All the men are dead. Bang.

January 7, 2008 12:26 PM

After reading Y: The Last Man I'm finding myself haunted by the questions posed by the series. Where might one go (preferably online) to find statistics or evidence of how many women currently excel in various industries?

I'm particularly thinking about industries that would be important in times of crisis like power plants, shipping, infrastructure, law enforcement, etc.

The comic book series Y: The Last Man by Brian Vaughan (which wraps up its sixty-issue run shortly) poses a world without men, in which women would be unable to keep roads clear of cars, to keep any power plants up consistently, phone systems would go out, gas distribution would dry up, in some parts of the US poverty and starvation would get out of hand in a matter of weeks or months... Surely women would fare better than this comic book series speculates. Is this work an example of a male-centric point of view on a matriarchal society? Is there a way of collecting evidence that would either prove or disprove the claims made by this fictional work? Online information by reputable sources would be preferable.

posted by ZachsMind to media & arts (39 comments total)

Wow, it sounds terribly sexist. No men and the world falls apart!

I'm not sure that stats of women in various industries would really prove anything about a world with a sudden vaccum of men - wouldn't many women step UP into those positions, in order to keep infrastructure running?
posted by agregoli at 12:42 PM on January 7, 2008

Surely women would fare better than this comic book series speculates. Is this work an example of a male-centric point of view on a matriarchal society?

Having no knowledge of the series other than what I got from the wikipedia link, it seems to me that it isn't necessarily any statement on the capabilities of women versus men. I mean all the men die, right? That's roughly half the population gone which I'd imagine is going to be pretty devastating to a society no matter what gender they are.
posted by juv3nal at 12:43 PM on January 7, 2008

Having read all of the trade paperbacks thus far, I don't find Vaughan's approach sexist. In fact, I'm willing to wager that if he were to approach the same subject from the opposite side (all the women die and only men are left), he'd paint a much bleaker picture. Part of the reason things go to hell in the series is because, as in Children of Men, it's clear that the human race is going to die out sooner rather than later. It's good stuff.
posted by jdroth at 12:50 PM on January 7, 2008

agregoli: "...wouldn't many women step UP..?"

Precisely! That's what I keep thinking!

I'm reading through this whole series and although it's a riveting story, all the while I'm going "surely women would just step in and fill the void!" I'm rather torn with whether I like this story or despise it. So far it's a bit of both. Are there not enough women who know how to run oil distribution? Manufacturing? Construction? Energy? Food distribution?

Just wondering what information others can provide to illuminate this whole thing. Any pertinent opinions or facts would be appreciated.
posted by ZachsMind at 12:50 PM on January 7, 2008

Of the over 12.5 million women employed in industrial and service occupations, over 18% are blue collar workers...In the mid-1970's women represented about 18% of the 29 million blue collar workers in the United States; almost half a million women were working in skilled occupations.

Having read about half the series it didn't seem that far-fetched to me.
posted by herbaliser at 12:53 PM on January 7, 2008

Part of the question too is, it makes a difference whether the goal is to resume society as normal, or whether a new society (it would have to be new?) could be brought about with women running it.
posted by agregoli at 12:54 PM on January 7, 2008

A link for Northern Ireland, the site probably has more UK references: "Women hold 10% or fewer of the jobs in the process, plant and machine operative sector and in skilled trades."
posted by herbaliser at 12:55 PM on January 7, 2008

I think the world would be worse off than portrayed in Y: The Last Man, for the reason juv3nal called. Kill 50% of the world's population at random, and there'd be massive collapse. In our world, with men disproportionately represented in so many areas crucial to the infrastructure, it would be much worse.

I think accusations of sexism on this count are silly (not that there aren't other complaints about the work I find well-grounded.) I see no suggestion that the women are congenitally any less able to function in the roles vacated, just that, given the initial conditions, it simply wasn't possible to fill the vacuum fast enough to prevent massive collapse. (But I've only read the first 7 or so collections, so I don't know whether there's some sexist smoking gun later on.)
posted by Zed_Lopez at 1:04 PM on January 7, 2008

Sorry my "accusation" was "silly." That's going to be my first impression when a story is framed this way - it has inherent sexist tendencies, in my mind. I haven't read the series, and I certainly wasn't condeming it without reading it.

