The Ends of Men

Article here. MRAs have been refuted by feminists and others when they have asserted that there is indeed a subset of feminism that wants to see "the Final Solution" to the "man problem": our very existence. If there is no such trend in feminism, then why are there literally dozens of books depicting men as disappeared and a "better world" arising from it? Excerpt:

'“When the men disappeared, it felt like nothing,” reflects Jane Pearson in the first line of Sandra Newman’s new novel The Men. But more than a hundred years of literary history tell us that what follows will not be nothing. The Men was the subject of online debate earlier this year when Newman announced its premise on Twitter: “everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly, mysteriously disappears.”

Indeed, Newman’s characters walk through all the familiar beats of the “all men vanish or die” plot: the disaster in workplaces dominated by males, like operating rooms and oil refineries; the grief and fear and occasional guilty excitement of the women who are left over; the emergence of factions; the interesting adjustments such remnants might make in their sexual relationships in a post-hetero world. Newman’s not pretending she’s new to this territory; in her acknowledgments, she thanks Joanna Russ, Alice Sheldon (who wrote as James Tiptree Jr.), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sheri Tepper, lauding them as writers who explored the idea that “there should be no men.” But there have been so many more. Recently, I read more than 20 of these books—thousands of pages of worlds erased of the unfairer sex. Often, the theme felt exhausted and repetitive, though sometimes, when I found myself immersed in a book that did something new with this idea and my husband interrupted me to ask where he put his wallet, I got it. Why is this plot so durable? And, after all these years, has it finally lost its bite?'