Couple of years ago, the blog Radical Wind posted a radical-feminist utopia manifesto(which reads essentially like a modern day SCUM Manifesto).
Discussion of the Radical Wind blog and this post (the poster who runs the Radical Wind blog is basically a modern-day Valerie Solanas - you can see some…interesting blog posts hereand here) would take all day. But there was one claim in particular that someone challenged - namely, the claim that in an all-women society, there wouldn’t be any wars.
A woman on YouTube countered that there would, indeed, be wars all right, that many women can’t get along with each other even in the office workplace or schools right now.
So - suppose that all men vanished right this moment, leaving behind only women on planet Earth - but women were able to reproduce through cloning or DNA-combining technology. Would there be wars? How would they be fought?
Would there still be a continuation of existing geopolitical conflicts, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the North Korea vs. South Korea conflict, etc.?
Would there be small cliques of women warring against each other, like high school cliques, but on a larger scale?
Would women be fighting using advanced weaponry (and the whole military-industrial complex), or simply with smaller, person-held weapons?
What would be the primary motive/reasons behind wars in such a world?
IIRC, in Philip Wylie’s novel The Disappearance , where all the women vanish from one world and all the men from another, the men-only world suffers a nuclear war. The women-only world doesn’t , but only because they’re on the brink of starvation from not being able to cope without men. I think Wylie was unrealistically and uncharacteristically hard on the women there.
My personal opinion is that women alone are perfectly capable of all the faults and problems of men (and all the virtues). Aggression would not disappear.
The people on Radical Wind blog are bat shit insane. They obviously have no memory of middle school. I’m guessing most girls suffered less bullying from the boys than they did from other girls.
Women can be just as vicious and hateful as men can be.
War, or at least the type of war where armies, cities, and properties are damaged are pretty much left for kings, queens, and dictator types who do bad things.
Democracies hardly ever war with each other, and if they do its a quick skirmish type fo thing.
Women seem to have a hard time forgiving other women and can be petty and jealous a bit more than men. So while I think they would try to avoid war from an ethics point of view, there are more emotional reasons for it to become a possibility.
There have been some pretty aggressive and warlike female leaders. I could see a argument for* less* wars, maybe. But saying there would be no wars is pretty sexist.
Sure, some. But for every aggressive warlike female leader, I could literally show you a hundred aggressive warlike male leaders.
And the armies under the command of those warlike female leaders were also composed of 99% men. Sure, some women in there over the span of history, either openly or secretly. But the overwhelming proportion of the armies have been male, and the overwhelming proportion of war leaders have been male.
So I think it’s not exactly a stretch to imagine a world with only women would have greatly reduced open warfare. There would be conflict, but there’d be a lot fewer organized bands of people with swords or guns marching around stabbing or shooting each other.
As long as we’re going with stereotypes, I’ve been assured that women have far more emotional intelligence than men, who are often too foolish to realize who’s really calling the shots: males think they’re making the big choices – but behind every great man is a greater woman who knows better. Was I misinformed?
I think the latter is more of a problem for the hypothetical world’s wars. Even when you look at criminals, it’s rarer to find female violence as a means of achieving an end, (as opposed to being an end in itself such as murder or terrorism.) And war is using violence to achieve an end. That said, who’s to say the leaders wouldn’t institute a draft: after all, the vast majority of men don’t have any particular hankering to be cannon fodder, either, so have to be induced by gold or laws.
Men are better at fighting than women are. It is not sexist. It is just how we are physically built. Same as men being far better tennis players than women (the #1 ranked woman probably could not beat the #300 ranked man).
So, if you are going to a war and want to win you don’t bring your army of women. Instead you bring an army of men.
This is not to say women can’t make good fighters. They provably have over the years many, many times but it remains that, overall, men make better fighters.
Also, biologically women are more valuable than men. They can have about one baby per year for a limited number of years. A single male could father thousands of children in his lifetime if he had to. So, you want a lot of women back home making babies but can get by with far fewer men and not negatively impact your society’s population growth (in ancient times this would be of more concern than it is today). Thus it is more “affordable” to squander men’s lives in a war rather than women’s lives.
As long as warfare puts a value on brute strength, yes. But now, when we can wage war like a video game in air conditioned comfort? You might see a change.
