....no, they know that, but a woman who has had sex before is much less desirable as a wife, less likely to be faithful and also just...worse, why would you want something used when you could have something new. And a woman who has spent a year in an army, around lots of men, washing around men, living around men, is just going to come back different, and no one's going to want to marry her. 

It seems to her that - 

- so, men and women are very different in lots of ways. Some women are strong, but most men are stronger; some women are tall, but mostly men are taller; some women can fight, but even in Avistan adventurers are mostly men, because men have more of the nature for it. All of those things shape the world, and it'd be stupid to leave them out when making sense of it, but - if a woman is tall and strong and likes fighting, she's still a woman. It'd be awfully horrible to her, to make laws that only reference tallness and strongness because they're easy to measure, and that count her as a man, and ruin her life on that account.

Yes, it is indeed an awful meddling foreigner, that they are discussing, and perhaps Osirion would be better off if he just solved some of their bigger problems and then left without trying to 'help' them any more than that.

But if that awful meddling foreigner told Osirion's government that they had no choice but to make symmetrical laws treating men and women, with respect to who has control of a household, or who can have incomes - how then would she minimize the harm done?  What's the next best alternative, from her perspective, to laws that treat men and women as the hugely different creatures they are with respect to owning things?

Well, in villages like the one she grew up in, the government doesn't really do anything except stop bandits, and do truth spells for weddings, and impose a quarantine sometimes if there's an outbreak in Sothis. And the men leave for the winter levy.

And it seems to her that if you couldn't have any rules that were good, then it'd be best to just try not having any rules at all and see what went wrong with that. So the government could keep on stopping bandits and doing truth spells for weddings and imposing a quarantine, and stop it with the levy, and maybe that'd work out.

...Keltham can think of more probing questions to ask, here, but he's also getting the impression that, measured INT 12 or no, this person is lower-thinkoomph than the INT 10 vendor who asked why Keltham looked human-shaped if he wasn't from Golarion.

Thanks for trading.  Next in line, INT 14 potential-wizard girl whose name Keltham has of course already forgot, although this time he needs to remember it for All-Seeing-Eye wizard lessons purposes.

Message:  He's Keltham out of dath ilan; and if somebody needed to find him alone out of all the dath ilani named Keltham, his birth-order number would be these ten digits, he's that number of person born in dath ilan since the world started counting.

Herself?

She's Mirna, and if you needed to find her alone out of all the people in the world she's not really sure what you'd do; if you wanted to get a letter to her in Axis once she'd died you'd say Mirna who was married to Gamal and lived south of the market in Sothis, and probably run into a false start or two. The numbers are clever.

Yeah, very clever if you come from a planet which otherwise has planetwide instant communications, and can easily have a central count that goes up by one every time a doctor clicks a button about a newborn baby having its umbilical cord cut after it starts breathing.  Keltham wouldn't really blame Golarion on this one.

(He'll go Prestidigitate 'Mirna' and 'husband Gamal' onto the interior of his wrist jacket so he doesn't forget.)

Keltham is planning to help Osirion a lot, enough to let it face down Cheliax, to repair past mistakes he's made and because of a debt he owes to Abadar.  He doesn't want to make the world worse, in the course of doing that, and there's also the question of whether he should help Osirion a lot more than that minimum.

Countries like Cheliax and Absalom in Avistan - which continent underwent a different development history where a lot of men died out in wars, and there was more competition among women for the remaining men - Cheliax and Absalom both allow men and women alike to have their own incomes and own their own property.  Or so Keltham understands it.  Keltham's home planet of dath ilan didn't treat men and women any differently, in this regard, and would have regarded it as a very grave wrong akin to enslaving somebody, to not let them own their own property and hold for themselves what money they had earned; whether they were men, or women, or children old enough to earn money.

Keltham, when he arrived into Golarion and called out to a god of honesty and fair treatment who turned out to be Abadar, would not have thought that a god of fair trading would have countenanced women being treated as Osirion treats them; and a seventh-circle priest of Abadar out of Absalom, whom Keltham spoke to, didn't seem to feel much differently.

If Osirion increases in power and spreads its own culture across the world, a culture in which women are - as Keltham's world would see it - halfway enslaved, it is something Keltham would have thought a grave wrong to do to Golarion, in the course of an outsider trying to help it.

It's not nearly as grave a wrong as Cheliax spreading its culture and sending more people to Hell, and Keltham is indebted and obligated to help the non-Evil societies of the world at least enough to stop that whatever the cost.

But if Keltham is to give Osirion more help than that - would she, Mirna, a woman of Osirion, who wasn't allowed by Osirion to follow her own path, if she had to pass judgment on Osirion - what would she tell Keltham should be their fate?  Or how would Mirna say that Osirion must change how it will treat her daughters and granddaughters, if Osirion is to be made greater and more powerful than this, and given a louder voice in shaping Golarion's Future?

