Usually when clerics of Abadar have plans to tackle sexism they are incredibly annoying plans that presume that everyone involved is just being a rational economic agent and not hurting people for their own benefit because they want to.

This one has unusually interesting plans to tackle sexism! That seems promising!

Do not do ANYTHING with the anomaly.

Do not ADD CLERIC LEVELS to it.

Do not make anyone AROUND it a cleric.

Do not drop FOUR ORACLE LEVELS on anyone especially if they are going to CONTINUE hanging around the anomaly.

Otolmens is TRYING to get the anomaly back in the anomaly containment zone and MEANWHILE all of the gods should LEAVE IT ALONE even if it is NOT IN THE ZONE RIGHT THIS TIME-UNIT.

If Otolmens murders the worst quarter of men in the world, then there'd be no need to try to convince this random Abadaran to do it.

Otolmens will CONSIDER it if Calistria can arrange for the anomaly to go BACK IN THE ANOMALY CONTAINMENT ZONE.

Otolmens can figure out whether a mortal is a 'men' without TOO much effort.  Can Calistria define for Otolmens which quarter of men are the WORST ones?

"- well, I can't speak for anyone else, sir, but if people figured out who the 'worst quarter' of men were and came to my house to kill my husband and sons, I'd stab them."

"A very reasonable attitude, if your husband is not, like, making you work, keeping the stuff you make, and then not letting you trade it for things that you are then allowed to keep.  If your husband is like that -"

"Oh wait.  Is this a perverted thing?  Uh, perversion, making sex more complicated.  Like, the Osirian equivalent of 'masochism'?"

".....no, sir. I mean, obviously while you're trying to make your marriage work you can end up in lots of weird places, but a normal young woman is not thinking, 'oh, I hope my husband's cruel to me', she's hoping he's reasonable and hardworking and makes her rich and doesn't hit her without provocation."

"Okay, I was about to ask if I was coming at this the wrong way and the whole system was voluntary and maybe you could just opt out by cutting your hair in a locally stereotypically masculine hairstyle and then you'd be allowed to have your own money.  But that is again sounding like the women are being forced by violence into a system where they're not having fun and they'd prefer a different system."

"Well, it depends on the different system. Sarenrae's church fights for women's concerns in Garund and Casmaron. They say things like that we should raise the minimum age of marriage, and if a man was poor when he married but is rich ten years later he should be obliged to buy his wife more wedding jewelry, and that a man shouldn't be allowed to take a second wife if his first one says he's lousy. Those would all be popular, if you asked women.

If you ask whether we want things to be like they are in Avistan, where everyone's a whore - no. I've talked to women who want that, but - only two of them, and I've done orientation for hundreds of new concubines."

"I wish everyone in Avistan was a sex worker.  I had one girlfriend who'd name a price for anything in either direction and the rest were like 'oh no if we're ever financially legible to Keltham we'll be in the same referenceclass, "category", as women who get pregnant and die in the street even though we are all at least second-circle wizards who know Alter Self!'.  Though I suppose that all could have been a lie, and if it was I will be annoyed even considering everything else they lied to me about.  I'd just arrived from another dimension and had barely any idea what a gold piece was worth and nobody in Cheliax would tell me whether sex here was valued at like one copper or a thousand gold pieces or what!"

"Sorry, none of that is your problem.  But I'm not getting what the connection is between 'can own things' and 'is sex worker'.  Is the idea that if women own things, they will inevitably realize they can trade sex for money?"

"Sidenote Fe-Anar, most men and women in dath ilan have both paid for and sold sex at some point, the word 'sex worker' actually means a professional good enough to make a living at it, but I'm repurposing it to mean 'has ever been paid for sex' since Baseline doesn't have a native word for 'whore', end sidenote Fe-Anar."

"So, in Osirion, most women will only lie with a man if he's married her. There are prostitutes, they're not illegal, but there's not many, and you certainly can't bring them to parties, and they're not a very appealing substitute for a long-term romantic relationship. So if a man wants a serious relationship, and regular access to a woman's bed, he'd better make himself a good candidate for marriage and then go persuade someone to marry him. 

Marriage is a lifelong commitment. A man promises to provide for his wife and for any children she bears him, to pay for treatment if she's sick within whatever his abilities are, to provide her with a home and protect her and her children from danger, and to greet her with love. In return, a woman promises to obey her husband, to steward his money wisely and raise his children well, to be faithful to him and to greet him with love. 

Some marriages break down, and the couple ends up living separately or barely speaking to each other. But still, they are bound by these promises; and a woman can go to the Osirian state if her husband isn't providing for her family, and get money drawn out of his bank account if he has one, and get him prevented from remarrying. 

Because of all this, it's actually very rare, for even a girl-child to be left outside to die of exposure when she's born. You marry someone who can provide for your children, and then your children don't starve; that is the whole promise, here, that if you refrain from recklessly having sex without the safety of marriage then you won't have to watch your children starve.

In Avistan they don't do any of that very much. Some girls will have sex with you even when you haven't married them. Because some girls can do that, no girls can hold out for a lifelong promise to provide for them; why would a man offer them that, when he could just go have sex with all the girls who'll offer it for free? No one would get married, so they made a sort of fake marriage that you can break at any time, and they all do that. Women are, in a sense, freer. They aren't chaperoned. Because no man will provide for them, it's more important for their families to figure out how they'll provide for themselves, so more of them are financially independent, though also many, many more of them starve, or are killed by a man they trusted and shouldn't have, or die of an abortion. Many of them feel that there's something wrong, something missing, that things shouldn't be like this, but those ones simply don't lie with anyone at all; they can't find any men who'd be worth trusting. 

