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A Depopulation Bomb variant that removes approximately half of the population of the world in one stroke, namely one complete gender, with one exception. The exception will be the protagonist, love interest, or Mac Guffin of the story.
If it is the males who die off (as is most frequently the case), the story will be about how the surviving women rebuild society, or how Fish Out Of Water males cope with a society that has already been rebuilt. If it is the latter, the Last Man on Earth, our hero, may initially think that his life is going to be all orgies and pampering from now on. This is classic Genre Blindness, as stories of this type almost never fit this pattern. The last man will quickly become a target, sought by every woman of power and means in the world, as his sperm may be the key to the survival of the human race.
This type of story seems to exist for several reasons. Primarily they exist 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 a lot of fiction). In addition, classic gender roles and the glass ceiling 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. And finally there's Rule Thirty Four: being one of the few males alive (fertile or not) gives our hero the chance to seduce every woman he sees, which is a popular trope on the horny side of the Web.
Some hard-line feminist authors might create this kind of story as a utopian vision, in line with their view that men are the root cause of all the ills of society. Some anti-feminist authors might create exactly the same kind of story to produce a dystopia, to show that feminists are the cause of all the ills of society (see for example Edmund Cooper's Wall Banger Gender Genocide). More reasonable authors take the stance that humans are the cause of most human problems, and that if men aren't calling the shots, women will still make the same short-sighted and foolish decisions (At best, all new short-sighted and foolish decisions). The total collapse of society in these cases is not because of some inherent flaw in female leadership, but because three billion people just died all at once, with all the problems that causes. Either way, the dirty secret of these stories is that they're usually actually there to impart some political message, sometimes subtle and unobjectionable, sometimes not.
When all the women die off, the story is usually less about politics or gender issues and more about The End Of The World As We Know It. These stories almost always take place After The End, in either a cruel Dystopia or a chaotic Scavenger World. Either way, the clear implication is usually that without the " calming presence" of women, the men will immediately nuke themselves to hell out of sexual frustration and other "manly" demands. Note this can happen with the women-left scenario, but much less often. The situation is slightly (but only slightly) less sexist if the men are "fighting over" the remaining women (in which case, there's at least a reason for conflict). It's probably not worth worrying too much about the sexism in the premise though, as these stories tend to be just an excuse to have a story about a bunch of guys killing each other (probably while wearing too much leather).
The name is a pun on genocide, and comes from a recent story with this premise, the comic Y The Last Man.
See also Gender Rarity Value, which this trope is a prime setup for.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In the anime Girl's Bravo, the alternate dimension of Seiren has a 10/1 female/male ratio. The main character, milquetoast gynophobe Yukinari, gets propositioned by a couple of grade school girls and chased by virtually the entire female population of the city before he escapes back to Earth.
- Of course, a 10:1 ratio really isn't rare enough to explain why about 50 women were chasing after Yukinari, and not a male in sight, so it really doesn't make much sense.
- It is explained by the apparently very strict monogamy in that world. ("Strict" as in women don't seem at all interested in cheating.) Any single man would have a massive field of candidates rushing him, until he chose a mate, dropping the ratio of single men even further, driving competition to become even more fierce. Of course, in such a world, one would expect a good portion of the women simply not becoming that interested in marriage (probably settling on Heterosexual Life Partners, instead), unless it somehow became a status symbol to become one of the few actually reproducing. Given the probable decline in population in such a situation, however, unless each woman was bearing 11 children on average (and the only family we see is implied to be only child), either raiding Earth for men, or some form of polygamy would almost have to be introduced.
- The So Bad Its Good anime OVA ICE takes place In A World where all men died after the space station Mir unexpectedly crashed into the ocean while still carrying experimental toxic substances. Girls Love ensues, obviously.
- In the hentai manga St. Margareta, "chromosome abnormalities" have caused a 25-to-1 female/male ratio; as a result, statistics show that 90% of all women will be deemed "useless to society", and are federally forced to enroll in a special school training sex slaves through S&M classes for nine years, for the purposes of "social services".
