"When you come to Kazakhstan, you are all invited to stay at my house, eat my food and use my sister."
A No Woman's Land is a misogynist hell. Women are forced to marry, either by direct violence or by intentionally induced poverty, and every husband is a lazy cheating bastard who is allowed to beat his wife to a bloody pulp and can sell his daughters to the highest bidder with impunity; blink the wrong way and you get burned as a witch; take a step out the door and you'll get raped on the spot; and every other girl is a prostitute and/or Sex Slave. It's a Crapsack World if you're a woman.
This is commonly used as to depict either a specific nation or region or just "the other place with people who are different from us and are therefore of lesser quality", the Straw Misogynist trope applied on a wider scope. While the Arabic world is one of the most frequent receivers of this stereotype, India, Mayincatec societies, Southeast Asia, and the whole African continent don't get off well either. Asian movies have been known to depict Western nations this way, as well.
Related to Damsel in Distress. Compare Medieval Morons, which sees people of another time as essentially cruel and stupid. Contrast Lady Land. See also The Women Are Safe with Us, another form of contrasting the treatment of women to depict one group as more moral. Unrelated to the "No Man's Land" of trench warfare.
Remember that real-life "examples" would be very controversial, and are therefore forbidden. While nearly all societies throughout history have discriminated against women to some extent, this trope is for fictional portrayals that are virulently misogynistic even by the standards of their respective time periods.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Shitsurakuen. A metaphor for the callous ambivalence towards students being bullied pushed to Anvilicious levels. Girls in Utopia Gakuen are nothing but objects to be hoarded, fought over, abused, and discarded at leisure by the boys, who are universally depicted as doing so.
- The world of Berserk has made it quite clear that it wasn't easy to be a woman in The Middle Ages. Adding the fact that there are actual demons and monsters that want to do far worse than just eat you, it makes one wonder if the imagery of damsels being sacrificed to dragons really did the era any justice.
- Women are forbidden from entering the Mount Kurama stronghold, home of the Tengu, in Kamisama Kiss. Naturally, Nanami doesn't let that stop her.
- This is the case with Silverland, in Princess Knight. Women aren't allowed to vote or own property and generally are considered inferior to the men. In fact, one of the driving conflicts in the series is that the King and Queen's child, Sapphire, was born a girl and thus is ineligible for the throne. It's subverted at the end, when Plastic mans up, gets all women in the kingdom equal rights, and gives Sapphire the crown. Considering that the comic was written in The '50s, this resolution was very much Fair for Its Day.
- Implied to be the case in the towns the women of Iron Town came from, in Princess Mononoke. When Ashitaka comments on how hard they must work to run the furnace, they tell him that it's far better than the brothels they used to work at, mentioning that they're given plenty of food and protection from men harassing them. The men of Iron Town don't seem overly thrilled by how much freedom the women have, but everyone respects Lady Eboshi and she insists on the women being treated well.
Comicbooks
- The Fantastic Four ally Thundra (of Lady Land Femizonia) often finds herself pitted against Mahkizo of Machus, a world that is violently misogynistic. The two timelines are eventually merged; it's debatable if anyone's really any better off since the resulting world is still violent and deadly. There was one point where they learned to love each other, but that seems to have been forgotten.
- Bitch Planet is set in a world where Non-Compliant women get sent to a Penal Colony. Non-Compliant can mean murder, or causing your husband to have an affair, or not keeping yourself looking suitably attractive for men.
Fan Fiction
- In one Harry Potter fanfic, The Last War, the author goes on a particularly Anvilicious rant about how the wizarding world "denied the sacred healing acts of witchcraft in favor of the violent virility of wizardry, the way it covered women in hideous robes to conceal their natural beauty."
- Wartmonger society in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf is portrayed as misogynistic, with males and females segregated from each other except for matters of procreation and sexual amusement. Empath meets a few of the female Wartmongers who don't particularly like the situation that they live in, especially with King Bullrush's guards threatening to molest a young female Wartmonger if the others refuse to surrender Empath unto them.
- The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan-universe Fall of Equestria is this to a ridiculously absurd degree: born from a now defunct Tumblr blog, the basic premise is that Equestria is overrun by a nation of misogynistic caribou and the mares are little more than sex slaves and toys to the males. Needless to say, it attracted an opposition which created a counter group dedicated to deconstructing the overall setting (if not just going outright Kill 'em All on the caribou); suffice to say, the very premise itself is Not Safe for Work so be warned.