Our society demands virtue of men and virtue of women, and constrains them so that they can't do whatever they like but they won't go hungry. Avistan demands no virtue of anyone, and they do as they like, and they kill the babies that result and then they go to Hell, or Abaddon, or the Abyss, and it just doesn't sound like a very good trade, really. If you say the wrong things about women's liberation people think you're proposing they raise their girls into Avistani whores -- by which I don't even mean they pay for sex, just that they offer it outside of marriage -- and they'll hate that idea and stop listening to you."

"...so it's a conspiracy by the women themselves, to prevent competition between women and maintain sex at an artificially high price, allegedly for the sake of raising children because otherwise why would any man pay to raise a child, and the men are also trapped in that, it sounds like to me.  The husbands beat the wives.  The wives, I assume, beat any woman who tries - what I'd consider normal dating.  Check?"

" - you don't beat someone, if she's gone around sleeping with men, you just stay away from her. It'll ruin her life, but not because anyone did anything. I guess you'd tell your sons not to marry her, because she has terrible impulse control and is probably infertile?"

"And then she ends up in an awful 'afterlife', which is, I suppose, what underpins the whole system, what Pharasma arbitrarily defines as 'Evil' or 'Chaotic'... Calistria is 'Chaotic Neutral', not because she's doing something contrary to decision theory, but because decision theory itself as correctly applied by female sex workers is opposed to Asmodean/Osirian power relations which are 'Lawful Evil' and 'Lawful Neutral' respectively..."

"You know, Cheliax tried to sell me on a bunch of sexual behaviors like that being 'Evil', but apparently that was a false advertisement for 'Evil' and they were actually just 'Lawful'?  I guess that makes sense, Abadar wouldn't have 'clericed' me if he wasn't on board with my 'sadism'."

" - no, sir, whatever they do in Cheliax is definitely Evil. Marriage is Lawful, it's - structuring your life around a promise made to protect the long-term interests of both parties. Cheliax doesn't have that, because they don't want people promising to protect and care for one another."

"They were pretending not to be Evil, or rather, they were pretending about what Evil was.  Supposedly, Carissa was going to obey me and wanted to obey me, and - wanted me to be in charge, wanted me to be cruel to her and hit her, I'll have to check the transcripts for what she said under Osirion-verified truthspell but it sounded like - maybe that part was not a lie - and I had qualms about this - 'qualms', a sense that something violates your deontology, 'deontology', simple rules you obey instead of calculating out the exact consequences of things - which is why I did not buy her from Cheliax when Cheliax offered her to me and now I do not have her, which, I don't even know, now, if that was good or bad.  But it sounds like basically the same thing you have in Osirion, except that, at least the way they presented it, Carissa wanted to be hit, and wasn't trying to corner me into that relationship via a monopoly on sex enforced by ostracizing women who try to go on dates and preventing them from fleeing your country by not letting them earn money or own things."

Keltham can now talk about this without having a crying fit.  Good for Keltham!  He will probably be fairly recovered by tomorrow at this rate.

"I don't think that's the thing we have in Osirion, sir. If you retain the option to get bored or meet someone better or get angry with her and leave her as soon as you feel like it, then that's nothing like marriage. Osirians would have told you that you could take this woman as your wife, if she desired it and you desired it, and that she would obey you and be faithful to you, and if hitting your wife worked out well for your marriage then by all means you should do so, and in exchange you would be committing to protect her, to see that she didn't go hungry, to arranging her shelter and medical care and supporting the children."

"I would have done that anyways."

"It would not need to be enforced upon me."

"Fe-Anar, and - your name was on the price-list sheet but I don't remember it - please excuse me and leave me alone for a few minutes, I will come out when it's okay for you to come back."

Never mind that part about not having a crying fit!  But nobody could blame Keltham at this point!  He is still definitely doing better than yesterday.

They'll step out into the hallway, then.

It's a bad one.  Keltham wants to scream, or maybe just let out a thin wailing sound, but he does not have a Silence spell chambered and the area does not look particularly soundproofed.  Possibly he should start carrying around a Silence scroll?

"Sorry about the delay.  Let's resume?"

"Yes, sir."

"Fe-Anar, what's 'sir' mean in Osirian?"

"It's a generic, uh, title used to indicate respect and importance."

Not worth arguing over.

"So I think I have a basic model of what went wrong."

"I am very sure, going on how my whole society worked, and also the way I feel, that I would not need this -"  Baseline, of course, does not have a word for blasphemy.  "- awful setup, to be convinced to take care of my kids."

"Why?  Because, though we don't know our history any more, dath ilan would not have had this setup.  Dads who didn't take care of their kids, just had fewer kids, until there were fewer dads like that."

"You set up a situation so that men who didn't care about their children could be forced to take care of their children anyways, you set up a way for men like that to be reproductively competitive with men who just cared, and that, in fact, was a mistake."

"Over in Absalom, where, as I understand it according to some things people have said in Osirion, men and women are not forcing themselves to behave this way, do you know how many surviving children the average man or woman has, on average, including all the men and women who just don't have kids in the first place?"

"Two."

"And do you know what the number in Osirion is?"

"Two."

"Any other number and the population quickly goes to zero or infinity.  But that's not what actually happens, if the number goes up or down, what happens is that there's fewer people working better land so that fewer of their children starve, or people more crowded in cities with more epidemics, until the number goes back to roughly two."

"That's what all of this awfulness bought you, in the end.  Two surviving children per man, two surviving children per woman, on average."