"....I don't actually know if Osirion does want to spread the Osirian way of doing things. I don't think that'd work. The way they talk about it in church is, there's two balancing points, one where everyone's out for themselves and men leave women and women have to be financially independent and there's lots of abortion and infanticide, and one where everyone has to make their marriage work whether they like it or not. There aren't any in between balancing points; every in between strategy can be exploited.

And you can't get Cheliax to be like Osirion, and if they'd rather go to Hell, well, Abadar isn't about making people do things they don't want to do for their own good. 

Osirion doesn't do wars of conquest. We don't have colonies. I think if Osirion got richer, more people'd come here, but - that seems different than Osirion spreading, at least to me. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know politics, but - maybe you could solve the puzzle just by assuring yourself that we don't believe in spreading." 

"Maybe.  Common wisdom out of dath ilan is that people tend to instinctively imitate success, including the incidental characteristics of success if you don't think about them carefully, and I'd expect that effect to be much much stronger in Golarion where nobody gets training in thinking about which qualities are incidental or not."

"Some people in my world would say that the solution is to make travel cheaper and then let all the women in Osirion who don't want to be there leave for Absalom; let the men compete over the fewer and fewer women who would remain, if women saw their sisters who left looking more - instinctively what a person feels is successful."

"It's just - the way people talk about other people, including themselves, it seems like this remedy, that would be the first thought in my own world's mind - that was my first thought when I heard about Osirion - it doesn't make sense, in a place where women will marry terrible husbands because their shirt has a ruffle, or men will drink alcohol even though that makes them violent and stupid, and people in Cheliax say they want to go to Hell.  It seems like - it isn't helping people at all, to offer them more choices - in a world like that - and I don't know people enough to just, optimize their lives for them, I don't want to do that, to be that sort of dangerously Good person, if it's not just, Evil, that I don't want to."

"What do I do, Mirna?"

"Well, sir, I don't know why you're asking me, but I think, you know, Axis is pretty good. And in Axis there's no men or women, and they wouldn't have to change their laws at all, to play by the strange rules you were talking about with Azra. And Osirion getting richer means Osirion getting more like Axis. I don't know how it'll happen, exactly, but the thing we're imitating is there, and it's beautiful, and with more strength we would lift ourselves closer to it."

"I've seen Axis, yeah, or what I think was Axis.  Early Judgment.  It looked a bit like dath ilan.  Nicer aircraft, smaller buildings, more aliens, and - closer, in spirit, to the person who I was, used to be, back when I arrived in Golarion and thought that selfish people trading honestly was enough to support a world -"

Keltham realizes he's possibly about to burst into tears and cuts off that line of thinking before his eyes can do more than slightly water.

"But, something like that has to begin with people in this world making their own choices, about where to go, about what they want."

"What would you like Osirion to be, to become, as it became richer?  How would you have it move towards Axis, step by step?"

"Oh. Well, once we're a bit richer, we can send girls to school as well as boys. Then they can read and do figures, and they'll make more money, probably. And if they're making more money, they can hold out for better marriages. Or not get married, I suppose, if they aren't suited to it, without being burdens on their families. And maybe we can hire more city guards, so the streets are safe for women at night, I'm sure in Axis the streets are safe for women at night."

Someone else chimes in. "You could have a cleric on hand for every childbirth so women didn't die of it."

"You could have it easier for a newlywed couple to go off and set up their own household, if they weren't getting along with the husband's parents, if rents weren't so high and men weren't in debt from apprenticeships."

"You could have minimums for marriage jewelry, or require husbands to add to it every year."

"Or let a woman add her own income to her marriage jewelry, if she wanted, maybe only if she could convince the church she wasn't just being selfish."

"Is there ever a point where it would make sense in Abadar's country for women to just - trade freely, own their own things, trade their own work for things that they owned - is there an amount of wealth that would clearly be enough for that, and what amount, and how, and why?  Or should all the women who want that - just be offered a ticket to Absalom, once it's affordable, and that's the most you can do for them?"

"Are you asking about unmarried women," Mirna says, "or married ones, or widowed ones, or all of those?"

"In my homeworld, it would have been - people.  Anybody who could pass a competence test about understanding what money was, how it was used, the fact that if you spent money now that meant you didn't have it to spend later, and only very very disabled people wouldn't have been able to pass that test by age thirteen; I passed it at age seven."

"Well, if I take this gold coin and I go and buy something with it, no one's going to say 'she's a woman, she's not allowed to be spending money'. But it'd be selfish of me, to spend it all on a silk shawl or something. If my husband earned a gold coin somehow, he'd take it home and show me and show his mother and we'd all decide together what to do with it. And since that's what my husband'd do, that's what I'd do, and I know we fall short of comprehending Abadar all the time but - I don't see where He'd see us in error, there -"

"It's the part where somebody who wants out of the system, to just be themselves, and earn their own money and spend their own money, is not allowed to do that, especially if they're a woman.  If that part was misrepresented to me, then I've been worrying over nothing."

