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.Attebery 2002, p. 13. Many of these predate a widespread distinction between gender and sex and conflate the two.
In the fictional setting, these societies often arise due to elimination of one sex through war or natural disasters and disease.Bartter 2004, "Momutes", Robin Anne Reid, p. 101. The societies may be portrayed as utopian or dystopian, as seen in pulp tales of oppressive matriarchies.
Women-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, women-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 women to reproduce parthenogenically. The societies may not necessarily be lesbian, or sexual at all—a famous early sexless example being Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
In literature During the pulp era, matriarchal dystopias were relatively common, in which women-only or women-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.Larbalestier 2002, "Mama Come Home; Parodies of the Sex-War", p. 72. 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 woman-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.
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."Wonder Woman vol. 1 #216 (March 1975)
British sci-fi writer Edmund Cooper explored the subject in several of his novels, including Five to Twelve (1968) and Who Needs Men (1972).
Alice Bradley Sheldon, under the pen name James Tiptree Jr., explored the sexual impulse and gender as two of her main themes;Clute & Nicholls 1995, "Sex", p. 1088. 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.
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.
Women-only society are often shown to be utopian by feminist writers. Several influential feminist utopias of this sort were written in the 1970s;Brulotte & Phillips 2006, "Science Fiction and Fantasy", p. 1189. 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. Female-only societies may be seen as an extreme type of a biased sex-ratio, another common theme in science fiction.Majerus 2003, p. 4. However, some male authors have portrayed female-dominated worlds as dystopian, as discussed in Joanna Russ's essay "Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction".
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.Landon 1997, "Writing Like A Woman: Joanna Russ", p. 129.
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.
Kameron Hurley's The Stars are Legion (2017) is set somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, into a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. There are no males anywhere in the Legion. Women are given birth by, and live inside, biological entities called Worlds. Women living inside the Worlds become pregnant without sex and give birth to various biological beings and spare parts which are used to keep the Worlds, and thus their civilization, alive and functioning.
Jonathan Frame's Schrödinger’s Elephant (2018) is a collection of five novellas exploring overpopulation and the idea humanity is programmed to maintain its population levels sub-consciously through violence, war and so on. Each novella deals with a moment in human history as women violently revolt against men to eradicate human males, the remaining female population learning to live in the world they have engineered.
Alexander Scot McPhie's Female Planet (2018) is a novel in which disease has wiped out all the males on Earth. After a recession and extensive rebuilding period, women now run the Earth, but many of the same roles and power imbalances have been recreated. In this scenario a young couple become pregnant through artificial fertilisation but have to deal with the fallout when the sex of the child is revealed to be male.
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 a feminist society, where apparatchiks teach that women suffered under men until men 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. Men died due to a war and a subsequent virus that affected males. They reproduce by artificial insemination using frozen sperm left over from the time when there were men.
Vandread, an anime series from 2000, begins on the premise that men and women separated sometime after the colonization of space and moved to separate planets, Taraak and Mejeer. Through circumstances a small group of men and woman are forced to cooperate to get home again from the depths of space and fight a common enemy.
The 2010 German vampire film We Are the Night explores the idea of feminist separatism. In the film, the female vampire committed genocide against male vampire somewhere at the end of the 1800s after many of them already had been killed by humans, as they were "too careless" and risked exposure to humanity. The female vampires agreed amongst each other never to turn another man into a vampire.
In the Mass Effect universe, the asari are a monogender-pansexual species, outwardly appearing as 'female' and using female pronouns and descriptors for the benefit of dual-gendered species. With their reproductive system based on the 'melding' of nervous systems rather than the exchange of genetic material, asari are capable of procreating with any sex, gender or species but with the resultant offspring being always asari.
Men-only worlds Men-only societies are much less common. Joanna 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.Romaine 1999, p. 329.
In literature The earliest mention of an all-male society seems to be the myth of the creation of man in Greek mythology by the titan Prometheus, as recorded in Hesiod's 8th century BCE Theogony. To punish Prometheus for his trick at Mecone, Zeus hid the fire from men, but Prometheus managed to steal it back and restore it to mankind. This infuriated Zeus even more, who sent the first woman, Pandora, to live with mankind. Hesiod writes, "From her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth."
Some mythological creatures are often considered solely male, such as the satyrs, pans, centaurs, gigantes and cyclopes of Greek mythology and the dragons of Chinese mythology. Female centaurs, called centaurides or centauresses, are not mentioned in early Greek literature and art; they appear only occasionally in later antiquity. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, werewolves were always described as male (in Old English the word wer means "man"; it is cognate to virile). Descriptions of female werewolves began to be seen from the end of the 16th century.
The myth of the origin of the Myrmidons told in Ovid's Metamorphoses says that Zeus transformed the ants on the island of Aegina into a race of men, repopulating at the request of his son Aeacus the island devastated by a plague sent by Hera.Ovid. Metamorphoses. Bk VII:614-660 "The creation of the Myrmidons" In Homer's Iliad, the Myrmidons are the soldiers commanded by Aeacus' grandson Achilles, who brought them to Troy to fight in the Trojan War.
According to ancient Greek records there were the Gargareans, an all-male tribe on the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains that copulated annually with the Amazons in order to keep both tribes reproductive. The Amazons kept the female children, and gave the males to the Gargareans.Strabo, Geography, Bk. 11, Ch. 5, Sec. 1 The Ancient Greek chronicler Strabo mentioned that both the Gargareans and Amazons had migrated from Themiscyra.Strabo. Geography. Pages 1-49
In the 2nd century CE, Lucian of Samosata tells in his fictional work A True Story that the inhabitants of the Moon, the Selenitans, are all males, completely unaware of the female gender. As adults they marry man to man and have children, always male, begotten in their legs, in the manner of Zeus begetting Dionysus in his thigh. There are a kind of men among them called Dendritans, who generate children by cutting and planting the right testicle in the earth, from which a flesh tree grows bearing a fruit the size of a cubit, from which the baby son is harvested.
Although in Catholic tradition angels are considered spiritual beings without sex or gender, in the Bible they always have male names and are referred to by male pronouns. The so-called "Sons of God" are interpreted as angels who fathered children with human women, thus indicating that they are sexually masculine beings.