"I think most people would care if their husband had a child and some would care if he had a outrageous but childless history and some wouldn't care at all but it's mostly a matter of personal preference or something where you'd care about - his reasons, whether he's grown up since then..."

"I honestly kind of have no idea what Osirians think of as an outrageous history. Like, not to be annoying or embarrassing, again, but this did not clarify very much."

"Uh, say I have a sister, and a boy asks after her, and I know that he visits whorehouses every weekend after the races, I'm probably going to say I disapprove. But if a boy asks after her, and I know that he did visit whorehouses every weekend after the races and then he decided a few years ago it was time to straighten up, I'm probably not going to say anything. And if a boy asks after her, and I happen to know that he visited whorehouses every weekend until he learned that the pimps were taking three quarters of the girls' pay and threatening them if they tried to leave, and so he bought them all a place across town where they could set their own prices and smuggled them out one day, and still visits sometimes, I'd - well, I'd tell the sister so she could decide but I'd consider it qualifying, personally."

Sigh.

"I don't think I get this system. You're like - having sex with other people while you're married is fine as long as nobody can get pregnant, at least if you're a man, but also something called adultery is illegal, and men can take other wives but wives can't ever take other husbands, and if a woman is ever alone in a room with a man this is some kind of horrifying scandal that people need to use zone of truth over, but if a man used to visit prostitutes then that's whatever, even though he very well might have had children by them and wouldn't necessarily know, and - I'm just totally lacking an intuitive sense of which things you think are a big deal."

" - unmarried women having sex is a very big deal. An unmarried woman having been in a position where she might have had sex is a big deal, because she wants to preserve for her wedding a reputation for having never done that, and because - uh, since having had sex might ruin her life, someone who gets her alone might have sex with her against her will and then have her active cooperation in hiding it, right -"

" - I mean, I guess if it also ruins your life for people to know you were raped, sure."

"Depends. Definitely ruins - lots of things. So it wouldn't - it wouldn't be right for Fazil not to ask, right, because if he's the kind of person who won't even ask then what does that tell you about whether you'd be believed if something did happen -"

"I am really not very certain what it tells me."

"Uh, normally in that situation a responsible authority would ask. If he hadn't asked, he'd be saying he trusted me kind of unconditionally. You might say, okay, but he's known you for six years and has generally good judgment, maybe it's reasonable for him to trust me that much, but given what you knew about us, him trusting me that much is a scarier position to be in."

"I mean, I guess that's valid? I don't even - insofar as we were your prisoners it could be considered a reasonable thing to do. It's just - I keep being really confused about which things you people care about."

"Sexual relationships between men and women who are not married. To each other. Things that might look like sexual relationships between men and women who are not married to each other. Things that might make it easy to hide sexual relationships between men and women who are not married to each other."

"Unless the woman is a prostitute, in which case it doesn't matter for the man much at all and it would have been a big deal for her but she's already fallen so who cares?"

"More or less, yeah. - I don't see prostitutes. I think - it matters if he thought at all about it? It matters if he's the kind of person who'd think at all about it? But no one's going to - if they share his values they're not going to hesitate on account of his history. And with women they will."

"I assume this is an incredibly stupid question, but - why?"

"Uh....it might be kind of hard to explain if you don't have any relevant intuitions. Uh, I think a lot of it is people just finding a woman who has slept around disgusting. And then some of it's that she took a much bigger risk than he did, it's a much stupider thing to have done. And then some of it's that - the ideal for men is that they spend some time being stupid, grow up and with the perspective and maturity from their time being stupid make good husbands and fathers, so it's a forgiving narrative, there's space in it to have really kind of sucked. But the ideal for women is that they learn household skills and then become an adult and get married and have children. There's no narrative about the worth of women who spent five years being an idiot and screwing up their lives. 

And then some of it's just that, uh, concretely, you get diseases from sleeping around and they make women infertile and usually don't make men infertile. Obviously for rich people that's not a consideration now but it might've shaped the norms."

"Men can totally get messed up by diseases they get from sex. I guess I'm not sure which outcomes are most common across genders. I do not particularly see why one gender should learn from mistakes while the other shouldn't. And maybe it's a sign of stupidity in a woman, to have sex while unmarried, but it's a sign of cruelty in a man, especially if he did it with someone who wasn't already getting paid for it, because he's the one making a decision that he knows Is probably going to ruin someone's life. And - there are lots of things you can do that can't get you pregnant, and if people stuck to those then the only reason it'd be dumber for a woman would be that people are going to judge her for it, and that just seems - circular, if you're going to go around judging women for doing things that they should have known they'd be judged for because doing them proves that they're too stupid to think of the reputational effects.

" - generic you, sorry, I did not actually miss the part where you want to marry a Chelaxian. For some reason."

"I don't think I disagree with any of that. Uh, except that I think it might be hard to just stick to things that don't get you pregnant? I know married couples sometimes try that when they don't want more kids and I think sometimes you just get carried away? But I haven't had sex with a woman, so -"

Shrug. "I dunno.

" - I realize I am not doing a great job coming off as non-xenophobic here, but - I do not, actually, care very much what you've done, as long as you didn't - thoughtlessly go around ruining lives, or whatever. Which it sounds like you have not. I just - it seems like it would be pretty stupid to have a relationship with someone I know has bizarre alien beliefs about sexuality without, like, clarifying some of those beliefs."

"I, uh, when I was younger I kind of did some stuff that was like thoughtlessly going around ruining lives and I don't think it ruined any lives because I got lucky but it easily could have."

"Oh.

"I'm - not going to ask you to clarify right now if you don't want to, but, like, that is the sort of thing I would care about."

Nodnodnod.

"Not that I've never done anything bad. So, like. Y'know. ...maybe we should resolve the gender mistake imbalance in favor of deciding that everybody can learn from their mistakes."

"Seems like a - nice thing to think."

"Yeah.

"Also still kind of confused about the thing where Osirians just - what, don't think same-gender sex counts as sex at all?"

" - I mean, it super can't get you pregnant. And it's not the same thing, like, the way men and women relate to one another is just different from the way people relate to friends they happen to be sleeping with."