I guess it's the framing and the point of the work itself that I would question - if 50% of the population died, men or women, it would cause problems for the remaining, as you say. That it reinforces sexist ideas of "of course women couldn't run MALE dominated industries" is what sounds suspect.
posted by agregoli at 1:09 PM on January 7, 2008

I'd note that in WW1 in Europe, women managed to quite quickly and successfully take on male roles in industry and agriculture. Though of course they had time to be trained by men in advance.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:09 PM on January 7, 2008

From this Census Bureau report (.pdf): Even though women have made progress in entering occupations predominantly held by men (especially executive and professional specialty occupations), the majority of women were still in traditional “female” occupations. For example, of the 18 million people in administrative support occupations (including clerical), 79 percent were women. In contrast, 91 percent of the 14 million people in precision production, craft, and repair occupations were men. (emphasis added)

I haven't read the series, but it doesn't strike me as sexist to observe that people without training would just be able to "step up" to running a nuclear power facility, or whatever.
posted by rtha at 1:10 PM on January 7, 2008

"of course women couldn't run MALE dominated industries"

I'm not necessarily crying sexism. It's more that I'm unsure of the believability of the world posed by the writer. Do we really have this few women who are trained in these industries? Who could then train others without chauvinist men saying women aren't capable? I mean w/o men in the picture that argument would fly out the window. Whether a woman is qualified or capable would be irrelevent. They'd either be capable, or that particular industry would collapse.

The storyline seems to put into question the very act of trying in some cases. Some aspects of infrastructure just collapse without explanation. Just a general presumption on the writer's part that phones would go out almost immediately, power plants would fail. The trucking industry would disappear. Trains would remain active but in a limited capacity. Communities would revert to almost tribal societies. Practically every industry would be set back over half almost a century.

It's a bit of an unhappy pill to swallow. The writer does seem to present one-sided evidence inside the narrative supporting his position, but the writer is admittedly bias to supporting his story.
posted by ZachsMind at 1:18 PM on January 7, 2008

I too would argue with the premise behind this question. I admittedly have not read the entire series thus far, but I was under the distinct impression that the problems it portrays were simply a logical result of a large chunk of the population dying. I would imagine that the sudden deaths of even, say, 20% of the human race would result in widespread chaos, regardless of the genders involved. Slacktivist's reviews of the Left Behind books frequently discuss the devastation that the Rapture would probably cause, and that only involves children and a handful of Christians. Besides the problems caused by sudden vacancies in the infrastructure, there's the emotional trauma and paranoia suffered by the survivors who have just had family members killed by an inexplicable force.

Frankly I'd find it rather unrealistic if Y portrayed civilization being put back together in a recognizable way on a timescale of less than decades.
posted by fermion at 1:23 PM on January 7, 2008

I've read everything that's come out in trade paperback so far. I'm a huge feminist and don't find them sexist, though I can certainly see why some folks would. It's a valid question.

I've heard, though I haven't seen it, that the original comic book installments (as opposed to the trade paperback anthologies) each have a list in the front matter of sex ratios in various industries. Have you seen them? Is this right?

I'd think, were all men to die suddenly (or vice versa), of course women would step up. But I think it would take quite a while--what are we, two, three years into it at this point in the story?--for the percentages to shake out to roughly what they were before, or what they'd need to be in the new all-female world. And even then you'd have a pretty large chunk of the population who were in jobs that were brand new to them, so it'd take them a while to master those new jobs as well as the folks who had been doing them their whole lives. Plus there'd be a lot of woman-hours just dealing with all the dead bodies and organizing things and all that.
posted by lampoil at 1:27 PM on January 7, 2008

For the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has the data from their Current Population Survey online. It won't tell you anything about how many women are excelling in their fields, but a quick scan shows that women make up 13.1% of aerospace engineers but only 0.9% of electrical power-line installers and repairers.
posted by hydrophonic at 1:28 PM on January 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

I think that thinking Y: The Last Man is sexist is hardly accurate. The world fell apart because half of the population died in less than an hour. The women that are left are (too steal blatantly from Wikipedia), " ... try[ing] to cope with the loss of the men, their survivors' guilt, and the knowledge that humanity is doomed to extinction." The world falls apart not because the women are incompetent but because of these reasons.