- By now, even one of the original authors of Fall of Equestria (Schorl Tourmaline) has joined the counter-group, and has written a fic of her own that thoroughly dismantles the setting - primarily because she thinks the setting is too stupid to be allowed to continue.
- The The Hobbit fanfic Amazons of Erebor
portrays the culture of the Tolkien's dwarves like this. The dwarves are all women and their quest for the Lonely Mountain is mainly to have a place to live free of male rule.
Film
- Kazakhstan is portrayed this way in Borat: as a place where women are regularly raped and the only viable career choice is selling their bodies. Actual Kazakhstani people were not amused by their country's portrayal.
- From the second Bridget Jones movie: she is in a women's prison in Thailand and all the other inmates talk casually about how their boyfriends abuse them.
- See also Bangkok Hilton, which is a female-centered version of Midnight Express.
- Kiss of the Dragon, a Jet Li vehicle set in Paris, plays this trope straight by having Bridget Fonda as a woman from some rural region in the US who was lured to France and ended up forced to work as a prostitute for the Big Bad. This may be more a part of the illegal immigration scare than "France is bad for women", as there is a strong narrative in France of "illegal immigrants end up enslaved by their smuggler".
- A particularly notorious use of the trope is the Hong Kong "Women in Prison" sexploitation flick Bamboo House of Dolls, in which the Japanese capture a bunch of American nurses in China during World War II and subject them and their Chinese cellmates to various forms of torture and sexual abuse. While several tens of thousand of women (including a few thousand ethnic-Europeans) really were made sex slaves for the IJA's use, besides the hundreds of thousands who were sexually assaulted in other capacities,
- 300 has the unfortunate Persian messenger astounded to see that the Spartans allow women (or at least, the queen) to speak at a council. This is generally assumed to be part of the film's attempt to portray the Greco-Persian war as an allegory for The War on Terror. In reality, while on the one hand Spartan women did enjoy more rights than in any other Greek city-state (Dido's line, "Only Spartan women give birth to real men," was directed at the Athenians in "historical" record), Persian women on the other hand enjoyed more rights than Spartan women at the time, and Spartan women were only given self-defense lessons because they believed that women who could fight gave birth to strong babies. On the other hand, the historical Queen Gorgo actually was an adviser for her husband, as well as the ruler before him.
- Ironically, according to the historian Herodotus it was the Macedonians who were offended when Persian guests insisted on eating meals together with women.
- Subverted in 300: Rise of an Empire, in which the Persian Empire is portrayed as egalitarian enough to have the Amazonian Dark Action Girl Queen Artemisia as Emperor Xerxes's Dragon-in-Chief and leading their fleet against the Athenians.
- The Afghani film Osama exposes much of the misogyny that was hidden from Western eyes during the reign of the Taliban. A member of the morality police whacks a woman on her husband's bike because her ankles are visible. Later we see that the protagonist's family is on the verge of starvation because all the men are dead and thus none of the women can leave the house because they don't have a male escort. They are starving to death with a market right down the street.
- Even though it wasn't the main theme of the film, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America briefly touches on the fact that women in the Confederate States of America never got the vote and, thanks to John Ambrose Fauntroy V's "Family Values" program, are allowed to be beaten by their husbands. (Compare that to Canada, who actually got the vote sooner because Susan B. Anthony emigrated to Canada.)
- Suffragette takes care to portray the suffrage movement's England in a nuanced way, but to any modern woman, it nevertheless comes across as misogynist hellhole, simply because it was like that. Especially the fact that the men have no scruples about violence against women, domestic violence as well as Police Brutality, and the protagonist's husband is legally entitled to give her child, for whom she is the primary carer, up for adoption without her consent makes England look way worse than in, say, Jane Austen's novels where those parts of reality are conveniently not mentioned. Not to mention the fact that the protagonist's employer is implied to rape all his underage employees, or at least the pretty ones, and get away with it. The fact that men are paid more than women for less work almost seems insignificant compared to the horrors of the time.
Literature
- Stepford, where guys kill their wives and replace them with "perfect" robot women.
