Female only world?

[Anarchy_Kanya]

Lets say that the world/setting has no males. There are only females, they don't know what a male is, because there never where any. Lets also assume that it's a fantasy setting/world, so there is magic or supernatural powers available. I'm very curious if anyone of you Playgrounders knows any books, games, game settings, etc. that have this kind of setup, and if you could tell in short something about it. Maybe you even played in such a game? Please, share your experiences.
(P.S. I'm most curious about how did the story/game/setting deal with the problem of reproduction. There are some simple and obvious solutions like for example magical cloning/impregnation, but I'm interested in any original ideas. SOMEHOW they have to make babies, right?)

[gkathellar]

There's some speculative fiction book I read a chapter of where all the men died in this little valley and now all women just inexplicably reproduce.

Y: The Last Man deals with our world becoming one of these. Not fantasy, but very good.

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They figure out cloning, IIRC.

[Ravens_cry]

So, everyone reproduces via parthenogenesis?
It would certainly change society in the extreme. For a significant part of history, and likely before, powerful individuals have gone to great lengths, and other powerful individual have gone to great lengths to stop them, to beget an heir. While not the whole dynamic of history, a casual glance at history shows a rather huge influence.
It rather changes things, to use a rather extreme understatement.

[Andreaz]

Vandread starts with one of those. They are aware of males, but never interacted with them in manners not "shooting them dead", and only became aware of reproductive capability late in the series. They reproduced via cloning.

[gbprime]

Well unless you want to take away the entire concept of motherhood, divine intercession is a good answer. They can participate in a ritual that makes them pregnant. In this way, the deity literally has a hand in creating her followers, and all of them could benefit from abilities that can only be acquired by those descended from the divine.

An archetype for such a deity could be an Artemis like figure. Feminine, no use for men, has created her "ideal world" to make this happen.

...

Another more mature (as in adult themed non PG) method might be that the world was created/discovered by a very powerful wizard who used it as his own personal playground and laboratory. In time he populated it with females that he had created or transformed, gave himself a harem, etc, etc. Quite the perv.

He's gone now, either dead from old age or his slaves revolted against him. If his creations are long lived enough, the fact that there are no new ones being born is not a problem. Otherwise, perhaps they have turned to the magics in his laboratory as a source of procreation. Maybe the elders know (or knew, if they're all gone now) what a male is, and to them this is a very bad thing...

[LibraryOgre]

Well, in the Robotech: Sentinels series, there's the Praxians, who are an all-female race; the Zentraedi weren't genderless, but the genders were very segregated at the lower levels, and reproduction was tank-based, meaning they didn't really understand most gender concepts. Of course, there's also the Asari, from Mass Effect, who are counted as female, despite being monogendered themselves.

Usually, however, such races are set against "normal" races as a contrast. Older works tended to play up their "us against a man's world" attitude, but it seems a lot more common for their difference to just be a cultural/genetic "oddity" from the POV of bi-gendered races. If everyone in the game world is female, you have to consider what dynamic you're looking for, especially if the characters are otherwise essentially "human".

[Calmar]

I had the impression James T. Kirk might have visited such a place once, but that's probably not true. However, TVtropes.org has a list of stories depicting societies consisting mostly or only of women. There's also a link to a wikipedia site about a concept called "Lesbian Utopia".

Edit:

(P.S. I'm most curious about how did the story/game/setting deal with the problem of reproduction. There are some simple and obvious solutions like for example magical cloning/impregnation, but I'm interested in any original ideas. SOMEHOW they have to make babies, right?)

If I were to create such a setting, there would be priesthood dedicated to a mother/impregnator deity performing the rituals to bless the women with pregnancy - nothing lewd or spectacular, just simple and realistic fertility rites.

[Lord Il Palazzo]

I don't like the idea of a single-gendered world or race that reproduces entirely by cloning. Maybe it's the fact that such a race couldn't survive without the technology (or magic, as the case may be) to create clones or the fact that it implies a nearly complete lack of genetic diversity.

