What would the world really look like without men?

It...really doesn't play out that way, no. The fact that most of the population didn't just magically go "welp, looks like we're all lesbians now LOL" even if they very desperately wanted to for lack of other option was one of the more somber points that contributed to the whole mood of general malaise.

Yeah, it should be noted that in that series, stuff didn't start collapsing because nobody could do REAL MAN JOBS RAWR. Very little of what our labor force does pushes people far enough that intrinsic differences in top-end physical capacity become particularly relevant, and most of what does, does so because it's competitive against other parties that also push it that far (military).

The world nearly self-immolated in that story because people got paranoid in the fallout of half of goddamn society dying all at once, political factions sprung up immediately to exploit the new status quo as aggressively as possible under delicate circumstances that weren't in any condition to take that stress, and there was a looming sense of doom about the utterly fucked-over ecosystem and inability to reproduce.

edited 1st Oct '12 12:12:23 PM by Pykrete

Even if something all women alive were to disappear for some reason we could survive provided that we manage to get an uterus analogy and develeop cloning enough to get viable clones. Female clones could be grown from male stock

@Kolikeos:

If you read the OP you might remember the part right before your quote:

edited 1st Oct '12 1:07:35 PM by Qeise

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

This is a very big "if". Finding a way to trigger reproduction without male sperm, or a way of synthesizing sperm from female cells, would be extremely tricky; but I think that creating a functioning artificial uterus and developing cloning would be whole orders of magnitude harder.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Well, we're already experimenting with forms of in vitro fertilizations using only eggs and such. At this point we have nothing approaching an artificial womb. Provided the technology survived the initial collapse, as well as people with the requisite scientific and medical skills, and a support structure was maintainable, we could work with in vitro and the still living women who volunteered. Since the hypothetical scenario says nothing about women being unable to carry to term and so on.

The problem is I just don't think it would work out that way. Massive die offs do more than just kill a species. They upset the entire system they're connected to, which in this case is all of society. Again, mass panic. The decay of infrastructure, cutting off all our most basic services. Which in turn leads to starvation and dying of every day sicknesses that we no longer have readily available medicine for. If we can't even save those basic things, then we have no hope of saving the infrastructure required to keep running a sperm bank, or any kind of high tech medical facility.

So yeah, killing off fully half our population, and specifically one gender, equals extinction for us.

An all female society?

A village would last about the time it takes for all of them to sync up menstrually, then they would destroy eachother when that week came around.

I just remember that from basic training. It was 6 and a half weeks for me, and we had my all-male flight, and an all female sister flight. In the beginning, the males were out of sorts and fighting eachother for dominance, and eventually a pecking order was reached and we became stable by the last few weeks and started doing well.

The women started out doing really well at the gate, and eventually learned to utterly hate each other as cliques started and they learned enough about each other to talk shit behind girls backs. They were pretty much ready to implode in a massive explosion of hatred by the end of training, as one of the female airmen who went to cop school with me said.

Yes-no. If it always worked like that, I'd've died in a fire at the all-girls boarding school I was at.

The politics changes even around permanent grudges, depending on several factors... not least what the core triangle relationships of the Alpha Bitches currently looks like. <shrugs>

In a military setting, I'm betting on too many Alphas for any of the Betas to undermine them using the stealthy way to change their group-dynamics with rather... understated rumour tactics that can take months to mature.

Bitch fights are many layered things that work like wines.

edited 1st Oct '12 2:20:56 PM by Euodiachloris

It also depends how many chicks we have playing.

In a small community, it's dangerous. But you get enough of them together like in a city or a state situation where there is variety and distance, it's not so bad.

I don't see 100K women suddenly going Lord of the Flies, but I do see 20 doing it, easily.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

You know, considering my usual 'stance' on the matter, I'm rather surprised that no one took this thought into account: this thread hasn't specified that the 'what would' part couldn't be an AU, or if women had 'both parts of reproductives' to begin with.

What profit is it to a man, when he gains his money, but loses his internet? Anonymous 16:26 I believe...