- In The Goblin Emperor, the protagonist is the son of a woman who was married to the much older Emperor at 16, had the misfortune to get pregnant in the wedding night ... and spent the rest of her short life banished to some remote country estate because her husband hated her. Her father didn't even answer her letters, as, from his point of view (and legally) she was now her husband's property. It is later revealed that said Emperor had another wife banished from the court because she was barren, but did never legally divorce her (which would have allowed her to return to her family), even though he himself married again. When the protagonist asks his sister her opinion on being married off to a power-hungry nobleman, she is very surprised. One of the problems the protagonist has to deal with is the case of a woman who was engaged to his brother (who died in an accident) and thus does belong neither to her own family, nor the Emperor's family. Apparently no one ever cared enough to change the law to prevent this problem; the women to whom this happens are usually sent to join a convent.
- Gor most certainly is: women are prized as objects of conquest, so in places where the risk of sudden seizure is great, High Caste Free Women are heavily covered to make raiders uncertain if they're worth the risk and accompanied by security level tantamount to house arrest while slave girls are left exposed as the more attractive targets. In areas where the risk is slight (such as Torvaldsland, which is too cold for the flying Tarns, too rocky for mounted raiders, and longboat raids can be detected well in advance), the Free Women wear less cover and get ultimate political clout within their household... however, they can still be enslaved by their husbands. note
- The short story Taboos by Mary Caraker. Among other things, women are forbidden literacy.
- Subverted in The Belgariad. Garion initially reacts poorly on finding out that Nadrak society dictates that women should have male "owners"... until learning that "ownership" works out to what is essentially a mutually beneficial business relationship instead of slavery. Most Nadrak women carry several knives to "chastise" a man who gets carried away, an act that is regarded approvingly by other Nadraks. The Murgos may be a somewhat more accurate example, as their views on maintaining pure bloodlines require their womenfolk to be sequestered and locked up most of the time. However, we only see three Murgo women with any character depth in the whole series, and none are very accurate examples of the culture. This all turns out to be very deliberate, since The Belgariad itself firmly established the heroes' racism, and the Mallorean showed them that the rest of the world was never as cut-and-dried as they always believe.
- In L. Sprague de Camp's novel The Honorable Barbarian, princess Nogiri of Salimor comments that Kerin of Novaria, with whom she has just entered into a Citizenship Marriage, is an incredible man and husband and wonders why all Salimorese women don't go to Novaria to find such wonderful men. The primary reason she says this is that Kerin doesn't beat her when she argues with him.
- Margret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale gives us the future Dystopia of Gilead, where women are second and-third-class citizens whose status is determined by their fertility. Taking it a step further, lesbians, rebellious women, and women with compromised fertility (which is the majority of them due to contamination and disease) are forced into prostitution if they're lucky or sent to work as slaves in toxic environments until they die horribly if they're not. This is made more disturbing by the fact that those who are charged with the task of indoctrinating women into such a life of servitude, The Aunts, are other women.
- In Sorcerer To The Crown, only men are allowed to become sorcerers; magical talent is seen as very embarrassing in an upper class girl, and there is a school where young ladies are taught to not use magic, and even to use a spell based on an illegal, lethal spell on themselves to drain themselves of magic. (Though the protagonist, Zacharias, initially agrees that women should not be taught magic, the use of this spell horrifies him enough to reconsider his stance.)
- Vorkosigan Saga:
- Barrayar is a unique example where the No Woman's Land is both the protagonist's home country and is neither presented as a utopia nor dystopia, and they are becoming saner by the time of the story. Barrayaran women have no citizenship rights, and in Memory, when serving as the "Second" (read Best Man) at the Emperor Gregor's engagement party, Miles reads from a long list of traditional Admonitions to the bride which are clearly instructions for obedience. Pretty much every non-Barrayaran person Miles meets thinks of his country as a hellhole on this score. Then you meet Lady Alys, the Professora, etc. and learn law and practice are two different things.
- In Ethan of Athos, Athos is a planet composed entirely of men, no women allowed whatsoever. It was founded by a gynophobic sect of Christianity, making it a Cult Colony as well. Thanks to Uterine Replicator technology they can actually make it work, though a sudden shortage of viable eggs kicks off the plot of the short story "Ethan of Athos" as the aforementioned Ethan ventures into the wider galaxy in search of replacements. It's a bit of a learning experience for him.
