I was watching Fire Maidens from Outer Space last night, a knuckleheaded movie about the last (all-female) survivors of Atlantis, holed up on the 13th moon of Jupiter. A (male) rocketship crew from Earth lands, and various tedious plot developments, um, develop, until the whole thing creaks to an unintentionally hilariously stupid end.
Crimeny, it’s awful.
But as I sat there watching that atrocious piece of sexist hokum, I suddenly developed a strong desire to see another type of movie: one in which leather-clad dominatrixes completely controlled a planet’s society, and men were utterly subjugated. Not that I’m a perv, or anything like that.
If you’ve ever seen Devil Girl From Mars, something like that, but actually set on the Devil Girl’s Mars, so we could see lots and lots of Devil Girls in their native environment.
So: Any movies like that out there? Female-run, female-dominated societies?
Gene Roddenbery had a few of these – the Star Trek episode “Spock’s Brain” sorta did, as did one of his “Planet Earth” pilots.
Science Fiction films in the 1950s featured lots of female-only societies, but terrifically sreriously. Many of these films featutred the same women:
**Abbott and Costello go to Mars
Queen of Outer Space
Cat Women on the Moon**
as well as the aforementioned Fire Maidens from Outer Space.
But no guys, so you don’t have a female-dominated society.
By the way, in Devil Girl from Mars the men are reluctant to follow the dominatrix-clad Devil Girl. And it’s a British film. Go figure.
There is a Next Gen Star Trek episode from the first season, Angel One, about a female-cominated society. The men are basically kept as breeders and pets.
Also Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, Peter Bogdonavich’s first director’s credit, which was the same film (literally – the same footage was used, from a Russian SF film) with new footage of a different group of women added.
I feel obligated to point out here that on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Bajorans were a matriarch society. That doesn’t really come in the category asked for in the OP, though, but since ST has already been mentioned, I thought I’d add the Bajorans.
At a Toronto festival of short films, I saw a short called The Porcelain Pussy that was a film noir that was basically a mini-Maltese Falcon, but with diamonds hidden inside a cat figurine (my cousin did some work to help out the film crew, so we got free tickets to the premiere).
It was essentially a 1940s parallel universe to our own, but where women were the dominant gender. While the film was funny, it wasn’t played for laughs (as in, it wasn’t presented as a comedy like a Monty Python parody, or tongue in cheek, or anything. They played it straight.) It was actually well-done. The Sam Spade detective was a woman (and a war vet who had seen heavy combat), the police chief and bad guy were also female. There was an “homme fatale” instead of a “femme fatale”, and what made it cool was that he didn’t play the role effeminately or “weaker”.
Same with the guy selling cigars in the gin joint. The men played all their roles in a masculine way, not at all weak or “pansies”, but socially they had less authority, they were less agressive and less assertive than the women. The film took place in the 1940s, so socially “men were kept in the kitchen”. When a woman grabbed one of the scantily clad waiters in the gin club, the gritty P.I. punched her, totally as you’d expect Bogart to do to a scumbucket pawing at Mary Astor. When the homme fatale actually dared to talk back to the bad guy, he got bitch slapped for his defiance, but again, never acted effeminate. He was just not socially dominant.
That was what was so cool. The women were socially dominant without acting butch, and the men deferred to the authority of women without playing “the weaker sex” in a lampoonish way.
Often gender reversals have a hefty dose of caricature, and this didn’t so much.
Were they? We saw two women serving as “Kai” (rough equivalent of Pope, I guess) but Kira was romantically involved with “Vedek Bareil”, who’d made a bid at becoming Kai himself, suggesting gender isn’t an issue for the office.
The society of Bajorans was matriachal; they traced their lineage through the mothers line or with the mothers line having more prominence. In marriage, the man took the woman’s name. Traditionally. By the time of DS9, there had been a lot of interaction with the Federation and probably a loosening of the traditional mores.
I have to laugh at myself - talking about a made-up society! At any rate, though, there you have it. I don’t think it made any difference in whether the Kai was a male or female, but I could be wrong. Canon in the Trek verse is … flexible, apparently.
Heh. Reminds me of when the university theater here did a version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. If you’ve never read it, it’s one of those gender-confusion plays, concerning Sebastian and Viola, identical twins of different genders (which we know today is impossible, but anyway…). As I recall the plot, Sebastian is lost at sea, and finding herself alone in the world, Viola disguises herself as a boy to get work as a page. Well, another woman falls in love with “him”, and her employer figures out he’s a she and falls in love with her, but she’s in love with another dude, who loves the woman who…anyway, all very confusing and humorous, especially when Sebastian reappears and everyone thinks he’s Viola.
Anyway, for this particular production, all roles were played by women, even those that were supposed to be men, such as the Duke and the officers of the law (who sported Texas Ranger-esque dusters and five-o-clock shadow). That sorta ratcheted up the gender confusion even more.
Sliders had two episodes on female-dominated worlds. One was much like this one except that gender roles, and relevant stereotypes, were reversed. The other was female-dominated because a plague had wiped out nearly all the men, and the few survivors were held in government custody for breeding purposes.