It is quite similar to Children of Men in that if humanity cannot reproduce, then there's really no point to trying to save civilization. Things fall apart not due to a lack of competence (although lack of skills in certain areas certainly plays a part), but mainly because most people think there's absolutely no point. Unlike the Rapture or other post-apocalyptic scenarios where there are some survivors who can go on, in Y, nearly everyone believes that there will be no more human beings ever. Everyone left is literally waiting around to die, knowing there will never be anything more. It's basically nihilism made brutally, painfully real.

The storyline seems to put into question the very act of trying in some cases.

That's exactly right and I don't think it's unintentional. With the exception of the few people that have met Yorick and know what Dr. Mann is trying to do, no one has any reason to believe that anything they do will matter. If you knew, for a fact and without a doubt, that in 2050 every human on the planet would die, would you really be motivated to try and sustain society for the next 42 years? I can't honestly say I would.

As Zed_Lopez said, unless there's some massive change to the story in 9th or 10th trade (I haven't read 9 yet and 10 isn't available), thinking the story is about the weakness of women and their failure to survive in a world without men is quite shallow.
posted by Nelsormensch at 1:29 PM on January 7, 2008

I agree with the general analysis above, and I think the following two observations are worth noting in addition:

(1) Each and every individual woman, including the blue-collar workers, has lost every man who is in any way important to her: father, brothers, husband, sons, male friends. For almost all women, this is a major personal tragedy. So not all of those women capable of training other women to do blue-collar work, are going to be immediately and enthusiastically up to it; their trainees, who by definition are unskilled to do the work, are going to be even less motivated to learn and do than their trainers.

(2) It's not just male humans. It's all male animals too. The question of male plants and male insects are left unaddressed, as I recall. Even taking the rosiest possible view of the situation, ie only Y-chromosomal males are killed, almost the entire ecosystem, in that world, is pretty much a goner. (I think it's safe to assume that XXY humans, whatever their apparent gender, and more obscure and uncommon variants who might be fertile as males also die.) Actually this is where the story falls down a bit for me. The world environment of the comic should be far, far worse off. The median lifespan of individual animals is (guessing) under five years. The median generation length of animal species is (again guessing) under two years. Prey species on the average live for shorter lengths of time than predators; the food chains, all of the food chains, will rapidly collapse from the bottom up.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 1:45 PM on January 7, 2008

^ "XXY humans, and equivalents in other species, whatever their apparent gender"
posted by aeschenkarnos at 1:47 PM on January 7, 2008

BKV shows the post-male society as one in chaos, with fitfully interconnected pockets of order and disorder. The idea that you could kill off half the population without causing a result like this is more than a little bizarre, and nowhere in the series did I ever get the implication that women would be unable to run any business in particular, let alone for any reason having to do with being female (or not male). It's just a matter of the massive CHAOS that killing half of the world would bring about, especially when most of the financial power had been concentrated in that half - let alone the implications of no more children being born ever through natural means.

If BKV seems a little pessimistic (I wouldn't even say that he is), it's to heighten the drama of the post-apocalyptic world. There is also a natural tendency to fear future catastrophes in excess of how difficult they would be to deal with in practice. BKV is not an expert in phone systems and the trucking industry, so it's also natural that he would be unable to think of the creative solutions which might save those industries. I will say that it's awfully convenient that, IIRC, the Internet doesn't work - I think the Internet really could turn the world around in the event of a cataclysm.

Either way, even with the Internet, if all the men even just in Washington DC were to die tomorrow, it wouldn't be sexist to presume that intelligent people such as Condoleeza Rice, Barbara Boxer, and their staffers would have their hands full for a very long time, even if they had all the files in front of them necessary to run everything ever. It's not just a matter of information, training, and aptitude - it's a matter of the mass graves filled with all your co-workers and many of your bosses. I would also have faith that some sort of order would eventually arise, albeit without a strong central power to unite everything. Think about how difficult it can be to navigate bureaucracies even as they stand now, let alone with one half dead and the other half grieving.

You might wish to research how quickly concentrated centers of wealth and military might could spring back after such a catastrophe. To go back to the DC example, power would spring back as long as the financial security of the republic could be in some way guaranteed and the now-decimated armed services would be able to both control the populace and deliver aid where it would be inevitably needed. I don't think women would break into a panic, but I do think that, if there is a central power vacuum, smaller powers will arise, and the more cemented these smaller powers become, the more difficult it will be to re-establish some sort of order on a broader scale. It's also possible that turning the world into a loose confederation of city-states would be beneficial, but attempting to proceed with negative population growth until the end of time will be impossible. One way or another, an endeavor would have to be undertaken to either bring men back or in some other way restore the reproductive faculties of the human race.