- Grayson and Masada in the Honor Harrington stories are both introduced as gender-imbalanced worlds with obligate polygamy where women have no rights or access to education. The situation of women on Grayson and especially their marital arrangements are later portrayed in an idealized way, while Masada continues to be a rape-happy dystopia, though Grayson is more chivalrous than Masada, and that their other hat is adaptability. Thus after exposure to foreign powers and particularly seeing Honor in action, they begin reforms. Still, their world suffers from a high mortality rate among male infants, so plural marriages remain a fact of life.
- Sheri S. Tepper plays this trope for all it's worth. As her novels are primarily sci-fi/fantasy, example's of No Womans Land are not so much abroad as they are off-planet. Raising the Stones, Sideshow, Shadow's End, Gibbon's Decline and Fall offer examples of entire planets that are women-unfriendly. Subverted in Six Moon Dance.
- Janine Cross' Dragon Temple Trilogy one-ups Gor: Women aren't just considered property, they're disposable property. They work, eat, and sleep separately from men. They sleep on raised mats so that their "filthy female secretions" don't desecrate the soil. "Unclaimed" women (adult women not taken as wives) are subject to becoming sex slaves (which is an express ticket to a horrible, diseased death). Those women who do have power only have that which is granted by the men in their lives (powerful husbands or male relatives). Those with Dhjibi blood (denoted by mottled skin) are doubly-disposable. Naturally, in their own lands, the Dhjibi have more or less equality of the sexes.
- Sweden is portrayed like this in The Millennium Trilogy. If you're a female character in this trilogy, you will be discriminated against, abused, raped, and/or killed. There are no exceptions.
- A healthy bit of Fridge Horror as well, since the author was Swedish and supposedly based on the book on real observations. If Sweden, vaunted for its gender equality, is such a Crapsack Country, what about the rest of the world?
- Surprisingly enough, the Nome Kingdom in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, making this Older Than They Think. The Nomes are the sworn enemies of Oz (which is a matriarchy), and the Nomes make sure that anything feminine is verboten.
- The past is treated this way in Time Scout. Qurac is explicitly called as much. The downtimer Muslim cult is presented as rabidly misogynistic, especially hating the revived worship of Artemis because it has a female deity.
- Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley has a post-apocalyptic dystopian society whose Religion of Evil labels women as vessels of the Unholy Spirit and breeders of filth. If they give birth to deformed babies (which they usually do), they are brutally whipped and their babies are ritually sacrificed to Belial.
- Though averted in the canon Warrior Cats series, a plot in one roleplay is about a 'pseudoclan' (group of loners who are structured much like a Clan) called SkullClan which is basically this.
- In a story from the Star Wars Expanded Universe anthology Tales of the New Republic, Mara Jade accepts a mission to rescue a man's daughter from an extremely misogynistic and speciesist alien who loathes human women, and subjects them to extremely humiliating and abusive forced labor on his private moon. It's pretty clear where things go once the former Emperor's Hand infiltrates his slave pits...
- Dune:
- In general, most societies in the universe are patriarchal—outside of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood—with women exposed to socially sanctioned subordination and violence; but the worst by far are the Tleilaxu, who lobotomize all their female children and use genetic and biological engineering to convert them into giant, bloated, brainless uterus-machines used for organ regeneration and cloning. The Bene Tleilax are also viciously xenophobic and jingoistic about their racial superiority, justified in part by their misogynistic theology, as they despise other cultures—and in particular the Bene Gesserit—which do not subjugate their women as totally or as absolutely as the Tleilaxu do.
- Fremen society is patriarchal, and even though Fremen women are strong and fearless, they're still treated like subordinates. For example, a man dying at the hands of a woman is considered embarrassing, as Chani notes when she kills a man who wanted to duel with Paul in the first novel. Also, sietch leaders are always male. In Dune Messiah, Farok tells Scytale that Fremen sacrificed virgins to Shai-Hulud (a practice Farok thinks should return) before Liet-Kynes made them abolish the practice. Finally, male duel victors inherit the wives of their defeated foes as spoils of war, with the wives having no say in the matter. Some Fremen men have no qualms about rape through force or deception. In Dune Messiah, Farok's son gives semuta to Otheym's daughter "in the hope of winning a woman of the [Fremen] for himself despite his blindness." Farok speaks casually about the conquest of Naraj and his son's forced impregnation of Naraj women.
