A relatively common motif in speculative fiction
is the existence of single-gender worlds or
single-sex societies. These fictional societies
have long been one of the primary ways to
explore implications of gender and gender-differences
in science fiction and fantasy. In the fictional
setting, these societies often arise due to
elimination of one sex through war or natural
disasters and disease. The societies may be
portrayed as utopian or dystopian, as seen
in pulp tales of oppressive matriarchies.
== Female-only worlds ==
There is a long tradition of female-only places
in literature and mythology, starting with
the Amazons and continuing into some examples
of feminist utopias. In speculative fiction,
female-only worlds have been imagined to come
about, among other approaches, by the action
of disease that wipes out men, along with
the development of technological or mystical
method that allow female parthenogenic reproduction.
The resulting society is often shown to be
utopian by feminist writers. Several influential
feminist utopias of this sort were written
in the 1970s; the most often studied examples
include Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Suzy
McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World
and Motherlines, and Marge Piercy's Woman
on the Edge of Time. Utopias imagined by male
authors have generally included equality between
sexes, rather than separation. Female-only
societies may be seen as an extreme type of
a biased sex-ratio, another common SF theme.Such
worlds have been portrayed often by lesbian
or feminist authors; their use of female-only
worlds allows the exploration of female independence
and freedom from patriarchy. The societies
may not necessarily be lesbian, or sexual
at all—a famous early sexless example being
Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.Themyscira,
the home island of DC Comics' Amazon superheroine
Wonder Woman, was created by William Moulton
Marston to allegorize the safety and security
of the home where women thrived apart from
the hostile, male-dominated work place. It
is governed by "Aphrodite's Law", which states:
"Penalty of death to any man attempting to
set foot on Themyscira."British sci-fi writer
Edmund Cooper explored the subject in several
of his novels, including Five to Twelve (1968)
and Who Needs Men (1972).
Some lesbian separatist authors have used
female-only societies to additionally posit
that all women would be lesbians if having
no possibility of sexual interaction with
men, as in Ammonite (1993) by Nicola Griffith.
The enormously influential The Female Man
(1975) and "When It Changed" (1972) by Joanna
Russ portrayed a peaceful agrarian society
of lesbians who resent the later intrusion
of men, and a world in which women plan a
genocidal war against men, implying that the
utopian lesbian society is the result of this
war.During the pulp era, matriarchal dystopias
were relatively common, in which female-only
or female-controlled societies were shown
unfavourably. In John Wyndham's Consider Her
Ways (1956), male rule is shown as being repressive
of women, but freedom from patriarchy is only
possible in an authoritarian caste-based female-only
society. Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet" depicted
a world where five hundred castaway women
found a way of reproducing asexually—but
the daughter is genetically identical to the
mother—with the result that eventually the
planet has a large population composed entirely
of "copies" of the original women. In this
female-only world, human males are considered
mythical creatures—and a man who lands on
the planet after centuries of isolation finds
it difficult to prove that he really is one.
An example of a contemporary dystopian female
world is Y: The Last Man, which features one
male human and monkey who survive a cataclysmic
event killing all other males.James Tiptree
Jr., a woman writing secretly under a male
pseudonym, explored the sexual impulse and
gender as two of her main themes; in her award-winning
"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (collected
in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever), she presents
a female-only society after the extinction
of men from disease. The society lacks stereotypically
"male" problems such as war and crime, but
only recently resumed space exploration. The
women reproduce via cloning and consider men
to be comical.A Door into Ocean is a 1986
feminist science fiction novel by Joan Slonczewski.
The novel shows themes of ecofeminism and
nonviolent revolution, combined with Slonczewski's
own knowledge in the field of biology. The
water moon Shora is inhabited by women living
on rafts who have a culture and language based
on sharing and a mastery of molecular biology
that allows them to reproduce by parthenogenesis.In
Elizabeth Bear's Carnival (2006), a matriarchal,
primarily lesbian society called New Amazonia
has risen up on a lush planet amidst abandoned
alien technology that includes a seemingly
inexhaustible power supply. The Amazonian
women are aggressive and warlike, but also
pragmatic and defensive of their freedom from
the male-dominated Earth-centric Coalition
that seeks to conquer them. Distrustful of
male aggression, they subjugate their men,
a minority they tolerate solely for reproduction
and labor.