I like the asari from the Mass Effect series as an example of a single-gendered race that still produces sexually. When two asari mate, one of them (refered to as the mother) provides all of the genetic information for the child, but the information is altered by psychic melding with the other (called the father), in such a way as to emphasize traits from the father in the altered genetic code. Because the process is psychic rather than biological, an asari can mate (and produce viable offspring) with an individual of any race, though the child of the union is always an asari.

[gbprime]

Really the only stumbling block might be animal life. The intelligent race with magic is one thing, but what do all the beasts do? (and if they do "do it" and have males and so forth, then the natives are going to know something is up, though it could be a taboo.)

[Calmar]

Really the only stumbling block might be animal life. The intelligent race with magic is one thing, but what do all the beasts do? (and if they do "do it" and have males and so forth, then the natives are going to know something is up, though it could be a taboo.)

I agree. on the other hand, in most cases animals don't wear clothes, don't create tools, or houses. I think an explanation for another fundamental difference between man () and beast would ealily be found.

Should there be no male creatures in this world, there wouldn't exactly be 'females' either, because then the basic 'sex' probably is hermaphrodite...

[LibraryOgre]

(P.S. I'm most curious about how did the story/game/setting deal with the problem of reproduction. There are some simple and obvious solutions like for example magical cloning/impregnation, but I'm interested in any original ideas. SOMEHOW they have to make babies, right?)

Whoops. I UTTERLY misread this, and wondered why everyone was talking about reproduction when you didn't want to talk about that. So, to actually address those things...

Praxians: Mystical temple thingy. Were compatible with humans, Zentraedi, and Tirolians, but almost all offspring was female.

Asari: "Female" in that any could have children and appeared female, but were really monogendered, using their partner's DNA as a template for randomizing their own. Believed that "daughters" took on the traits of their "father's" species (said father did not need to be male), but did not actually mix DNA. Also believed that outbreeding was essential. Slight prejudice against "purebloods" (those with two asari parents), partially because some genetic diseases were more common among purebloods (notably, the Ardat-Yakshi, who more or less shredded the nervous systems of anyone they slept with).

Also, to add:
Dryads, from David Eddings' Belgariad: Monogendered "monster" race that lived in symbiosis with their trees, but are not tied to them. Captured human males for reproduction, but also entered into an agreement with a Tolnedran (read: Roman in medieval fantasy drag) noble house Borune to provide them with the occasional Dryad princess as a wife. Most Borune females ARE dryads, complete with their own tree; the line "breeds true" in females.

Of course, in D&D you also have Nymphs and Dryads, both of whom mate with other species.

[jseah]

Asexual reproduction is certainly possible. Aphids can do it.

Also, I do recall writing a pretty strange play on this topic. Science fiction of course.

Basically, a sociologist and a geneticist have tracked down the cause for a slow rising in male:female birth ratios and they request a conference with the president. I did not write any solution to the slowly growing no-male problem.

This story was inspired by a biology lecture, interestingly enough. The situation in my story can plausibly happen. Of course, it requires genetic modifications of human beings but it does involve one of the more plausible routes to practical genetic modification.

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Essentially, a transposon carrying an SRY controlled lethal gene will end up wiping out all males from the human race. It needs to carry a mieosis controlled transposase but that's just details.
---Transposons are useful because they can self-splice into a chromosome. You just pop it into the cell together with the needed proteins and hope. They do it for flies. ---

This is because even a single copy of a transposon will be inherited by ALL children. Not just 50% of them. Transposons tend to copy themselves into other chromosomes.

If carrier mothers only ever have female children (male ones self-abort too early to tell), and the average birth rate is 2; I calculate in an ideal model that starting from 1% of the population carrying the gene, 20 generations later, 99% carry the gene.
Note: 1% of the american adult female population is >1million people. It gets kind of hard to stop. And even at 1%, it's pretty hard to detect unless you know exactly what to look for.

Which means the human race becomes female-only in around 400 years. Of course, having m:f birth ratios of 1:2 would start to happen in about 100 years and social chaos would result.

EDIT: also, some examination indicates that it is harder to do the reverse (male-only) since females turn on the same initial sex-determining genes as males do. Males just turn on one more.

[Coidzor]

Ahh, a setting where every player runs the risk of being That Guy. :/

Interesting, but ultimately dangerous idea.