Farok: I find it curious, though, to know I have grandchildren on Naraj that I may never see.- The noble houses of Dune are rigidly patriarchal, headed only by men. Female nobles and concubines do find ways to manipulate events, but it is always behind the scenes. The noble houses also practice arranged marriage, or in Irulan's case, forced marriage.
- Even the all-female Bene Geserit sisterhood doesn't fully escape this trope. Granted, Reverend Mothers wield a great deal of power, and the sisterhood provides women with elite training and avenues for getting ahead. However, the sisterhood also exerts rigid control over initiates' sexual and reproductive lives for the sake of its selective breeding program, deciding who they will marry, who they will have sex with, and when and if they will bear children. The idea that initiates might have other plans is never considered.
- In It Can't Happen Here, the fascist Windrip regime robs women of many rights and bars them from most occupations, and the Minute Men (M.M.s) perpetrate atrocities against women with impunity. Lorinda and Sissy chafe under the regime's misogyny.
- Armethalieh in The Obsidian Trilogy is this, to the extent that the high mages go as far as to erase women mages' memories and block parts of their brains rather than let them use — or even admit that they are capable of using — magic.
- In Raymond E Feist's The Riftwar Cycle, there is an ethnic group called the Ashuntai who treat their women as property, to the point where women can be punished for wearing clothes.
- This makes it all the more interesting when we learn that they are part of the same empire as another Ethnic group, the Brijaners, who worship women as sacred.
- The settings of A Song of Ice and Fire are all hostile to women to varying extents, although Dorne is better than most and in at least one tribe of wildlings, women are encouraged to deal with an abusive husband by stabbing him in his sleep. The writer often uses female characters' story arcs to explore and criticize several sexist notions. For example, Sansa Stark becomes disillusioned when she realizes that highborn girls are treated like chattel by their fathers and husbands, Daenarys explicitly considers arranged marriage a form of slavery, and Arya witnesses firsthand the horrible brutality inflicted on peasant women. Cersei Lannister despite being in high position as Queen regent, her power and authority greatly depended on her son(s) being the king of Westeros, and she is mostly a pawn to other people, her Father Tywin Lannister, along with Littlefinger and Varys.
- Subverted in The Stormlight Archive. While there are many societal roles that women are banned from filling (women can't be soldiers, rulers, or most kinds of artisan, for example), there are equally important societal roles that men are banned from filling. For example, it is considered profoundly immoral for men to learn to read or write, meaning that nearly all scholarly pursuits are woman-exclusive.
- Played with in the Terok Nor novel series. Cardassian women typically aren't allowed to serve as active duty military or other similarly dangerous jobs after marriage, and infertile women typically have the marriage annulled and are outcast (as happens to Corat Damar's fiancee Veja Ketan in Night of the Wolves). However, Malyn Ocett, a gulnote as of Star Trek: The Next Generation, actually joined the military because she was barren (and thus poor marriage material), and Cardassians view women as being superior to men at science and engineering occupations.
- Although dragon society in general operates as this trope in Tooth and Claw, the capital region of Irieth is specifically implied to be especially harsh and unwelcoming to female dragons. Maiden dragons are at great risk of being made dinner for larger, more powerful males if a particularly overbearing standard of beauty and dowager value isn't met, though worse is reputed to take place. Marriage markets exist where maidens are sold off to the highest bidders, and to a more unseemly degree, there exist concubinnages that also sell compromised maidens - all with the blessing of the draconic culture's Church.
- Alexis Carew: New London has a habit of encouraging people with backwards ideas to go to other planets and colonize them instead of combating the ideas, which means that sexism is much more common and accepted on the Fringe, up to and including banning women from inheritance (which is unconstitutional, but enforcement is lax to nonexistent). Naturally, this means that Alexis frequently takes crap just for having two X chromosomes, though she tends to win over the common spacers with her A Mother to Her Men tendencies. Exaggerated in Mutineer when she is taken aboard by Captain Neals, who makes it his personal mission to drive her to resignation. This is not true of the other major star nations: the first recurring Hanoverese officer we're introduced to, Balestra, is a female commodore. Women are also more common in New London's Army, since they have the attitude that if the Army is needed within New London's space, then they've got bigger fish to fry than worrying about pissing off some male-chauvinist fringeworld lord.
