What would the world really look like without men?

I would agree that the main reason there are few female gendercide stories is probably the whole birth thing. It's easier to imagine women having children with no men involved than it is to imagine men having children with no women. I mean, it's something that has happened in a number of mythologies (I don't know a lot, but I don't think Jesus is the only religious figure to have been born of a virgin), as well as existing in a couple of non-human animals.

In contrast, the whole idea of males having children together requires you to find somewhere to gestate the baby. The male contribution to pregnancy (fertilisation) is a lot easier to just handwave away or replace with something else than the female one.

Possibly it's also that we're very used to thinking of the 'standard' person as being male (you know, the whole male-as-default-women-as-deviation thing). In people's mind, removing all the men is a bigger deal because whoa, now women are going to have to do all the stuff! Traditionally feminine jobs aren't as visible and subconsciously people don't think of it as as big a deal for all the people doing those jobs to just vanish.

I suppose a somewhat exaggerated way of summing that up would be: "Imagine if all the women disappeared! Then all the world would have to be run by men! ... Oh, wait.."

edited 2nd Oct '12 7:46:23 PM by LoniJay

@Darkclaw: It might be that it's easier to see survival in a situation where most of the men die off rather than most of the women. For one, we have only a certain number of ovum, and only a certain amount of years to be producing them. Then there's the fact that it takes us nine months to bring a baby to birth. Men's contributions are much more minimal, and they can do it repeatedly without having to wait that long to do it again. And once they hit puberty they produce sperm until the day they die. It's a lot easier for the species to survive with less fertile males than it is with less fertile females. A bit cold, I guess, but there you go.

Though if we're still discussing the original scenario suggested in the op, where all surviving males are now sterile, than at present we're still fated to extinction. All that fancy stuff about male/male and female/female mating is not yet at a level where it's a possibility prospective parents can consider seriously, and even then it would still take massive technological support to be possible. (Basically, you're doing a lot of mixing of things outside of the human body entirely, and that takes a hell of a lot of training to do successfully, and a lot of technological tools to do. Losing the males means losing at least half of everyone who knows how to do that, and can train others. Thinking about fancy means to impregnate females seems rather moot, due to the loss of life and infrastructure that would inevitably come with half the population suddenly dying.

There are stories of the inverse gendercide but I don't know of any statistical rate of either one (I certainly have read the names and synopsis of a few female-gendercide or male-only society stories).

And yeah, as Loni points out, it's not very interesting for someone to go "Woo I'm going to write a story that has the power in the hands of the people who already have power! What changes then?"

In any case, modern society has issues where men train significantly more in physical tasks than women in western societies, so it's hard to separate what the difference would be other wise. But, a quick look at agrarian societies show women have more strength and do more of the physical labour, so it doesn't really make sense to say women can't do those jobs. They were the original ones doing them.

As for gender composition of the military and police, it's interesting that one of the posters here said something like "that's the United States!", as if the USA had way better gender equality than other nations. Unfortunately, that's not true. Communist countries have far far higher gender equality in the military and the police force. So, I think the irony would be that China, Vietnam etc would be the most stable in the immediate aftermath.

Would that translate to mean a lot in the long run? Hard to say. Geography says that it shouldn't really matter because it's not likely for the Chinese to invade the United States anyway. Though it does mean the Asian communist countries are going to trounce the Asian capitalist countries that are super sexist (like Korea and Japan), and beyond that, probably doesn't reach any further.

However, the United States and other western nations have far better high-tech medical equipment which are the primary vehicle for cloning tech. That's how you're going to have to reproduce afterward so, it would be existing tech versus organisation. I'd like to point out that male/male combo can produce both sexes but female/female combo can only produce one sex. So if you were doing something that were on the harder scale of science fiction, only female-only society perpetuates itself. Male-only society has to constantly murder or oust female births.

In some renditions of the legend, Merlin. Also Darth Vader would have been, but those movies never happened.

Hinduism, some sects of Buddhism, some cults of Islam (not recognized as either Sunni, Shia, or Sufi), Zoroastrian, a few dying Persian faiths, and some Native American traditions contain a virgin birth story of some kind.

Korea and Japan are super sexist?

For Japan, you have no idea.

Shmi Skywalker was a virgin before Darth Plagueis got to her?

Seconded. It's unreal.

Do other First World nations share the tendency of Britain's public sector to mostly employ women?

@ Loni Jay

Your summarized statement deserves a award, as not only did I fully understand your position from reading it, the sarcasm actually made me laugh a bit...I sometimes enjoy Black Comedy, hope I'm not offending anyone by saying this.

