If all women died

The BBQ Pit
61

[QUOTE=Malacandra]

Having fired off an earlier answer to the matter of men being under-represented in midwifery, I realize that I ought to have mentioned male gynaecologists and obstetricians, of which there is a buttload, and argued that they could pick up the slack for the missing midwives fairly adequately.

[/QUOTE]

It was a joke. That’s what the smiley was to indicate. There are female dominated fields of expertise. They would be understaffed in the unlikely event etc. Missing any arbitrary half of the population would have a bad effect on society. The joke was in reaction to the “parallel parking” joke a few posts earlier. It was not meant to be taken as a serious argument - again, the smiley.

62

[QUOTE=Malacandra]

See, that’s being vindictive for the sake of it, as well as just plain stupid - on a par with killing the goose to get all the golden eggs at once. If a healthy young man can’t knock up all the women the community needs knocked up within the space of a year or two (and why can’t he?), what’s wrong with getting his willing daily donation and sharing it five ways with the aid of a syringe? 1825 inseminations a year not enough or something? :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]

Yes, but I would add that that’s a common problem in science fiction. How many times have you watched a science fiction tv show or movie and asked yourself "why don’t they just . . . . "

I understand that, I just find it troubling that people praise a book like “Houston Houston” and/or use words like “thought-provoking” to describe it. Sounds to me like first and foremost, it’s the offensive product of a hateful mind.

63

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Yes, but I would add that that’s a common problem in science fiction. How many times have you watched a science fiction tv show or movie and asked yourself "why don’t they just . . . . "

I understand that, I just find it troubling that people praise a book like “Houston Houston” and/or use words like “thought-provoking” to describe it. Sounds to me like first and foremost, it’s the offensive product of a hateful mind.
[/QUOTE]

I agree with you, it sounds like that to me also. “Thought provoking” isn’t always pleasant. At least she didn’t say it was ‘fun’.

64

[QUOTE=maggenpye]
It was a joke. That’s what the smiley was to indicate. There are female dominated fields of expertise. They would be understaffed in the unlikely event etc. Missing any arbitrary half of the population would have a bad effect on society. The joke was in reaction to the “parallel parking” joke a few posts earlier. It was not meant to be taken as a serious argument - again, the smiley.
[/QUOTE]

Ah, I misunderstood and thought that the smiley meant “Ha, gotcha! You didn’t think of that, did you?”. What female-dominated fields of expertise did you have in mind? Do they have the immediate impact of a similar order to the collapse of the transport, power and sewerage infrastructure? Do they lead in a matter of days to widespread starvation and cholera/typhoid epidemics? :cool:

True dat. I’ve repeatedly criticized the ST: TOS episode The Paradise Syndrome as representing Spock doing his damnedest to kill Captain Kirk. :slight_smile:

65

[QUOTE=Snarky_Kong]
The hypothetical is some magical thing. Say space aliens kidnap all the women for sex slaves or something.
[/QUOTE]

In that case, then yes, I suspect the men will work something out with the use of chimpanzee wombs. Artificial/mechanical/robotic/android wombs are what I think rather unlikely within a single lifetime from now.

66

[QUOTE=Malacandra]
True dat. I’ve repeatedly criticized the ST: TOS episode The Paradise Syndrome as representing Spock doing his damnedest to kill Captain Kirk. :slight_smile:
[/QUOTE]

Nitpick: There was an episode of that title, but you’re probably thinking of TOS “This Side of Paradise,” where Kirk provokes Spock to overcome the effect of the spores, and Spock smacks him around the transporter room before coming to his senses.

67

The key with science fiction is to not assume that the author thinks that all is good. “Houston, Houston, Do you Read?” wasn’t a case of the women rising up in arms and slaying all of the men; it was a mysterious disease which humans (of both sexes) tried to fight, but were unsuccessful, so the survivors had to rebuild society without men. We hear mostly of the positive aspects of the society, not the negative, but that’s largely because the people we’re hearing it from are products of that society. And we do get glimpses of the negatives, as well: The women can’t really appreciate most art from before the disease struck, and Shakespeare is considered quaint, but not really relevant. I don’t think any author would believe that a world which couldn’t appreciate Shakespeare could be a utopia.