Live-Action TV
- A Dr. Phil arc featured a girl (about 19) who moved to the Middle East to marry a boy she'd met on the Internet. The point was heavily delivered that if she married him while over there, she would lose all her rights as a person. So her parents smuggled her back and revoked her passport and had her date an American boy. It was basically said by Phil that Arab men seek out American women to brainwash and hold hostage. In another episode where the girl was featured, it turned out they were right.
- Firefly:
- In the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds", Saffron says that on her planet a woman is always subservient to the male until her father/brother uses her as payment for something, or sells her. This may or may not be true, but the crew of Serenity certainly buys her story.
- "Heart of Gold" features a planet (or at least those in charge) of Straw Misogynists, to the point that working in a brothel is seen as a better life for those who work there simply because the owner is a woman who treats them with basic human decency.
- Implied in one episode of How I Met Your Mother.
Barney: At one point, I'm pretty sure I sold a woman. I didn't speak the language, but I shook a guy's hand, he gave me the keys to a Mercedes, and I left her there.
- Stargate SG-1:
- Played very anviliciously in the early episode "Emancipation" which featured Samantha Carter becoming a Blithe Spirit on a planet with this as their hat.
- Also occurs with the Jaffa. "Birthright" introduces Ishta and the Hak'tyl ("liberation"), a group of female Jaffa who have fled the domain of Moloch, a Goa'uld who has female infants put to death. Ishta also tells Teal'c that she is from a world where "women aren't held in such high regard", that she was one wife of many, and that she was mistreated. Later, after the downfall of the Goa'uld, Ka'lel (the representative of the Hak'tyl to the Jaffa high council) reveals that many regions oppose giving any rights to female Jaffa.
- The BBC miniseries Occupation toyed with this — one of the British ex-soldiers who returned to Afghanistan states that the problem with Afghan culture is that "they've got no respect for women". As he says this, he is framed by the camera sitting in his office, which has several objectifying pin-ups plastered all over the wall behind him. However it's also played uncomfortably straight when the most central female character is fridged by the boy who prompted this comment. Evidence would suggest that
- A particularly horrifying example in "The Screwfly Solution," an episode of Masters of Horror directed by Joe Dante and based on a story by James Tiptree, Jr., aka Alice Sheldon. Every man on the planet becomes violently misogynistic and kills every woman they can find, ending the future of the human race. This is later revealed to be an alien Hate Plague plot to depopulate the Earth and take over.
- Angel:
- The season 1 episode "She" featured female demons, who turned out to be refugees from another dimension, where the female of the species has her personality removed when she comes of age to make them easier to control. This is done by removing part of their spine, and renders the subject docile.
- In the season 3 episode "Billy", the touch of the episode's villain turns men (including a couple of the protagonists) into murderous misogynists. In this case, it wasn't so much horrifying as it was anvilicious.
- In Star Trek, the Ferengi exemplify this trope to an extreme. Ferengi women aren't allowed to handle money, think for themselves, or wear clothes. They also pre-chew their sons' food. This begins to change when one Ferengi woman points out that the society is handicapping its ability to turn a profit by disenfranchising half its population. Given that the planet's hat is materialism, this is seen as a very valid point, and begins to bring about change.
- The JAG episode Head to Toe centers on this. A female soldier is defending herself on not wearing an abaya, and arguments are made for abiding by the culture and appeasing terrorists (Osama bin Laden is even quoted as Americans in the Middle East being cause for Jihads, meaning the abayas will protect women) and against the subjugation of women and treatment of foreigners. When Mac is subjected to this poor treatment she sides with the defendant.
- Here's The West Wing's C.J. Cregg, responding to an incident in the show based on the 2002 Makkah girls' school fire“Outraged? I’m barely surprised. This is a country where women aren’t allowed to drive a car. They’re not allowed to be in the company of any man other than a close relative. They’re required to adhere to a dress code that would make a Maryknoll nun look like Malibu Barbie. They beheaded 121 people last year for robbery, rape, and drug trafficking. No free press, no elected government, no political parties. And the royal family allows the religious police to travel in groups of six, carrying nightsticks, and they freely and publicly beat women. But ‘Brutus is an honorable man.’ Seventeen schoolgirls were forced to burn alive because they weren’t wearing the proper clothing. Am I outraged? No, Steve. No, Chris. No, Mark. That is Saudi Arabia, our partners in peace.” ...