[Trekkin]

The only examples I can think of from biology are probably too bizarre for application to a sentient species, although I'm forced to wonder what exactly you want "female only" to mean. If you want to keep reproduction as humans understand it, a hermaphroditic race would work, and you'd have only one gender. If they are female only and capable of reproduction without the involvement of another member of their species, almost every option with sufficient genetic variability is going to involve some variation of magic.

[Mando Knight]

Unless the setting is horridly sexist (one way or the other, leave your double standards at the door), realistically, the society would probably be fairly similar to ours, just without the direct derivatives of physical sex differences and a means of procreation/reproduction that probably seems utterly arcane to us.

However, the women in the hypothetical society would probably have different values for the "ideal woman" compared to our society, probably with a significantly decreased emphasis on sexuality, especially if the method of parthenogenesis is primarily asexual and non-romantic in nature.

[Calmar]

Are we actually talking agout human (or humanoid) females?

[Coidzor]

However, the women in the hypothetical society would probably have different values for the "ideal woman" compared to our society, probably with a significantly decreased emphasis on sexuality, especially if the method of parthenogenesis is primarily asexual and non-romantic in nature.

Building off this, I'd say take the ideal man. Subtract the parts from that ideal that would conflict with caring for one's offspring and the parts about wooing a mate and getting sexual pleasure. Add in the ideal forms of nuture and child-rearing.

Then you've got one reasonable jumping off point for beginning working out what that'd be, adjusting, of course, for whether physical intimacy is known and how child-rearing is laid out. If it's communal, then there's less pressure away from hunting in their early cultures.

If every 'woman' is bogged down by her offspring, then that's going to put pressure more on gathering and scavenging and eventually planting/cultivating than on hunting and domesticating animals.

Or possibly just means that the population was controlled because the young had to go out and hunt in order to gain enough security to be able to stay back and raise a kid and war was rarer because it was a losing proposition due to the reproductive culture.

[Fouredged Sword]

If you are willing to go really into alien biology, then you could go the same way as some species of insect.

There are males of the race, but they are aborted pre-birth. Their sisters are inseminated in the womb and hold the male genetics in their bodies until they reach adulthood. Then they internally gestate a new generation using the genes they where born with.

In a sentient race you could add a ritual that triggers their bodies reproduction. You could have a race that had two genders, but are completely unaware of the male side because it never grows into a viable life.

Squicky, but there is a breed or two if insect that does this, so it is theoretically a viable way to breed. One of them could breed their whole race from nothing. I would expect birth defects would be a problem, but their race would likely breed itself to resist the inbreeding degredation, tending to favor very dominant genes.

[flumphy]

If there literally never were any males, then yeah, everyone would be hermaphroditic or, with some kind of mystical reproduction, genderless rather than female. Is that what you're wanting, OP, or are you thinking of something where the characters are (demi)human but males simply ceased to exist a long time ago?

In any case, a mono-gendered society no one has brought up yet are Tolkien's ents. Sure, they're supposedly all male rather than female, but well, they're trees. I assume that wherever the entwives ran off too, they were doing pretty much the same things.

Also, to add:
Dryads, from David Eddings' Belgariad: Monogendered "monster" race that lived in symbiosis with their trees, but are not tied to them. Captured human males for reproduction, but also entered into an agreement with a Tolnedran (read: Roman in medieval fantasy drag) noble house Borune to provide them with the occasional Dryad princess as a wife. Most Borune females ARE dryads, complete with their own tree; the line "breeds true" in females.

Of course, in D&D you also have Nymphs and Dryads, both of whom mate with other species.

I don't think they count. As I recall, they were very, very keen on, uh, interacting with males. When they could get their hands on them, anyway.

David Eddings is a horrible author to look at for inspiration for female societies, or female anything, anyway, considering his twisted universe where every single woman is either a ruthless b**** or a complete airhead with no middle ground. (Yeah, yeah, he was supposedly being deliberately cliche. But still...)

[LibraryOgre]

David Eddings is a horrible author to look at for inspiration for female societies, or female anything, anyway, considering his twisted universe where every single woman is either a ruthless ***** or a complete airhead with no middle ground. (Yeah, yeah, he was supposedly being deliberately cliche. But still...)

