Fury", an Amazon with a serious bent against the male gender decides to release a disease into the atmosphere that nearly kills off all of the men on the planet. This includes the male members of the Justice League (even Superman and the Martian Manhunter are affected, despite not being ''human'', and Solomon Grundy, who is TheUndead. It's implied magic is involved). It's up to Franchise/WonderWoman and Hawkgirl to save the day (of course, this includes fighting against an all-female alliance of villains).

This type of story exists for several reasons. Primarily it's to explore gender politics and behavior, but they also have the secondary benefit of providing an excuse to write literature in which most of the principal characters are female (a major change from [[TheSmurfettePrinciple a lot of fiction]]). In addition, classic gender roles, the glass ceiling and biology being what they are, the death of all men would effectively decapitate most of the world's organizational structure, meaning descent into chaos is likely, especially in stories set before 1970. This collapse (and probable renewal) of society provides an excellent source of conflict for writers to build their plot around. Finally there's RuleThirtyFour: being one of the few males alive (fertile or not) gives our protagonist the chance to [[TheCasanova seduce every woman he sees]], which is a popular trope on [[TheInternetIsForPorn the horny side of the Web]].

See also GenderRarityValue and ChildlessDystopia, both of which this trope is a prime setup for. If ''all'' of the members of a gender dies off, it may result in a OneGenderRace. Compare SterilityPlague, which can enable similar kinds of plots.

* It's said in ''Anime/YuGiOh5Ds'' that [[spoiler:only Z-one, Antinomy, Paradox and Aporia are the only survivors in the future where the Machine Emporers has killed the human race. All four of them are male.]]

** Two women argue about the typical 'Female Utopia' element of this trope. One women claims that without men, there are no more wars and society is better, while the other argues back that female pleasure has vanished.

* In Creator/EnkiBilal's ''Nikopol Trilogy'', Paris is introduced as a facist city-state where the DepravedHomosexual elite uses eugenics to minimize the percentage of females in their population, and keeps them out of sight in underground breeding farms. The eponymous protagonist, Alcide Nikopol, puts an end to the practice while turning the city-state to communism with the aid of the rebellious Egyptian god Horus. It's a surreal comic.
* ''ComicBook/{{XXXenophile}}'' had one story where a naked male time traveler shows up in a woman's closet. He's from a future where all women have been wiped out and men reproduce by cloning. One side effect of the gendercide is that they got rid of all wars, starvation and diseases, and generally built a utopia, but now they've began to wonder if those "women" weren't good for something after all and maybe they should be brought back, so he's sent through time to conduct research. Thus, much acrobatic research is had, after which he concludes that women are a ''very'' good thing to have after all. [[spoiler:Turns out they're actually a normal couple roleplaying.]]

* Used on a smaller scale (with, of course, the exceptions of the love interest and the plucky teenage girl) during the latter half of ''Film/TwentyEightDaysLater''. With a dubious twist- the only reason men outnumber women in post-quarantine England is because the majority of the survivors were soldiers holed up in a manor house in the countryside as a makeshift headquarters. TheVirus has identical effects on women and men, the men just have bigger guns. The end result of the soldiers' nine man society at first looks hardly dystopian -- apart from the [[HighPressureBlood blood spewing pseudo-zombies]] and the general feeling of depression -- up until the last women in England showed up, at which point they practically all turned into crazy rapists, presumably because they were convinced they were the last humans alive on Earth and the whole set-up was designed specifically to attract women so that they could alleviate this sense of despairing hopelessness by 'rebuilding the species.'
* Polish CultClassic ''Film/SexMission'' is about two men waking up from [[HumanPopsicle cryogenic sleep]] to discover that they're apparently the only males in the world now, the others having been killed by a pandemic, nuclear war and most notably the M-bomb. Women live underground and their community denies the existence of males. The movie was directed in the time of the Soviet Union, and was one big middle finger about living in a land under the control of a totalitarian communist regime.

* On Venus, all the surviving men have been exiled to an orbiting moon in the sexist camp classic ''Film/QueenOfOuterSpace'', staring Zsa Zsa Gabor. All it takes to put these ladies back in their place is a trio of red-blooded American astronauts with enough Vaseline in their hair to a drown a bat.

* The feminist novel ''Literature/{{Herland}}'', by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland was founded in the wake of a volcanic eruption which killed most of the men, with the rest wiped out in civil war with the women.

* ''The Rainbow Cadenza'' is a libertarian sci-fi novel by J. Neil Schulman where men outnumber women seven to one, and all women are drafted into prostitution for three years. This happened due to a number of long wars in which more men were created (via chemicals which affected the gender of the sperm) than women.

** The novella "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" is about a group of male astronauts on a circumsolar mission who run into trouble and are trying to contact Houston to return to Earth. They get picked up by a ship crewed only by women, and spend a good deal of time asking where all the people (meaning the men) are. Turns out, their ship had slipped through time several hundred years and in fact a plague had wiped out all men and most of the women on Earth, leaving only 11,000 survivors. The world the guys returned to had no crime or war but also no advancement (the women must propagate by cloning, so by this time everybody is one of a certain set of types, which it's implied is the problem).

