Yet another version of one of the Five Basic Plots of SF
The conceit of "All The Men Are Gone, Except For Gary-Stu!" is not exactly a new one in sf - and it goes all the way back through Baroque and Renaissance pop culture to the Classical original exurban legends which inspired the conquistadors to fear being kidnapped by sexually-insatiable warrior-women (with or without man-eating gryphon-cavalry); whether it's done in stereotypical jokey-prurient, horny-male wish-fulfillment manner (Virgin Planet, Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women and in 1924 (!!!), The Last Man on Earth), or with a more-or-less serious attempt to imagine what the reality would be like, (Herland, Cité des Dames, Princess Ida, The Female Man) it has at least been done a lot, so even back in 1976 it's not like there was no corpus to judge the execution of the theme against.
[Attention please, this is NOT a topic-change...Attention please, this is NOT a topic-change...Please Mind The Gap...]
The thing that made it clear to me that Camille Paglia was no feminist, or at least if she was, then I wasn't, even before I had really made a serious effort to grapple with and disentangle all my Catholic Neotrad baggage (can't remember if it was before or after I discovered JS Mill, altho' I do think it was prior) was reading her smuggery about how if women had run the world, we'd all still be living in grass huts, and this not being a positive (ie, because she saw civilization so-called as having been a destructive and dehumanizing thing) but because she apparently believed that creativity and technological smarts were all bottled up in the testes. I'm reading this, and I'm all like "wha? this sounds like what all the conservative Catholic academic guys I know are yapping at us all the time, to convince us of our inferiority! But isn't she supposed to be a feminist? This doesn't sound very pro-woman! Regardless, it's stupid and unprovable pseudo-anthropology!"
So, this is exactly what James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon was saying back in 1977, imagining a world run entirely by women - that future technology would stagnate, without male brains and inventiveness to supply the creative spark -- altho' the women would put what there was of it to thrifty, housewifelike use, doncha know. Evidently this is supposed to be a story of an AU where Marie Curie and Lady Lovelace didn't exist.
But it would be a more peaceable, safe, cozy planet, of course! Queen Fredegunda exercising considerable finesse to terminate a Frankish feud wouldn't be part of that femmes-only future. It isn't just that there wouldn't be any angry guys putting the smackdown on each other because they felt dissed - women are intrinsically-non-aggressive, in the Tiptree-verse of "Houston", unless tanked on androgens. They just quietly, gently poison people in typically-feminine fashion, instead of shouting "Off with their heads!" and even bloodier, more violent commands, which might have been deplored by ancient chroniclers as unfeminine but were undeniably done by queens, regardless. [cough*StOlga*cough]
Now, you may be thinking, "Um...given my own acts of aggression as an XX human being, and other gals of my direct personal acquaintance - let alone the evidences of history - why is this more likely than that women would just move on [up, across] into the sociological niches currently occupied by males, much more swiftly and without the hesitance borne of opposition that we presently have? Didn't Mary Renault have her Theseus remark on how the girls in the Cretan bull-dancers dorms fought duels for each others' favors back in 1958?? Isn't jockeying for position and pack-rank an intrinsic part of being a social animal, no matter what the plumbing? Isn't how violent you are in response largely determined by what is socially allowed to someone of your rank?" But you would be judging this story's plausibility based on the Primary World, not the gender-essentialist/Men-are-from-Mars-Women-from-Venus 'verse that Tiptree's mind inhabited.
Likewise, in this MAFMWAFV Secondary World, there is no diversity of the XY formerly-half of humanity: all three of men are irredeemable, uniformly-sexist swine, the only differences being one of style. Now, I grant you that in a small mission setting off from the US in the mid-70s it would in fact be entirely possible to have selected all three members and have them all be MCPs, even all MCPs of the same sort. But thing is, when you're writing a story, you're not stuck with mere reality, you get to load the dice to make your points. So long as you don't cheat too much**, or too obviously, it's okay. So if you're not trying to draw a very crude cartoon, then you shouldn't have all your representatives of one group be identical in their faults - any more than you should have every English character in a historical drama (even of colonialism) be absurd John Bulls or Mrs. Podsnaps; no more than to have every tribesman or tribeswoman be sullen, silent, secretive and bloodthirsty cannibals...