" - well, if she's a spellcaster or something and can support herself, then she can get declared the head of her household."

"I am imagining myself in the shoes of a girl growing up inside this system and not, for example, being able to assemble the fifty gold pieces required to get started on Spellcraft lessons, or nobody giving me a loan for that even if I detect as having 14 Intelligence, or maybe I only detect as 13 Intelligence and can't be a wizard but my husband only has 12 Intelligence so why should he keep all the money I earn?  I do not get the impression that there are banks with offices in the port cities offering to make loans to any woman who wants to take herself to Absalom.  It does not seem to me that in practice this system has been reasonably set up to let people who understand money, and want to make and keep their money, just do that.  It is set up very nicely if you want to be a boy who lives with his parents until he's twenty-five and done with his carpenter apprenticeship and then find a wife so he can own his own business and his wife and all of the income that she makes, and dispense however much of that to her he finds convenient.  It is not set up to be a girl who wants to be treated as owning herself."

"People can be owned, can be treated like this, can be hit by their husbands even, if that's what they want."

"The system needs to be set up to handle the exceptions who don't want that, or the system does not, in my eyes, have a right to exist for the sake of those people who do want it, even if they are a majority."

...they will listen attentively, looking confused.

"...maybe all of this is meaningless because people in Golarion don't think - like that - and my own system needs to be set up to handle that exception."

"...so what is Abadar even doing here, then?  How are there enough people - to pray to him, to become clerics?  What to you is Abadar, if not the god of voluntary coordination?  In Osirion women are slaves to men, in Cheliax both men and women are slaves to the government.  They both quite approve of men hitting women under the right circumstances, and the right circumstances are not that the woman chose it.  I had thought, hoped - that Abadar - was something more different from Asmodeus than, a difference of who owns who."

"We're not slaves," Mirna says. "I don't know what point you think you're making, saying that, but it's not true. 

Abadar is the god of working hard, and dealing fairly, and prospering through your own labor and determination, and building cities, and building a world where your children are richer than you, and your grandchildren richer than them, and not just because you were on the right side or made the right friends, but because you planted trees that are now bearing fruit for them."

"Fruit which your granddaughters and grandsons pluck, and then your grandsons keep all of that, and dole it out to the granddaughters.  Unless the granddaughters can somehow, in a country where they can't earn and keep money, scrape up enough money to go to wizard school."

"Cheliax also seems to have a philosophy of building for future generations, it's just that Asmodeus owns it all, instead of the people who built it.  Do you see the symmetry here?  The god of prospering through your own labor and determination should not be, like, the same god as the god of your husband prospering through your own labor and determination, and then, so far as the government is concerned, he has the legal right to spend all his money on alcohol and hit you, and whatever kindness you receive from him instead of that is just him being gracious -"

"I don't even understand how these men aren't ending up in Hell, and maybe I should, while I'm still a fifth-circle cleric, be trying to scry one of them to see which afterlife they actually went to.  Though maybe the actual answer is just 'Pharasma is an ancient alien thing far stranger than the inhuman gods, who never cared about making her system make sense to the tiny helpless creatures she trapped inside it.'"

"- I mean, bad husbands sometimes go to Hell, which is why the church spends so much time warning men not to be bad husbands. Most men aren't bad husbands! Most men are sort of middling husbands, doing their best, and they don't spend all your money on alcohol and hit you.

And, I mean, if you'd be better off without your husband around, and you moved in with your parents or out on your own or something, it's not like anyone'd make you move back in with him. Make sure he could see his children, yes, but not you, if you've decided you want nothing to do with him. It's just that even most women with drunk husbands don't do that, because it'd be worse."

"Or because they worry about the children," one of the other women objects. "I'd probably have gone to my parents', when Hatem was being an ass, if I wasn't worried for the baby. - I don't think he's going to go to Hell, though. He never did anything really bad."

"I don't understand, but, for whatever it's worth, I am - listening, and learning, even if the main thing I am learning is that - this world may not be something that I belong in enough to help it.  Maybe Abadar doesn't think any differently, since he must be more alien still, and is looking at this mess in equal horror, thinking that all he can do is try to help you become richer, until you find your own way.  I only wish - that I had confidence - that you would - find your way - and not, as a people, choose to do the civilizational equivalent of drinking more alcohol when you became richer."

"I think being rich - it's not quite that being rich just is being free. But it's pretty close. Everyone in Axis is freer than anyone but a king, here. And if we get that rich, then - then no one will put up with anything a king wouldn't put up with. And a king wouldn't put up with Hatem."

"I barely put up with Hatem," says Hatem's wife. "If I were a king I'd keep him at my country villa where there wasn't any alcohol, and see him when I pleased, and if he hit me I'd have my guards drag him off."