Tumblr and the wider internet are full of wacky ideas. As was already said, how many of those became reality would hinge largely on how much control women actually had. Would there still be a SCOTUS and Constitution to limit the government’s power, or are women, collectively, now dictators with total control?
For an amusing take on this idea, dig up a copy of Thomas Berger’s comic novel Regiment of Women.
There’s also the question of collective vs. individual power. You mentioned lower thresholds for the definition and prosecution of rape. Seems like that could only happen in a world where women collectively have the power to pass and enforce laws, but are still at a disadvantage in one-on-one encounters with men. Otherwise, they could just use whatever authority they have to prevent the rape in the first place.
The loss of privilege can feel like oppression. Femininity itself is a patriarchal concept used to control women. Without that society would look a lot different. Hard to predict where nature and society cleave apart on that aspect. Judging a matriarchal value system on the way women behave in a patriarchal one doesn’t seem right to me.
Monogamy is a sort of socialism for lower status men, ensuring that women are distributed evenly. Perhaps the matriarchy would set out to share high status men among themselves, leaving low status men in the dust. This is rare in our world. Or maybe it would be more like bonobo society.
There would be severe penalties for leaving the toilet seat up.
Would toilet seats even go up?
At puberty, young men would be turned out of the house to form bachelor bands which gallop aimlessly, homeless, over the barren steppe, huddling together for warmth, often starving or dying of exposure. The few that the women have selected as acceptable for breeding purposes are housed in splendid quarters and treated like kings for a few years until their popularity wanes and they are fed to the pigs.
Women handle all the jobs men used to do, except better. There’s a lot of petty bickering but otherwise, humanity is at peace, and the fabric of the world is healed.
I think that’s a book I might have read. Or possibly wrote.
The only way the hypothetical works is if the genders switch traits. And women, in general, would have to be typically bigger and stronger than men.
So given that, I’d say not much changes.
Except, I don’t think “House-husband” would have ever been a thing. somebody has got to go out and earn a living while the mother is recovering from birth or nursing child.
And if women were in power, I don’t think the norm would be to show up at work until the baby drops. I think the tradition would be something along the lines of taking the third trimester off.
Interesting. So maybe both some radical feminists and certain radical religious conservatives favor polygamy. Horseshoe Theory again.
So far has it been about 90% men replying to this thread?
There are female dominated species, including some primate species like Bonobos.
Having said that, I think some western nations are moving towards a society that gives more advantage to women over men. So what would a female ruled world look like, probably like western nations taken to a further extreme:
[ul]
[li]Female on male domestic violence is morally and socially acceptable, male on female DV is criminalized and shamed (the way many people think parents hitting their kids is ok, but kids hitting their parents is abhorrent)[/li]
[li]Women have access to guaranteed welfare to help raise their children (eliminating financial dependence on men for childcare). Welfare men are forced to pay. [/li]
[li]Only the top men would mate (the most attractive).[/li]
[li]Pornography, prostitution, possibly masturbation would be illegal or shamed. The reason is that when men have alternative ways to meet their sexual needs, they devote less time/energy to trying to impress women. So eliminating the competition would likely happen to keep men devoted to impressing women. [/li]
[li]Men would be forced to work the most dangerous, unpleasant jobs. [/li]
[li]Men would have no reproductive rights, women would have a litany of them (which is again, just modern western nation taken to a further extreme). [/li][/ul]
Would men be forced to mate against their will? Meaning, would the most attractive 1% of men be forced to have sex with whatever woman claimed him, the same way that male on female rape was common in history?
I do not know if women would lock men out of education and employment the way men lock women out of these things when men have power.
Maybe they’d do like some insect species do and kick us all out to die of exposure after mating season is done.
If you have political alliances but the person you are oppressing does not, then it becomes easier to oppress someone even if they are bigger and stronger. That is why in dictatorships they always have laws saying that you can’t have more than 5-20 people congregated in one place. They are trying to prevent people from forming alliances to take on the government alliances (military and police).
A 110 lb cop can take on a 300 lb bodybuilder if the bodybuilder knows the cop has endless waves of backup and the bodybuilder does not.
Maybe women wouldn’t be all that into oppressing men, or turning the tables. We aren’t just a version of oppressed men waiting to rise up and get revenge, like some men seem to imagine.
Men would be required to pay for and wear sanitary pads for one week a month. They say they don’t need them, but hey, they’re a minority and need to act civilized like the rest of us. Everybody knows that people have periods.
I think one cultural change would be a decline in spectator sports. I know there are female sports fans but I think it’s true that men predominate in this area. Women might participate in sports at numbers that approach male participation but women generally seem far less interested in watching sports as an entertainment option. And without fans as a financial base, professional sports is going to be much smaller it it exists at all.
One difference is that women are often attracted to men who are ambitious, rebellious and successful. I don’t think a world in which men are universally an underclass, never allowed to hold higher positions, would be at all stable with the way human personalities are wired.
I could imagine a world in which a small proportion of men are considered “outliers” and are allowed to take prominent roles, while most men are considered fodder. Indeed many patriarchies have been largely like this: the only difference in this hypothetical matriarchy is that some or all women are allowed to be outliers too.
I had not even considered that!
:eek:
Humanity might and its big might, have invented mud huts by know. Perhaps might have thought of Agriculture.
Matriarchal societies tend to be fairly primitive and conservative. Mouso culture in China for instance.
Ah? I’d thought it was the other way around. :dubious:
I could envision the first two being banned but the third being banned is just too far out. But IIRC there was indeed a motion in Iceland, once, (arguably the most feminist country in the world) to have online pornography banned.