I would say that we can't have a meaningful discussion on the topic if we deviate too much from the norm. If all humans were hermaphrodites with female secondary sexual characteristics, that would be far stranger than a gendercide where women had to come up with artificial solutions for the missing plumbing.

Edit: And I hate it when a long screed that I wrote is the last post on the previous page and gets no replies.

edited 1st Oct '12 3:05:40 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Doublepost. I had a thought that I'd like to append to my loquacious post from last page. A gendercide would also destroy the current family dynamic. Without equal numbers of men and women, heterosexual marriage would disappear and so would the incentives to live in single family units. Given how women associate socially in the current environment, I'd expect them to form communal groups for the purpose of pooling resources, such as child-rearing. This would harken back to ancient tribal culture. There would be no point to monogamy because there would be nobody to be monogamous with.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I read your longer post, and you have an interesting hypothesis.

I'm just kicking back and browsing through this thread.

edited 1st Oct '12 3:55:16 PM by Aprilla

Pooling resources would be a natural thing in a catastrophe, provided you find someone you trust enough not to kill you while you sleep. That part is not unique to this scenario.

We still wouldn't survive very long, realistically. Not past the youngest girls. Seriously, it take a literal miracle for the human race to survive this. We don't evolve that fast, so I doubt we'd end up like those frogs that can change gender in a mating crisis.

Can we imagine a non-catastrophic scenario? For example, the very unlikely scenario where men disappear through evolution and women reproduce through parthenogenesis?

I vowed, and so did you: Beyond this wall- we would make it through.

It would be depressing to watch certain ethnicities go extinct first. I don't think little groups like the Basque, the Australian Aborigines, the Ainu, or the First Nations would survive this.

Interesting scenario: a mutagenic plague that turned men into women. How would that play out?

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Probably much less negative if it's quick and doesn't have many complications. The most likely events have been covered.

Fight smart, not fair.

We'd have an interesting look at transgenderism, that's what. There's a lot that would try to keep behaving the way they did before. Cuz, you know, that's how they were born and what they feel like? Iunno.

And still we'd be extinct soon, if they didn't start in vitro fertilizing a lot of women. And the transformation kept happening before any boys hit puberty.

Oh just suddenly remembered something. It's not EXACTLY the same scenario, but close enough I guess. In Isekai No Seikishi Monogatari the "pilots" are almost always female. Male pilots are quite rare (I forgot the reason for that though LOL; but it's implied that piloting skills are apparently inherited), and that the males are taken care of very well. Hence the main character, who is male, and is the most powerful guy in that planet, is a hot "mate material." LOL

I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.

I can imagine a lot of suicides in the first two months. Some guys wouldn't be able to handle it. The first period is traumatic enough for real preteen girls.

If this spread like a plague, the unaffected men would probably be quarantined away. Then asked to masturbate into plastic containers on an hourly basis. Worst sperm bank ever.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

I would think it more interesting to talk about a society that has had men wiped out and survived, what would happen. Or what would the world be like long since such an event.

I mean losing half the world's population is a generalised apocalypse scenario with nearly nothing different from whatever means and whatever half disappeared. It's not an "interesting" question in that, the gendercide doesn't matter.

As far as "hard physical labour", I'm guessing almost nobody here has studied anthropology otherwise they wouldn't make strange statements about women not being able to do hard physical labour when that was where they dominated until modern industrial European society swept the globe. Men would do the talking, politics, hunting and war, while women did the gathering, farming and household work. That was pretty much how it was like throughout history and if you look at agrarian societies, women did more farmwork than men. It's purely a modern fantasy that women didn't do work or that women "aren't useful on the farm".

Looking ahead 100-200 or even 1000 years from when men disappear from society and there in-vitro fertilization technology was perfected (I have heard a report that said it was successful somewhere but of course, two eggs produce more females so you'll be in a perpetual no female problem), what would happen?

