“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.”
Sometimes I’m reading a short story that features a cast of a dozen or more characters, in an open setting—they interact with society—and not one woman. Not even a passing mention of a woman existing somewhere. It always takes me out of the story as I reflect on how disorienting it feels. Short stories usually try give you a good sense of place, time and genre within a few pages, and in such a setting the conclusion I reach is “this story is sci-fi and takes place in an alternate male-only dimension.” It feels like reading an experimental work like Perec’s A Void, a story written without once using the letter e, to see if he could. By which I mean, to me it feels like some effort is being put into this; like the author is conducting a thought experiment—alright, let’s write this story in a world without women, what is it like? What are the repercussions? But there are no repercussions, the story continues in a seemingly normal, inexplicably functional society, which indicates that the author is not putting any thought into this, to him nothing is amiss.
I’m used to the average level of male solipsism that gives us countless books featuring ghostly female characters who exist only in relation to a man but have no name, no agency, no influence on the plot—but I’m so disturbed by fictional universes in which women are not present. In these stories men are born and raised and implied to have families, and still no women are mentioned. Does the reverse even exist? Female authors who set their story in a world without men do so deliberately, often as actual
scifi. What disturbs me is how men, as they establish their story’s setting, will unthinkingly start writing a detailed, realistic world that’s expunged of all women. Then (maybe) remember
to add (or mention) one or two women later, if their hero needs a
girlfriend, prostitute, dead mother or some other appendage. I always wonder what these authors’ worldview must be like, what kind of mindset a man like this operates under as he goes through his life (occasionally interacting with women, maybe even cohabiting with some)—for him to set his story, without realising it, without putting any effort into it, in what to me amounts to a disquieting alien society, and to him is just the world as he experiences it.
