What would the world really look like without men?

I thought of Children of Men

Well in Y The Last Man it is actually about all males on earth (except the Main Character and his pet/friend monkey) disappearing.

Note that this includes non-human males.

Sounds like the plot of some harem anime, hentai or just ecchi (very few men left). LOL

edited 1st Oct '12 1:53:38 AM by entropy13

It does sound suspiciously similar to a Harem plot.

edited 1st Oct '12 2:08:42 AM by DeviantBraeburn

Stairs and doors would be smaller. Also, politics would probably move leftward.

After the first shock there will be a massive crisis in construction, engineering and other areas where primarily men were employed. This will result in an immense downfall of civilisation and even when women start to fill those roles it will take time to rebuild everything that was lost, if that even is possible at that point. At least initially, it will lead to physical labor getting more valuable as without men fewer people will be willing to do this jobs and society will have to change a lot before that will change. And the massive shift power shift between countries with female soldiers and those without or less of them will lead to more wars not less at the start.

People tend to adapt their behaviour to their roles. Women in roles where they have to show stereotypically manly traits (commanding, dominant, tough) will indeed show those traits. You don't need a horrific cataclysmic event to see this in action - just look at females in the army, boxing, heading criminal cartels.

I don't think such an event will stop those tough roles from existing and whoever fits into those roles changing their behaviour to suit. Therefore a horrible event like this will probably have little in the way of a different cultural outcome just because one sex was destroyed.

I'm pretty sure stuff is going to collapse. That would happen if a society lost half its population, no matter what half it was.

In Girls Bravo there's a "twin planet" for the Earth in the setting, and the main character got teleported there. So he was chased around by all of the inhabitants (finally seeing a male) even though he looks like a little boy. LOL

Then there's another male supporting character (which was also teleported there) who told the main character that he will "protect" the MC from those chasing him. LOL

edited 1st Oct '12 6:17:27 AM by entropy13

There's also an episode of Sliders with this plot, where a biological weapon kills most of the men on the planet. The remaining men are basically a strategic resource and are kept captive.

Well, they will have ressource problems in the beginning because it was mostly men who extracted those kind of ressources. And in the long run, they will be able to produce more people anyway, so any advantage due to the decreased population will vanish.

That's assuming that women somehow won't be able to get the hang of resource extraction before they manage to replace half the world's population. You'll forgive me if I think that's a very silly assumption.

Women can do the same jobs as men with as much as no modification to a lot, depends on the job. And in a world without men, they'll figure out how just like if men suddenly lost all the women they'll have to go through the same thing.

The question is if civilization can survive the initial chaos and panic of having somewhere near half the population dying.

If you wanted to get rid of men, it would be simpler and far less traumatic to alter the process of conception/fertilization so that only female babies would be born. If you wanted to keep some breeding stock around, make it a 10:1 (female:male) ratio or something.

Murdering half of the world's population — the male half, at that — would be a disaster on a scale not seen since prehistoric extinction events. Worse than the Black Plague by far, especially given the vast amounts of infrastructure that would become inoperative as a result. Just think of the labor involved in disposing of all the bodies and the disease that would run rampant in most places...

I'm hardly an expert on gender psychology but it seems that any victory for women's freedom you'd earn as a result of this would be rendered moot.

Woah, no one said the OP's plague would be intentional!

Anyone who would willingly destroy such a large portion of the population regardless of targeted gender is batshit insane and wouldn't care the consequences.

I thought of the aforementioned Children of Men situation honestly.

In the long term you will have the same ressource problem as in the beginning and at the start you will have massive problems. There might be a slightly beneficial outcome between a world with the same problems as ours and the start, but I don't see any positive factors for humanity overall. And, frankly, I find it insulting that someone would suggest as such.

The "sons stop being conceived" scenario is much more forgiving and survivable.

Seems like way too specific of a longshot.

90 percent of the worlds men die. 10 percent remaining are sterile.

Women find a way to reproduce without men.