Sex is no longer tied with reproduction and is now purely for social bonding or entertainment. ST Ds either become more virulent or infection rates drop. Politics and economic issues are not likely to change; humans are humans. Though early in history, female dominant societies tended to be more clan or tribal like, I'm not sure what that may translate into for modern society. Very large clans don't exist because they aren't very stable, but I'm not entirely confident in saying that nationalism is purely a construct of male thinking. That may just be the fact that men were primarily in the military jobs and nationalism tended to boost all the industries related to men: politics and war.

To be honest, it's more of the little cultural differences than any broad sweeping ones. The rules on sex and interaction.

As regards the physical strength issue; Even if we couldn't do the weightlifting that men can in regards to physical labor, people seem to ignore the common sense solution of women doing the weightlifting that they can carry. Which, given that survival depends on it, is exactly what anyone who wanted to live would do. They're not going to have a bunch of people lying around saying "I can't do it" they're just going to do it. Once they figure out what needs doing, anyway. They'd be in more trouble due to lack of arable land rather than lack of strength anyway.

I don't think physical strength would be a major issue, since most labour of that kind is done using machinery, and women are not at such a huge disadvantage strength wise anyway. But it would be problem for predominantly male industries requiring specialised skills, since it would take time to train new people.

Really, thousands of years in the future? O_o;

I vowed, and so did you: Beyond this wall- we would make it through.

This topic reminds me of Y The Last Man.

Yes, people have said that the plot is just another Harem Genre. But seriously, read it, and you'll find out that it depicts a world without any males in a rather realistic/believable manner.

Some of the things in it:

1) The world turns apocalyptic for a while since 50% of the population is wiped out.

2) Most women lament the loss of their fathers/sons/relatives/friends, while some ultra-feminists go "good riddance" and proceed to destroy anything that remains of the patriarchy (spells great trouble for our only male protagonist).

3) Women pretty much can take care of themselves, and some turn lesbian and pretend to be guys to satisfy the others urges.

4) The male protagonist actually doesn't get laid as often as you think: he thinks that it is wrong to take advantage of the situation like that.

edited 2nd Oct '12 12:11:53 AM by IraTheSquire

I just don't really get what this concept of physical strength difference is all about. The actual real physical strength difference between men and women is that men might be a few percent stronger at the highest tiers of olympic strength competitions (going by the olympic world records, women perform lower but not by any significant amount to mean anything in normal life). In terms of the common person, there's virtually no difference. In fact, women did more of the physical work the further back in time you go, when you had LESS machines to do things.

And looking at communist countries such as the Soviet Union and China, I'm not sure if having women in the military makes much of a difference. They don't appear to fight much different from men and they're likely to just adopt our existing training methods (whatever they may be for each country). I suppose the question is whether it would shift due to being only females.

At first, there is likely to be a lot of sudden emergence of women-power groups or gender supremacy groups. But, after maybe a few decades, maybe just two, it would be pretty pointless when there's no men to oppress anyway. So then those groups would just disappear, having no one to rule over. The ideology itself might last for a long time after that before people, after maybe a few centuries, just completely forget about men having existed.

Then, with so many women in the world, there'd be a much higher acceptance of asexuality, I presume. While situational attraction will arise in some cases, it's just likely that sexual culture will just have exceptionally wide standard deviation as sex has far fewer consequences (no unwanted pregnancies anymore, anywhere).

But then, if technology is necessary for humanity's survival, I'm not sure if this would tend to lower the intensity of conflicts. It might be a slight mitigating factor but usually everything else is just such a much larger influence.

@ Ten Tails Beast

Well, versus there having men/women versus just women.

It plays into the stereotype that one, men are stronger (and generally they are) and two, the stereotype that women are incapable of doing hard physical labor, taking care of themselves, "hard" work, or other such dumb shit that we have in fact been doing for all of human history. The original guy who said that on yahoo didn't have even a cursory knowledge of the history of gender roles. Or history in general. Here's the history of gender roles: People did whatever was economically most efficient! Which means women quite often did the hard labor.