- Vandread seems to be something like this early on. In this show's take, the all-male planet develops into a paranoid fascist dictatorship, while the all-female planet is a constitutional democracy but is described as a morally and socially deficient world, where everyone is constantly trying to out do each other, and waste an outrageous amount of resources.
- Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou does this with the relationship between male and female androids.
- The manga Ôoku begins with a disease that kills off a large proportion of the male population of Japan during the Edo period. Subsequently, males continue to die of the disease while women take over almost all productive roles in society, including the shogunate. Only the female shogun is wealthy enough to keep a harem (the titular ooku) full of non-productive, pampered men in her care and, like its real-world female historical equivalent, the male harem lives a strictly cloistered life.
- An alien example in the backstory of the Arume of Blue Drop. Once again its the men who died out. The women solved things by giving themselves some male genes so that women could reproduce using machines to facilitate the process; it was only a stopgap measure and wouldn't keep them going forever. They made a smashing attempt to go get the last male Arume genes from human males on Earth (there were apparently some Ancient Astronauts a while back who got... busy). They chickened out in the end, though, having become too used to the new status quo, and took our women instead.
- The Yuri Hime serial, Love DNA XX involves humanity contracting an epidemic that causes no males to be born. After the last man dies off, the governments start enforcing a rigid new gender system on the leftover females splitting them into "Adams" and "Eves".
Comic Books
- The DC Elseworld story Created Equal is one of these, with Superman as the last man. Halfway through the story it's revealed that Lex Luthor survived too.
- A rogue Amazon—of the Wonder Woman variety— tried to wipe out men with a plague in a Justice League multi-parter.
- I'm pretty sure the same plot was used in an animated series episode, and it was stupid: The rogue Amazon had released the virus, so all the men in the vicinity started collapsing, but not WW or Hawkgirl. At the same time, Superman and Martian Manhunter fall down too. So... it's a virus specific enough to knock out human males, but not human females, and broad enough to take down a Martian and a Kryptonian too?
- In the same episode, Batman jumps out of his nice safe Batwing to land on the ground... where he collapses too, because he's not wearing a breathing mask. Isn't he supposed to be the patron saint of Crazy Prepared?
- Though, on the other hand, Kryptonians can interbreed with humans.
- The adult comic Naked Earth.
- In Enki Bilal's Nikopol-trilogy Paris is at the start introduced as a facist city-state where the Depraved Homosexual elite uses eugenics to minimize the percentage of females in their population, and keeps them out of sight in underground breeding farms. The titular protagonist puts an end to the practice while turning the city-state into communism with the aid of the rebellious Egyptian god Horus. It's a surreal comic.
- The entire premise of Y:The Last Man. A Comic Within The Comic, made by a female survivor, tells the gender-reversed version.
Film
Literature
- Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale plays with a variant of this, in which 95% of all women were rendered sterile by a plague. This leads—in America at least—to a rigid theocracy which virtually enslaves the few remaining fertile women. The men are also frequently sterile but the theocracy insists that failure to produce children is the fault of women. This leads to handmaids trying to secretly conceive children by fertile men to prevent themselves being declared barren and sent to the work camps.
- The feminist novel Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The men of a tribe all kill themselves in a war, leaving the women to randomly develop the ability to reproduce parthenogenically and found a Utopia.
- Frank Herbert's novel, The White Plague. (Here, it's the women who die.)
- Joanna Russ's The Female Man features a man-less world as the home of one of the principal characters. It is unabashedly utopian, and it's hinted that it's the direct result of one of the other alternate worlds, where men and women are at war with eachother. Russ was anything but subtle in how she felt about men. One of the longest, most detailed passages concerns a woman warrior from the latter world literally tearing a man apart with her bare hands.
