Avishraa Reloaded

Courtship, here, refers to the process of initiating a relationship, regardless of its length or level of formality.

The eliciting of favor through gifts remains a central part of the courtship process for both the takmar and the xtauh. Although the giving of gifts by males to females is nearly universal, there are a smaller number of societies in which the reverse is also allowed by custom, most commonly when the female is particularly impressed by the male. (There are few, if any, societies where there is only a tradition of females giving gifts to males.) It is generally considered that, for either sex, eligibility to engage in the courtship process begins once an individual leaves their mother's home.

The appropriate length of courtship and number of gifts involved vary from culture to culture, but in general are proportional to the permanence of the desired relationship. A courtship intended to end in marriage may last for several turns and involve repeated gifts; a traveling male that wants a sexual partner during a stop will present a single, simple gift to an amenable female, and after their tryst, there is not necessarily any further tie between them - though, of course, the male may prefer his experience with her and return in the future.

(Despite the very close similarities between the latter situation and the human concept of prostitution, it should be said that in most societies this is, to a greater or lesser degree, considered entirely normal behavior for a female not otherwise restricted. If any comment is to be made, it is usually only if the female is actually making her living from sex.

By contrast, male prostitution is far more often seen as distinct, and is often considered immoral or undesirable, though this does not at all prevent it from occurring.)

The nature of the gift may vary, though in general it should be something of use, value, or importance. Food, tools, and other goods useful in the home are widely accepted, as they have been since prehistoric times; in those societies that have developed coinage, money is also widely appreciated. That said, it often helps if the gift is not generic: something the recipient particularly likes or which are clearly aimed at her - favorite foods, an object of a favorite color, something particularly needed, a song or poem she likes (or even composed just for her). As one might guess from this, the gift does not necessarily have to be a physical object, though what counts as an acceptable or desirable gift may vary between cultures and personal tastes.

All else being equal, the higher the status of a female recipient, the more lavish or unusual the gift must usually be to have a positive effect on her attitude toward her suitor's courtship, partly out of a sense of self-worth, but also partly because she is more likely to already have plenty of some mundane gift.

Neither takmar nor xtauh are particularly more stingy than humans are. While gifts given for particular occasions can be easily understood as being related to the occasion and not to any attempt to woo someone, gifts given simply as kindnesses may raise the problem of context; if both giver and recipient would be considered appropriate partners, a gift could potentially be taken as an expression of interest that was not intended (or intended as one but not taken that way). Most cultures tend to deal with this in one of several ways: through the use of particular rituals or behaviors at the time a particular gift is presented; by some statement or ritual to mark the beginning of a courtship period, during which any gifts given may be considered as intended to gain the recipient's interest; the designation of particular days on which gifts should be taken as courtship measures (not unlike Valentine's Day); or considering only particular kinds of gifts to count toward courtship. (Some cultures don't deal with it at all, and require the participants simply to puzzle the matter out for themselves.)

The more involved courtships, of the sort leading up to a more permanent or formal relationship, often require the recipient to periodically give some kind of signal as to whether, and how much, the giver's efforts are appreciated and whether they should continue. Outright rejection or return of a gift, while not unknown, is relatively rare, and is almost always done when the recipient finds either the gift itself or the giver to be particularly offensive. In all other situations, the gift is expected to be accepted, but how much the recipient's feelings are moved are generally expressed via enthusiasm of one sort or another.

The reaction to the gift is not necessarily connected to the recipient's feelings about the gift itself (though a good one often helps). It is not at all uncommon for a fine gift to receive a tepid reaction if the recipient wishes to discourage the suitor, or for a very favored suitor to receive overdone appraisal of a mediocre gift. Someone who is impatient or determined to be successfully courted by a suitor may even specify something absurdly common or easy to obtain. (Waiving the requirement of gifts entirely may sometimes also be done, but most cultures consider it unusually informal at best.)

The most involved courtships are those aimed at what, in a human context, would be called marriage.

While marriage takes a wide variety of forms, it typically has several broad functions. One involves mutual behavior; married partners are expected to support each other and meet each others' needs and not be neglectful (i.e. sex, emotional support). One is the establishment of paternity: the right and responsibility of the husband to act as a father to the wife's children. One involves the right of the husband to live in the wife's household, and the responsibility to help maintain it. While it is most often the case that these three functions are united, it is not universally so. Some cultures may have several types of marriage-like arrangements, with different functions assigned to each. Some, rarely, may omit one of the functions from marriage entirely.

Marriage is usually contracted between a female and one male; that is to say that, even if a female has multiple husbands, the marriage to one is theoretically independent to those for the others. Divorcing one will not divorce them all, and different husbands may have different terms to the marriage. There are sometimes exceptions to this; in some cultures, males who have a close bond may court and/or marry a female jointly, while in others, the marriage may encompass all a female's husbands to ensure that they are treated equally.

