In the titular Flatland, women are line segments and men are polygons with various side lengths and angles. Even in such a simple world, social hierarchies and inequality persist. Social status is determined by a man's regularity of shape and their number of sides. Women, as line segments, are considered dangerous because they can disappear from view and wound others with their end points. In addition to its social critique, Flatland has also been widely praised by scientists like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking as a useful thought experiment for conceptualizing life in higher and lower dimensions.