- The adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale has the Republic of Gilead, where woman cannot own property, work, read or write, or do anything else freely, and effectively have no rights now. If fertile they're turned into a Handmaid - a breeding slave. Others are Wives, or Marthas (domestic servants). The unlucky ones are sent to the Colonies for a slow death from radiation poisoning as they clean up toxic waste. Flashbacks show scenes of the process of women losing their rights, where Offred's (then June) credit and debit cards stop working, and all the women are then fired from their jobs under the eyes of armed guards.
Mythology and Religion
- Subverted in The Bible. While the scriptures were written by relatively patriarchal cultures and do have a number of examples of mistreatment of women (and have been misused to justify it), this is generally disapproved of, particularly in the New Testament.
- Ephesians 5:22-33 is often quote mined as saying "Wives, submit to your husbands". People who quote that line tend to conveniently forget the part right after that where Paul says, "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church."
- Another of the Epistles actually states that wives are not to just put up with an un-Christian husband, but rather to work to convert him if possible (with the implication being that if all else fails, get out of there).
Newspaper Comics
Tabletop Games
- One of the many, many flaws in FATAL is turning medieval Europe into one of these. Granted, the Dark Ages weren't known for their contributions to Women's Liberation, but... half of the world's males being rapists? And getting less punishment than a wife keeping a disorderly house? Really?
- The female Skaven seen in Warhammer have been relegated into mindless sex slaves and breeding machines. The person who created the brood mothers has pointed out that although they're the only females explicitly mentioned, that doesn't mean they're the only female Skaven that exist, but it doesn't make their situation any less horrifying.
- Bretonnia is a chivalric medieval version of this trope: Women are considered second-class citizens that are not allowed to own property, fight, or take any part in politics, but men are also expected to open doors for them, protect them, and be courteous to them. It should be noted this mostly applies to the noble class, as the peasants tend to be more egalitarian as a simple matter of pragmatism (Bretonnian peasants aren't allowed to own property, fight, or get involved in politics anyway). Naturally, citizens of The Empire (which has gender equality as a basic right) use this trope on them a lot. It's balanced out somewhat by Bretonnian spellcasters being exclusively female (they're the result of young girls being taken into the forests and brought back... different; young boys taken the same way are never seen again).
- In Spawn Of Fashan, the basic rules assume that your character is male. If you want to play a female, you have to divide your die rolls for strength by 2, and multiply your die rolls for charisma by 1.5. Since the rules are already obscure and hard-to-follow enough as it is, most players (if there were any) would choose to play a male just because it would simplify their lives. (But don't worry, the game isn't sexist, because the authors say in the introduction that they're not sexist so it must be true.)
- Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game by White Wolf says female trolls are just breeding stock and property used to make more trolls. World of Warcraft heavily disagrees however, as there are many female trolls leaders like Arlokk, Mar'li, Lor'khan, Jeklik, and Primal Torntusk in various troll tribes, various troll males treating
- In Spelljammer, the Romani equivalents known as Aperusa are like this. Men get all the glory and are unequivocally in charge, whilst women do all of the actual work of keeping their ships and families running. There are also separate rules for men and women — for example, widowers are encouraged to remarry, but widows are expected to take lifelong vows of chastity. It's also noted that Aperusa men love to seduce gullible, ignorant women who fall for the "romanticism" of the Aperusa lifestyle, only to find out after the wedding that they've condemned themselves to a life of backbreaking labor looking after a vain, lecherous, quasi-space-gypsy.
- In Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, this is what happens in any area where the highly misogynistic Demon Lord Kostchtchie is worshipped. Women are second-class, fit only for breeding strong sons and waiting on their menfolk.
Videogames
- Caesar's Legion in Fallout: New Vegas. Women are pretty much just to cook, mend wounds, be sex toys, and make more little barbarian legionnaires. They are explicitly stated to be nothing but property; every woman in the Legion is a slave who is raped, beaten, and brutalized by soldiers daily. If you play a female character and side against the Legion, en masse Death by Irony will ensue upon the Legion. The real kicker here is that one of the female slaves in the Legion's stronghold will warn you that some of the Legion soldiers are planning on raping YOU if you play as a female character.
