delegations from topias: anomaland, bobbiverse, malachitin, elfland, ozytopia, alicornutopia, dath ilan
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... a Bobbiversian inquires about whether the other worlds have male sex workers who they’d be willing to send, if they’re very sure that the male sex workers wouldn’t go around murdering people; about 90% of their population is only attracted to men and this sometimes produces issues with the thing where only one twentieth of their population is male. Possibly they’d even want to send over permanent male immigrants, if they have less of the issue that the Bobbi’s have with men murdering people all of the time? 

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Firstplanet's best guess at the evolutionary explanation is that the sex drive only activates when there's reason to believe one can provide for a resulting child, and that usually requires two people. Maybe dath ilanis are more instinctively confident in their ability to raise a kid solo?

Also, their men aren't particularly criminal--maybe a bit more than their women and genderlesses on average--but vanishingly few of them will want to be sex workers.

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Greens have observed that testosterone seems to increase aggression. What exact murder rate is "murdering people all the time" describing here?

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Ozytopians will be happy to send male sex workers to Bobbiverse if their rate of murdering people all the time is acceptably low. They would not describe their men as murdering people all the time.

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About one in a hundred Bobbiversian men end up nonconsensually murdering someone at some point, and about three in a hundred end up murdering someone in a kind of ambiguously consensual tragic-beautiful way. Tall-purple-flower-women and regular-women barely ever murder anyone at all, by comparison, although it does still happen. Also the other universes seem like they might count infanticide as the same kind of thing but they aren’t keeping the right kind of statistics on that.

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Dath ilan was under the impression that ancestral males would have been evolutionarily incentivized to donate genetic material for free, and in fact would pay to do so; and that ancestral females would have played a more complex game that is mostly about trading sex for resources or for the credible prospect and commitment of those, but also trading sex as a desired and marketable resource for political alliances, and also being attracted to higher-evidenced-genetic-quality mates especially when longer-term resources aren't in the offing.

Today, a supermajority of men can easily have fun sex with a relative stranger that they paid.  A supermajority of women will be pleased and flattered enough by a large payment for sex that they'll hug you and mean it.  Some women find it easy to enjoy sex they're having for strategic reasons, and a few of those women become sex workers.

This doesn't seem weird to dath ilan?

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(Backchannel, in sign language:

"On the upside we are not worried about invasion from Bobbiverse."

"On the downside, EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT BOBBIVERSE."

"Also even if we're not worried about invasion from Bobbiverse it would still make closing the cave significantly more complicated."

"I'm still confused how their gender situation even happened??"

"Everyone else has the converse confusion about us, though."

"Theirs seems significantly more impossible! --but then we would think that.")

 

Malachitin's murder rate is way way way way way below that and was even when they still had wars. More relevantly, although no gender is significantly more murderous than the others and straightforward men have a larger population share than most genders, that's not saying very much and they don't in fact have very many straightforward men.

That... is not how malachitinous psychology treats sex. It is also not how malachitinous psychology treats gender.

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Dath ilan's situation seems like a reasonable way for evolution to have gone differently! Anomalans seem to have their sex drive more closely tied to their parenting drive, and possibly also fewer sex-linked traits in general. (It's kind of hard for anyone else to determine the sex of the delegates given how much clothing they're wearing, except the one with the green hair and red eyebrows has a blue beard so that one's probably male.)

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Dath ilan is getting an increasingly strong impression that many other societies - possibly not the Greens? - thought that the initial pair of sexual clusters and dimorphisms that evolution handed them were way too boring.

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Yep! That is indeed what their society thought. In fact, no two people in the malachitinous delegation are the same gender. 

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Anomalans don't exactly find it boring, per se? Just not really that useful for stuff other than deciding who to have kids with and some stuff about what clothes look good on people that none of the delegates have studied.

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Well they were boring but now it's been thousands of years so they have greebles.

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Anomalans mostly don't attach their aesthetic greebles to physiological traits because most Anomalans don't like their starting set of physical traits very much. 

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The Bobbiversians are of the opinion - directed carefully not-at-Dath-Ilan and instead at the other universes discussing the topic - that the ancestral environment was dumb and terrible and probably also already contained lots of really unhappy tall-purple-flower-women anyways. And lots of men who were being deprived of the routine of steroids and growth hormones that every man ought to have access to, and lots of regular-women being deprived of other hormonal and cosmetic and surgical stuff.

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It's possible that the steroids are involved in their murder rate. Just a thought.

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Yeah no for sure, into the garbage bin with the ancestral environment as anything but a source of data. But definitely also consider the thing with the steroids.

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“You can’t just not let men take steroids,” says the sole male diversity hire of the Bobbiverse delegation, horrified. “Are you not letting your men take steroids? That’s awful!”

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"I mean, we can, if we just want to watch numbers go up on our athletics metrics," says Cason, sounding like this is a low status hobby, "but it's not a very good idea?"

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"Some men take testosterone about it? Of course lots of non-men also take testosterone about it."

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"Plenty of no-limits-atheletes take steroids and they do a little more crime than average for their wealth bracket but it's a high enough wealth bracket that that's still under the population average and not our highest crime reduction priority."

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The main way in which a noticeable number of people in dath ilan don't like the Initial Setup (that dath ilan mostly kept) is the imbalance between male and female sex drives.

Dath ilan has been looking hard for a pharmaceutical that augments female sex drive, but phemelanotide, the current best candidate, still has too many side effects.  There's a less side-effectful pharmaceutical that damps male sex drives, and some men take that to be happy in relationships with women with below-average sex drives, since most men can't afford sex work on any regular basis.  Some women limit their orgasms to one a month so they'll have a greater supply of sex drive to trade for social capital, or so that they can have supportive harems of men.

Some men write elaborate stories about being isekaied into alternate universes where the male and female gender roles have been reversed, though obviously still with the original anatomies, and men get to be the ones who are courted and pursued and say 'no' and have harems and trade sex for things they want.

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That sounds really sad? Have these men tried giving their partners massages, or arranging that a lot of chores get done so she can experience an entire afternoon in which she doesn't have any problems?

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Is there a reason the dath ilani men don't date each other? 

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Plenty of people on Green have fairly restrictive types, perhaps dath ilan has a lot of that too.

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Arranging whole afternoons free isn't particularly a problem, that's assumed background.  Massages sound like the sort of thing that would work maybe twenty times over the course of a relationship, before the massage recipient got dumped-by-the-hedonic-treadmill and they stopped working for her?

It's not that dath ilani never try to solve this problem, it's that the solutions are imperfect and have very real very serious costs, and if anybody has 'phemelanotide except it actually works correctly' then dath ilan will pay an awful lot of money for it.


Men who can enjoy sex with other men are the very rare sexual lottery winners of dath ilan.  Everybody else tries not to think about how easy it is for them and how much fun they're having.

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