Krista Heflin is a blonde, Southern college student; she drinks Keystone Light, oozes over cats and laughs at her own jokes. In her red and zebra print bedroom, she talks candidly about her high school friends and busy college schedule— and how she wants to systematically decrease the population of men to 10 percent of the entire world’s population.

Heflin, the self-titled “Femitheist,” has started a 20,000-strong following on YouTube, proselytizing about her theory. Over centuries of time, through “sperm reserves,” selective abortion and genetic engineering, she hopes to build a majority female population. In her utopia, basic human necessities are provided by the state and females are indoctrinated to be peace-loving, egalitarian lesbians. Ten percent of the male population would be saved for breeding.

“If I am considered a radical today,” she says via email, “It is only because the world is mistaken. I espouse what ought to be, not what the misguided erroneously believe is right. They have faith in a deeply flawed, self-destroying and inferior system, and I do not.”

 It’s Not Personal

 Heflin— who asks that most of the details about her personal information be withheld because of the many threats she is faced with— says that contrary to the speculation from most, her ideals are not products from traumatic personal experiences. Instead, she says it’s based on the simple desire to make men safer in order to create a better world.  

“A great deal of violence is carried out against men, by other men... and even some women,” she says “Most documented crime and violence is, and has essentially always been, male-on-male or male-on-female.”

It’s true: the US Department of Justice estimates males are the victim and perpetrator in 90 percent of physical assaults and 90 percent of homicides.

Although Heflin says her intentions are rooted in general good for the world, her history is hard to ignore. Heflin’s father died when she was young, and her mother was hooked on crystal meth and in and out of jail throughout her childhood. She writes it off as it if it didn’t impact her much, and she smiles and shrugs while explaining a brief stint in a foster home. She casually explains one time during high school when she accidentally fell into bed with a younger guy while drunk, and later found out in a Walmart bathroom that she was pregnant. During her first year of college, she gave birth to a baby girl. 

Today, she cares for the child without help from the father, who she says has never shown interest in paying child support or seeing the child. She says, too, that she has no interest in his involvement in her child's life. Heflin has a new boyfriend who she says is not involved with her theorizing because, as she puts it: “Who would want to date The Femitheist?”

Faking Suicide

In 2012, Heflin became discouraged by the amount of backlash she received and decided to put an end to her virtual persona by faking her own death. She posted her own obituary on multiple sites— including that it was death by suicide— and had friends make announcements. In doing so, she started rumors in radical feminist circles on blogs and forums, who made her out as a martyr for women’s rights: a scorned, innocent girl bullied by men’s rights activists— therefore perpetuating the need for her cause. After weeks watching wild rumors snowball online, Heflin resurrected herself to quash the chatter and continue her work.

 Is She Legitimate?

With a rocky past and an extreme “global initiative”— as she calls it— with tens of thousands of followers, should her plan be taken seriously? This isn’t the first time women have wondered about a world without men. The question has risen in recent years when in 2004, a mouse was reproduced through all-female DNA and in 2008 when a genetics professor at Oxford University found the Y chromosome— the chromosome that makes a human a male— is deteriorating and may disappear. From war to literature to sex, ABC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Atlantic and The New York Times picked apart what the world would be like without men.

Unilaterally, they found countries would be less likely to go to war, there would be far less violence of every type but that ultimately, they wouldn’t want to see that world at all.

A world without men, however rosy the picture could be painted— without violence or war or trauma, without sexual harassment or man-splaining or cat-calling— would be a world without half of the population’s thinkers, doers, lovers and friends. The condemning of an entire population based on one facet of its social impact is the same struggle civil and human rights activists work so hard to quell. To reduce any gender, race or religion to one purpose in life to make the lives of everyone else easier is a simplistic solution to social tensions, and was decidedly not OK in the 1860s with the abolition of slavery in the United States, in 1945 with the end of the Holocaust and then again in 1994 when the world witnessed the mass slaughter of Rwandan Tutsis and Hutus.

Perhaps In Time

Years ago, Heflin started her first firestorm with a proposal to create “International Castration Day” (ICD) with the same goal in mind: to deplete testosterone to stop what she sees as masculinity-inspired violence. She wrote it because “[she] was extremely irritated one day,” she says, and later took it down because she simply changed her mind.

“I’ve changed a lot as a person since then,” Heflin says. “I never really considered it a serious proposal...The objectives that I espouse now were always what I cared about in one way or another, and I’d reached a point where ICD was far too inconsistent with the rest of what I have now to keep it around.”

So perhaps, in the same way Heflin’s previous theories have evolved from angry rants, her subsequent theories will be scrutinized by her opposition, deleted and molded into something less genocidal. 

Author Bio:

Stephanie Stark, a contributing writer at Highbrow Magazine, is a freelance writer and web producer out of New York City. Her work focuses on social, religious and gender issues in the US. Follow her at @stephanie_stark.This article was first posted in astarkreality.com.