case: (Default)
Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2012-10-06 03:53 pm

[ SECRET POST #2104 ]


⌈ Secret Post #2104 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 06 pages, 129 secrets from Secret Submission Post #301.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat x 3 (NS to begin with)], [ 1 - unreadable ], [ 1 - secret posted as text ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

[personal profile] anonymouslyyours 2012-10-06 09:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Um, yeah? A world where half the population is suddenly dead is going to be pretty hellish.

Let alone the fact there are a lot of fields & skills pretty necessary to running our countries/societies that not very many women are in or have the experience/training for.




If this ends up badly paraphrased as me believing only the mighty peen can do anything on the FHW blog I will not actually be surprised.

(Anonymous) 2012-10-06 09:35 pm (UTC)(link)
OK, I'll bite: Which skills/fields are you referring to? (It's late and I'm tired and my brain isn't working to try and think up some of my own.) I'm genuinely curious.

[personal profile] anonymouslyyours 2012-10-06 09:41 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't know? Construction, trucking, oil rigging, engineering, aeronautics, multiple science fields, etc., etc. The list of fields that don't have a strong enough presence of women to be sustained in the event of all men suddenly dying is pretty big.

And in any case it's almost half the population. Male or female, the disappearance of that many workers would severely inhibit us logistically even if we didn't have to clean up the mess and the survivors didn't experience emotional trauma at suddenly losing a massive portion of their loved ones.


brightblueink: Kyuubey's face. It's terrifyingly cute. (Contract?)

[personal profile] brightblueink 2012-10-06 09:45 pm (UTC)(link)
People would learn it again pretty quickly IMO. Men didn't spring out of their mother's wombs knowing how to build things way back in ancient times, they had to learn how to. Women could learn how to, too. Not to mention that knowledge of certain subjects wouldn't necessarily disappear with men--we live in a society that collects knowledge both in the internet and in books. And there are still SOME women with the skill sets you mentioned, so they could teach other women.

[personal profile] anonymouslyyours 2012-10-06 09:49 pm (UTC)(link)
Okay? Not saying that isn't true. But it would be pretty hellish for a while there.

I'm not claiming that the knowledge would disappear. Just that the skilled workers would. Even with textual information experience counts for a lot.

The level of organization and time required to find and train enough women to return society back to similar standards we lived at pre-XYapocalypse would be pretty significant.

(Anonymous) 2012-10-06 09:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Yep, and it will vary greatly from one place to another. Think of what would happen in Saudi Arabia, where women are about 5% of the workforce, compared to, say, Iceland, where the prime minister is a woman.

[personal profile] anonymouslyyours 2012-10-06 10:04 pm (UTC)(link)
This is a good point.

World relations would also be pretty hectic as something like only 20 of the 200+ world leaders are women.

I wouldn't be surprised if something like this vastly restructured world government and borders.

(Anonymous) 2012-10-06 10:09 pm (UTC)(link)
I agree with you. I'm in engineering in a developed world, and the gender discrepancy is very big. There are ten men to every woman training to become an engineer, and the actual gender discrepancy in the workforce is even greater.

If all the men suddenly died at once, there will not be enough women engineers to take over the men's jobs and to train new engineers at the same time. I imagine the situation will be more dire in small communities where there are only one or two skilled workers per specialized job.

(Anonymous) 2012-10-07 06:29 pm (UTC)(link)
I think a scenario where most (but not all, because that would make it next to impossible to produce any future generations) women died would be an equally interesting thought experiment.

If that happened, I think most health care systems would utterly collapse and factory production would drop dramatically for lack of workers.

[personal profile] anonymouslyyours 2012-10-07 07:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh I agree. Women make up a significant amount of our workers. Not just in factories. The health care system would obviously be the biggest hit just considering nurses (who come in a wide array of specialties) and home care administrators. But we're also talking doctors, technicians, pharmacists, health care industry workers, etc.

I think the childcare field is made up of something like 90% female workers. Education would take a pretty hard hit.

Pretty sure more than half of households are maintained or contributed to more by women than their male partner. Not to mention the influx of orphans from single-mother homes would be pretty overwhelming. Social services seems to have a significant number of women so that would be a double whammy.

Retail, hospitality, customer service, office workers etc. have always had pretty significant female presence.

(Anonymous) 2012-10-06 09:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Depends on how the half is gone. Did they all die at once so it's sudden and shocking and dead bodies everywhere? Or was it a slow thing that crept up on people until suddenly there were no men, but enough time to kind of accumulate. It'll be awful to loose one half of the population but I don't see why that has to end up in things falling apart into a post apocalypse situation. Women are capable of learning and stepping up.

And yeah there are a lot of fields that are dominated by men, but part of that is not that women aren't interested or trained or capable but that men won't allow them to promote.

[personal profile] anonymouslyyours 2012-10-06 09:58 pm (UTC)(link)
I agree with your comment? Somewhat. Losing half of our population over time or not would be pretty drastic and would have a severely negative impact on society whether or not it happened over time or immediately.

Any large disaster that would disrupt the status quo like the one we're discussing would lead to different factions struggling for power which would impeded and delay progress.

The men being lost are people's children and loved ones. Some people respond well to adversity like that and others don't. So our population is halved, a portion of the survivors are skilled in areas we need and therefore can't pick up a new trade, another portion are physically or emotionally disabled or too young or elderly, it leaves us with very few women who could actually suddenly devote their lives to learning a new trade.

I'm sure there's a period of time that it could happen over that might allow us to transition with minimal or no ill effects. Perhaps instead of the men dying out humanity just stops have male children? I can see how that might work.

(Anonymous) 2012-10-07 07:59 pm (UTC)(link)
The thing is, even the people who were disabled would probably have to work somehow. It wouldn't just be male dominated fields that would be effected - half of most of the work force [in some places even more than that] would be gone. That also means that half of farmers [if not more] would be gone which would directly impact food production, and not in good ways, along with various other fields that would have a direct, negative impact. Everyone would probably have to pitch in somehow because of that - and, as far as the skilled women not being able to stop and train...bringing apprenticeship back to a larger degree could help take the load off since people would be learning on the job - and some jobs actually still do that in order to get trained. [Plumbing, for example, is one of the fields it's still used in.] It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a way to get enough breathing room to properly train people.

Also, if it were a sudden thing, it probably wouldn't just be governments and borders that would get restructured - chances are society as a whole would end up completely changing, and it would be interesting to see what it ended up changing to, I think.

[personal profile] anonymouslyyours 2012-10-07 08:10 pm (UTC)(link)
I think maybe you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying society would grind to a halt forever and ever. Just that there would be a period in time that would be pretty grim. And recovery from the direct effects of losing all the men would be impeded by the effects of that period of adjustment. We wouldn't be starting from the level of progress we have today, we'd be starting several steps behind and it would take us time to catch up.

If all men died tomorrow it would not be possible for women to step into the vacated rolls in less than a month and because of that thing would be pretty hard in most places. Even places where women were able to quickly get a good handle on everything there would be an adjustment in the quality of living at least temporarily.

And all of this speculation is happening without regard to the collateral damage (bodies of the infected, downed flights, car accidents, etc.), the emotional trauma, the inevitable infighting with factions struggling for power.

And, yes, I absolutely agree surprising and dramatic changes would occur on social and personal levels as well.
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