Beic culture

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Well, that part about Beic sexism was an interesting read.

I would however disagree with the idea women cannot commit rape on man. Rape is a lot more than a mere physical attack, and I feel a lack of imagination.

Other than that, great read.

[zompist]

Thanks!

I can't completely agree with your disagreement. A woman can't get a man pregnant and in the Beic system can't spoil him for marriage. And it's hard to imagine that, even with very different socialization, women would commit as many sexual assaults as are found in traditional male-dominant societies.

But as I said, there are certainly nasty things Beic women can do to men, and they are not above violence.

[vec]

Wait wait, where is this article?

[zompist]

http://www.almeopedia.com/index.php/Beic_sex_roles

[vec]

Wow, I love that. I love how you are not afraid of creating controversies. It always gives me pause to create something off-putting.

You beat me to it, actually. I have a very similar idea in mind for Imuthans, although in their case, neither sex is dominant, though the women, because of the different reproduction system, have a slightly upper hand. The men are the ones who carry out the latter, more difficult part of the pregnancy and they are the ones who take care of them. The society is based around families (sg. piņ, pl. piņņa), which usually have roughly equal numbers of each sex, from 2 to 8 members on average. It's kind of like how we have groups of friends, except these live together, sleep together and raise children together. But I haven't entirely worked out the mechanics of it; what do I do with the jealousy factor, for example? How do these families come to be? It's so weird thinking about a group of college buddies getting married from our point of view. I don't know, I'll figure it out eventually. Cheers to you!

[sangi39]

except these live together, sleep together and raise children together

In a kind of polyamorous polygamy? If so there are people who essentially do that today and jealousy rarely gets in the way. If you just expand that mindset to a species you're set

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Controversies are what makes the world interesting. Really. And zompist has the right balance, and kicking us with making all this plausible.

A woman can't get a man pregnant and in the Beic system can't spoil him for marriage.

I would agree to that. I'd freely imagine a group rape from girls, all over him, going sadic and everything.

And it's hard to imagine that, even with very different socialization, women would commit as many sexual assaults as are found in traditional male-dominant societies.

I somehow doubt this, still. If anything, I was raised in a family that pretty much works like what you describe in your beic sexual role (without being that strict though). Not that I was sexually assaulted, but I have from first hand experience how "manly" (wholly self-confident) women (not of a week sex or anything like that) react. And they are nowhere different from man with the same attitude, so I don't expect Beic women of being les violent in that way either.

But we don't have such society on Earth now, so we can't have any first-hand verifiable proof of how it works, so we're limited to philosophy and almeology here.

[Gareth]

How do men fit into organised crime in Beic culture? I'd imagine at the very least that some gangs use men as muscle. A few all-male gangs wouldn't surprise me either.

[zompist]

You're not yet thinking like a Bé, grasshopper. Like all Beic institutions, criminal gangs are run by women, and their key operatives and enforcers are women. (The thief Ŋar was a member of such a gang.) "Muscle" is just a metaphor; you don't have to be physically strong to intimidate someone. (The most successful terrestrial gangs are governed by old men who could be easily beaten up by their entry-level thugs.)

Gangs would differ on how much of a role men have. Some prefer to keep men out of the rougher aspects entirely; some use them for low-level tasks. As with (say) female pirates on Earth, there are exceptional cases of men running a gang, most often after the death of their wife or sister.

[Gremlins]

That's very interesting. Does the band structure extend to urban life, too (i.e., do whole bands up sticks and move to towns and cities, or do just individual members go)?

Also, pootling about the Almeopedia, I really like the stuff on Nan, too.

[zompist]

Thanks!

Yes, the band structure extends to the cities... a band is just the thing for running a workshop or a shop. There are more unattached or loosely attached people, however... a writer, for instance, largely works alone.

[Salmoneus]

Personally, I prefer more naturalistic conworlding, though I admit that my own Ebdurian conculture has a (albeit more less idealistic) version of the 'band', in the form of cellular marriage.
I'll take it that the differences from Earth are well known, and only comment on one of the details: the discongruence between family structure and environment. You say that your society is more K, yet also that it is land-rich. These two are contrary. Production has two limiting factors: labour and capital (which in early societies is primarily land). The relative availability of these two factors determines the price of each factor. Power will come from dominance of the more expensive factor - groups will seek such dominance, and dominant groups will seek to expand and protect their dominance. As an extreme case, for instance, if labour is free (there's an unending supply of reproducing robot slaves, eg) nobody will care about labour, and they will instead want to get as much capital as possible. If there's lots of capital and not much labour, they will be willing to give up a lot of capital to control a bit of labour. Essentially, one factor is the limiting factor in production, and to maximise production (and hence power) each group will seek to maximise their share of the limiting factor.

