delegations from topias: anomaland, bobbiverse, malachitin, elfland, ozytopia, alicornutopia, dath ilan
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To Malachitin: After several years of study the Ozytopian ambassador will probably write a series of essays explaining various aspects of the Teaching that they think Malachitin would benefit from adopting, if that's all right?

To Telpere: If some people read kinky porn they'll decide that they want partners who nonconsensually beat them up in real life, and therefore kinky porn is only available to people who are willing to take that risk and adult enough to make that decision.

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A Bobbiversian delegate overhears someone mentioning the concept of LSD and inquires about whether other civilizations somehow manage to routinely use strongly psychoactive drugs without going insane, have they considered that psychoactive drugs are to be avoided if at all possible because they make you go insane?

(“We clearly haven’t been avoiding them well enough, given present circumstance,” mutters the Bobbiversian in an intricate mask and a fully concealing robe, in a conlang that hasn’t been fed to relevant machine translation. 

”Shhh, no cheating the premise that this scenario is real,” says another Bobbiversian, in the same language.)

A continental overflight in a non-Bobbiverse aircraft would be fine; they could land and talk to people and be circumstantially permitted to enter their houses if they indicated to the people that they talked to that they were larping at the being-from-another-universe thing, since otherwise those people would be worried that they were hallucinating. 

The Bobbis are delighted by this representative with flowers, they are such good flowers, thank you ambassador you’re so kind we love you ambassador your outfit looks fabulous! Would the ambassador like a reasonable selection of delicious baked goods?

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The Keeper is now, rather gingerly, checking the infohazard catalogue, since nobody else seems to be reacting very much to what's inside.

"Can I get a translation check on the word 'masochism' and whether that's a fictional trope or a real thing," the Keeper requests.

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"'Masochism' means sexual arousal at being hurt," a monk says. "It's normal and common but you should do it with consensual partners and not with billionaires who kidnap and torture you at their whim."

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Series of essays are fine, as long as the ambassador is willing to take the risk that if they make those essays public people might have very strong opinions about them on the internet.

(Sidenote, not particularly urgent, they're confused about this concept of "porn"? It's translating as some combination of "sexually explicit story," "story which is hot for some people," and "story which is about sex," none of which are the same thing and none of which are restricted although most parents opt to keep them away from children under about seven.) 

They also have masochism as a real, not uncommon thing.

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"Pornography" is media that is intended to be read while masturbating, not sure why the machine translation is screwing that one up.

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"Well, now you don't need to worry about not having anything to trade us," the Keeper says dryly.  "We need at least a hundred thousand sex workers from your world.  - not urgently."

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The ambassador would love a selection of delicious baked goods, here is the translation of her allergies*!

*Actually a broader term that encompasses moral, cultural, sensory, nutritional, and non-allergy medical reasons to avoid food, in addition to allergies per se.

Some Greens are masochists, or sadists (- not THAT many, wow??) but virtually none of them want to be sex workers - it's not literally unheard of but it's really unusual.

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Malachitians do have plenty of people who want to be sex workers but, uh, they have some concerns about dath ilan's ability to integrate a hundred thousand of their people.

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“Masochism isn’t translating as a strictly sexual term,” remarks a Bobbiversian, to the monk, pointedly ignoring the keeper. “The term it’s translating to also encompasses wanting-to-be-murdered and wanting-to-tell-your-murderer-that-you-forgive-them-as-you-slowly-bleed-out-and-then-they-tell-you-that-you’re-beautiful-and-that-they’ll-love-you-forever-and-then-you-die.”

The Green word for allergies translates straightforwardly into a very similar word in Bobbish; the delegates are happy to supply her with delicious baked goods that meet her requirements. They are delicious and very very weird.

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Masochism is real and fairly common on Firstplanet but just as an enjoyment of pain and not that other thing and a lot of the time it has nothing to do with sex either. Being infected with self-contradictory kinks by pornography is not common at all. Can someone explain what a sex worker is? The translation is having a hard time. 

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This seems like it might be more Ozytopia's comparative advantage in any case?

(Dath ilan has concerns about the reality of Malachitin.)

Sex workers are, from among those people who are good enough at sex that a normal person can't realistically pay them back in kind, those who will accept money flowing back the other way, and have made a profession and a market of this - not such that literally anybody could buy them, except in rare cases, but with enough variety of potential buyers and potential sellers for an explicit supply and demand to equilibrate.  Dath ilan is confused by why Firstplanet would not have this.