I actually disagree with you, quite a bit.

Ce'Nedra is neither a ruthless bitch nor an airhead... in the first series, she's a spoiled little girl, but that's also a bit in character, since she only turns 16 at the end of the 4th book.

Polgara is a bit ruthless, but she's also a strongly maternal figure, with a great deal of compassion for others (who are not evil).

Truthfully, I'm having trouble seeing any merit in your statement. I can think of one minor character in the Belgariad who was an airhead (Islena), with a possible argument for another (the wife of Furlach of Sendaria... Layla, I think), but few who were ruthless that weren't outright villains (Salmarissa and Zandramas).

Do you have some examples?

[Dienekes]

Building off this, I'd say take the ideal man. Subtract the parts from that ideal that would conflict with caring for one's offspring and the parts about wooing a mate and getting sexual pleasure. Add in the ideal forms of nuture and child-rearing.

Then you've got one reasonable jumping off point for beginning working out what that'd be, adjusting, of course, for whether physical intimacy is known and how child-rearing is laid out. If it's communal, then there's less pressure away from hunting in their early cultures.

If every 'woman' is bogged down by her offspring, then that's going to put pressure more on gathering and scavenging and eventually planting/cultivating than on hunting and domesticating animals.

Or possibly just means that the population was controlled because the young had to go out and hunt in order to gain enough security to be able to stay back and raise a kid and war was rarer because it was a losing proposition due to the reproductive culture.

The way I see it, if some ritual is made to create birth it would be most likely that the standard romantic relationship would be between young woman older woman. The young woman would take the place of the male in hunting and gathering and waring, while the older woman would care for the child and become selected for the breeding ceremonies.

I don't see war being rarer really, or if anything would be more violent. Since the entire population could theoretically keep reproducing even while half the population is on campaign the loss of troops is actually less detrimental to the society.

David Eddings is a horrible author to look at for inspiration for female societies, or female anything, anyway, considering his twisted universe where every single woman is either a ruthless b**** or a complete airhead with no middle ground. (Yeah, yeah, he was supposedly being deliberately cliche. But still...)

Polgara, Layla, Porenn, Poledra, Beldaran, Tamazin, Velvet, Taiba, Dweia, and Leitha to name a few who fit rather nicely in the middle ground. Now I'll admit that there are plenty of problems with Eddings writings, but I generally enjoy his stronger female characters.

[Coidzor]

^: After all, he's no Robert Jordan when it comes to male-female dynamics.

I don't see war being rarer really, or if anything would be more violent. Since the entire population could theoretically keep reproducing even while half the population is on campaign the loss of troops is actually less detrimental to the society.

I'm talking the rise and invention of warfare here at the tribal level. Unless large numbers of females are going to be workers or even soldiers that can't reproduce a la hive insects, the reproductive dynamic is going to limit mobility without some kind of counter to this, assuming roughly mammalian, humanoid biology. If every woman is a mother, there's no daughters to send to war but the children, so to speak.

Older women are exactly the ones that one doesn't want reproducing though, as they're less able to do it without complications and then there's that factor that makes genetic hooplah like Down's Syndrome become more and more frequent.

Though I guess that bit could be handwavium'd by having the gametes created over the lifetime of the creature, or perhaps having two puberties, one minor/false one which gives an adult body that can actually do work and then a second one later in life that gives reproductive capability.

To be sure, if they do manage to get war, or rather, when, Kipling's words would almost certainly ring true, I'm just saying there's a pressure away from it that would most likely delay it to the rise of societies, possibly to cities over farmland/water access.

[Wardog]

In any case, a mono-gendered society no one has brought up yet are Tolkien's ents. Sure, they're supposedly all male rather than female, but well, they're trees. I assume that wherever the entwives ran off too, they were doing pretty much the same things.

Ents are all male, and they presumably do (or did) reproduce sexually, as there haven't been any entlings since the entwives left.

If I remember right, the entwives had notably different personalities and goals in life, prefering gardening and growing crops to wantering about in the forests talking to trees. (Which, IIRC, was part of the reason they wandered off in the first place).