--But I begin to digress, and so rein back to the course: to illustrate a point properly, you need to do the shading and the perspective/elevation. Otherwise it's just crude propaganda, or worse yet, attempted propaganda.
So, on the one hand, we have a female-only civilization which has been very crafty and nurturing with recombining what is left of the technology bequeathed them by the lost males of planet Earth - all killed by a mysterious plague/bioweapon gone wrong - which sadly but univocally decides to make away with the only three surviving human men when the latter pop through a wormhole and arrive post-androcaust, deeming them irredeemably violent and unfit for modern civilization...though only after taking a sperm-sample from one of them, in a bit of callous cock-teasing.
And on the other hand, we have all three Terran astronauts completely validating this low opinion of the XY sector, being completely incapable of seeing females as humans, of respecting them as persons, and of adapting mentally to the changed state of things on Earth. Except in so far as they illustrate the tripartite division of the Republic, they are identical -- all of them regarding women as nothing more than cunts inconveniently surrounded by a sentient, loquacious life-form. And this is so, without exception, for all of them: the hard-ass, St. Paul quoting, conservative Catholic, married CO who just walked off the Bull Durham set; the bluff, macho Dood who like the guy trying to demonstrate docking as an allegory of Tab-A/Slot-B sex in Apollo 13, just wants to get laid but loathes all things feminine otherwise; and Tabaqui the whiny insecure scientist who resents the big successful military jocks, but hates women (especially independent ones) even more, again despite being married and likewise claiming to love his wife back on earth/back in the 20th c.
All three of the men, note this, all three of them, despite their diverse backgrounds and states of life (old traditional married guy, younger more modern married guy, pretty young wenching-around married guy) cannot stand to hear women speaking.
Women speaking drives them to distraction, as if they were surrounded by dripping
faucets or crickets and suffering from insomnia. Now, not every guy openly writes poems like this but the mere historical fact of the existence of salons run by heterae*** throughout the centuries is sufficient to prove that this loathing of female company (aside from cunts) is not a universal male trait, even among societies overflowing with
machismo and institutionalized sexism. That all the men on this mission feel that way, without exception (even if they respond to it in different ways) is beginning to push the probability envelope, but it certainly spoils the artistic balance and thereby any hope for even a good didactic work.
So, in this Hugo/Nebula winning story, you have a humanity which, when split along gender lines, gives you on the one hand males who only want mute, busty RealDolls to orgasm with, and on the other, females who live in bovine placidity and contentment, without strife, without contention, without violence physical or emotional - and [thus, it is implied] without excellence or glory of any sort.
What's more plausible? If I had bothered to write [another] "Planet of a Bazillion Women and a Couple Horny Men!" story, I would have done something a lot different. Granted, I'm writing in aught-seven, not back at the Bicentennial when I was a wee sprite of under-ten, but given the utterly-unregenerate misogyny/gynophobia revealed by men young and old every day on message boards (and in the Editorial pages of the NYT), and the cheerleading servility of the male-identified women who hope to gain from them, in terms no different than a dozen or twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, the fact of intervening memes doesn't seem to me to make much difference. Plus, I remember well how much I as a girl growing up resented the inability of heroines to do things, on TV and in movies, back in the 70s and after, how I thrilled first to see on screen (as one of my sisters uttered in her first full sentence) "Princess Leia's got the gun!" and then much later, a whole theatre of mostly-males cheering raucously at Trinity kicking bad-guy buttock, something our father had assured me in the mid-80s could never happen, ever--
But in between, when role-models were few and far between, I still met Clarisse, who despite being in many ways a stereotypical feminine figure (embodying Purity, Spirit/Wisdom/Intuition, and Love) in even more ways wasn't -- someone whose sexual allure was subsumed in the challenge that her mind presented to the reluctant hero - I confess that when I first read Fahrenheit 451 as a reluctant teenager who was in the process of reading a lot of old SF (but that one out of duty only) and had also seen a bunch of '50s movies (not impressed much) I fully expected her to end up in a torrid affair with Montag, and rather had the ground yanked out from under me when not only was their relationship never consummated, it never even rose to the level of a relationship, before she was killed off by The System.****
So if a mere heterosexual male could imagine another "redblooded" [ie heterosexual] American male being able to be Uplifted to a higher intellectual and spiritual plane of existence by the intellectual encounter with Beata Beatrix a mere female teenager, back in 1955 -- well. Things were always more complicated, even back in The Good/Bad Old Days. And I knew this when I was 15, even without encountering Chan Davis. But I segue into raconting, however related to the topic--
What would be a more plausible rendering of "Houston" - I do my futile best to erase other wormhole-related plotlines from my memory, and come up with this: nowise, nohow would there be uniformity and total agreement among the anarchic clone-women, any more than any three human beings can be in uniformity and total agreement about anything, as to the irredeemable nature of the time-traveling males. There would be Factions. They would fight fiercely over it, and some of the crew of the rescuing starship would want to kill them, and others to protect them - as a genetic resource, if nothing else, and thus them becoming the MacGuffin, the Grail to fight over/protect as a power ploy - while still others would, like the gentle, open-minded scientists in Planet of the Apes, recognize their common hnau-ness and duty to fellow-sentients regardless of danger/potential danger, and want to prove to their compatriots that being XY didn't automatically make a being subhuman...
