Women produce most of our global output. Women provide almost all unpaid production; almost all social reproduction; and a good portion of all paid production. Suppose we attempted a little experiment and sent all the men on earth for year long vacation (all expenses paid and no work to do) to planet x3pz in 2004. Then we did the same for all the women on earth in 2005 (sent them to planet x3pz that is). My question is what would the planet EARTH be like in 2004 and 2005. How would the economic dependency conditions differ from those in 2003 and how would they differ from each other?
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These sorts of discussions almost always carry a certain amount of tension and freight - great or small depending upon the participants' opinions regarding the behavior and habits of women and men and their comparative contributions to global economic and social scenes.
If we accept the assertion that "women produce most of our global output" (and I'm not disputing this though perhaps I should) we must conclude that the year-long, offworld holiday for men would have no appreciable impact upon the amount of things made or work done.
Also, if we accept the statement that women produce "almost all social reproduction" we're compelled to imagine the year without men on Earth as being not so bad for that area of life as well.
Conversely, the strong premises push us, should we choose to accept them, to foresee the year of extraterrestrial vacation for women as a near total disaster for Earthly levels of production, "social reproduction" and the unpaid work mostly women perform.
So the thought experiment ends before it can begin and reveals itself to be an outline for the kind of dystopian (or, if you prefer, utopian), gender-centered novel a subset of the reading public enjoyed in the 1970s.
DRM
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