You should also look into the histories of nations where genocides or other programs of mass removal have taken place. Think about Cambodia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. Now also think about Germany after the Nazis, or the Jewish people after the Nazis, or Ireland after Cromwell - those nations did better eventually, but with a lot of outside help, or at the very least not in a closed system. To go back to our DC example, America would be able to soldier through, through its remaining power and the help of others - and certainly America would suffer a titanic financial hit. Now imagine that same situation everywhere, except without Canada, the EU, the UN, and so forth lending a helping hand. Worldwide financial and emotional chaos would not be so good.

I don't think it's that unreasonable to assume that, for a period of several years after a worldwide pandemic which kills all men, the world would break apart and suffer. It would be the same case if all the women were to die. I have some story issues with Y outside of gender politics, but I'd be hard-pressed to identify those problems as being specifically sexist in nature. The list of wholly realistic post-apocalyptic worlds is so tiny that I can think of precisely none.

Furthermore, imagine a world where there are not only no male humans, but no living thing with a Y chromosome. Remember all that stuff you learned in grade school about how delicate the ecosystem is? Yyyyyyyyyeah.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:52 PM on January 7, 2008

Unlike the Rapture or other post-apocalyptic scenarios where there are some survivors who can go on, in Y, nearly everyone believes that there will be no more human beings ever.

Really? Strange - no options exist in in-vitro, or anything like that?

I agree that if all male mammals died, that the ecosystem would collapse even faster than humanity would.
posted by agregoli at 1:54 PM on January 7, 2008

worldwide pandemic

durr
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:54 PM on January 7, 2008

(Also, I can't imagine even trying to re-establish society if I knew it was all going to die out anyway. The loss of hope would be tremendous.)
posted by agregoli at 1:56 PM on January 7, 2008

Really? Strange - no options exist in in-vitro, or anything like that?

Even if you were able to impregnate 200 volunteers, it would be a massive undertaking and it would not help the world entire. In vitro fertilization certainly works, but the ability to create many, many, many viable offspring from female-female couples is not technology which exists today, AFAIK. It's certainly true, though, that if something like a Y scenario were to occur, almost every reasonable hour, brain, and dollar not being spent on aid and reconstruction would be put into a project like this.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:58 PM on January 7, 2008

Further to the ecosystem, there are several classes of higher animal that have better chances of surviving the event: those that start life as female and later become male, such as groupers and other fish; those that reproduce through 'normal' parthenogenesis (ie, the species is all or mostly naturally cloned females) such as some lizards; those that through a variation on parthenogenesis give birth to males, such as Komodo dragons; and those that mate once or infrequently and store sperm for a long time. The last set are at greatest risk risk from the curse, I don't recall from the story whether the sperm in human and zoo sperm banks was rendered infertile too.

In any case a species that depends entirely on sexually-reproducing species for its food, and can't switch away in time to jellyfish or something, will die, whatever its own method of reproduction.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 2:01 PM on January 7, 2008

Why don't you head to the heart of the Barnett Shale (Bosque County, maybe) and see for yourself how many women are out there, doing grunt work on the gas rigs.
posted by Kwantsar at 2:02 PM on January 7, 2008

Gah! That should have been wouldn't have been able - I was zooming off to lunch w/ the boss and failed to preview.
posted by rtha at 2:14 PM on January 7, 2008

"I don't recall from the story whether the sperm in human and zoo sperm banks was rendered infertile too."

The storyline indicates that the pathogen takes out anything with a Y chromosome. That was the determining factor. I presumed that meant any and all sperm as well. The first issue revealed a pregnant woman who gave birth the very moment the event occurred. The male doctors died and so did her child. The gender of said child is left indeterminant until later in the series.

I don't know if that limits it to mammals or if reptiles, fish, insects, etc are affected. The story only gives data as it's pertinent obviously.

Fascinating conversation here thus far. Thanks everybody for your thoughts on this. Links like to the Census Bureau are particularly illuminating. Again, I'm not questioning just sexism. My apologies if I inferred that. I was looking at general validity of story. Not necessarily questioning Vaughan's politics.
posted by ZachsMind at 2:24 PM on January 7, 2008

Sorry to butt in again: for those of you who have either not read the series or only just begun it, it's pretty important to say that the series isn't a paean to manhood or a condemnation of feminism or anything like that. I'd say that it's a zippy chase/spy/mystery story set against a post-apocalyptic backdrop, whose thematic questions run more like, "seeing as how men have dominated the world's power structures for so long and have only very recently begun distributing things even somewhat fairly, how would their legacy look if they were all gone?" And what would the sole remaining man, who is a fairly average soul, think of the world which now arises?