Granted, some of that goes on in Poul Anderson's Amazon planet story -- but hey, you can't make a tabula rasa ex nihilo. Like BEMs, this is a well-trodden genre -and was thirty years ago, too. The humor-in-incongruity came in no small part from envisioning a Stereotypical Red-Blooded American Male of the mid-20th c. trying to deal with beautiful women who, to his mind, behaved just like men. (Granted, I still think The Pride of Chanur did a better job at dealing with ingrained sexism and gender-segregated societies getting the shock of their lives, but one has to acknowledge success where found.)And on the other side, there would be division and dissent among the NASA guys, no less: Dull Thud Muscleboy Bud, the Man of Appetite, might never rise to the level of according women full humanity - or then again, he might, after some disgruntled amazon lass kicked his ass up and down the deck a few times, primate-submitting-to-power, alpha-dominance yielding to stronger, no matter how lacking in
intellectualization his conversion-process (this could be played for laughs, even funnier than Aeryn stomping John, "Hey, guys, look! my new girlfriend can bench-press ME! An' there's THOUSANDS more just like her back home now! Whee!"); rigid suddenly-widower Commander Davis could be crippled with traditional Catholic "chivalry" views of the '50s and '60s he was raised under, and honestly believe that he was more truly honoring and respecting women by insisting that they couldn't, shouldn't be running the world, for their own sakes, but should be glad to return to being Precious Objects and chaste Sacred Vessels for male ideas and sperm, and be driven to frustrated tears by it all, trying to reconstruct the priesthood in his own person; while the puny, weedy, resentful, embittered beta-male scientist-narrator could totally embrace it all - an egalitarian civilization not dominated by crude muscular hierarchy and arcane rituals of machismo! A world where they've managed to colonize space, safely and efficiently, instead of spending the GNP of a small country just to toss a limited-use tin-can up for a few hours! A society where I, being [Almost] The Last Man On Earth, am treated like a Precious Object no less! A world in which there are no more jocks to torment me ANYWHERE - except for these two lunkish misogynist putzes who share my quarters, damme-- hmm.... [connive, connive] My years of high school torment and shame at the hands of oafish alpha-males shall be Avenged! Muahahah!!1!!!
You could go all different ways with this. Even under Silver Age strictures of What Was Kosher in SF, and the limited limping feminism of the mid-20th. (I know Lloyd Biggle could have, frex.) You could have it tragic, or comic, or tragicomic. But by showing such a range of personalities and motivations, you could get a lot more than "men do and must hate/fear/despise women, but women while they may not NEED men any more than fish need bicycles, can't be creative and humanity will stultify without male fecundizing power*****" when it comes to drama and pathos. Making them all stupid and cardboard isn't good feminist critique, nor critique of feminism, at least not by any definition of either term that I'm aware of.
Of course there's the problem of the untenable worldbuilding, because it isn't just that the few feeble, easily-overridden by the older women "let's keep them and retrain them!" pleas of the tenderhearted Judys being the only - you can't call it serious - opposition to putting the men down is implausible, - and especially implausible given that they are supposedly non-hierarchical - but the whole notion of the homogenous bland female civilization, monocultural, because of the combination of XX and cloning, after 300 years, is just bunk. I've known female clones - identical twins, who shared eerie similarities of mind as well as physiological idiosyncracies, and were completely different people with different priorities, attitudes towards life, and mannerisms, who I at least could never mistake for each other. A world of women only - and I wish I could remember the name of that novel I started to read back circa '85 which had that premise, involving some gimmick I think they called it "the parth plant" - would be just as full of intrigue and dominance struggles as it is now, they just would look very different. And I'm sorry, but the idea that they'd need to make pseudo-men by giving one clone-group testosterone treatments so that there'd be people around to do the heavy lifting - absurd. Even in 1976, nobody should have been so sheltered that they were unaware of the existence of tall, muscular, athletic - and unaltered - female humans. Bradamante-types have existed, and not just in fantasy lit, long before artificial steroids.