If your society is land-rich, land will be cheap relative to labour, and labour will be cheap relative to land. Groups will thus seek to control as much labour as possible. The easiest way to control labour is to integrate it into the group itself, by making labourers group-members. In a land-rich society, there won't be much concern with whether land splits, because so much land is either owned but fallow (because there aren't enough workers) or unowned (and hence can be acquired if you lose your own land). There's thus relatively little purpose in having few heirs, as capital prices are low, but at the same time theres' a big advantage in having lots of heirs, because the price of their future labour is high.

In the real world, then, what we find in land-rich societies (as in much of west africa, for instance) are societies that not only have high birth-rates (ideally polygamous) but that also have very permeable families that allow new members to join through adoption. In particular, slavery in such societies is 'open' - most slaves, and certainly almost all female slaves, are eventually adopted as full family members (or sometimes only their children are). This allows families to have birth rates higher than they would be able to achieve by themselves - essentially they have such a drive toward having children (to keep their control of the labour supply) that they acquire all the women of breeding age that they can.

Contrariwise, it's in land-poor societies that we see low birth rates and marriage practices that avoid splitting inheritances (ie diluting capital). At the very extreme, fraternal polyandry (in which capital can never be diluted) is practiced in areas with very low land supply, such as in the Himalaya. A more moderate example would be China, where the birth rate in the upper classes was so low that in many cases families had to adopt male infant slaves as heirs.

There are earth societies who don't protect their women - but you'll mostly find them in small valleys in PNG, where labour costs are low and land is at a premium.





One other thing should be considered: 'caring more' won't massively up your infant survival. Eighteenth-century Europeans didn't have such appalling rates of infant mortality just because they didn't invest in their children - there simply wasn't the medical knowledge to keep babies alive. If you don't have near-universal vaccination of infants, for instance, you're going to need a lot more babies, unless you don't have the diseases Europeans had.
Oh, and if they're old when they have children, they'll be taking time out in the prime of their career. That alone has probably been enough to prevent any similar societies existing among humans.

Thinking about it, reproductive instincts will probably be problematic here - why will all those women be happy not breeding? Polygynous societies don't have that problem, because the excess men can still have sex adulterously. As women want babies as well as sex, how will the former demand be met?

[And there's either going to be a huge percentage of women not breeding or else women will have to let their men have a lot of promiscuous sex - and the latter option is unpopular enough when women aren't dominant. If men are the shiny possessions of women, the women will likely be even less keen on other women using them.
But those are the options, as there'll be a big gender imbalance once the primary cause of death for human women (childbirth) and the primary cause of death for adult human men (war) are both suddenly inflicted on the women. Particular as you'll also be giving the women the more dangerous occupations]


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Anyway, I don't want an argument - I think conworlding styles just differ sometimes. Instead, I'll contribute to the debate upthread, on female rape. In reality, lesbians are as likely to rape women as men are*. You may consider this evidence that the propensity to rape is either based on power or upon socialisation, and isn't biologically biased toward men. Or you may not consider that, if you think that lesbians are so biologically different from 'normal' women that they are closer to men than to women in whatever the relevent ways are (I seem to recall that lesbians on average have more testosterone than straight women? But that could again be social rather than genetic). I find that a stretch, but it's up to you.


*I don't have evidence for this precisely. However, I've seen evidence that says that (in the UK or US, I can't remember which) lesbians are as likely to complain (in anonymous surveys) both of spousal rape and of date rape by their female partners and prospective partners as straight women are to complain of rape by male partners and prospective partners. Assuming that this means lesbians are as likely to be raped by women as straight women are by men (ie ignoring the possibility that lesbians are on average more likely to consider encounters 'rape' rather than 'assault' (perhaps through a broader definition of sex), or more likely to in hindsight consider encounters nonconsensual), that still doesn't necessarily imply that lesbians are as likely to rape. There could be some intervening factor, like lesbians having more dates than straight women, and hence being more likely to encounter date rape. Nonetheless, I think it's reasonable to think that lesbians are approximately as prone to rape when they can as men are.