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Sex work is when someone wants to have sex, or sometimes a weirdly specific kind of sex, and they can't find anyone who is interested in that so they exchange money for it instead. This is fine when people want to do it but it's super niche and expensive on Green.

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Firstplanet does have a small minority of people who want to have sex with someone they aren't in love with but not enough for anyone to do it professionally. 

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A sex worker is someone who does sex and sex-adjacent activities* professionally, there's some debate whether it includes tattoo artists, piercers, etc, but in most countries it doesn't. The not wanting to have sex with anyone you're not in love with is common in Malachitin but sex-adjacent activities are usually less that way.

*this term encompasses lots of different forms of hitting, making out, cowriting sexually explicit fiction that is hot to the authors, some but not most forms of pretending to be a vampire-or-similar, and various ways one can talk to a partner.

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Oh, tattoo artists and profressional-fiction-collaborators they've definitely got. It's just usually not a sex thing even if you're collaborating on porn.

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Ozytopians have a different word for wanting-to-tell-your-murderer-that-you-forgive-them-as-you-slowly-bleed-out-and-then-they-tell-you-that-you’re-beautiful-and-that-they’ll-love-you-forever-and-then-you-die as a romantic kink and a third word for that thing as a generally desirable trait of the world unconnected to one's sexuality, and have the opinions you can expect about wanting-to-tell-your-murderer-that-you-forgive-them-as-you-slowly-bleed-out-and-then-they-tell-you-that-you’re-beautiful-and-that-they’ll-love-you-forever-and-then-you-die as a life goal. Although this section of the catalog right here contains many books that appeal to this preference.

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Yeah you wouldn't hire someone to cowrite with you, and tattooing is only sometimes a sex thing which is why they're not considered sex workers everywhere ("or even most places, Tisa is just weird," says one of the people from Niqal) but you might hire someone to hit you or do vampire-or-similar RP with you, and some people specialize in fairly specific things. 

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Elves certainly have the concepts of sadism and masochism, and variants on power exchange are extremely common as fetishes, but power exchange involving specifically pain above a relatively low level is significantly less common than it appears in Ozytopia.  Sex work used to be much more common in Elfland before UBI got its kinks worked out; now it is much rarer and more niche because people who want to have sex can just have it without needing remuneration.

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...Most people in dath ilan will have sex with you for a reasonable amount of money, so long as you fall within their general strike zone?  They'll similarly write erotic fiction for you, if they don't antilike the contents, if you pay them moderately above par for their time?  Why wouldn't someone do that?  There are imaginable reasons, obviously, but dath ilan doesn't know which such reasons hold.

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Does dath ilan want the evolutionary explanation for why most people aren't interested in sex with most other people, or the neuroscience explanation?

There are probably some people on Firstplanet who are into wanting-to-tell-your-murderer-that-you-forgive-them-as-you-slowly-bleed-out-and-then-they-tell-you-that-you’re-beautiful-and-that-they’ll-love-you-forever-and-then-you-die, but nobody the diplomats know personally. Ah, yup, someone on the commentary forum says there's a microgenre.

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Obviously you don't want to cowrite with someone you don't creatively mesh with? You can commission fiction from anyone who takes commissions, people do that all the time, but that's not sex work any more than giving your friend a story as a gift is having sex with them.

Lots of people only want to have sex with people they're close to and don't consider the exchange of money an acceptable substitute for emotional closeness; there are various evolutionary explanations that have been floated for that but nobody here studies evolutionary psychology.

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Greens usually only want to have sex with people who, at minimum, have a good personal-space-overlap-and-meshing* going on with them, and that's really hard to predict in advance! Cason has heard of a guy who'll charge for a test cuddle and then have sex for free if that pans out but most people who are interested in paying for sex are really fed up with not having managed to get any and want a sure thing even if they can't guarantee good personal-space-overlap-and-meshing.

*A three-syllable word encompassing reactivity to one another's body language and vocables, enjoying one another's smells and textures, and having compatible being-near-another-person algorithms such as what locations and with what level of pressure one pets/scritches/massages/rests various body parts on

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Ozytopians have found that actually a lot of people tend to be upset by having casual sex and experience somewhere between grave distress and actual trauma. They try to set up society so that people don't have to traumatize themselves for money.

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Dath ilan would be very interested in hearing about airtight evolutionary logic that proves dath ilan cannot exist; dath ilan is always on the lookout for that sort of thing.


...dath ilan has possibly ever played through a LARP with certain plot elements in common with the patterns Bobbiverse presents as real-life romantic tropes.

(NOT THAT THIS IS ITSELF SUSPICIOUS OR ANYTHING.)

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