" - as a prince? You can tell from the robes, they're more expensive than other peoples' and not standardized like the priests."

"Wait, so people are also supposed to do that with, like, Merenre?  What do people have to do when the Pharaoh walks by, flop all the way onto the floor?"

"...well, yes, powerful-person."

"You don't have to speak Baseline.  The spell is that so I can speak Baseline to you, and Fe-Anar can listen and pick up my intonations, and signal me any time I use a vocabulary word he doesn't recognize so I can define it and add it to his set."

"Would I be correct if I conjectured that Fe-Anar has multiple times tried to get people to stop doing this to him, and been shot down every time?  'Shot down', ignored / counterargued / dismissed."

She'll switch back to Osiriani. "I don't know, sir."

"It's bad for everyone's Law, if they stop following all the rules just because the rules are arbitrary and stupid. So it's a bit rude to tell them to and I only do it when it's really, really wasting a lot of time."

"Law is exactly not doing stuff that's arbitrary and stupid, unless you like really want to or something.  I'd ask if Pharasma has a way to submit bug reports - that's stories about an error in the system and what you were doing when you got the error - for her alignment system, but I'd guess going on the general tenor of Golarion that the answer is no."

"But, not the primary topic!  I have, at this point, gotten somewhat different stories on women getting some sort of weird treatment in Osirion, from sources that included my Chelish girlfriend, a seventh-circle priest of Abadar who was actually an illusion being operated by my Chelish girlfriend, a couple of books that were secretly edited by people acting under the orders of my Chelish girlfriend, and some brief confusing conversations in actual Osirion suggesting that a lot of what my Chelish girlfriend said was actually true."

"So, like, what the actual ass is going on here?  What are they doing, what's their stated reasons for doing it, and why do women put up with it?"

"Women can become pregnant, and men can't. I assume you knew that and it's not the answer that you're looking for, but it'd be an unkind abuse of your time, if trying to sound clever I neglected to say that part first."

"Oh, we definitely want to start with the basics here, yes.  My home dimension has pregnancies, they take nine months and afterwards you want to breastfeed the kid for a couple of years."

"It doesn't have involuntary pregnancies, because everybody has constant contraception running and two people need to deliberately turn it off in order for anybody to get pregnant."

"I do not think, however, that removing all the contraception from my home dimension would cause women to stop being able to own property."

"If we then further reduced everyone's income by a factor of 100, women would still be able to own property."

"If we reduced everybody's Intelligence by 7, and deleted everybody's knowledge of math, I'd still expect that women would end up able to own property, because, like, why wouldn't they."

"So I'm guessing that it has something to do with magic and gods and afterlives, somehow."

"I'm actually not sure it does, sir. Say you have a farm, and in that farm, they live off grain that grows by the river, and only men are strong enough to pull the plow and plant the grain. Boy children are valuable, as they'll grow up to be able to work the farm; girl children aren't valuable, because they need to eat and they can't grow grain. If that family has twins in a year when there's not enough grain, they'll expose the girl, and raise the boy. He's a better investment. Right?"

"Why not take the same logic further?  By hypothesis, girl children have less value than boy children; so kill all the girl children all the time."

"Seems like a more sustainable long-term strategy if boys could, in fact, get pregnant."

"They'd rather not kill their girl children, because people don't like killing their children and also it's Evil, so they won't do it unless it's a year where there's not enough grain. But yes, if there's been a famine, then when those boys grow up they'll have trouble finding wives, and that'll make having girls more appealing, and that balances out, though where it balances out depends on how much women can contribute to the production of food, and it's different in different places. 

...anyway, what you can do with girl children, if there's more than one farm in this story of ours, is marry them out. Girls are a luxury; farms that are producing an excess of grain, because they've got better land, or better luck, or a smidge of magic, can afford them. They're not very much of a luxury, they come close to earning their keep, and of course people do want wives, and heirs, so if they're running a little bit of margin, on the grain, they'll look to take a wife. In places where a woman is an economic liability, her parents will pay her husband to take her from them. There are also places where a woman is an economic asset, and her husband pays her parents for her, but we're not talking about those."

"So if I can improve ironforging and steelmaking techniques and produce sharper plows that can cut the land easily enough for a woman to push them, the entire current system of gender relations is upset?"