And that every male on the mission should be utterly hornswoggled at the very idea of women in space - even if we assume total cultural amnesia regarding the WAVEs and WAACS we can safely assume that they probably weren't totally oblivious to the existence of the television, and thus had at least some awareness of the fact that this concept had at least been broached in popular entertainment, by the time we reached the moon... (then again, they're very dim bulbs - Bud has to be reminded that there have been female cosmonauts already.)
--As far as feminine invention, or the a priori lack thereof - I say as Mr. Mill said, a hundred years before Tiptree inflicted "Houston, Houston, do you read?" on the world: when women have had the same educational and business opportunities and freedoms as men have had, not on paper but in actuality, for as long as men have had them, then we will have the evidence to make a proper comparison of relative superiority. Not before.
And until then, I'm not any more interested in male-identified women (living or dead) telling me how inherently defective I am for lacking a penis, than I was in hearing it from the Aristotle-venerators of Thomas Aquinas College and Steubenville, sorry!
* The reverse is a lot rarer - off the top of my head I can only come up with Ethan of Athos altho' I am sure there must be others.
**This is a context-sensitive thing: the multi-ethnic, non-monosexual composition of the bridge crew of the Starship Enterprise in 1966 was completely obvious dice-loading to make a point, but that point was the raison d'etre of the series, however clunkily done.
*** And yes, I should say that that Pancho whose exploits were acknowledged in The Right Stuff was indeed a hetera, and a lady of the salon, albeit one fitted for the American West.
**** Yes, the heartless human-on-human violent culture endorsed by their society is just as much part of The System as the Hound. And of course, being Beatrice, her death is an integral part of the story. But even erudite teenage Catholic ubernerds already somewhat familiar with Dante don't necessarily expect to find it bodied forth in classic skiffy at first encounter.
*****I do give Tiptree points for at least addressing the problem of linguistic drift,
given that even now way too bloody many sf writers totally ignore it, even when they've set their stories thousands of years in the far future, in distant colonies in other galaxies even!
[Attention please, this is NOT a topic-change...Attention please, this is NOT a topic-change...Please Mind The Gap...]
The thing that made it clear to me that Camille Paglia was no feminist, or at least if she was, then I wasn't, even before I had really made a serious effort to grapple with and disentangle all my Catholic Neotrad baggage (can't remember if it was before or after I discovered JS Mill, altho' I do think it was prior) was reading her smuggery about how if women had run the world, we'd all still be living in grass huts, and this not being a positive (ie, because she saw civilization so-called as having been a destructive and dehumanizing thing) but because she apparently believed that creativity and technological smarts were all bottled up in the testes. I'm reading this, and I'm all like "wha? this sounds like what all the conservative Catholic academic guys I know are yapping at us all the time, to convince us of our inferiority! But isn't she supposed to be a feminist? This doesn't sound very pro-woman! Regardless, it's stupid and unprovable pseudo-anthropology!"
So, this is exactly what James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon was saying back in 1977, imagining a world run entirely by women - that future technology would stagnate, without male brains and inventiveness to supply the creative spark -- altho' the women would put what there was of it to thrifty, housewifelike use, doncha know. Evidently this is supposed to be a story of an AU where Marie Curie and Lady Lovelace didn't exist.
