OOC - Wrath of Trees

[sythyry]

The world and people of Wrath of Trees are annoying me more and more, so thought I'd annoy you some, too.

The main intelligent species of Kono is sexually dimorphic. Rather a lot: men average 6' tall and wiry, with colorful wattles; women average 4' tall and rather plump, but with plainer coloration. Sex roles are quite distinct, too, and in almost-familiar ways: e.g., reading and writing are female things; most physical jobs are male things.

Also, women have an estrous cycle. They compare being on heat to being hungry: they want satisfaction, and they're certainly easier to seduce than at other times, but heat doesn't override intelligence or free will or conscience or common sense. Estrous women are not (generally) slutty, either by their standards or by the reader's, and the book isn't a parade of sexual adventures. (I'm not Jack Chalker.) I do plan to explore what this does to social institutions, and of course it will be relevant for some plots; it's an integral part of Kono culture.

Now, RL, I'm as egalitarian as possible under the circumstances -- yeah, I work days and my wife takes care of Rhys days, but that wasn't inevitable. I'm vaguely gender dysphoric. I'd really hate being either gender on Kono. Some authors' treatments of sexual dimorphism annoy me in ways that seem to reflect badly on the author -- Larry Niven's races with nonsentient females, for one.

And philosophically it shouldn't bother me, the way I'm doing it. There is certainly "men's work" and "women's work" on Kono, but by having intellectual and administrative stuff on the female side -- and by some of consequences of the estrous cycle -- neither sex dominates the other to the degree that, say, human men dominate human women in most human cultures.

Now, to some extent it is good that I find it disturbing. Melyl, the narrator, isn't that kind of girl -- she's not even in the same phylum. She has an outsider's perspective on Kono society. She doesn't like it very much. Admittedly, for different reasons, but it's probably helpful for writing if our opinions are similar.

Anyways, what do you think about sexual dimorphism, estrous cycles, and the real-life politics thereof?

[Poll #658749]

Comments

[mazlynn.livejournal.com]

I'm a biologist, so well written novels in which interesting societies develop as a direct consequence of interesting biology intrigues me. I see nothing disturbing or offensive in exploring those worlds in a novel of the type you describe.

As another commenter mentioned, it depends a lot on how the author handles the situation. If the author seems to be using the fictional world setting as a thinly veiled "and this is the way it SHOULD be" propaganda, then I get extremely annoyed at it. But given the way you're likely to handle it, I don't see that as being a problem at all. Especially since you will have the outsider perspective to insert the occasional "but WHY is it this way" comment.

If it really bothers you, you could always do something silly like flipping around what you call the genders, so the tall strong "females" do the penguin thing and hand the kid off to the small, drab, "male" right away. But authors that do that without some story/world setting/philosophy reason behind it always seem to be trying too hard. Plus, the readers tend to think of the characters that act the way we expect males to act as males anyway, so it doesn't buy you much.