68

[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
Nitpick: There was an episode of that title, but you’re probably thinking of TOS “This Side of Paradise,” where Kirk provokes Spock to overcome the effect of the spores, and Spock smacks him around the transporter room before coming to his senses.
[/QUOTE]

Nitpick yourself. The Paradise Syndrome is the one where Kirk gets brainwiped by an ancient obelisk and Spock has to take off with the ship to try to stop a planet-killing asteroid. He burns the engines out through a combination of too much Warp 9 speed to make the deflection point and then sustained phaser fire over Scotty’s protests, leaving the Enterprise to limp back to the planet at impulse speed, arriving months later just a few hours ahead of the big rock. Spock had any number of better alternatives to stop the asteroid, all of which are obvious to me and should have been super-obvious to his giant Vulcan brain, and none of which entailed leaving the ship stranded in space through sheer pig-headedness with only a last-minute lucky break enabling him to save Kirk and, incidentally, the planet. Reasoning that these alternative were indeed obvious to Spock, I have to assume he was trying to kill Kirk on purpose. :slight_smile:

I don’t say you can’t out-geek me over Trek, but you have to bring a fair bit to the table. :stuck_out_tongue:

69

[QUOTE=Chronos]
The key with science fiction is to not assume that the author thinks that all is good.
[/quote]

Perhaps, but when a feminist author writes about an Earth that is all-female, it’s the obvious assumption. Of course, you can never know for sure what the author really thinks.

That may be, but it still sounds like somebody’s wet dream to me.

Perhaps the message is “A world without men would not be perfect, but it would be hella good.”

70

So, if there were no women, and babies were created with frozen eggs with surrogate chimps, and were all born male, and this went on for generations, how would sex drive play out? A bunch of horny frustrated guys who don’t know what they want? Would particularly effeminate men be sought after? I wonder if suddenly a woman appeared after centuries, would she immediately be attractive?

71

[QUOTE=Bootis]
So, if there were no women, and babies were created with frozen eggs with surrogate chimps, and were all born male, and this went on for generations, how would sex drive play out? A bunch of horny frustrated guys who don’t know what they want? Would particularly effeminate men be sought after? I wonder if suddenly a woman appeared after centuries, would she immediately be attractive?
[/QUOTE]

Homosexuality would no longer be “ick”, I can pretty much guarantee that!

72

Amusingly though, one of the women in “Y - The Last Man” is quoted as saying that it took more than there being no men left in the world to make eating pussy look good. :smiley:

73

[QUOTE=brazil84]
I understand that, I just find it troubling that people praise a book like “Houston Houston” and/or use words like “thought-provoking” to describe it. Sounds to me like first and foremost, it’s the offensive product of a hateful mind.
[/QUOTE]

One difference is that a world without men or a world without women is a legitimately interesting thing for anybody, not just man-haters or woman-haters, to explore, since there would clearly be huge problems and challenges; a world without blacks or jews is just stupidly racist.

Of course, I’ve never read the above-mentioned book; if it’s actually advocating that a world without men would be awesome, then it might be the offensive product of a hateful mind. But I certainly wouldn’t assume that it’s so without reading it.

74

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
Homosexuality would no longer be “ick”, I can pretty much guarantee that!
[/QUOTE]

Or maybe transgender surgery would become vastly more popular!

75

[QUOTE=Snarky_Kong]
I was in a bit of a gender battle with an ex. She said that if all men died the human species would carry on because of frozen sperm and such, but if all women died that’d be it.

