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| - It's a fact that throughout history, humans have dwelled in mostly patriarchal societies where the males are dominant. But Earth is a diverse place. In the parts of the insect world that are organized, the females rule (the others are loners). In colonies, females -- or sometimes the genderless -- are the only ones who have any semblance of a life with a job and purpose and are responsible for all the work involved in running things (building, foraging, defending from outsiders, what-have-you). The males? They have sex and then die - or are eaten. But that's not how it is in the human world... most of the time, anyway.
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| abstract
| - It's a fact that throughout history, humans have dwelled in mostly patriarchal societies where the males are dominant. But Earth is a diverse place. In the parts of the insect world that are organized, the females rule (the others are loners). In colonies, females -- or sometimes the genderless -- are the only ones who have any semblance of a life with a job and purpose and are responsible for all the work involved in running things (building, foraging, defending from outsiders, what-have-you). The males? They have sex and then die - or are eaten. But that's not how it is in the human world... most of the time, anyway. When an insect society like that of ants or bees is depicted in fantasy media, the hero of the story will usually be... a male worker? The fact that the workers in Hymenopteran social insect colonies (ants, bees, wasps, etc.) are all females, and the only males exist to fertilize the queen and quickly die after this mission is complete, sometimes by the queen ripping the male's genitalia out of his body, seems to have no bearing on the need for making the hero a male. After all, you NEED a "Male Lead" who can go out on adventures and save princesses. And as the only actual males in an anthill spend their entire lives doing nothing but providing the queen with a constant supply of genetic material... makes it hard to set up any kind of adventure-hooks. Furthermore, it would seem like there's an even split between males to females, when usually there are barely a few hundred males for thousands of females in most insect societies due to the nature of how sexes are decided. (Did anyone bother to actually do the research? No.) And don't expect the "exist solely to have sex and die" thing to get anything more than a passing Double Entendre. It probably doesn't help that, in common slang, a "drone" is someone or something who works mindlessly, so a lot of people think that "worker bees" (the females who work) and "drones" (the males who do a different kind of work) are just different names for the same thing. All in all, if you're a human female (and/or beekeeper), it's enough to really bug you (if you'll pardon the Incredibly Lame Pun). Of course, it's not quite as simple as all that. Termites have male workers, but Termite Movie probably isn't going to sell well. There are also bees, such as the Alfalfa Leafcutter, which have a one-to-one sex ratio, but they don't make honey or build hives. They're the freaky loners of the bee world. OK, so insects don't have human language, human facial expressions, human social dynamics etc. either. All those aspects are anthropomorphised, so why not impose human gender politics on Bee People as well? This particular departure from reality is harder to forgive because, unlike granting insects human speech, it's not necessary at all to telling the story - they could easily have an Action Girl heroine. Maybe it's related to other hive-worshiping issues, like portraying a hive as an absolute monarchy (where the "queen" is of course the ruler - as opposed to simply a creature specialized as a reproductive and secretory organ of the collective-organism) or as a sort of republic, depending on the author's preference. Social/political interpretations (and their flexibility) apply to drones as well - the writers may simply have baulked at the idea of portraying males more realistically as disposable mating machines, especially in a family film. On the flipside, since nearly all the members of these species (aside from queens, future queens, and drones) are sterile, the gender by which they are depicted when anthropomorphised is somewhat ambiguous to begin with (they are only considered biologically 'female' as a result of their technical genetic structure and vestigial, or modified beyond all recognition, physiological characteristics). But that justification just brings up the matter of why your sterile, androgynous characters are all of a sudden striking up romantic relationships with each other (and wait... aren't they all sisters?) And let's definitely not even get us started on biting male mosquitoes. Only female mosquitoes bite. A hilariously flawed combination of You Fail Biology Forever and Most Writers Are Male. Possibly the most extreme form of The Smurfette Principle. Examples of Insect Gender Bender include:
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