But it would be a more peaceable, safe, cozy planet, of course! Queen Fredegunda exercising considerable finesse to terminate a Frankish feud wouldn't be part of that femmes-only future. It isn't just that there wouldn't be any angry guys putting the smackdown on each other because they felt dissed - women are intrinsically-non-aggressive, in the Tiptree-verse of "Houston", unless tanked on androgens. They just quietly, gently poison people in typically-feminine fashion, instead of shouting "Off with their heads!" and even bloodier, more violent commands, which might have been deplored by ancient chroniclers as unfeminine but were undeniably done by queens, regardless. [cough*StOlga*cough]
Now, you may be thinking, "Um...given my own acts of aggression as an XX human being, and other gals of my direct personal acquaintance - let alone the evidences of history - why is this more likely than that women would just move on [up, across] into the sociological niches currently occupied by males, much more swiftly and without the hesitance borne of opposition that we presently have? Didn't Mary Renault have her Theseus remark on how the girls in the Cretan bull-dancers dorms fought duels for each others' favors back in 1958?? Isn't jockeying for position and pack-rank an intrinsic part of being a social animal, no matter what the plumbing? Isn't how violent you are in response largely determined by what is socially allowed to someone of your rank?" But you would be judging this story's plausibility based on the Primary World, not the gender-essentialist/Men-are-from-Mars-Women-from-Venus 'verse that Tiptree's mind inhabited.
Likewise, in this MAFMWAFV Secondary World, there is no diversity of the XY formerly-half of humanity: all three of men are irredeemable, uniformly-sexist swine, the only differences being one of style. Now, I grant you that in a small mission setting off from the US in the mid-70s it would in fact be entirely possible to have selected all three members and have them all be MCPs, even all MCPs of the same sort. But thing is, when you're writing a story, you're not stuck with mere reality, you get to load the dice to make your points. So long as you don't cheat too much**, or too obviously, it's okay. So if you're not trying to draw a very crude cartoon, then you shouldn't have all your representatives of one group be identical in their faults - any more than you should have every English character in a historical drama (even of colonialism) be absurd John Bulls or Mrs. Podsnaps; no more than to have every tribesman or tribeswoman be sullen, silent, secretive and bloodthirsty cannibals...
--But I begin to digress, and so rein back to the course: to illustrate a point properly, you need to do the shading and the perspective/elevation. Otherwise it's just crude propaganda, or worse yet, attempted propaganda.
So, on the one hand, we have a female-only civilization which has been very crafty and nurturing with recombining what is left of the technology bequeathed them by the lost males of planet Earth - all killed by a mysterious plague/bioweapon gone wrong - which sadly but univocally decides to make away with the only three surviving human men when the latter pop through a wormhole and arrive post-androcaust, deeming them irredeemably violent and unfit for modern civilization...though only after taking a sperm-sample from one of them, in a bit of callous cock-teasing.
And on the other hand, we have all three Terran astronauts completely validating this low opinion of the XY sector, being completely incapable of seeing females as humans, of respecting them as persons, and of adapting mentally to the changed state of things on Earth. Except in so far as they illustrate the tripartite division of the Republic, they are identical -- all of them regarding women as nothing more than cunts inconveniently surrounded by a sentient, loquacious life-form. And this is so, without exception, for all of them: the hard-ass, St. Paul quoting, conservative Catholic, married CO who just walked off the Bull Durham set; the bluff, macho Dood who like the guy trying to demonstrate docking as an allegory of Tab-A/Slot-B sex in Apollo 13, just wants to get laid but loathes all things feminine otherwise; and Tabaqui the whiny insecure scientist who resents the big successful military jocks, but hates women (especially independent ones) even more, again despite being married and likewise claiming to love his wife back on earth/back in the 20th c.
All three of the men, note this, all three of them, despite their diverse backgrounds and states of life (old traditional married guy, younger more modern married guy, pretty young wenching-around married guy) cannot stand to hear women speaking.
Women speaking drives them to distraction, as if they were surrounded by dripping
faucets or crickets and suffering from insomnia. Now, not every guy openly writes poems like this but the mere historical fact of the existence of salons run by heterae*** throughout the centuries is sufficient to prove that this loathing of female company (aside from cunts) is not a universal male trait, even among societies overflowing with
machismo and institutionalized sexism. That all the men on this mission feel that way, without exception (even if they respond to it in different ways) is beginning to push the probability envelope, but it certainly spoils the artistic balance and thereby any hope for even a good didactic work.
So, in this Hugo/Nebula winning story, you have a humanity which, when split along gender lines, gives you on the one hand males who only want mute, busty RealDolls to orgasm with, and on the other, females who live in bovine placidity and contentment, without strife, without contention, without violence physical or emotional - and [thus, it is implied] without excellence or glory of any sort.
