If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then it would
be several decades before someone created the space travel technology for men and
women to finally meet. Perhaps that’s why so many writers, moviemakers and artists
have imagined places where only one gender run their worlds. These stories illustrate
that although men and women have been living together for millions of years, we
still have a long way to go before we understand each other.
Y: The Last Man
Bryan K. Vaughan’s very popular Vertigo comic series is
about Yorick, the last man on Earth, following a plague that wiped out the
planet’s male mammals. After the requisite amount of chaos and destruction from
half of the planet’s population dying suddenly, the women step up and Yorick
discovers they can be just as ruthless, bureaucratic and aggressive as the man
were, as the Earth’s various factions and governments chase him around the world for
his immunity, his sperm, and his political leverage.
The Handmaid’s Tale
There are plenty of women in Margaret Atwood’s novel The
Handmaid’s Tale, but they’re not in charge of anything, least of all themselves. The ultra-conservative, ultra-Christian male majority of the nation of Gilead takes all of women’s rights away, forbids them to read, or have money. Women
who are fertile (there aren’t a ton of these) have the pleasure of being
concubines, a.k.a. Handmaids, to the society’s male elite. Fun!
The Amazons
Unlike many of the stories discussed here, there was no
plague that wiped out the men of Themyscira. These women devoted themselves to fighting and war, and
didn’t mind venturing outside of their land for a good fight, either for glory and
to get ahold of some male fuck-slaves.
Here’s the thing about the Amazons — they didn’t feel that men were terrible,
or that they were ruining the world, or that women were superior — they just
didn’t want to deal with them… except when necessary to procreate. Men were a
hassle that the Amazons did not need. In DC Comics, Wonder Woman is of course
an Amazon, although the comic Amazons are a bit less ruthless than the mythological Amazons — sometimes the Amazons have sex with
male sailors and kill them, sometimes they’re immortal; sometimes Wonder Woman
is made of clay, sometimes she’s the half-daughter of Zeus. No matter what,
though, Themiscyra is a great place to live (possibly even for the
fuck-slaves).
Vandread
In this 2000 anime, humans have spread out through the
galaxy, but in one star system all the males are on one planet, and all the
females on the other — and they’re at war with each other. A third-class
working man named Hibiki is accidentally the only man left on the space
battleship the Vandred when it’s attacked and overrun by female soldiers. The
men’s mysterious battleship seizes this opportunity to merge with the women’s
spaceship, warping them to the other side of the galaxy — and as Hibiki and the
women defend themselves from aliens, they discover the men’s mecha suits and
the women’s mecha suits can combine to form even more powerful mecha. So it turns out that men and women are more poerful when they work together. Go
figure!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_pBD-1P9c8
Hell Comes to
Frogtown
In the post-apocalyptic world of Hell Comes to Frogtown,
most of the planet’s inhabitants are sterile, so there’s no real need for men
and women to hang out with each other. Or so Rowdy Roddy Piper discovers when
he captured by a group of warrior-nurses who rule at least a certain part of the country, and
force him to rescue a group of fertile woman captured by amphibian mutant men.
To make sure Piper — whose character is named Sam Hell in the film — stays on mission,
he’s accompanied by one of the
nurses named Spangle and is forced to wear an exploding codpiece. I guarantee if any men were part of that leadership council, they would have determined the exploding codpiece to be cruel and unusual.
The Last Man on Planet
Earth
In this 1999 TV movie, a Y-bomb is dropped during a war with
Afghanistan — so named because it kills almost everything with a Y-chromosome.
After 97% of the world’s men die, the surviving females decide to outlaw men,
because they’re so violent and pretty much made a mess of things while they
were in charge. Twenty years later, a genetic engineer named Hope Chayse
creates her own man named Adam, whp matures in a mere 33 days and has all his
violent and aggressive instincts genetically removed. Of course, that really
doesn’t matter when his very existence is illegal, forcing Adam and Hope to go on the
run and search for the small groups of surviving male rebels.
Herland
This short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about three
male sociology students who go on an expedition to discover a legendary land
ruled solely by women. The men have some pretty awful and sexist preconceived notions of what this place will be
like, and are kind of shocked to discover the women’s society is strong, just, full
of impressive accomplishments, aesthetically pleasing, and contains pretty much
none of modern civilization’s problems. They even reprodice asexually, so they
don’t need to capture men for their seed or anything. Indeed, when the
shittiest of the explorers tries to rape one of the inhabitants — which doesn’t
happen, because the women are badasses — all they do is send him away, never to
return.
Smurfs
With thousands of males to every female, the Smurfs have a
patriarchy by default — their leader is even known as Papa Smurf. Indeed, the
only reason a female Smurf exists is because Gargamel made her in one of his
weirdly elaborate plots to capture the Smurfs; now a member of Smurf
society, Smurfette wields no political power except that which she can gain by
her feminine wiles.
Queen of Outer Space
Several male astronauts land on Venus in this 1958 movie, only to discover a bevy beautiful space-ladies living without men, after their Queen tossed all
of them off some years before. The female inhabitants miss men and thus paw
shamelessly over the astronauts, and everybody wonders why their queen hates men so much. As it
turns out, the Queen was disfigured in one of the men’s stupid wars, and she’s
still bitter about it. How bitter? Well, bitter enough to kill all the women on
earth as collateral damage for killing the men, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL3ziAob_f8
Crimes of the Future
One of David Cronenberg’s earlier films, Crimes of the Future
decides that a plague has killed all of Earth’s sexually mature women, not the
men, caused by some king of tainted cosmetics. As the main character Tripod
wanders the land looking for a “mad dermatologist” named Antoine Rouge, he
discovers how really, really terrible men would get in a world without women,
culminating in an incredibly awful scene where a group of pedophiles invite
Tripod to borrow their imprisoned 5-year-old girl. Blech.
JLA: Created Equal
In this Elseworlds tale from 2000, a cosmic storm kills all
the Earth’s males except Superman, thanks to his Kryptonian DNA. After the
world government gets established on the Amazonian island of Themiscyra,
Superman does his duty by trying to repopulate world, starting with Lois Lane,
who gives birth to their son Adam Kent. Eventually, Superman discovers he might
have the plague too, and leaves Earth… only for Lex Luthor, having hid himself
in a bunker, to show up and try to lead the Earth’s new generation of men
against the women in charge.