[zompist]

Thanks for the response, Salmoneus; it has a lot to think about. I'm going to have to think over the land-rich business; I adopted it because it tends (on Earth) to make women more valued (i.e. there's a bride-price rather than a dowry).

One other thing should be considered: 'caring more' won't massively up your infant survival. Eighteenth-century Europeans didn't have such appalling rates of infant mortality just because they didn't invest in their children - there simply wasn't the medical knowledge to keep babies alive. If you don't have near-universal vaccination of infants, for instance, you're going to need a lot more babies, unless you don't have the diseases Europeans had.

Good point. Though some of the unhealthiness of European medieval cities was due to overcrowding; that might be different in a garden agriculture zone.

Thinking about it, reproductive instincts will probably be problematic here - why will all those women be happy not breeding?

Our own society indicates that women can be quite happy with few children. When other interesting things are available, such as study or a career, they can even be happy with none.

(It may be, however, that a female-dominant society is very unlikely without a form of birth control.)

Anyway, I don't want an argument - I think conworlding styles just differ sometimes. Instead, I'll contribute to the debate upthread, on female rape. In reality, lesbians are as likely to rape women as men are*. You may consider this evidence that the propensity to rape is either based on power or upon socialisation, and isn't biologically biased toward men. Or you may not consider that, if you think that lesbians are so biologically different from 'normal' women that they are closer to men than to women in whatever the relevent ways are (I seem to recall that lesbians on average have more testosterone than straight women? But that could again be social rather than genetic). I find that a stretch, but it's up to you.

Yeah, I don't think we know if lesbian violence occurs because women are in control, or because lesbians differ from other women. I think it's a stretch to say that women in general are as violent as men. Men still commit the vast majority of crimes; and surely women's liberation (i.e. the move from a male-dominant to a much more egalitarian society) hasn't produced a wave of female crime.

[-]

The Beic culture is indeed an interesting thought experiment. Always a pleasure to see conworlding that explores these kinds of questions.

That said, Sal's points about the general dynamics associated with land-rich societies are spot on AFAICT.

As far as female violence goes, men are still identified as the most frequent perpetrators of, say, domestic violence and violent crime, but this may simply be because women's liberation is as yet a recent phenomenon and the ambient values of patriarchal society still affect how men and women are socialized. It's entirely possible that women actually come close to matching men in domestic violence incidents, for instance, but that men are on average far less likely to report being beaten up by a woman because of the associated stigma. Likewise, more "public" violence tends to remain a man's game, but this is arguably because this kind of violence is still tacitly considered by both men and women to be a naturally "male" domain, women's liberation or no; and in fact, as the liberation of women continues to percolate and deepen among cultures -- not just in the West, either -- violence by girls (albeit mostly directed toward other girls) is in fact on the rise in the current generation.

[brandrinn]

I'm still not totally convinced about these female soldiers. Granted, in the movies women have super-human powers that make them stronger than twelve men, presumably to make up for all those ridiculous "damsels in distress." And Hollywood seems intent on convincing us that a bow and arrow takes no more strength than plucking a guitar string. But if you want to decimate your opponents at a distance, you need one hell of a draw. The English longbow had an 80-90 pound draw. And as for women having better endurance and maneuverability... I have no idea what that means. Certainly women are no better than their male counterparts at endurance running in the Olympics.

I'm sorry, Zompist, but you just can't have Xena in real life. It's something every young male has had to come to terms with at some point in his life.

As for Sal's points, I wonder what is it that keeps Beic society so land-rich? If the poor bands can split off once the hao dies, why can't they split when they have too many daughters? If they're farmers, the only wealth to share would be land (obviously in great abundance) and maybe oxen (shouldn't be too much of a problem, since oxen can reproduce as quickly as humans). Surely there must be periodic cycles of population explosion and population crash... unless there's something to maintain the equilibrium...

Also, great work! Sex and gender is always my favorite part of conworlding.

[-]

But if you want to decimate your opponents at a distance, you need one hell of a draw. The English longbow had an 80-90 pound draw.

