Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

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Firebird766
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Firebird766 »

Dormouse559 wrote:Do they also compare certain parts of his anatomy to a tornado? [>:D]

More seriously, do the omens ever point to anyone/thing having more than one spouse? Like can more than one person be married to the sky? Also, is remarriage a thing for inanimate objects (especially celestial or otherwise unreachable ones), since they're likely to outlive their spouse.
In theory, it is possible for anyone or thing to have more than one spouse. A few years back, though, omens tend to unconsciously be interpreted so that multiple spouses don't occur because there was an absolute mess of a legal dispute a while before involving a multi-spousal marriage. Seers are just as human as everyone else, and when an incident occurs they tend to shy away from possible repeats without realizing it.

Right now, though, Jor has bigger things to worry about so any subconscious interpretation shifts are more along the lines of "now is not a good time for marriage." Actually that's even what they're saying out loud, before reading the signs, because holy crap people are dropping left and right and no one wants to marry someone only to have them eaten the next day by an immortal spiritual predator.

Remarriage is a thing for anyone, though divorce is not, and there is a traditional half-year mourning period before the surviving member seeks out a seer again. Because of the aforementioned bigger things to worry about, there are a lot of people in that mourning period right now.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Khemehekis »

A fascinating article for a fascinating thread:

https://aeon.co/essays/marriage-is-dead ... -couple-up
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Pabappa
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Pabappa »

Humans on planet Teppala have some anatomical and behavioral differences from humans on Earth, and they also differ more widely from each other than we do among ourselves. Thus some behaviors considered appropriate or even mandatory in one society are forbidden in others, and both sides see their differences as a positive expression of human diversity rather than something to fight about.

Some of these are ideas I'm absolutely wedded to, but others are tentative and some I've already discarded. Lastly there are ideas for angels, who look like humans but have supernatural powers. I'll post them in roughly the order I've laid out above.

1) Women are taller than men. In some societies, by quite a lot. Women are in charge of all aspects of society and men have few societal rights. In the most extreme societies, women simply buy men when they're ripe and there is no concept of marriage. More commonly though, in societies such as Moonshine, there is a contract we would recognize as marriage, which like the rest of society assigns a greatly superior legal status to women. In Moonshine, polygamy is legal, with any gender makeup, so long as no "triangle marriage" exists. A triangle marriage is any marriage in which two people are married to the same person (male or female), while also married to each other. The reason for this has nothing to do with women being taller than men, but rather is a cultural norm inherited from the Crystal culture from which the Moonshines emerged thousands of years ago.

1b) As a corollary, despite women being vastly better off than men, male violence against women is seen as a minor problem, and a woman who can't control her man is supposed to be embarrassed. Men raping women is rare, but men raping other men is common.

2) Women and men are about the same height, with a lot of internal variation. Coeducational sports are common and men think of themselves as socially equal to women, but neither side has a clear grip on power and each society handles the situation differently. Some have radical feminist parties to ensure that their women can live like women in Moonshine, while others split the difference and give men some advantages while giving others to women.

/more to come .... this post is already quite long so I maybe I wont type up quite as much as I had planned
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Pabappa »

This is a long post and I could go on even further but i figured it was best to just quote from the beginning of the thread. ive come to post in a personal style with headings to separate sections ... Im not trying to make my posts stand out from others, i just find it easier to read. i plan to move much of this to a personal website where the headings will be actual HTML anchors, as well.

This is a very interesting thread, as you said, but it's been so buried that I didnt see it until now. I will answer the questions you asked at the very beginning:
Khemehekis wrote: 03 Sep 2015 06:41 Does your conworld have same-sex marriage, polygamy, child marriage, interspecies marriage, necrophiliac marriage, etc.?
Introduction:
Human societies on planet Teppala are essentially conservative from a modern Earth standpoint. The hyperfeminists up above are not fighting an entrenched male power structure .... they're living in an absolutely stable society, shaped by women's biological advantages over men, and in the case of the Moonshines, have been living with the same laws and customs for more than 3,000 years.

Gay marriage:
But because of their anatomical and behavioral differences, as well as happenstance cultural traits, societies such as these are not much like modern western conservatives either. No major society views homosexuality as a problem ... at worst it is seen as irresponsible to not raise a biological child, but even this is a minority position. Among the Moonshines, it is well understood that men often prefer sexual contact with other men, and women with other women, largely because of the stress associated with heterosexual marriage, but also in part because they can see eye to eye better with each other than with an opposite sex partner.