Carissa would like that not thinking that.

"Yes, sir. There are other things going on, but they are all things that built up around the fact that women are weaker than men, and that they're frequently pregnant, and that under normal conditions at least where I grew up, it's less in a family's interests to keep a daughter alive than a son."

"Where I come from, people with -1sd thinkoomph, sd is square root of the average squared deviation from average, thinkoomph is a broader metric that includes Intelligence and Wisdom and some other things, tended to usually be less economically productive and earn lower salaries than people with +1sd thinkoomph.  We didn't, like, exclude the -1s from owning property.  In your terms that'd be Intelligence 14s or 15s, who are less productive than Intelligence 18s and 19s."

"- so our farm hasn't gotten around to 'owning property' yet, sir. It's got a man, and his wife, and their children, only they married out the daughters, so their sons, and their sons' wives. In most places, the land is actually owned by a noble far away, who everyone pays tribute to, and no one in this story can own property.

But perhaps the Pharaoh has come to Sothis, and declared independence from the Keleshites and told all their nobles to go back to Qadira, and told the farmers, that land you work, now it is not owned by distant nobles, but every farm is owned by the family that works it, and the head of each family can go to the temple of Abadar, and get documents of ownership of their land."

"Back up.  'Property' doesn't just mean land, it means - the clothes you wear, the food your land produces, some of which you trade for shoes - shoes, foot-clothes - can women own that or is it just that they can't own land?  Or did the faraway 'nobles' also own all the food crops and shoes produced, and if so, how did anybody get shoes?"

"The nobles own the food-crops, sir, though if they have any sense they leave you enough to survive on. They own the livestock, I think, in most places that have nobles.

The house makes or trades for clothes to wear and those I don't think the nobles usually take. If they're reasonably well off, the woman has shoes, though there's certainly no court she could go to, if her husband for some strange reason took her shoes from her. Even if they're poor, she has her wedding jewelry he gave her when he took her as his wife, and that's hers; if he steals it from her or makes her sell it all their friends would condemn him, and warn him he might not make Axis, conducting himself like that. In modern Osirion she could go to a court if he took her wedding jewelry. 

When people say that women can't own property in Osirion, they don't mean that she does not wear clothes, and they mostly don't know about the wedding jewelry, that's not a custom in other places. They mean that the land and the foodcrops are legally owned by the household, as are any profits they've saved from last year's foodcrops, and that the household is headed by her husband, except in cases where she's been widowed without adult sons or something."

"Because the men are physically stronger and formed a collective faction that violently subjugated the women, and women here are not well-coordinated enough to stab all the men like that in their sleep?  I guess that's harder if you literally don't own knives... no, you've got plows, you should have other sharp objects?"

"If we stabbed all the men we'd starve, sir. Because of the thing where grain farming requires male strength levels."

"Okay, I'm not seeing a way out of that one.  The last time I had this conversation I was under the impression that, okay, you just went to the afterlife, but if killing people is Evil and then you go to Hell, that's not much of an option either, is it."

"I'd say, see, it reduces to afterlives after all, except that in dath ilan where afterlives don't exist... no, in dath ilan, if you're this far back in technological time, you know you're dying the True Death at the end of your life no matter what.  So you might as well stab the man exploiting you and die immediately instead of living a little longer while being exploited."

"Okay, it is about the afterlives and the alignment system.  That checks."

"Women often also don't want to kill their husband because their children need a father, and they don't want their children to starve and then to never see them again. The afterlives are important, but it would be a hard thing, to say goodbye to your children forever even if you know they'll go to the Boneyard and won't be tortured there or anything.

Even if I were sure of Axis I wouldn't kill my husband unless he was a danger to me or the children, and I'd probably try other things first."

"Does your husband have the power to grant you the ability to own property?  Or if not, does he track that - your shoes are yours, within the larger property system that says they're his?  There's such a thing as the right choice for a man to make, even in a situation like that.  And if he's doing his best, or trying to a reasonable degree, you stab the people who do maintain the system, not your husband who's doing the best he can."

"Actually, I think you could probably get pretty far just stabbing the worst quarter of men every fifteen years?"