[/QUOTE]

Wow, I dated a girl like this. Until she said something like this, then it was over. She was 19 and idealistic. She told me how women were biologically superior, more intelligent than any man, and that within 10 years men will no longer be needed (and she seemed to look forward to that day). I have no idea why she dated me as I am a guy. I told her that while I support feminist ideals, I don’t support bigotry towards men and that her attitude alarmed me and turned me away. She was like “you are going to break up with me over THIS?” Like she couldn’t fathom how offensive it was.

76

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Perhaps, but when a feminist author writes about an Earth that is all-female, it’s the obvious assumption.
[/QUOTE]

No, it really isn’t. Feminist does not equal “man hating”. Feminism is the political advocacy of gender equity, not gynocentrism or gynarchy.

A feminist writer can explore the implications of a one-gender world without indulging in misandry. In fact, such an exploration could easily be used to invoke philandry, the love of men. After all, feminists like myself have fathers, brothers, friends, and sons. Even excluding the global effects of a mass gender die-off, the loss of our male loved ones would be emotionally crippling.

77

[QUOTE=phouka]
No, it really isn’t. Feminist does not equal “man hating”. Feminism is the political advocacy of gender equity, not gynocentrism or gynarchy.
[/QUOTE]

So Epimetheus’s girlfriend was No True Feminist, then?

I saw a very short piece of “world without men” fiction in Spare Rib in the Eighties. It made no bones about how the absence had come about: the narrator explains to her daughter that “it was found to be necessary to disappear the bad creatures”. Again, just because SR self-designated as a feminist publication and was generally considered one by its readership doesn’t mean it actually had a feminist viewpoint. :dubious:

78

[QUOTE=phouka]
No, it really isn’t. Feminist does not equal “man hating”. Feminism is the political advocacy of gender equity, not gynocentrism or gynarchy.
[/quote]

I take it that a true feminist would not say something like “all men are rapists and that’s all they are”?

Because to me, that’s just as ugly as a white supremacist stating that blacks are criminals or that Jews are criminals.

Like Malacandra says, I think you are falling into the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

79

[QUOTE=Malacandra]
Ah, I misunderstood and thought that the smiley meant “Ha, gotcha! You didn’t think of that, did you?”. What female-dominated fields of expertise did you have in mind? Do they have the immediate impact of a similar order to the collapse of the transport, power and sewerage infrastructure? Do they lead in a matter of days to widespread starvation and cholera/typhoid epidemics? :cool:(snip)
[/QUOTE]

Only saw this last night, and didn’t want to fire off a knee jerk reaction.
Using this: http://www.dlt.state.ri.us/webdev/lmi/pdf/gender.pdf as a guide.

Yes. There may be plenty of doctors (though I note ‘healthcare practitioners and technicians’ are heavily female dominated (74.9%), but most of the nurses , administration and support (hygiene, food prep etc (86.1%)) staff have gone.

It’s unclear which of those stats includes nurses, but either way - cholera/typhoid city.

The administration sector would be in chaos, and that does affect the smooth running of society.
The gutting of the education sector would have long term affects.

[QUOTE=brazil84]
I take it that a true feminist would not say something like “all men are rapists and that’s all they are”?

Because to me, that’s just as ugly as a white supremacist stating that blacks are criminals or that Jews are criminals.

Like Malacandra says, I think you are falling into the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

[/QUOTE]

It is just as ugly as white supremacy. As I said to you earlier on this page.

Most feminists wouldn’t say that. Some radical extremists would. Just as there are some extremist men with radical and violent views on keeping women ‘in their place’. Shall we agree that some membersof our gender groupings act shamefully?
Luckily we do not judge each other by our worst examples, yeah?

80

(obligatory joke in bad taste)

If all women died…

you’d have a lot of very, very unhappy sheep. :smiley:

(/ob joke)

What everybody else said. If either half of the population just upped an vanished overnight via Plot MacGuffin or whatever, the future of the human race would be grim indeed. The technical difficulties of overcoming missing one gender would be cake compared to the social, political, emotional, and maybe even spiritual implications.