What's more plausible? If I had bothered to write [another] "Planet of a Bazillion Women and a Couple Horny Men!" story, I would have done something a lot different. Granted, I'm writing in aught-seven, not back at the Bicentennial when I was a wee sprite of under-ten, but given the utterly-unregenerate misogyny/gynophobia revealed by men young and old every day on message boards (and in the Editorial pages of the NYT), and the cheerleading servility of the male-identified women who hope to gain from them, in terms no different than a dozen or twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, the fact of intervening memes doesn't seem to me to make much difference. Plus, I remember well how much I as a girl growing up resented the inability of heroines to do things, on TV and in movies, back in the 70s and after, how I thrilled first to see on screen (as one of my sisters uttered in her first full sentence) "Princess Leia's got the gun!" and then much later, a whole theatre of mostly-males cheering raucously at Trinity kicking bad-guy buttock, something our father had assured me in the mid-80s could never happen, ever--
But in between, when role-models were few and far between, I still met Clarisse, who despite being in many ways a stereotypical feminine figure (embodying Purity, Spirit/Wisdom/Intuition, and Love) in even more ways wasn't -- someone whose sexual allure was subsumed in the challenge that her mind presented to the reluctant hero - I confess that when I first read Fahrenheit 451 as a reluctant teenager who was in the process of reading a lot of old SF (but that one out of duty only) and had also seen a bunch of '50s movies (not impressed much) I fully expected her to end up in a torrid affair with Montag, and rather had the ground yanked out from under me when not only was their relationship never consummated, it never even rose to the level of a relationship, before she was killed off by The System.****
So if a mere heterosexual male could imagine another "redblooded" [ie heterosexual] American male being able to be Uplifted to a higher intellectual and spiritual plane of existence by the intellectual encounter with Beata Beatrix a mere female teenager, back in 1955 -- well. Things were always more complicated, even back in The Good/Bad Old Days. And I knew this when I was 15, even without encountering Chan Davis. But I segue into raconting, however related to the topic--
What would be a more plausible rendering of "Houston" - I do my futile best to erase other wormhole-related plotlines from my memory, and come up with this: nowise, nohow would there be uniformity and total agreement among the anarchic clone-women, any more than any three human beings can be in uniformity and total agreement about anything, as to the irredeemable nature of the time-traveling males. There would be Factions. They would fight fiercely over it, and some of the crew of the rescuing starship would want to kill them, and others to protect them - as a genetic resource, if nothing else, and thus them becoming the MacGuffin, the Grail to fight over/protect as a power ploy - while still others would, like the gentle, open-minded scientists in Planet of the Apes, recognize their common hnau-ness and duty to fellow-sentients regardless of danger/potential danger, and want to prove to their compatriots that being XY didn't automatically make a being subhuman...
Granted, some of that goes on in Poul Anderson's Amazon planet story -- but hey, you can't make a tabula rasa ex nihilo. Like BEMs, this is a well-trodden genre -and was thirty years ago, too. The humor-in-incongruity came in no small part from envisioning a Stereotypical Red-Blooded American Male of the mid-20th c. trying to deal with beautiful women who, to his mind, behaved just like men. (Granted, I still think The Pride of Chanur did a better job at dealing with ingrained sexism and gender-segregated societies getting the shock of their lives, but one has to acknowledge success where found.)And on the other side, there would be division and dissent among the NASA guys, no less: Dull Thud Muscleboy Bud, the Man of Appetite, might never rise to the level of according women full humanity - or then again, he might, after some disgruntled amazon lass kicked his ass up and down the deck a few times, primate-submitting-to-power, alpha-dominance yielding to stronger, no matter how lacking in
intellectualization his conversion-process (this could be played for laughs, even funnier than Aeryn stomping John, "Hey, guys, look! my new girlfriend can bench-press ME! An' there's THOUSANDS more just like her back home now! Whee!"); rigid suddenly-widower Commander Davis could be crippled with traditional Catholic "chivalry" views of the '50s and '60s he was raised under, and honestly believe that he was more truly honoring and respecting women by insisting that they couldn't, shouldn't be running the world, for their own sakes, but should be glad to return to being Precious Objects and chaste Sacred Vessels for male ideas and sperm, and be driven to frustrated tears by it all, trying to reconstruct the priesthood in his own person; while the puny, weedy, resentful, embittered beta-male scientist-narrator could totally embrace it all - an egalitarian civilization not dominated by crude muscular hierarchy and arcane rituals of machismo! A world where they've managed to colonize space, safely and efficiently, instead of spending the GNP of a small country just to toss a limited-use tin-can up for a few hours! A society where I, being [Almost] The Last Man On Earth, am treated like a Precious Object no less! A world in which there are no more jocks to torment me ANYWHERE - except for these two lunkish misogynist putzes who share my quarters, damme-- hmm.... [connive, connive] My years of high school torment and shame at the hands of oafish alpha-males shall be Avenged! Muahahah!!1!!!
