A History Lesson

She launches into a history of the decline that leaves your head spinning.

A fairly large part of what she says is much the same as your world, it isn’t until she starts talking about the “Woman's Duty Movement,” that things start to get strange. At first you think that she is talking about something akin to the Women's Suffrage movement however you pretty quickly figure out it is not quite the same.

The movement had twin goals, the first was much the same as in your world namely giving women the same rights as men. However the language is different, she talks about how women already outnumber men and they hold most jobs and offices of power. It seems that that part was more about formalising things that had already been going on. The part that is completely new to you is the part that talks about a “Woman's Duty”.

The idea is simple, namely that with the number of men dwindling we can no longer rely on ideas of monogamy or even marriage. There are now so few men that it is suicide on a species level to expect them to only ever have children with a single women, or to expect a woman to only have children by a single man. The speech, which she seems to have memories, uses a great deal of religious context, coming back time and time again to the commandment to go forth and be fruitful.

She starts talking about the reaction to the movement, unsurprisingly there was a fair amount of push back however eventually it could no longer be denied that there was a problem. So it was that in 1930 the first raft of laws related to the movement was passed. It was a combination of laws that decriminalized adultery and also a collection of tax laws that aimed to make monogamy less attractive. However there were still hangovers of the old ways, the first set of laws was move toward polygamy rather than monogamy as marriage was still expected.

Over the following decades it seems like these ideas were slowly chipped away at as even polygamy was pushed to the side. The situation now seems to be in a pretty dire straights, men are now expected to leave home at the age of 18 and submit to being moved to areas where there are the fewest men. Homosexual men are expected to provide regular semen specimens for artificial insemination and monogamy seems to be viewed as a silly and outmoded way of living. Societies whole view of sex seems to be one of a means to an end, both women and men have a expectation bear as many children as they can by as many people as they can.

By the time she is done laying all this out her break is up and she leads you back out into the reception area. You feel your head spinning as you make your excuses and head out side.