Anyway, for something else, I've been thinking about how you'd go about designing a plausible backstory for a "realistic femdom matriarchy" complex society, so with multiple levels of goverment, especially how one'd get there. Tho I'm personally no fan of those socially or legally enforced domination and submission settings because I prefer bdsm based on agency and personality, for a femdom matriarchy there's the issue that all premodern large complex societies (like those governed by states or similar-to-states) have been various shades of patriarchal. That's because complex societies like that need a type of food supply that usually means agriculture, and agrarian societies have pretty strong tendencies to develop patriarchy.
There's an important difference between wet field agriculture and dry field agriculture in how patriarchal they get, but as far as I can tell their complex societies are all patriarchal.
I think the aftermath of the First World War and the flu epidemic's a good, or at least plausible template for the introduction of a femdom matriarchy tho, if you like consider the communist revolutions all over east and central Europe and suffragette bombings in Britain. You could easily imagine some suffragette group moving to a Leninist-style revolutionary ideology and trying to overthrow the regime in a country on the periphery. The aftermath would be some kind of political violence, but the revolutionaries exploiting the lack of fit conscript age men from the war and the epidemic. But this part needs like some more thinking. The idea that warfare in this period
strongly favoured the defender could do a lot of work tho.
I was curious tho if anybody else has some better ideas. The idea's to make the femdom matriarchy feel as "real" as possible in a complex society (think state with at least a dozen towns), but realism's a tool for immersion here.
LAKueiJin
Ok, Jaike, I know I just skipped our previous convo last year when I disappeared due to irl issues, so sorry for that and I'm really happy to see you again! But, I swear, sometimes I feel like both you,
Leo Humilis, myself and a couple other old timers on this thread can be so serious about historical realism that the level of intellectual rigour we place upon ourselves is a bit insane for a porn website!
Are you familiar with the ethnomusicological Youtube channel Farya Faraji? He's an ethnic Persian Canadian who reconstructs historically accurate Roman music and also makes original compositions (based more on modern folk music and instruments/musicological traditions from the area) titled things like "Epic Byzantine" or "Epic Persian Sassanian Music", (his "epic" muisic tackles historical themes and uses real culturally-appropriate instruments but is very clearly not reconstructive work or ever claims to be anything other than modern music) and sometimes he uploads 2 hour long video essays where he talks about historical music and can dedicate one hour to disproving the idea that early "vikings had throat singing", (which got popularised by bands like wardruna) and, while that's all amazing work and he's right in defending altaic cultural traditions from norse neo-pagan cultural appropiation,
I sorta feel like his channel treats "youtube" and the "epic music compilations" space as if it were the debate halls of Oxford, and I sometimes get the same feeling from our historical rant posts here.
As in, if you have a good story idea set in an interbellic revolutionary matriarchy, I would love to read it
irrespective of the level of historical realism involved, so I would definitely urge you to go for it!
In a space where we are constantly dealing with writing such as "4 female orphans in the same orphanage were so hot they all became fashion models, were all adopted by the same family who bought their orphanage and saw their potential for becoming models ever since they were kids, one of whom also became a badass dominatrix who has no qualms about killing mafia Dons on a Tuesday morinng, yet is at the same time stupid enough to answer her front door naked or threaten a politician who could and would kill her before uploading any evidence to blackmail him with anywhere else but on her very destructible phone", any historical faux pas and/or suspension of disbelief you might do will still look like a Dostoyevsky next to a half-baked fanfiction when compared with some... other porn games or erotica stories. (I'm sorry for singling out "Sin Heels" like that, as there are other offenders, but by god in spite of the great graphics and animations in that game I could never take its plot seriously...