But the fundamental world wouldn’t change. Take away all the men, and the various nation-states would still be there…as would their various interests. America, ruled by women would still be fundamentally the same, with the same goals and interests. China, Russa, the various European nations would be in similar boats. 3rd world countries would still face the same struggles. Unless you posit that women would magically be able to solve all of the issues that actually create the factors for war today then I don’t see how they would avoid it except perhaps in the short term, since few countries have more than a handful of women in their armed forces today. That could, of course, cause a whole bunch of other issues and might actually level the playing field a lot, but I think that might lead to a whole bunch of smaller brush fire wars all around a world where NATO and the US (and China, Russia, India etc) can’t really project power anymore and the women in those regions decide this is a good time to get some back.
There have been more male leaders, period - because of the patriarchal nature of state-level societies.
The issue would be whether female leaders, taken as a group, display less warlike tendencies than male leaders, taken as a group.
I think they tend to be, in fact, more or less - exactly the same. Leaders such as Catherine the Great of Russia, Elizabeth the First of England, Golda Meier, the aforementioned Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi - all were pretty warlike, and for the same reasons: as national leaders, war was a tool at their disposal, seen as necessary.
Whether the average woman in the street is more or less aggressive is rather irrelevant, because the average person in the street, man or woman, doesn’t set national policy.
Leaders start wars, and they often do it because they think it in their nation’s interests, not usually because they are hot-blooded and full of testosterone. It is simply inherent in the nature of nation-states existing in an anarchic world that wars happen when national interests clash too severely, or a gain is there to be made and the consequences worth the risk.
I see no indication that women are more or less likely to change this structure than men.
Men form most of the armies in history, in large part because of sexual dimorphism - men are on average larger and stronger, and so better at it; in a world without men, of course, that would no longer matter.
True. But even ordinary women participated in mass murder ( as part of or even leaders of violent mobs or post-battle “clean-up” ) and torture quite commonly in history. Women might be a bit less aggressive on average, but we’re an aggressive species - less aggressive doesn’t mean unaggressive. And under the right circumstances they will certainly resort to physical violence. Probably the most viciously bloody teenage scuffle I ever saw was between two girls.
In a modern age( all men vanished today ), I think I might agree with fewer wars, but not no wars.
Well, men are a large majority of workers in agriculture, manufacturing, warehousing and transport, as well as construction, maintenance and the emergency services.
In other words, imminent death for everyone. A few weeks and starved bodies litter the streets.
Now if there was time to adapt, rather than the sudden and surprising disappearance of all the men, then I would expect more wars, once the armed forces are put back together with women.
But that’s not the OP. The OP doesn’t give time to attempt to adapt to what would be the largest and most catastrophic social and economic change in history. So immediate chaos followed by speedy starvation of everyone not willing to adopt cannibalism or who doesn’t already live on a farm.
Nonsense. The reason you can show a hundred warrior kings for every warrior queen is because there have been a lot more men in leadership positions than women. If you take all of the men out of the equation, then fights will be settled by women instead of the (now non-existant) men.
Do you have any particular reason to suppose that women settle conflicts in situations bereft of men without violence? Stories I’ve heard from friends who went to all-girl high schools have had plenty of physical conflict in them.
Men form the armies of history not because they are larger and stronger but because they are more aggressive and violent. That would be the testosterone thing. Men may imagine that women are like them except smaller and weaker, but that’s not true. Testosterone is the difference.
While there have been female leaders who have waged war successfully, they did so in the context of a completely male-dominated, warlike world. They cannot be used as examples in this case.
Women are not free of aggression or violence but it is on an entirely different scale. It is far less about the simple enjoyment of violence and the emotional rewards of the exertion of force to dominate others. The aggression I’ve observed (and been the subject of) by women is always emotionally complicated and individualistic. It is rarely physical beyond pushing and hair-pulling. Yes, women can certainly be bullies but their bullying is far more emotional than physical.
I don’t think there would be any wars if there were no men. There would certainly be things like economic sanctions, breaking off diplomatic relations, and things of that nature, but I just can’t imagine women banding together for the specific purpose of killing other women.
For there to be armies, violence has to be rewarding for the participants, on some level. The percentage of men who enjoy violence versus women? There just is no comparison at all.