You could go all different ways with this. Even under Silver Age strictures of What Was Kosher in SF, and the limited limping feminism of the mid-20th. (I know Lloyd Biggle could have, frex.) You could have it tragic, or comic, or tragicomic. But by showing such a range of personalities and motivations, you could get a lot more than "men do and must hate/fear/despise women, but women while they may not NEED men any more than fish need bicycles, can't be creative and humanity will stultify without male fecundizing power*****" when it comes to drama and pathos. Making them all stupid and cardboard isn't good feminist critique, nor critique of feminism, at least not by any definition of either term that I'm aware of.
Of course there's the problem of the untenable worldbuilding, because it isn't just that the few feeble, easily-overridden by the older women "let's keep them and retrain them!" pleas of the tenderhearted Judys being the only - you can't call it serious - opposition to putting the men down is implausible, - and especially implausible given that they are supposedly non-hierarchical - but the whole notion of the homogenous bland female civilization, monocultural, because of the combination of XX and cloning, after 300 years, is just bunk. I've known female clones - identical twins, who shared eerie similarities of mind as well as physiological idiosyncracies, and were completely different people with different priorities, attitudes towards life, and mannerisms, who I at least could never mistake for each other. A world of women only - and I wish I could remember the name of that novel I started to read back circa '85 which had that premise, involving some gimmick I think they called it "the parth plant" - would be just as full of intrigue and dominance struggles as it is now, they just would look very different. And I'm sorry, but the idea that they'd need to make pseudo-men by giving one clone-group testosterone treatments so that there'd be people around to do the heavy lifting - absurd. Even in 1976, nobody should have been so sheltered that they were unaware of the existence of tall, muscular, athletic - and unaltered - female humans. Bradamante-types have existed, and not just in fantasy lit, long before artificial steroids.
And that every male on the mission should be utterly hornswoggled at the very idea of women in space - even if we assume total cultural amnesia regarding the WAVEs and WAACS we can safely assume that they probably weren't totally oblivious to the existence of the television, and thus had at least some awareness of the fact that this concept had at least been broached in popular entertainment, by the time we reached the moon... (then again, they're very dim bulbs - Bud has to be reminded that there have been female cosmonauts already.)
--As far as feminine invention, or the a priori lack thereof - I say as Mr. Mill said, a hundred years before Tiptree inflicted "Houston, Houston, do you read?" on the world: when women have had the same educational and business opportunities and freedoms as men have had, not on paper but in actuality, for as long as men have had them, then we will have the evidence to make a proper comparison of relative superiority. Not before.
And until then, I'm not any more interested in male-identified women (living or dead) telling me how inherently defective I am for lacking a penis, than I was in hearing it from the Aristotle-venerators of Thomas Aquinas College and Steubenville, sorry!
* The reverse is a lot rarer - off the top of my head I can only come up with Ethan of Athos altho' I am sure there must be others.
**This is a context-sensitive thing: the multi-ethnic, non-monosexual composition of the bridge crew of the Starship Enterprise in 1966 was completely obvious dice-loading to make a point, but that point was the raison d'etre of the series, however clunkily done.
*** And yes, I should say that that Pancho whose exploits were acknowledged in The Right Stuff was indeed a hetera, and a lady of the salon, albeit one fitted for the American West.
**** Yes, the heartless human-on-human violent culture endorsed by their society is just as much part of The System as the Hound. And of course, being Beatrice, her death is an integral part of the story. But even erudite teenage Catholic ubernerds already somewhat familiar with Dante don't necessarily expect to find it bodied forth in classic skiffy at first encounter.
*****I do give Tiptree points for at least addressing the problem of linguistic drift,
given that even now way too bloody many sf writers totally ignore it, even when they've set their stories thousands of years in the far future, in distant colonies in other galaxies even!