It’s like Girls’ Night Out, but one step (or 12 steps) further…

The Chinese government, ever on the watch for how to enhance tourism to a country that was for centuries known as the one where the women bind their feet and where girl babies had less of a chance at survival in the male-dominated culture, seems to have found a theme park angle as yet unexplored by the Disney Corporation. As reported by Reuters:

Chinese tourism authorities are seeking investment to build a novel concept attraction — the world’s first “women’s town,” where men get punished for disobedience, an official said Thursday. The 2.3-square-km Longshuihu village in the Shuangqiao district of Chongqing municipality, also known as “women’s town,” was based on the local traditional concept of “women rule and men obey,” a tourism official told Reuters.

[…] The motto of the new town would be “women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women’s requests,” Chinese media have reported. When tour groups enter the town, female tourists would play the dominant role when shopping or choosing a place to stay, and a disobedient man would be punished by “kneeling on an uneven board” or washing dishes in restaurant, media reports said.

At the risk of inflaming my male readers and inciting my female readers into a feeding frenzy, I wonder if there might be anything to creating a place that is constructed as a women-governed area, at least as a place where women are, by law, elevated to equality or superiority over men. Most men and women acknowledge the need to bond with their friends–heterosexual men may do it over beers or Monday night football, heterosexual women might do it over margaritas and Sex and the City marathons; lesbians might seek out a bar environment where they show the L-Word on large screens, while gay men might also enjoy margaritas over Sex and the City marathons. (Of course, I’m not saying only straight people like certain things and only gay people like certain things, so back off, people. I’m not stereotyping, I’m illustrating.) But the point is, sometimes it’s just important to spend time with other people like you.

This women’s town isn’t that exactly, it’s more theme parky, which I’m not sure I’m loving. And instead of correcting an imbalance in the power structure between men and women it goes the other way, creating an imbalance of an inverse proportion–there’s still superiority of one gender over another more submissive one, instead of declaring that all human beings are created equal. Maybe the Chinese know their audience a little better than I do–perhaps they’re aware that such equality or superiority can only exist within theme park boundaries, but perhaps there’s something to carving out gender-specific space in our lives.