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Jan. 12th, 2019 12:58 am People are really bad at worldbuilding. How can a society a) have strictly gendered family structures where one mother and one father have specific roles in raising children, b) have monogamous love marriages for the purposes of having and raising those children, and c) not have any prescriptions about what gender people pursue relationships with?
Like, you can have it so marriages are based in love and still gendered, but people can have as many relationships outside of that as they want to pursue, and those relationships aren't gendered. Or you could have marriages not be based in love, and only for the purposes of having children, where they have nothing to do with romantic relationships. Or you could have children raised in ways that have nothing to do with their parents, by some other organizational scheme, and kids could have two (or more) mothers or fathers and just be raised by caretakers who raise all the children. Societies have done all kinds of things, and imaginary societies can do things even if real societies haven't.
Or you could have it so any of these things used to work differently. Like maybe people recently became more okay with queer relationships and family structures, not like that hasn't happened in real life. Or maybe marriage used to be strictly gendered, but as the gender roles became less useful to society that fell out of favor. Maybe relationships between two men or two women were fine up until marriage, at which point parenting roles had to take precedence. Maybe the nuclear family is recent, or even families at all are a recent invention. Maybe marriages used to be arranged and now they're about love, used to be poly but now they're mono, or used to not require kids and now they do, or any number of other things. But make the social prescriptions and proscriptions commensurable, please.
This is leaving aside the questions about why aliens a) have strictly two sexes, b) have strictly two genders that are directly tied to those two sexes, c) have nuclear families, and d) otherwise conform exactly to modern Western neoliberalism. Aliens are aliens they don't have to make any sense whatsoever, but they certainly shouldn't just be American all the fucking time.
Like, you can have it so marriages are based in love and still gendered, but people can have as many relationships outside of that as they want to pursue, and those relationships aren't gendered. Or you could have marriages not be based in love, and only for the purposes of having children, where they have nothing to do with romantic relationships. Or you could have children raised in ways that have nothing to do with their parents, by some other organizational scheme, and kids could have two (or more) mothers or fathers and just be raised by caretakers who raise all the children. Societies have done all kinds of things, and imaginary societies can do things even if real societies haven't.
Or you could have it so any of these things used to work differently. Like maybe people recently became more okay with queer relationships and family structures, not like that hasn't happened in real life. Or maybe marriage used to be strictly gendered, but as the gender roles became less useful to society that fell out of favor. Maybe relationships between two men or two women were fine up until marriage, at which point parenting roles had to take precedence. Maybe the nuclear family is recent, or even families at all are a recent invention. Maybe marriages used to be arranged and now they're about love, used to be poly but now they're mono, or used to not require kids and now they do, or any number of other things. But make the social prescriptions and proscriptions commensurable, please.
This is leaving aside the questions about why aliens a) have strictly two sexes, b) have strictly two genders that are directly tied to those two sexes, c) have nuclear families, and d) otherwise conform exactly to modern Western neoliberalism. Aliens are aliens they don't have to make any sense whatsoever, but they certainly shouldn't just be American all the fucking time.