Somehow the way that they reproduce does not create male children.

Where's the next hurdle?

edited 1st Oct '12 10:26:12 AM by Barkey

I think that regardless there's too much focus being put on the how and why rather than the actual results. I think the point is more about what happens AFTER the mess of whatever causes the gendercide is cleaned up.

Honestly the world would not change magically, it would just adapt. I don't see a huge change in the social structures or the pressure of economic or academic classes just because there were more women than men.

It's kind of like in Land of the Dead where the rich were still intent on living in their fortified skyscraper with PMC's protecting them.

Humans would just work around the issues like they always do.

Children of Men's scenario was worse in that it was "no more children, ever, by any method".

I should add that, intentional or not, this Gendercide apocalypse would not stop at killing half the population. It would be more like 75 or 80 percent once all the secondary effects were felt, mainly in the collapse of industry and infrastructure and the consequent disease and famine.

One good thing is that you probably wouldn't see any significant amount of organized warfare, as most militaries around the world exclude women except in a very token manner and so they wouldn't have the training to fight even if they wanted to from a psychological standpoint.

As stated, any industry or profession with a significant majority of male workers (construction being a big one) would collapse due to lack of people with the requisite skillsets. That could recover in time but it would take years and a lot of stuff would be left undone or fall apart due to neglect. This wouldn't be terribly different from a generic Depopulation Bomb except in the demographics of the labor force.

The sexual, social, and political dynamics of the human race would most certainly change. Again, I'm not well versed in gender psychology, but as an interested layman I'd say that there would be an enormous rise in relative poverty levels above and beyond that caused by the basic apocalypse itself, as you'd have large numbers of single parent families where the mother never entered the workforce and has no useful skills.

What I would expect to happen is that a lot of those "homemaker" women would enter the profession of child care for the vast legions of other women who would have to be single working parents. Childcare would become a plurality profession for parents of preschool and school-age children.

I'm not about to say that all women would become lesbians, but when you have a species that's wired for sexuality — we're a randy bunch — there would be an awful lot of hurried substitutions being worked out. What happens next would depend on the degree to which the gendercide is thorough.

If some fertile males live or can be born — that is, it's not 100% — then those males would become prized as breeding stock. Smart men would attempt to parlay this into becoming harem lords, with or without political power. I have a feeling that women would take over most positions of authority because the men would be too busy and too prized to let out of sight. "Having a man" would become even more of a social status boost than it is now. Having a male child would elevate you to revered status and invite all kinds of jealousy and possibly even retribution. There would be a strong impetus to go the Chinese route and abort or kill female children.

If the elimination of the male gender is complete — no [fertile] men, now or ever — then the future of the human species would now depend exclusively on the scientists who remain to come up with a means of asexual reproduction that's sufficiently cheap and efficient to be used worldwide. This in a world still reeling from a 70-80% population loss and struggling with the decay of vast amounts of industry and infrastructure.

They'd have an absolute deadline: that being the time it takes for the existing supply of fertile females to reach menopause. If a solution that permits widespread reproduction is not found by then, the human race goes extinct.

Even if a solution is found, it would take time to build up economies of scale and thus it would be extremely limited and expensive at first. Thus you'd have a new form of competition: access to the baby-making apparatus. It would rapidly eclipse all other trappings of society in terms of perceived importance. Whoever controls the ability to conceive children would have Godlike power over humanity.

Humanity would continue to dwindle for some time, as the rate of reproduction enabled by these artificial solutions would be vastly lower than before until they could reach a state of mass production. Then it would be another race: can we maintain the population needed to support the technology needed to allow us to reproduce? There would be a critical threshold beyond which we'd be headed for extinction anyway.

The only good thing I can say about a male gendercide is that it's far easier to survive from it as a species than from a female gendercide. The reason being, of course, that the species' ability to reproduce is limited primarily by the number of wombs, not the number of penises.

edited 1st Oct '12 3:10:02 PM by Fighteer