A party of men set out in search of women, who have apparently wandered away and whom none of them have ever seen in person.
This feels like a satirical sibling of Joanna Russ’s “The Female Man” and “When It Changed,” seen from the point of view of the woman-less male society: self-important, ignorant, bumbling, but somehow touchingly earnest. They have strange notions of what the female separatists might be doing (I like the image of them living in giant underground kitchens), and why they disappeared (their psychoanalyst images low self-esteem must be a big part of it). When the party is called off, ostensibly for lack of funding, there’s an air of relief that they’ve abandoned their mission before completing it, the wild women imagined as monstrous and terrifying. Better to go back to base and collect their pay and medals …