Man

In prehistoric times men did the hunting, supplied the food, fought off invaders, weathered the elements and generally provided for their families. Women were revered for their fertility. This had been the natural progression; there was no conscious aversion to placing either gender in a different role, it just happened that way. The way it worked was not very different from Homo Sapiens’s ancestors: natural selection.
This continued throughout the ages. Men defended their houses, villages and communities. Wars were fought, nations were defended and ice ages were overcome thanks to efforts put forth by men. Slowly but surely, advances were made: new weapons, new armor and new equipment. In hindsight the pattern could have been discerned from this point on.
Armies followed strategies, crossbows and catapults were invented, wheels and boats were used, fortifications were built. Strength, however, was still the chief attribute of the survival of any society. The longbow was ingenious, but it needed a strong arm, shoulder and footing. Through time, however, this tended to occur less and less.
Muskets and pistols did not need strong muscles. Cars and tanks neither, not to mention planes. After a number of centuries computers were used more and more to operate machinery for warfare and defense. It was clear by this point that brains were much more important than brawn. Activities from farming to conquest were progressively automatic.
Around the same time men started acting differently. Having brute strength was no longer an advantage. It did not accomplish much in life and it did not attract the opposite sex. Men started exercising their brain and started realizing that women were capable of everything they were, for the first time in human history.
Well, that’s not exactly true; it had been happening throughout history, mostly in spurts of realizations. Plato talked about how women differed from men in physical attributes, but had the same intellectual abilities as the best of men, and should therefore be assigned the same vital functions in society. Thomas More’s Utopia, though not as progressive, had women involved in government, labor and battle. Voltaire was attracted to Émilie du Châtelet because of her intellectual genius (most probably far greater than his). Despite all this, however, women received the vote in most countries only when all counter arguments had been exhausted, and even then with great reluctance.
Women could run a country, conduct a war, explore new frontiers, till the land, provide food, defend a society, weather the elements and perform any other activity needed for human survival. Men started acting less like men had acted traditionally, and more like women. Men did not concentrate on their physical prowess; they eschewed violence and prided themselves in their domesticity and care for their environment.
It was shortly after this that the change happened. At the time it was called the Misconception, among many other names: parthenogenesis was the proper term. What was clear, however, was that this was one of the most drastic evolutionary jumps, if not the most drastic, in the history of humans and all mammals. Some women were worshipped as new Madonna’s, while others were reviled as whores. Some had followings, while others were executed. Their children were treated in the same manner. Nevertheless, the trend became evident and undeniable: women were conceiving by themselves.
What started out as tragedy and fear slowly became increasingly controlled. From the great Misconception women soon learned how to have more and more power over their pregnancies, while medicines perfected this mechanism. This was going hand in hand with another concurrent phenomenon: almost all the newborns were females.
At this point it did not take much intellect to decipher what was occurring. Rape, Sexual assaults, molestations, Syphilis, AIDS, prostitution, spousal abuse would all be things of the past. No more bikinis, no more Burkas. And an entire gender would be erased from existence.
To recount the number of scientific studies and experiments which occurred in an attempt to reverse this trend would be useless. Heads of state talked of promoting the male gender. Couples were encouraged and enticed to produce male children. The change, however, was inevitable.
And now here I lie. The last male specimen. I have spent my life in seclusion because of the danger I am to myself for being what I am. The women I had contact with would stare at me intently, stroke my cheek to measure its coarseness, listen to my voice with curiosity. They would ask me about my sports skills and my male organs.
After my death, which is rapidly approaching, males will be consigned to history books, at which point we will be akin to fictional characters, such as fairies and ogres, or a sub-species: Cro-Magnons or Australopithecus.
I do not know if there is a God. I do not know what life means. I have stopped hoping that the male gender will recreate itself. Parthenogenesis has occurred in insect and plant species in the past, although a gender in itself has never become extinct by itself.

Nothing endures but change.
Heraclitus