=== In other media ===
The 1984 Polish film Sexmission deals with
a dystopian women-only society where all men
have died out. Women reproduce through parthenogenesis,
living in an oppressive feminist society,
where apparatchiks teach that women suffered
under males until males were removed from
the world.Lithia, Episode 17 of the fourth
season of the 1995 remake of The Outer Limits,
features a man who was cryogenically frozen
and awakens in a world populated only by women.
They reproduce by artificial insemination
using frozen sperm left over from the time
when there were men (they died due to a war,
then a subsequent virus that affected males).The
2010 German vampire film We Are the Night
explores the idea of feminist separatism In
the film, the female vampire committed a genocide
against male vampire somewhere at the end
of the 1800s after many of them already had
been killed by humans. The female vampires
agreed among each other never to turn another
man into a vampire.In the Mass Effect universe,
the Asari are a monogender-pansexual "female"
species.
== Male-only worlds ==
Men-only societies are much less common. Russ
suggests this is because men do not feel oppressed,
and therefore imagining a world free of women
does not imply an increase in freedom and
is not as attractive.Cordwainer Smith's 1964
short story "The Crime and the Glory of Commander
Suzdal" portrays a society in which all of
the women have died out. A. Bertram Chandler's
A Spartan Planet (1969) features the men-only
planet Sparta, which is dedicated to the values
of militarism loosely modeled upon the ancient
Greek city state of Sparta.Ethan of Athos
(1986) by Lois Bujold, inspired by the real
world male-only religious society of Mount
Athos, shows a world in which men have isolated
their planet from the rest of civilization
to avoid the "corrupting" effect of women.
Children are grown in uterine replicators,
using ova derived from tissue cultures; the
novel's plot is driven by the declining fertility
of these cultures. The titular "unlikely hero"
is gay obstetrician Dr. Ethan Urquhart, whose
dangerous adventure alongside the first woman
he has ever met presents both a future society
where homosexuality is the norm and the lingering
sexism and homophobia of our own world.The
gay fantasy book series Regelance by J. L.
Langley depicts a world where men are able
to reproduce via replicative technology. While
there are still women amongst the lower classes,
who reproduce in the traditional manner, there
are none among the upper classes which the
series focuses on.
== Sexless or hermaphroditic worlds ==
Some other fictional worlds feature societies
in which everyone has more than one sex, or
none, or can change sex. For example:
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness
(1969) depicts a world in which individuals
are neither "male" nor "female" but at different
times have either female or male sexual organs
and reproductive abilities, making them in
some senses intersex. Similar patterns exist
in Greg Egan's novel Schild's Ladder and his
novella Oceanic or in Storm Constantine's
book series Wraeththu about an oogamous magical
race that arose from mutant human beings.
John Varley, who also came to prominence in
the 1970s, also often writes on gender-related
themes. In his "Eight Worlds" suite of stories
(many collected in The John Varley Reader)
and novels, for example, humanity has achieved
the ability to change sex at a whim. Homophobia
is shown to initially inhibit uptake of this
technology, as it engenders drastic changes
in relationships, with homosexual sex becoming
an acceptable option for all.
In the Culture series of novels and stories
by Iain M. Banks, humans can and do relatively
easily (and reversibly) change sex.
== Sex segregation ==
Segregation of the sexes is another relatively
common trope of speculative fiction—physical
separation can result in societies that are
essentially single-sex, although the majority
of such works focus on the reunification of
the sexes, or otherwise on links that remain
between them, as with Sheri S. Tepper's The
Gate to Women's Country, David Brin's Glory
Season and Carol Emshwiller's Boys. Even an
episode of Duckman tried this.Sometimes the
segregation is social, and men and women interact
to a limited extent. For example, when overpopulation
drives the world away from heterosexuality
in Charles Beaumont's short story The Crooked
Man (1955), first published in Playboy, homosexuals
oppress the heterosexual minority and relationships
between men and women are made unlawful.
== See also ==
Arcadia (utopia)
Feminist utopia
Gender in speculative fiction
Hypergamy
Lesbian utopia
LGBT themes in speculative fiction
Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction
