16. The Male-Slave-of-the-Imperious-Queen Fantasy.

The male is the helpless slave of the female.

Comment:

In this fantasy a culture or a planet may be supposed in which women are dominant. Perhaps men are smaller than they are on this world, physically inferior in strength and size, so that the actual statistical relation existing on Earth is reversed; if this were the case I have little doubt that the position of men on such a world would be the same as, or similar to, the situation of women on ours; in fact, I would conjecture that men would be far more kept in “bondage” than women on our world; I expect that women are far more practical about such matters than men; a “man’s liberation” movement on such a world could not succeed; the women, recognizing the obvious danger in it to their social position, would not permit its success; it would be difficult enough for them to compete viciously with other women for the limited goods of society, without, as an act of incredible moral generosity or practical idiocy, doubling, at a stroke, their competition; they would want men home, to be their comforts and lovers, when they returned, tired and worn, from their daily battles, to be their servants and “wives,” to keep their houses and raise their children. Men would be weaker; that is why it would be “natural” to thrust them into such positions; men would doubtless be put in confining garments and would be taught to smile much and be pretty, and not challenge, but serve their masters. And men, smaller and lighter than such women, kept isolated from one another in separate families and houses and apartments, each easily intimidated in his own home by his larger, stronger spouse, kept busy with menial, repetitive chores, would have little opportunity to share society, except on whatever basis the masters accorded them. Too, of course, in such a world, the technology and the weaponry would be in the hands of the dominant sex. Manufacturing techniques, etc. would be the province of the females. In our own world, for example, if we put all the women in New York state on an island, with water and natural resources, they could not produce one automatic pistol. Such a simple device is, actually, a technological triumph, requiring the collaboration of hundreds of skills and processes. Women do not have these skills or know these processes. If women decided to have war with men they would be much in the position of the Indians, who had to rely on representatives of their enemy to provide them with guns and ammunition. This is not the sort of industrial base from which one wins wars. At any rate, it is my conjecture that men, in our world, in their position, are much more generous to women than women would be to men, were the positions reversed. It is difficult to imagine a woman, for example, giving a desirable position to a man over a more intelligent, better qualified woman, simply on the basis of divergent genitals. Yet this sort of thing occurs repeatedly in our own culture. I do not think women would permit it in a woman-controlled culture. It is just too stupid.