Yes (it was a huge part of the Jedi prophecy anyway), and IIRC it wasn't Plagueis either. The magic Force bacteria that most definitely never happened did it themselves as a fuck-you to Plagueis trying to do the same thing elsewhere.

edited 3rd Oct '12 1:26:02 PM by Pykrete

I don't recall it being stated anywhere in canon that Shmi was a virgin, merely that she didn't conceive Anakin with a man. Or did I miss that part?

edited 3rd Oct '12 1:56:17 PM by Fighteer

I actually took it as a statement that the father ran away and he was dead to her now.

Thread Hop.

I am reminded of a movie awhile back where precisely this scenario occurs and it leads to a society where men are seen as inherently aggressive/violent and therefore the cause of all the worlds' problems. All I remember about it was that the protagonist was a genetically modified man who apparently had aggression "engineered" out of him and that eventually he was hunted down with AH-64 Apaches. Oh, the irony.

So I guess, that's the Expanded Universe striking again. I'm with Fighteer on that, I always figured her exact status before Anakin was never described in specific terms. I took a look into Wookiepedia BTW, it doesn't seem to be specific either.

Also: Sex Mission

edited 4th Oct '12 12:43:48 AM by lordGacek

Even if women on average are weaker than men, I don't see how that would cause insurmountable problems in modern society.

If, say, a female removal & storage worker can't lift a big crate, what does she do? She gets one of her colleagues to help her. Or she puts it on a forklift. Or companies start shipping somewhat lighter crates.

In warfare (and no, I don't think war would stop in an all-female world, and frankly I find the idea insulting to both genders), the playing field would be evened since every army would be all-female, so physical strength or lack thereof wouldn't be as much of an issue.

edited 4th Oct '12 2:32:32 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

"Korea and Japan are super sexist"

You have no idea how much sexist they are. Korean males are finding...wives in other Asian countries because of how demanding women are in South Korea (financially, in terms of attention). Same case in Japan (The Yamato Nadeshiko is declining). Japanese women wants financially successful men, who are rarely the self-made millionaires the West typically has. Quite often those with much money are what they derisively called "otakus". While the "normal" men are stuck with average salaries from their jobs, and therefore are still not "attractive" to women.

edited 4th Oct '12 2:37:12 AM by entropy13

Physical strength wouldn't be that big of an issue. Problems will arise in male-dominated jobs which require certain knowledge. That might very well be physical jobs, as they might be easy on the mind but you still need to know certain things about them. Almost all dangerous work is done by men today and women would not only need to face the dangers themselves in this scenario but they also would need to find how they are done with almost nobody left to tell them.

The sudden wipe-out would mean knacks are lost, true... but, there are always Health and Safety bricks left to read up on to hit the high notes.

Just because the male population suddenly vanishes doesn't mean all the information about how to do the male-dominated jobs just vanishes, as well. It'd take a while for survivors to have enough practice to regrow knacks, but the theory is out there.

Of course training is necessary, but there aren't that few women working in heavy industry and menial jobs. Your response seems to assume that there would be no-one left to train new workers. Besides, it's not as if training manuals, videos, course plans etc. would disappear with the men.

Besides, my post was about physical strength, not about know-how and experience. At some points while reading this thread, I got the feeling that a women-only world would collapse because all we delicate women are unable to lift anything heavier than a tea cup.

EDIT: Also, ninja'd.

edited 4th Oct '12 3:19:20 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

All There in the Manual. Yeah, that would work for a lot of jobs. It would still initially suck as there are jobs which are really dominated by men and it would take a while for women to fill those roles. It's true that even in male-dominated jobs some women find employment but some have almost insignificant numbers of female employees. We also have to consider that work places interact with each other so when only one part fails whole industries could crumble. And there will be many missing parts.

And how long would it take before the women all figure it out and restart all those industries again?

Probably pretty long. It might get to the point where they might as well start from scratch, because unmaintained equipment will be unusuable at some point, at least in some industries. You can't simply turn the economy on and off it took ages to build and will take ages to rebuild. I'm not that experiences in this field but it seems reasonably complicated to recover from such a catastrophe and going to rebuild after taking care of basic needs.

Oh, we'd rebuild (and by "we" I mean humanity, since I'm a man and would be dead or sterile in this scenario). It might not be identical to how things are now, and a lot of stuff would break down before people learned the skills needed to maintain it. The real disaster is in mankind's ability to reproduce. Everything else is secondary.