Female-dominated societies in films?

[Robot_Arm]

@KGS

Gotta go with a classic: Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death

@silenus

Which was filmed at my alma mater.

You went to Jungle of Death U?

[Rocketeer]

@Sampiro

Chinquapin, Louisiana.

Heh heh. But where’s the black leather?

[The_Them]

There was an episode of Outer Limits(?) that had a future world where the Earth’s last surviving male was awakened from deep freeze into an all-girl society. Things didn’t go well; he got executed. It was played straight.

[jayjay]

@Rocketeer

Heh heh. But where’s the black leather?

In Ouiser’s closet…

[Elendil_s_Heir]

There was also passing reference in ST:TOS to Cygnet XIV, a female-dominated society of computer specialists who gave the Enterprise’s computer a more “feminine” personality (it called Kirk “dear”) during an upgrade there. And there were some hints, since picked up and expanded upon in the novels and fanfic, that Vulcan was a matriarchal society - T’Pau was certainly a big cheese.

[Odesio]

@tarragon918

The society of Bajorans was matriachal; they traced their lineage through the mothers line or with the mothers line having more prominence.

That’s not matriarchal that’s just matrilineal descent which does not a matriarchy make. In fact this is the first time I’ve heard that Bajorians were supposed to be matriarchal because I never saw any evidence of that on the saw. Matrilineal descent and matrilocal practices is practices by some societies here on Earth and that doesn’t make them matriarchal. I never saw any evidence that women on Bajor pretty much ran things.

Marc

[GIGObuster]

I thought I had imagined this series, but it turns out it was real:

http://www.animus-web.demon.co.uk/maidens/

The mid-1970s…you were patiently waiting for Space:1999 to return for its second year when a beguiling sci-fi series shuffled onto your screens, regional ITV scheduling permitting, for a brief thirteen weeks and then sloped off apologetically to disappear forever. Maybe you’re here because you just vaguely believe you may have dreamt about a planet ruled by women dressed in platform boots (and perhaps you did - that’s your own business), or maybe because you’re a ‘fan’ infuriated by the lack of hard and fast info around on this series. Maybe you’re just hoping to find pictures of Judy Geeson dressed as a space lady. Whatever brings you here - you’re in luck. This site intends to bring you everything you ever wanted to know about Star Maidens but were afraid to ask.

…

What Star Maidens is then, in short, is perhaps the most fascinating sci-fi series of all time. A bungled British-German co-production of a sci-fi comedy - two mutually exclusive concepts for the price of one and surely doomed to failure. It has proved an enigmatic series too - very little has been written about it and it has not been shown on TV in the UK since its original 1976/7 broadcasts. Indeed there are maybe one or two parts of the UK where the show has still never been screened. And quite possibly never will be.

So, for enthusiasts, the curious and of course the just plain pervy this is Star Maidens.

I did see it in Spanish in the early 80’s so I missed the extra campiness of the bad German accents.

But I for sure did not miss the “pervy” insinuations.

[Boyo_Jim]

I think Roger Corman produced or directed a bunch of trashy sci-fi films with woman dominated societies.

But on IMDB he’s credited with producing or directing more than 400 films, and I don’t have the stomach to look through all the synopses and find them.

[gallows_fodder]

@Swallowed My Cellphone

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.

I’d love to see this – is it commercially available?

[Icerigger]

Nobody remembers Dylan Hunt! from Gene Roddenberry’s TV movie Planet Earth with John Saxon. Shame.

Planet Earth (TV Movie 1974) ⭐ 5.7 | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

[Sampiro]

Actor turned writer Thomas Tryon wrote a novel that was all the rage in the 1970s, especially after the TV minieseries came out, called Harvest Home. Starts off with an old and still in use plot device: an unhappy but well to do NYC couple move to an idyllic (too idyllic of course) small town hoping to save their marriage and escape from the rat race. They choose the Connecticut town of Cornwall Coombe (this being in the New England part of CT rather than the suburban NYC part) and they’re made to feel super welcome by the town folks, though the wife and daughter are particularly welcomed, especially by the elderly Widow Fortune. Wife and daughter are invited to participate in the annual Harvest Home Festival, which is the biggest celebration in the town’s year.
In a “too exact opposite of The Stepford Wives to be coincidental” plot twist it turns out that Widow Fortune and the women of the town are part of an ancient pagan cult devoted to the mother goddess and the Widow Fortune is their high priestess. The Harvest Home festival is not a town festival but their holy day where they mutilate and sacrifice the Harvest King at their Harvest rites.
The miniseries featured Bette Davis as Widow Fortune.

I’m not sure whether it’s intentional or independent (this is after all based on several priestess dominated pagan cults) but aspects of Cornwall Coombe/Harvest Home have been featured in many other books and movies. The idyllic midwest town with a secret in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and the ‘Britney Spears must die’ recent episode of South Park both had a lot of parallels.

[Sampiro]

Added to above: There’s also a lot of similarities twixt Harvest Home and early Stephen King. I don’t think it’s plagiaristic borrowing on one side or the other so much as King’s also a New Englander (Yankee cousins of Southern Gothic) and was from that post “failure of the hippies and neo-paganism and communes/Utopia has a little secret” era (though hippies/communes often were notoriously misogynistic).

[silenus]

@Robot Arm

You went to Jungle of Death U?

Otherwise known and the University of California, Riverside.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Harvest Home sounds like it has some distinct similarities to the unnamed American small town from Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery,” too, although that was no matriarchy.