Polygamy:
Polygamy customs vary a lot from place to place, and show little correlation with humans' anatomical differences. The Moonshines have an essentially egalitarian view of polygamy, allowing men and women to behave interchangeably in a plural marriage, and despite the low social status of men in their society, it is more common to see two women sharing the same man than the other way around. Partly this is because women outnumber men in Moonshine society due to better survival rates, and partly this is because some men prefer to live, even at the edge of survival, with another man rather than spend their time serving a woman.

Child marriage:
A few hypermilitaristic societies draft children into the army from the age of five, or even from birth, but in such societies the concept of marriage has little meaning to a young child as there is no guarantee of surviving to adulthood for children of either sex.

I have not created any societies specifically with arranged marriage, and I suspect I will never use it except possibly in the very extreme societies up above where the military controls every aspect of everyone's life. And these societies never last long.

Other marriage:
I've done this in the past when I was blurring the lines between mythology and reality, but now I write in a euhemeristic style and leave mythology to in-world writings which are cleanly separated from my own writing.

This leads me to "self-marriage", if I can call it that, which is one of the three ways by which female angels in Teppalan religions can reproduce. They can marry a male angel, a female angel, or bring forth a child from their own womb. There's a small chance I might decide to at least imitate that in the euhemeristic writing as well, saying that female priests can choose to raise a child on their own, though I haven't put much thought into the degree to which believers would understand the situation as analogous to the angels' (the priest really did impregnate herself) as opposed to seeing the woman as an ordinary human woman living in the manner of the angels as a reflection of the power and beauty of the supreme god Malamṅ.
Is interracial or intercaste marriage banned?
In a few cases, yes. Most such examples that I have of this, however, are instances where a strong outside power controls two subjects populations and forbids them to marry each other because they want to keep the subjugated peoples distinct enough that they would be reluctant to unite against the third power. There are some examples of ruling classes forbidding their own people from marrying their slaves, but more commonly such marriages are allowed because the offspring must also remain slaves.

In general there are no mixed-race categories on planet Teppala, at least during the time period I write most about ... if a Crystal marries a Star, the children must be either Crystals or Stars, not something in between.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Birdlang »

Birdish culture has the following. They are only a heterosexual marriage friendly culture.

Gay marriage:
Birdish culture is very anti gay marriage, based on their religious and cultural views. It is illegal in their cultural area.

Polygamy:
This is illegal in Birdish cultural areas, and is seen as foreign as it is associated with a race that they drove extinct that practiced polygamy.

Child marriage:
They are against this too, it is considered taboo.

Interracial marriage:
They consider this taboo and illegal because all of the Birdish races don’t look very much alike to each other as they are multiple kinds of bird people.

Interlineal marriage:
Also taboo and illegal because of caste based rules.

Others:
They don’t have others.
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Pabappa
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Pabappa »

A few things I've thought of since two months ago when I wrote the other post:

Child marriage: I didnt consider the Moonshines to practice child marriage because, by their definition, boys and girls who move out of their parents' households become adults by so doing. But both boys and girls are usually married by the age of thirteen, and orphans can marry as young as ten. Both partners are usually very close in age.

Interrracial marriage: Humans on Teppala have similar appearance overall to humans on Earth, meaning they have different skin colors, hair colors, and so on, and these are mostly found in the places one would expect to: dark-skinned tribes live in the tropics, blonde people in temperate latitudes, and people with dark hair but very pale skin in the polar latitudes. But the central racial divide on planet Teppala is the male-female height gap I mentioned above. Some tribes have women who are much taller than their men, and some tribes have men who are much taller than their women. There are no stable mixed populations.

There are some human populations that have prohibited sexual intercourse with a human from the other side of the racial divide. For example, Moonshine, the world's foremost feminist power, prohibits all non-Moonshines from entering their territory, let alone marrying into the tribe. The tropical empire of Dreamland, meanwhile, does not prohibit Moonshines or others from visiting, but strongly discourages sexual intercourse. This is due to the differences in their anatomy: Moonshine women regularly give birth to babies weighing more than twenty pounds, and the genes for this are carried by Moonshine men and women alike, so a Moonshine man who marries a Dreamer woman will put his wife in a very dangerous situation as the baby develops in her womb.
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