The question about endurance is valid. OTOH I don't see why female archers wouldn't be able to use bows with a heavy draw. Given the cultural opportunities, real-life female archers do so.

[brandrinn]

But if you want to decimate your opponents at a distance, you need one hell of a draw. The English longbow had an 80-90 pound draw.

The question about endurance is valid. OTOH I don't see why female archers wouldn't be able to use bows with a heavy draw. Given the cultural opportunities, real-life female archers do so.

I don't know how many arrows you need to fire in a battle, but I'm guessing it's several dozen. drawing up to a hundred pounds many times (while apparently running at top speed around the battlefield) seems a bit demanding. I doubt any but the very strongest of women could handle it. Certainly most men couldn't, to be fair. If the army is the dumping ground for extra daughters, they'll have a lot of soldiers unable to operate their own weapons.

From a broader angle, I'm not sure why Zompist felt the need to make the army mostly female in the first place, or why he felt the need to liberate women from the burden of child-raising. Beic culture is much more than a mere reversal of terrestrial culture, I'll give it that, but it seems hasty to assume that Beic culture would treat fighting as important and childrearing as something that gets in the way. It seems to me that a truely female-dominated society would place child-raising at the very top of the occupational hierarchy, since only women can gestate and nurse. Wouldn't they farm out their fighting to men, devalourize it until the army is considered one step above toilet-scrubber, and then spend all the time they can spare doing the high-prestige work of caring for children? Who says reproduction can't be the most lucrative occupation? Forget weaving, carpentry, or shipping. Raising a child provides the community with much more, especially in such a land-rich society. Why would a woman pass off her babies on her little cousin to do some silly business like trade, when she can reap more money and prestige from raising children?

Our own society removes reproduction from the economic arena, and devalourizes it to boot. But go hire a nanny for 18 years and you'll see just what a mother can make if society treats her contributions differently.

[vec]

But if you want to decimate your opponents at a distance, you need one hell of a draw. The English longbow had an 80-90 pound draw.

The question about endurance is valid. OTOH I don't see why female archers wouldn't be able to use bows with a heavy draw. Given the cultural opportunities, real-life female archers do so.

Yes, and regarding the athletic question in general; women have been gaining on men's advantage in every type of sport since the 70s. Girls are usually two years ahead of boys in almost every sport until they are about fifteen and the boys are around seventeen, which is when they start to overtake them. One obvious example is swimming which I practiced until I was 16, almost all the girls were better than me (except at breaststroke, my specialty) until my final year before I quit.

[zompist]

An agricultural society can devalorize the military to some extent... indeed compared to a nomadic one it's very likely to. The major threats to the Beic states are themselves, especially as the barbarians don't have horses.

However, there are threats, and I can't see that a viable society will relegate defense to "toilet scrubbing". If you want that approach try Sheri Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country". I don't find it very plausible, though it's interesting as a thought experiment (and Tepper found it necessary to revalorize military prowess anyway, in the end, just in a covert and questionable way).

As for child rearing, to be blunt, it's tedious and not going to make your society rich or smart. But here Beic culture is much more like traditional terrestrial rural societies, or hunter-gatherers, than ours is. The idea that a woman can raise her children to adulthood alone is pretty much a modern Western phenomenon. In most cultures she had help, from the extended family and/or the older children (or in historical times, from servants).

Beic women warriors aren't superheroes any more than male armies are. They will have a great advantage anyway since they are a small trained class, which can generally outfight a mobilized peasantry before the age of gunpowder.

On archers, it seems a better direction for a female army than, say, spears. Naturally the bows will be whatever (trained) women can handle; English longbows are a late invention designed for opponents with heavy armor and horses.

[Gremlins]

On women armies: I really doubt that, in a rainforest, you'd really want to be wearing the kind of armour English longbows were designed to get through - infact most armour would probably be pretty impractical. Actually, looking at warfare in terrestrial tropical areas, I imagine big bows might not see an enormous amount of use either - IIRC in Mesoamerica they used dart-throwers and slings as much as ormore than bows. Since large amounts of armour would also be pretty impractical in a rainforest (unless heatstroke or sinking into the mud is your thing), it's not really important. IIRC in large parts of Africa bows were quite small, but arrows were often poisoned.