)
I know that for example my enlightenment era elven gynarchy setting that I've worked on creating as a VN is certainly flawed in some ways and no society exactly like it would ever realistically emerge, (even by including magic that you define the rules of as the author - you can make gynarchies likelier with some of the trappings of a fantasy or sci-fi universe, but if we actually simulated that universe I am sure the gynarchic societies that would actually form would be extremely different from whatever we could picture with our own cultural biases) but when I look at the writting in the majority of porn games, I realise I don't have to be an insane perfectionist and scrutinize myself for historical accuracy and likelihood
that much. (although I can't really stop myself from doing it ofc) The bar is not very high, so you should not worry about it too much!
(and we'd all love to read or play your story if you decide to write one
)
Ok, I realize now that I rambled for 3 paragraphs without addresing your post directly, so, more to the point, realistically there are certainly reasons almost all human sedentist agrarian societies develop some form of patriarchy, (I'm no historian or expert on the matter, but you've actually caught me right a couple of months after I read James C. Scott's
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, and while I disagree with some of his points, he makes a pretty strong case that agrarian sedentism and early state formation comes part and parcel with patriarchy, as, for example, the less diverse diets of new agrarian sedentist societies, as opposed to the richer diets of nomadic foragers, hunter-gatherers etc, lead to women having vitamin deficiencies and being even weaker and more tired relative to the men in their own societies, as staple crops like grain won't include everything a human body needs in the first place and women also lose more of it due to constant blood loss, eg periods, and pregnancies when their bodies have to share everything with the unborn fetus...) so I would not know how to make a feasible backstory for a complex matriarchy arising in the bronze age or any sort of early human history setting - it's definitely doable, but there would need to be some fictional underlying phylosophical or religious basis explaining away its formation and continued existence. (a complex matriarchal nomadic empire might actually be more realistic with humans)
As for Leninist matriarchal Yugoslavia/Lithuania (so people can always confuse your setting with "Queendom of Lithzena" and you can piggy-back on pkpk's existing popularity!
) post ww1, the ideology could've definitely coalesced in that time period, but it does require a pretty huge leap of logic to assume it would've taken over a state government, especially actually in a European country on the periphery, because a lot of the central and eastern European countries at the time were rabidly anti-communist and pretty socially conservative.
This most certainly wouldn't "sell" in a story due to current... political circumstances (so I'd say you're better off sticking with your original idea), but the Soviet Union itself, or a smaller breakaway republic in an alternate history if you don't want it to seem too unbelievable, could imo more feasibly become a matriarchal state.
Yes, even the whole USSR itself, as there was a lot of impetus for social engineering there, a lot of revolutionary enthusiasm after October 17, and many things that could go extremely differently throughout the civil war. For example, did you know that Elena Stasova, a woman, was the 2nd General Secretary of the Communist Party, the position Stalin later used to seize control of the state apparatus and purge his opponents? She only held the position for about 1 year in 1919 after Sverdlov died, but there were many women among the Bolsheviks who had the potential to be thought leaders and wind up leading the country in an alternate history. (like Krupskaya/Kollontai etc) Now, obviously, that'd just be a USSR with a female leader, not a matriarchal state, but you make her also be a ruthless opportunisst, add a Stalin-like personality cult around the dictatress, you have her support more female supremacist-leaning radfems and putting them in various key positions in the state bureaucracy, have her "saving the revolution" by defeating the nazis and being close to sanctified upon death, and over decades you can have a slow erosion into a more overtly matriarchal state. (this was actually my plot for a modded Stellaris save from many years ago in which I played as a gynarchic "Union of Terran Socialist Soviet Republics" with female-only politicians, ship captains and scientists, basically all the named characters in the game
)
Obviously, this requires plenty of suspension of disbelief, but I'd argue it's more feasible than just some random small conservative eastern european state going in that direction. (and it'd definitely be likelier for the Russian civil war to play out differently and for the former Russian empire to just become fractured into dozens or maybe even hundreds of states more long-term, after which you could have a militant matriarchist group just seize one of these unstable splinter states in the late 20s or early 30s for example
- there's not enough vintage femdom out there!
)
Anyway, glad to see you around here again and sorry for my (hopefully not too deranged) rambling!