I'd focus less on the mechanical stuff, like whether the phones work nationwide or not, than on moments like when one woman bursts into tears as she laments what will happen to rock music without people like Mick Jagger. The author not saying that music would die or suck without men, but that it would completely change, and that you'd have these figures from the past in your memories nonetheless. Imagine the state of the arts ten years after such an event, where there is no longer any male input, only the reaction to the past. What did (or do) men really add to the world? More and less than anyone ever thought, says BKV - maybe mostly less.

They're interesting questions, and not presented . As for the plausibility of the scenario itself, outside of the unlikelihood of the plague itself, I'd say that BKV is more accurate than not. Real life disasters on a scale much smaller than the Y scenario have destroyed many places. It would not be a very nice place to live at first, and even after some time, it would be a patchy melange of old and modern ways.
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:24 PM on January 7, 2008

They're interesting questions, and not presented unfairly.

Typo corrected. My mind is elsewhere. I quit the Internet.
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:26 PM on January 7, 2008

It's more that I'm unsure of the believability of the world posed by the writer. Do we really have this few women who are trained in these industries? Who could then train others without chauvinist men saying women aren't capable?

I think it's more a function of:

Modern technological society has complex interdependencies, and requires a huge number of moving parts to keep moving to function.

Pretty much no organization has so much redundancy that it could continue to function properly with half its people suddenly gone.

Imagine, all in a moment, half the people disappear, and every organization is trying to deal with that at the same time every other organization it depends on is also dealing with it at the same time the world has been left in an awful mess as a direct result of the sudden disappearance, what with all the crashed vehicles, fires, and whatnot at the same time most people are grieving the loss of loved ones and the fear of human extinction.

I think Vaughn's portrayal of how well the world's running is ultimately overly optimistic (and would still be overly optimistic with 50% of the population at random or all of the women dead in an instant, instead of all the men.)

Sorry my "accusation" was "silly."

I understand why someone would react that way on hearing just "world without men", but I've seen elsewhere the accusation of sexism on account of the portrayal of the degree of societal collapse from people who have read it and know that the premise isn't just a world without men, but our world in which all men unexpectedly died in the same instant. That was the position I find silly.

no options exist in in-vitro

Part of the premise is that following the death of all the men, groups of whacked-out women destroy all sperm banks and other potential reproductive options, for no adequately justified reason (other than being whacked-out.) And they get every single one. This is one of the things that I find unbelieveable and annoying.

if all male mammals died, that the ecosystem would collapse even faster than humanity would.

Yup, and he's basically ignored that (in the books I've read so far.)
posted by Zed_Lopez at 2:41 PM on January 7, 2008

Part of the premise is that following the death of all the men, groups of whacked-out women destroy all sperm banks and other potential reproductive options, for no adequately justified reason (other than being whacked-out.) And they get every single one.

Huh? What was the explanation of why people would do that? Fear of contagion?

I'm sorry, I'll stop questioning things now. This premise seems so out there that I shouldn't be commenting - it's obviously not my kind of book. I just read and enjoyed World War Z, so I like apocolyptic fiction and was intruiged by this. Carry on.
posted by agregoli at 3:15 PM on January 7, 2008

Zed_Lopez: "...following the death of all the men, groups of whacked-out women destroy all sperm banks and other potential reproductive options, for no adequately justified reason..."

Later in the series it's insinuated (note subplot of Yorick's sister Hero) that some if not all of the followers of the Amazon gangs consisted of women who had been battered or raped by men some time in their lives, and the writer indicates that the absence of women would give these women an overwhelming sense of empowerment, but only if misdirected by a crazy charismatic person like Victoria the chess champion. I found it a bit of a stretch at first, but after seeing this same story told from Hero Brown's perspective, I can't wholly dismiss it outright, having never walked a mile in her shoes.

If I'd been through what she'd been through, I might wanna see all men dead too, and leave no stone unturned.

agregoli: "it's obviously not my kind of book.."