[Raphael]

Nice work- IMO from a late 20th/early 21st Western perspective, it's kind of funny that one of the things that make the female dominance viable in that environment is the lack of horses.

And as for women having better endurance and maneuverability... I have no idea what that means. Certainly women are no better than their male counterparts at endurance running in the Olympics.

Apparently, zompist means something like enduring steady pressure for a very long time without collapsing.

[brandrinn]

Well, Zompist, you certainly don't have to convince me in order to be happy with your conworld. If you like it the way it is, feel free to ignore anything I might have to say. But if you do want some constructive criticism, some hand-waving about how tedious childrearing is doesn't accomplish that. You should read some Simone Weil to find out why you've been made to think of it as "tedious;" in fact, Marxist Feminism in general would be a wonderful first step to figure out how a matriarchal society would likely differ from ours. Certainly women have always had help raising children. But the idea that a mother would rather focus on production rather than reproduction (I'm using Weil's terminology here) seems like it was imported straight from 21st century America.

Again, you don't have to change your creation if you don't want to. Clearly you've put a lot of effort and thought into it. I'm just trying to offer whatever help I can in making Be as realistic as possible.

[Salmoneus]

Zompist is quite right to say that land-rich societies value women more (prima facie - in practice there are many competing variables). But for the exact opposite reason. The most important fact about women (and in a couple of societies the defining fact about women) is that they can have children. Land-rich societies have higher labour prices, more incentive to have children, and hence higher prices for those things that produce children - i.e. women. Think about it - if you've got hardly any land, you don't want too many children, and so women are, at best, a hazard. You pay people to take them off your hands. If you've got lots of land but not enough children, you need all the women you can get your hands on. And that means that you'll pay for them (bride price) and all else equal you'll be nicer to them to stop them running away.

The flip side of this, of course, is that the women in such societies get their power and prestige from bearing children, which prevents them from going over into non-reproductive professions, at least until they become grandmothers.

If you want not powerful women but women in what Brandrinn calls 'production', it stands to reason you have to take away the importance of their reproductive abilities. If the price of child-making goes down, more women will take up other careers.

If you want the price of child-making to go down, there are two alternatives: decrease the demand, or increase the supply. Increasing the supply means bringing in more children from elsewhere: large-scale slave-trading and baby-snatching. This is difficult to sustain in large societies.

Decreasing the demand means reducing the price of labour or increasing the cost of child-development - and the latter is hard to do within a given species, unless your society supplies high-end services that require great training. This can be feasible in small societies dependent on trade, or in a sub-culture or specific class, where the low-skill work is done by other groups, but probably not feasible society-wide.

Reducing the price of labour can be done by reducing the demand for production (ie a low-level material culture) or by changing the relative distribution of labour and capital (land). So the most feasible way to get women working is to have high land prices.

Of course, an alternative is to make female productive labour more valuable than male labour. This can certainly be done for specific occupations, either due to genuine advantage or due to taboos on male workers - but I don't think it's feasible on a wide scale.
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However, getting women not only into production but dominating production is more difficult - because there's nothing men are essential for. This means there's no one profession that men have a monopoly on. Women monopolise childbirth, and that monopoly allows a high price to be maintained, which keeps women in the profession. But anything men can do, women can also do. This, paradoxically, keeps men in the general labour market.

To summarise: if childmaking is valuable, women will exploit their monopoly on it and concentrate on that profession, which will move them out of the general labour market, giving it to men. If childmaking is not valuable, they will come back into the labour market, and you'll have less clearly defined gender roles. But I'm not sure its possible to have a genuine role-reversal, because that would require some other valuable profession that would suck men out of the labour market while leaving women where they are.

I think that if you want a society where women dominate the public sphere, the best way is to make something male-only by taboo - the most obvious option is the army (or the navy), as it can in theory take as many men as are available and it is something men have an advantage at. This wouldn't get rid of their power, though - whoever has the swords will always have at least a veto power over politics.

[brandrinn]

...Or you could abandon the idea that power, wealth, and prestige must come from typically male-dominated jobs, and place more emphasis on the power, wealth, and prestige of domestic tasks.