* ''Literature/ConsiderHerWays'' features a world in which men have been killed off by a virus, where women have discovered a way to reproduce without them, but this involves a whole caste of women whose sole duty is to squeeze out daughter after daughter for the rest of their lives all the while being fattened up for the child's health (several years ago it was believed a woman needed to put on a lot of weight to ensure a healthy birth, rather than the opposite we know today). The protagonist is a woman from our world who "travels" there while under the influence of an hallucinogenic drug and finds herself in the body of one of these birthers. It's AllJustADream... [[OrWasItADream or is it]]?

* In Creator/DavidBrin's ''Glory Season'', a space ship of feminist colonists goes to a far, far away planet in order to create a perfect society. The women are in charge, and whenever one of them finds their 'niche' in society, they clone themselves over and over. There are men left alive, because the scientists knew that if their society was completely stagnant, eventually something would kill them. So, there's the clone children, or "winter children" who are the majority of the population, and then "summer children" who are born when men who have proven themselves useful get to vent their genetically suppressed lusts during the summer. The summer children are also called "variants", and the protagonist's goal through the book is to find her 'niche' and be allowed to have a clone child.
* In ''Literature/HonorHarrington'', the planet Grayson has a fairly mild, albeit long-lived, form. Some desperate genetic engineering to save the colonists from a DeathWorld in the backstory results in roughly 2/3 of males being miscarried. This state of affairs continues for almost a millennium, until they get access to advanced enough technology to figure out what happened and reverse it. It's a lot less destructive than most other examples, however - they pretty quickly adopt polygamy and move on with life.

* In ''The Brides of Rollrock Island'' by Margo Lanagan, there is a variant of this. The witch Misskaella has made it possible for the men of Rollrock Island to marry [[SelkiesAndWereseals seals transformed into beautiful women]], or "sea-wives", instead of normal human women. The sea-wives are incredibly beautiful and considered superior to human women, since they basically do everything a man says. The families of the island actually begin killing girl babies, so that the sea-wives have no competition. This results in a cycle of men never seeing a woman until it's time for them to marry, at which time they get Misskaella to make them a sea-wife.
* ''Literature/LegacyOfTheDragokin'': [[EvilPlan This is the goal of the Kthonian Knights]]; exterminate men because they're all bastards. There is very little in the way of political messages as, in practice, they are indescriminate in who they kill and who they turn into a monster with TheVirus. Also [[spoiler: when Daniar convinces Kthonia that women are just as morally flawed as men, the latter decides to kill them both.]]

* The world of ''Literature/ThePower'' sees women spontaneously gain the ability to create electrical discharges from their hands during puberty, similar to electric eels. As soon as this begins to destabilize some of the most repressive countries in the world (namely Saudi Arabia and Moldova), Mens' Rights groups on the internet start insisting that this is inevitable. [[spoiler: It takes about a decade, but they're right.]]

* ''Literature/TheThebaid'': All of the men of Lemnos had their throat slit in the middle of the nights by their wives and daughters who were furious at the men for abandoning the island to wage some foreign war. The only girl who doesn't partake in the massacre is Hypsipyle, who sneaks her father out of the island.

* Gretchen Felker-Martin's ''Manhunt'' features a postapocalyptic society struggling with a virus that drives everyone who has too much testosterone and not enough estrogen violently rabid, turning them into rape-murder-cannibalism machines, which took out almost every man in the world. (One character sadly quips that she's "outlived every dad".) In addition to avoiding said [[TechnicallyLivingZombie Technically Living Zombies]], regulating hormones so you don't turn into one is a constant concern. Fran and Beth, our protagonists, are trans women who make their living hunting down sources of natural estrogen to be distilled and sold, the few male children will have to be chemically castrated for their own safety, anyone who lives long enough to hit menopause is in constant terror, and reproduction is essentially a nonstarter because even if you do manage to get safely pregnant (a tall order in and of itself) if the baby has a testosterone surge in the womb it will [[WombHorror eat its way out]]. Conditions that result in [=AFAB=] women having excess testosterone, such as polycystic ovarian syndrome, will also trigger the conversion. Meanwhile Robbie, a trans man, is only alive and sane because he had to go off his hormones for a surgery right before the virus hit, and has to deal with people either freaking out at the sight of him or misgendering him. And that's ''before'' you get into the literal army of transphobes who want to exterminate every XY bearer who's still a person "just in case". Adherents of this army spout rhetoric reminiscent of a classic "women will build a better world without men" version of this trope, but are actually violent fascists.

* Pretty much the premise of Oceanside in ''Series/TheWalkingDead2010''. The Saviors rounded up every man and boy over the age of 10, and then executed them. It isn't until the season 8 episode "Worth" that we find out it was all the work of [[spoiler:Simon and not Negan]].

* There was a hit rockabilly song in the 1950s entitled "Thirteen Women and Only One Man in Town"; it experienced a resurgence in popularity in the mid-1990s. What many people did not know, either then or now, was that the song alluded to the only fourteen people left on Earth following a nuclear holocaust. Lucky guy....

