writing, gender, and stuff

[anotheranon]

She doesn't post often, but posts well: just found another thought provoking article over at Brutal Women about the disappointment when fictional female-dominated societies turn out not to be, so much. I've not read the book in question, but she makes some interesting points - the society described reads as "female-dominant" only by virtue of there being more women than men, and the men are given great freedom to use and abuse due to their "rare" status:

Great! A female-dominated society, and girl babies are still greeted as gutter trash. One royal husband also abuses his wives and brutally rapes one of them. And guess what? Because he's a guy, he goes unpunished.

How does this fulfill the "things can be really different?" school of spec. fic.?

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional writer or gender studies student. However, I dabble in both and got to thinking - how would one create a fictional women-dominated society? I wrote a storyline once that involved a female-dominated society of evolved ants, but it wasn't that challenging - ant colonies ARE mostly female; in most species males only live long enough to mate. How to write it with people? Could women really be dominant without being a numeric majority? What would be different, and what would stay the same?

Maybe I've just not read a really good story on this theme - I am new to reading sci fi. Readers, writers - any suggestions beyond what's in the Brutal Women comments?

Comments

[kat1392.livejournal.com]

From my reading experience, I haven't come across many, if any, books that deal with a matriarchal society. Most show the genders as equal. I do believe, however, stories can be written from a matriarchal point of view. How one would go about that, however, I don't know for sure. Since it is fiction, not much has to be drawn from RL. If that was the route a writer wanted to take, he/she could always rework historical events.

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how reworking of historical events could be plausible without furious explanation/rationalization. Think of most of Western history - there were very definite sex roles for specific (if incorrect) reasons and simply reversing everything wouldn't be "enough", I think. You'd almost have to re-create "feminine" and "masculine" stereotypes from scratch, and then make them believable to a reader who is the product of 2000 years of cultural indoctrination of what men and women "should" be.

I'd love to read it, but I'm not sure what I'd expect.

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

Quoting myself from a comment to our hostess:

... seems to me that to make an alternate history really work, what one would have to do is make some adjustments to human evolution; that's easiest done by studying our relatives. Bonobos and olive baboons* both have female-dominant hierarchies ... transfer the mechanics of one of those to our own ancestors, stir well, and then move forward in time and start scribbling. :-)

*For you writer-types that are feeling adventurous: I haven't had much luck tracking down a decent single tome on bonobos (I'll own it the minute I find one) ... what's out there tends to be long on pictures and short on text, so your best bet is scientific articles; there's a few reasonably informative Websites out there as well. For olive baboons, the best source is Shirley Strum's Almost human.