The fact that you all find this impossible or even ridiculous is really exhibit A in the body of evidence to prove my point. We live in a culture that values what men do best, because we choose to do so. If you want to create society where the rules favor women then of course those things that women do best will be the most sought-after responsibilities. If your goal is to create female control of men and of the way we think about social roles, the roles themselves don't have to change. June Cleaver can bend Ward to her will without taking off her pearls, if you stack the rules in her favor. By holding a monopoly on childrearing (as well as inheritance and family loyalty) and sex, women can spend their days doing anything and still be in control, especially if they look down on the men for not being able to do what they do (and of course the men will need to comply and think badly of themselves).

I was thinking about these things while developing a matriarchal society once. In our own society we encode value to gender in such a way that we forget it's arbitrarily encoded at all ("you want to join the glorious army, little girl? But you don't have the strength! Ha ha!"). If we turn the tables, we get value arbitrarily encoded onto things women do best. Let's think of an example...

Given the pride and prestige of being pregnant, families spare no expense to make a pregnant woman comfortable. Each house will have a couch made of the finest, softest material available for the pregnant woman/women of the household. Over time, these elaborate couches become a symbol of power, and even the throne of the realm is basically a more ornate and expensive version of the same design. Imagine a man who demands to sit in "the pregnant chair." He may feel that something is being denied him, but he won't know what, and the reaction of his female counterparts will be hysterical laughter: "It's not my fault you weren't born a woman!" "Sure, let's see you get pregnant!" "Don't you have a sandwich you need to be making for me?"

This is the sort of thing I want to see more of- not liberating women by making them men, but changing the fundamental assumptions we all carry with us from a Western perspective.

[vec]

...Or you could abandon the idea that power, wealth, and prestige must come from typically male-dominated jobs, and place more emphasis on the power, wealth, and prestige of domestic tasks.

The fact that you all find this impossible or even ridiculous is really exhibit A in the body of evidence to prove my point. We live in a culture that values what men do best, because we choose to do so. If you want to create society where the rules favor women then of course those things that women do best will be the most sought-after responsibilities. If your goal is to create female control of men and of the way we think about social roles, the roles themselves don't have to change. June Cleaver can bend Ward to her will without taking off her pearls, if you stack the rules in her favor. By holding a monopoly on childrearing (as well as inheritance and family loyalty) and sex, women can spend their days doing anything and still be in control, especially if they look down on the men for not being able to do what they do (and of course the men will need to comply and think badly of themselves).

I was thinking about these things while developing a matriarchal society once. In our own society we encode value to gender in such a way that we forget it's arbitrarily encoded at all ("you want to join the glorious army, little girl? But you don't have the strength! Ha ha!"). If we turn the tables, we get value arbitrarily encoded onto things women do best. Let's think of an example...

Given the pride and prestige of being pregnant, families spare no expense to make a pregnant woman comfortable. Each house will have a couch made of the finest, softest material available for the pregnant woman/women of the household. Over time, these elaborate couches become a symbol of power, and even the throne of the realm is basically a more ornate and expensive version of the same design. Imagine a man who demands to sit in "the pregnant chair." He may feel that something is being denied him, but he won't know what, and the reaction of his female counterparts will be hysterical laughter: "It's not my fault you weren't born a woman!" "Sure, let's see you get pregnant!" "Don't you have a sandwich you need to be making for me?"

This is the sort of thing I want to see more of- not liberating women by making them men, but changing the fundamental assumptions we all carry with us from a Western perspective.

Very interesting.

My mum works with a woman from Vietnam who has a half-Chinese half-Vietnamese houseband and she is made to live with his family in a tiny apartment in North Reykjavík. When she got pregnant, she was made to lie on a bed for three months before and after the actual birth, as they said its not healthy for a woman to move during such a time. She was only allowed to move to go to the bathroom. (In reality, this is exteremely unhealthy but such is the way of the Vietnamese). Now, of course, in her case, she is being oppressed by the old women in the family and the alpha male, but still she has some power; while she's in bed, everything revolves around her. Is she fed enough? Does she have to go to the bathroom? Does she have enough blankets?

I'm not sure what my point is... it seems to have disappeared.

But anyway, it has long since been a theme in literarture that in reality, the women are the ones calling the shots. Look at the gods in the Iliad and the Icelandic saga, Njála. Women, with their manipulative cunning and sexiness make the men do as they wish and make the men think its their idea. All you'd have to do is leave out the latter and they're in charge. If only women were allowed to read and write, that would go a long way to give them more power than men.