Well, in Gate to Women's Country the system is that the men live in barracks outside the town, except for male servants. The women inside the town run everything--food, trades, learning, etc.--while the men defend the town from raids and the occasional war with a neighboring town. Every year or season or something* there's a festival outside the walls and the warriors and women have sex. Girl children stay inside the town, boy children are handed over to the men before puberty* and are inculcated in their warrior cult. At puberty, the boys have the option to choose to re-enter the town as servants, forswearing weapons. They are seen as weak by the warriors, serving women and never having sons.
Only, it turns out that actually none of the warriors are ever permitted to father children--only the servants who have forsworn violence and proved themselves capable of living in the peaceful society that the women have created. And the women of the neighboring towns negotiate wars to happen whenever their barracks get too full, or there is talk among the men of taking over the town--they're not wars, they are cullings. The women have engaged in this project in order to breed the aggressive traits out of men.
In Gibbons Decline and Fall the alien-derived solution is simply to enable parthenogenesis in human women, so that men are no longer necessary to reproduction and will no longer be created at all.
In several other of her books, men (or at least the ruling PTB men) are complicit in permitting aliens to harvest humans--often children--for their nefarious alien purposes.
What I find insidious--at least for me, personally--is that Tepper is a fine storyteller with very sympathetic characters, so it's very easy for me to get drawn along, going "yeah, yeah" and then get to the resolution and be left feeling a mighty "ewww!" Not to mention all the scientific objections one might raise.
*It's been a while, so the details may be off, but you get the idea.
Major spoilers
Only, it turns out that actually none of the warriors are ever permitted to father children--only the servants who have forsworn violence and proved themselves capable of living in the peaceful society that the women have created. And the women of the neighboring towns negotiate wars to happen whenever their barracks get too full, or there is talk among the men of taking over the town--they're not wars, they are cullings. The women have engaged in this project in order to breed the aggressive traits out of men.
In Gibbons Decline and Fall the alien-derived solution is simply to enable parthenogenesis in human women, so that men are no longer necessary to reproduction and will no longer be created at all.
In several other of her books, men (or at least the ruling PTB men) are complicit in permitting aliens to harvest humans--often children--for their nefarious alien purposes.
What I find insidious--at least for me, personally--is that Tepper is a fine storyteller with very sympathetic characters, so it's very easy for me to get drawn along, going "yeah, yeah" and then get to the resolution and be left feeling a mighty "ewww!" Not to mention all the scientific objections one might raise.
*It's been a while, so the details may be off, but you get the idea.