- As a side note, there was originally a plan to have female priestesses in the Legion's Imperial Cult, but this didn't wind up being shown in the final game and it's unknown if it's still canon.
- In Faria, the town of Beig will outright deny you from entering due to your main character being female. After you defeat the Wizard and break the curse that transformed you into a woman to prevent his prophesied defeat, you will be allowed to enter.
- Intentionally exaggerated by Amita in Far Cry 4: Yes, Kyrat was a horribly misogynistic country where girls were expected to be engaged at the age of six, but the religion that enforces this worships a goddess as their Crystal Dragon Jesus, and the effective pope of the land was always a woman by tradition. In recent years, the reign of tyrant leader Pagan Min has pushed La Résistance to enlist female soldiers, and the arena is run by topless ladies with assault rifles.
- The modern Island of Yamatai in Tomb Raider (2013) is a literal no-woman's land because the male inhabitants would promptly sacrifice any females who had the misfortune to wash ashore in an attempt to appease the Goddess Himiko.
Webcomics
- This turns out to be the case in at least one of the Puritan Territories called Sybion in Collar 6, Laura's homeland. Because of a severe gender imbalance, women are required to submit to men sexually
- Twokinds: Wolf clans are extremely sexist; Natani had to hide her gender because they wouldn't accept female soldiers. Everywhere else has equal-gender rights, even if racism is at an all-time high during the story. Though, the Basitins segregate the men's houses from the women's, but that's mainly because they have a low libido so it works out.
- Unsounded Duane Adelier's home country of Alderode doesn't give you a ton of options if you're female; women are meant to be wives and mothers (or if they're of the Platinum caste, 'encouraged' to go into the sex trade) and little else. They're not expected to have jobs, and they're not allowed to own property, vote or even use pymary, this world's version of magic. It says a lot when a woman's best option for real power and autonomy is to choose to become a Third Option and legally become a man; plenty of women from the Copper caste, who are relatively more liberated thanks to their long lifespans, take this route. The other countries on the continent, particularly the matriarchal Cresce, condemn such misogyny.
Western Animation
- In the King of the Hill episode "Joust Like a Woman," Peggy fought for women's rights at the Arlen Renaissance Faire run by a misogynistic real estate developer who fancies himself a king. The Faire is like a whole 'nother country, and while the real Middle Ages weren't always the friendliest era when it came to women's rights, the real estate guy goes overboard with it.
- In Batman: Gotham Knight, the flashback sequences of the "Working Through Pain" vignette where Bruce Wayne goes to India for pain-control training seemed to be set in one of these. The female mentor Bruce Wayne seeks out is a pariah by her local community because she dared to undergo Training from Hell reserved for Men Only. This is in spite of the fact that in real life India women who make it as female warriors are highly respected and have led entire armies as far back the twelfth century.
- In American Dad!, Francine stands up to the treatment of Saudi women with a musical number, and gets arrested for singing in public and dressing indecently. Later Haley gets arrested for beating up a guy who she thought was terrorist but actually works in a shawarma stand. (Note: she didn't beat him because she thought he was a terrorist, she beat him because he wasn't; he had led her to believe that he was and she dug that). Steve sells Roger (dressed as a woman) into sex slavery, and it's treated as perfectly normal.
- Mulan combines this with Deliberate Values Dissonance in its depiction of ancient China.
- Beauty and the Beast shows that France in the 1800s is not kind to a girl like Belle, as everyone considers her crazy for liking to read and back Gaston in his behavior towards her, even though he does things that are rude at best and worthy of a restraining order at most drastic. The only people who consider Belle's opinions or desires are her father (who's also considered crazy), the castle servants, and the Beast.
- The Thief and the Cobbler: The Rape, Pillage, and Burn Always Chaotic Evil Proud Warrior Race Guy One-Eyes use their own women only as entertainment (via exotic dancing and presumably something else) and furniture (no, really) for the male soldiers. A deleted scene from The Recobbled Cut reveals that the contortionist women that the One-Eye leader uses for his throne get even at the end by screaming "Throne! Throne!" and then all sitting on him all at once, squashing him to death.