I had thought that before too. Years ago when this came out I dismissed it as a hokey premise and forgot completely about it. However, in a recent MeFi thread, a fellow MeFite recommended it. I gave it a shot. Now I'm thinking this is one of those comic book series that raises the bar. People who don't usually like comics, might enjoy this one. It's definitely ingenious and innovative, and keeps you guessing. In early issues it appears that actions some characters make are clearly out in left field, but later on they're revisited and you kinda understand and even forgive a little.

If you like your stories to haunt you after you're done reading, I'm compelled to strongly recommend this one. Certainly is thought provoking, and on top of that, you get to watch a monkey slinging his poop. That's always a plus. =)
posted by ZachsMind at 4:39 PM on January 7, 2008

One thing that cannot be stressed enough is that the mass death happened instantly. Planes fell from the sky, ships crashed, trucks and cars littered the entirety of the highway system. It's not as though the men gently went away, but the women were left with a wrecked and ruined world in addition to their lack of men.

Towing the wreckage and clearing the interstates alone would be huge endeavor.
posted by explosion at 5:27 PM on January 7, 2008

Just grabbing a stat at random from Google, this study mentions that "the proportion of women physicians increased from 7.1 percent to 15.3 percent between 1970 and 1986, and is projected to reach almost 30 percent by the year 2010".

So, leaving aside the fact that women are not represented evenly across the different kinds of doctoring, if all the men are gone, 70% of your doctors are gone.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 6:00 PM on January 7, 2008

So, leaving aside the fact that women are not represented evenly across the different kinds of doctoring, if all the men are gone, 70% of your doctors are gone.

On the other hand, a nurse is more than capable of providing the kind of practical first aid that is needed after a disaster, and nurses are at least 70% women.

The ecosystem is more and more of a hole in the story the more I think about it. We have to assume the insects survived, otherwise the ecosystem would be in total collapse in less than a month. It isn't, in the story, therefore the insects have survived. With all farmed mammals either dead or effectively sterile, the only reliable source of protein is fish, and maybe birds (realistically meaning chicken, turkeys, ducks and geese), assuming the author cared enough about bird genetics to look it up. All survivors are on a vegan diet, supplemented by a reasonable-sized hoard of canned meats of which there isn't any more coming, ever.

I still don't see how the Amazons alone could have destroyed all sperm banks worldwide, including personal stores in household refrigerators, sperm stores kept as an incidental part of DNA research, sperm saved by some genius female scientist who realized within two hours what was going on and started saving testicles from men's bodies before the sperm in them could die, etc etc. It just makes no sense for the Amazons to be that powerful, that fast, and that resourceful. I far prefer the magic of the curse destroying sperm along with living males. This still leaves the Amazons free to destroy whatever sperm banks that they could get to, presumably all in the USA, all publicly operated as sperm banks, and to believe they have--and be believed to have--destroyed all sperm banks everywhere.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 11:37 PM on January 7, 2008

The ecosystem is more and more of a hole in the story the more I think about it. We have to assume the insects survived...

So far as I recall, the story indicates that it's all male mammals, despite the refrain of "everything with a y-chromosome." So while there'd be dramatic upheaval in the ecosystem, it wouldn't be as bad as the death of literally everything with a y-chromosome would. (Not that I'm saying that the end of mammals couldn't cause a collapse, just that I consider it at least plausible enough for fiction that it wouldn't.) But, for sure, everyone would notice weird things happening due to ecological changes. Vaughn would have made his life easier if he just killed off the male humans.

I still don't see how the Amazons alone could have destroyed all sperm banks worldwide

Yup. How was this one new ad-hoc group so effective and organized on a global scale when no established group was?
posted by Zed_Lopez at 8:38 AM on January 8, 2008

The Amazons didn't seem so much organized as they were driven. Mostly by hate and ignorance.
posted by ZachsMind at 11:42 AM on January 8, 2008

So far as I recall, the story indicates that it's all male mammals, despite the refrain of "everything with a y-chromosome."

There aren't many other known organisms that aren't mammals that have a Y-chromosome. Not even all mammals have one. Almost all insects use XO or ZW sex determination (or are haploid). Birds are also ZW. The ecosystem was fine before mammals, and it would be fine without us.
posted by Thoughtcrime at 4:14 PM on January 8, 2008

Here's the last page of volume 1 of the trade paperbacks, with the statistics.
posted by casarkos at 8:45 PM on January 9, 2008