- Where is it hinted that Whileaway (Janet's world) is "a direct result" of Alice Jael's world? As to how Russ "felt about men", she stated it specifically in the afterword to her short story "When It Changed" (the origin for The Female Man): "... I visit Whileaway — although I do not live there because there are no men there."
- 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.
- Alice Bradley Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr.:
- 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 short story 'The Screwfly Solution' (also made into a TV movie) has a rather disturbing version of this trope. Aliens distribute a virus that causes human mating behaviour to change, turning men's sexual impulses into violent ones, essentially turning them all into psychopathic serial killers bent on destroying all women. (And occasionally little boys.) Once they have accomplished this, the aliens simply have to wait for all the surviving men to die before they move in and take over the earth. The story's title is based on a real-life method for eradicating Screwfly, which uses a hormone that subverts the fly's mating instinct so that the males mount the females in the wrong way, so no conception can occur. So, Truth in Television?
- John Wyndham's novella "Consider Her Ways" features a world in which men have been killed off by a virus, etc, etc. The protagonist is a woman from our world who "travels" there while under the influence of an hallucinogenic drug. It was All Just A Dream — Or Was It A Dream?
- Don't remember the name, but I do recall a short story where a planet was colonised by humans, with no apparent ill effects for the first few years. Then the females, of all species, started to die. A female scientist than came up with the bright idea of turning herself and others into men. The results were not pretty, along the lines set out above of the lack of a calming influence on men from women.
- In one of Cordwainer Smith's stories about the Instrumentality of Mankind, an isolated planet has all women die from a cancerous virus. The men manage to find a way to reproduce, but any females born die. The men create an all male insane society, as the author feels that a permanent society of only men would mourn the lack of women to the point of insanity.
- In The Knife Of Never Letting Go, the protagonist Todd Hewitt grew up on an alien planet, in a town where there are no women. For his whole life, he believed that the reason was a Depopulation Bomb, which killed off all the women and had the side effect of allowing everyone to hear the men's thoughts. The truth is much more sinister. The thought-hearing is a natural effect of living on the planet, and the men in Todd's town couldn't stand that the women could hear their thoughts but not the other way around, and killed them all.
- In The Queen of The Damned the titular Vampire attempts this with males. By her own power.
- Lord Of The Flies only has boys on the island. Though, if there were girls, everyone would be EW COOTIES anyway.
- Or worse. A bunch of boys and girls who are just entering puberty, and no adult supervision? And yes, that was the official reason for the lack of girls.
- Lois McMaster Bujold's 1986 novel Ethan of Athos has the human colony on Athos as all-male due to religious reasons (women are EEEEEEEEEVIL!). They rely on cultured ovarian tissue to reproduce, but after 200 years the cultured ovums are beginning to fail . . .
Live Action TV
- An episode of Sliders. Gendercide was the result of a virus, all male survivors were kept in isolation at a secure sperm-bank facility. Australia had become a world power due to having gotten less of the virus and therefore having more men.
Music
- Believe it or not, there is a music example. "Cemetery Girls" by Schoolyard Heroes is about a Gendercide in which all males die.
Real Life
- The Wolbachia bacteria is inside 40-70% of insects and can't be transmitted by bug sperm. So it kills males in their eggs. If a little male critter survives, the bacteria tries to transform it into a female.
- Some good news for male bugs everywhere. The Blue Moon Butterfly has evolved a resistance to the bacteria and went from males being 10% of the population to 40%. They did it in a year, which is 10 butterfly generations. Start your mutating, males! Survive! Survive!!!
- 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.
Video Games
Web Comics
- Angels 2200; a major plot point is whether the plague affected the rebel colonies as well.
- Gotham Girls had a story arc in which all the men in Gotham disappeared. They got better.
Western Animation
- Ember and her cronies succeed in doing this to all the males in Danny Phantom, because one of them was dumped by her boyfriend. They got better, of course.
- Aresia in Justice League attempts this in the episode Fury with a virus that makes all the male sick and slowly die. She test it on Metropolis then tries to do it widespread around the world. Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl stop her however.
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