* Played with in ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}''; vault 69 was populated by 999 women and 1 man, likewise Vault 68 was the same, except with 999 men and 1 woman. The vaults were purposefully built social experiments of the cruelest nature, and were specifically designed to experiment on how much stress a society could take before the people broke down into civil war.
* ''VideoGame/Left4Dead''. Mentioned swiftly in a quote by Zoey where she sounds, not so surprisingly, less than happy. There are of course, many fandom plays on this, including a comic where Zoey has to go from killing Infected to killing men when the Survivors make it to the safe zone. Of course, when applying FridgeLogic, one can realize she isn't the last woman on earth, as we have not only Rochelle, but Amanda Slater, the boat man's wife, but still the joke continues.

* ''VideoGame/{{Lisa}}'' takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where an event only ever referred to as "The Great White Flash" has wiped out all but one woman. Civilization has completely collapsed and the surviving population have become suicidal or homicidal. [[spoiler:It is implied that women still survive, but outside of the world the game is set in]].

* ''Webcomic/{{Angels 2200}}'': The entire background of the comic is based on a mysterious [[ThePlague genetic plague]] that runs rampant and kills off nearly all human males, leaving the women to pick up the pieces (including an interstellar war with the unruly colonies). Leading to an almost entirely AmazonBrigade cast with occationally {{fanservice}}y and/or {{stripperiffic}} outfits.

* In ''Webcomic/QuentynQuinnSpaceRanger'', the Gestaltians had a symbiote that was capable of Lux manipulation, and an enemy race wiped that symbiote out--except those weren't usual Gestaltian symbiotes, but Gestaltian ''females''. A story arc is based around discovering a way to bring the females back.

* [[DarkActionGirl Ember]] along with [[EmotionEater Spectra]] and [[ClingyJealousGirl Kitty]] succeed in doing this to all the males in ''WesternAnimation/DannyPhantom'', because most of them were on bad terms with their boyfriends. [[StatusQuoIsGod The men get better]] thanks to Sam, Jazz and Maddie.

* Paraguay, after the War of the Triple Alliance. Five years of nonstop war against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay left about 50% of the prewar population and nearly 90% of the prewar ''male'' population dead. The word was that there was no male Paraguayan alive over the age of ''12''. Because of this, the Pope temporarily permitted polygamy until the population was replenished.
* Female children are often aborted in some regions of China and northern India, depending on local culture. Where this is impossible, such as in some of China's rural regions, baby girls are sometimes simply murdered after they are born. There are laws against this on the books, but they are either not enforced very rigidly or ineffective at curbing this. The cause is social mores that make male children more valuable -- "girl babies don't count." The ''Economist'' magazine wrote that "it is no exaggeration to call this gendercide", adding that the number of women "missing" in this way is well over a hundred million. This has led to increasing criminalization of selective abortion of females, including banning the use of ultrasound for non-medical reasons, but the laws have had limited effect because it's hard to prove the doctor informed a couple of a child's gender. Yin Yin Nwe, Unicef's representative to China, refers the fact that the one-child policy brings many benefits for girls "but they have to be born first".
** This results in a (much less serious) social problem for men: it means that there is a perpetual drought of women for spouses. In China this problem is frequently "solved" by trafficking women, often North Korean defectors, and forcing them to marry men. The Family Planning Policy was enforced through a financial penalty in the form of the "social child-raising fee" which is a percentage of the annual income.

* Infanticide has a long history. Back before birth control - i.e., before the twentieth century - people dealt with unwanted children in one of two ways: abortion, which was common virtually worldwide, and getting rid of the baby after it was born. In Europe and its offshoots, this took the form of giving your baby to an orphanage or a guild, or simply to leave them someplace that someone might pick them up. Whether the child lived or died - and at least nine out of ten babies abandoned in this way ''did'' die - was irrelevant, because their parents [[ThouShaltNotKill had not, technically, committed infanticide]]. In the (Indian) Subcontinent and East Asia, they gave them (honourable) death. Of course, there's many a case of parents throughout Eurasia ''meaning'' to dispose of their unwanted child, only to find they just can't do it; related to this, there are countless cases of the adoption of unwanted babies by those unable to have (more) children themselves.

* Historically, it's been fairly common practice that after one group has defeated another all men and boys (over certain ages, often ten or so) are killed. The women and girls meanwhile are absorded into the victor's groups, as {{sex slave}}s/wives.

* Amoridere's ''Housecats'' and ''Sonogram'' has the mother selectively aborting her sons (using a cup of tea). Oh, how's life for the sons she did have? It's not great, as she gets them "fixed", which is her idea of being "nice".

* Creator/JohnWyndham's novella "Consider Her Ways" features a world in which men have been killed off by a virus, where women have discovered a way to reproduce without them, but this involves a whole caste of women whose sole duty is to squeeze out daughter after daughter for the rest of their lives all the while being fattened up for the child's health (several years ago it was believed a woman needed to put on a lot of weight to ensure a healthy birth, rather than the opposite we know today). The protagonist is a woman from our world who "travels" there while under the influence of an hallucinogenic drug and finds herself in the body of one of these birthers. It was AllJustADream -- OrWasItADream?