So entwife society would probably be (or have been - we don't know if there are any left by the time of LotR) quite different from ent society.

[Kaun]

After spending some time working in a female prison this idea terrifies me lol.

[gkathellar]

^: After all, he's no Robert Jordan when it comes to male-female dynamics.

I just spent the last five minutes trying to find a decent "Ouch Burn!" image to place here, but then I got lazy.

[Tyndmyr]

^: After all, he's no Robert Jordan when it comes to male-female dynamics.

I had a brief, horrifying moment where I thought this was entirely serious.

Phew.

[cattoy]

does Gensokyou count?

[flumphy]

The way I see it, if some ritual is made to create birth it would be most likely that the standard romantic relationship would be between young woman older woman. The young woman would take the place of the male in hunting and gathering and waring, while the older woman would care for the child and become selected for the breeding ceremonies.

The thing is, I'm not sure how standard the idea romantic relationships would be without sexual reproduction. Even assuming there's still a sex drive--which isn't a given--the majority of women in real life are heterosexual. I suppose that could change in a world where both society and natural selection were pushing the other way, but again, it's not a given.

Polgara, Layla, Porenn, Poledra, Beldaran, Tamazin, Velvet, Taiba, Dweia, and Leitha to name a few who fit rather nicely in the middle ground. Now I'll admit that there are plenty of problems with Eddings writings, but I generally enjoy his stronger female characters.

I wouldn't call any of these "middle ground", to be honest.

Ce'Nedra is, in fact, ruthless. She hatches and executes a plan that she believes will lead thousands of men to their deaths on the slim chance it will save the guy she has a crush on. She even admits to herself she doesn't really love him at that point. It's deep in teenage infatuation territory, and she's aware of it and goes through with it anyway. Sure, there's the potential to save the world and all that, but that's not even on the radar when Eddings explored her thought processes. Her motivation is getting laid and, to some extent, gaining power as a monarch. And as for her being a bitch...well, honestly, it's hard to think of an example where she's not. She is, in fact, the stereotypical teenage drama queen.

And Polgara is the stereotypical bitter old crone. Yes, she has maternal instincts. So does the bitter old crone. Yes, she has good reason to be bitter and untrusting. That does not make her not so. Yes, her controlling, moody personality comes in handy at times and is often portrayed in a positive light. This does not mean she is not moody and controlling. Yes, she is a strong character. Being a strong woman does not preclude being a bitch. If anything, the two commonly go hand in hand. (And before anyone explodes at me, I am, in fact, female.)

I could go on to refute the rest of that list, but I don't want to derail the thread any more than I already have.

Now, like I said, Eddings wrote the Belgariad by deliberately mashing together a bunch of cliches, so I'm not really knocking his writing. Given the portrayal of females in the majority of fantasy literature, I'd say his characters actually turned out pretty well, considering. In fact, I wouldn't call most of his characters, on their own, terribly unrealistic, because a small number of real life individuals really do fall under one of those extremes. It's the fact that every single woman in the setting tends toward those extremes that's ridiculous.

[Another_Poet]

If every woman is a mother, there's no daughters to send to war but the children, so to speak.

Older women are exactly the ones that one doesn't want reproducing though, as they're less able to do it without complications...

Let's put these hands together.

What if it was a cultural expectation that older women go off to war?

This is similar to Siberian tribal practices where the elderly walk off on their own to die. It's also similar to the Vedic ideal that older men should leave their family and become hermits once their children are grown.

However, in this case the practice solves a chronic cultural problem, the lack of available young non-pregnant people to send to war.

I know what you're thinking - elderly women are not the ideal soldiers. But you're thinking Strength and Con. What if the default unit in this world is battle sorceresses?

Yeah you heard me. A world of parthenogenic women -> a world where battalions of grey-haired witches are the dogs of war.

[Yora]

Are we actually talking agout human (or humanoid) females?

There are some species of lizards that have done away with males entirely. I think they mostly just produce clones of themselves. Though I think this is kind of an evolutionary dead end. Useful in the short term, but absolutely kills genetic diversity.