Marriages of one male to multiple females are considerably rarer. It usually requires, in the first place, an arrangement in which two females are in joint possession of a single household, since if they lived separately the male could only live with one of them at a time and would have to shuttle regularly between them. Since females are territorial over husbands as well as land, this also usually requires a certain amount of preexisting closeness between the females; usually they are sisters or close cousins of a similar age. Typically, the sharing of both land and husband is done for economic reasons, pooling their resources in a marginal situation.

It should be noted that the above description of marriage mentions meeting each others' needs, it does not mention a partner's relations with others. The evolutionary history of the takmins is not particularly conducive to fidelity, even compared to humans. Both sexes were inclined to have multiple partners, and this was only partially dampened when males started settling in a particular female's home to help raise children.

In particular, female behavior in this regard is not, from the point of view of society, usually affected by one's marriage. While she certainly may refrain from relationships besides those with her husbands, there is no social requirement that she do so. Whether she does will depend on the feelings of her husbands, whether she takes those feelings into account, and what she feels her own needs are. (It is worth noting that, since the wife will generally be receiving a gift from her paramour in exchange for her consideration, there is sometimes an economic incentive for the husbands not to object.) She may not, however, knowingly sleep with another female's husband without social consequences.

Male behavior is not so lightly treated, as females are usually much less tolerant of extramarital dalliances. No one usually cares who an unmarried male sleeps with, but a married one is supposed to be devoting himself to a single wife and a single home, rather than gifting to some other female, married or not. If he is found out, this is usually grounds for divorce and a ruined reputation.

There are other grounds for divorce or revocation of marriage, but with the possible exceptions of physical abuse or female infertility, they are usually skewed toward the wife. The same is true of the results of divorce; not only will a divorced husband cease to have a home on his ex-wife's property, but, because there is usually no concept of paternity besides that conferred by marriage (see further below), he will cease to be a father to his children. Therefore, husbands generally have both economic and emotional reasons to remain in a marriage that is not otherwise tolerable.

In premodern societies with little access to healthcare or even accurate medical knowledge, high mortality is a fact of life - for all ages, but particularly for children. In such societies, to which nearly all takmar and xtauh belong, the survival of the population rests upon the ability to produce and raise offspring.

The same was true of premodern humans, and had much to do with high birth rates in early societies. For a human population, with approximately equal numbers of males and females, to be maintained at a replacement rate, there must be an average of two children per woman surviving to adulthood - one to replace the mother, and one to replace a man. (This is an oversimplification, of course; the sexes do not have exactly the same life expectancies or mortality rates.) Since many children died before reaching adulthood, and many women died in childbirth or never had children, those women who successfully produced children shouldered the burden of making up for the population-growth potential of those who didn't.

For takmar and xtauh females, the burden is proportionally heavier in that, rather than making up half of the population, they make up only a third. Rather than having to replace two individuals, therefore, preventing population decline requires each female to replace three.

There are, of course, a variety of factors complicating this picture. Because the takmins lay eggs rather than giving birth, the cost to the mother's body of producing an individual child is somewhat lower than it would be for a human; on the other hand, unlike human embryos - many of which fail to develop without the mother ever being aware of them - a takmin ovum, once fertilized, tends to develop into an egg regardless, and its viability can only be determined after the mother has already invested the energy required to fertilize, carry, and lay it. Female life expectancy is also, on average, lower than that for males; this is particularly true in areas of high population density, where stress related to female status interactions is a stronger factor.

Regardless, the fact remains that the maintenance of population levels requires females to average more children, and invest proportionally more effort into producing them, than human women do. (One of the rare exceptions is the Citadel, in that the presence of lifegivers lowers mortality rates significantly. The replacement fertility rate there is therefore between four and five eggs per female, though the actual rate is closer to six.) In most cases, therefore, it is an adaptive and quite common trait for cultures to place a heavy emphasis on female fertility as a social ideal or even a vital component of femininity.

The fact that most societies are either ruled or dominated by females does little to alter the basic picture. Since having many children is usually a component of female status, the female ruling classes are, indeed, usually and collectively both the source and the recipient of most of the pressure to bear children; those who already have many of them have a vested interest in proclaiming it a virtue, while those who (at the moment) do not will seek to bolster their position by having larger families. The average fertility rate, therefore, is usually much higher among high-status females than among lower ones - it is not unknown for noble scions to have laid dozens of eggs, and noble lineages collectively tend to be enormous.

Lower-status females, however, sometimes benefit in that they are not usually under the same kind of pressure; it is understood that they generally cannot afford to support as many children as their richer counterparts, and in some cases too numerous a brood may actually bring negative attention from higher-status females who are not keen on competition. (Some particularly stratified societies may actually attempt to legally restrict the reproductive rights of certain non-privileged classes.) While a publicly stated intention not to have children at all will undermine a female's social status, low-status females of a certain age range can sometimes get away with delaying having children. Some occupations also provide socially acceptable reasons, particularly if they are considered polluting or dangerous. Female warriors - who in any case often take up military careers because they are not yet established - are a particularly common example, since it is usually considered undesirable to get pregnant while on campaign.

A female who becomes physically unable to have children - for reasons not related to age, or if she never has a chance to have them before losing her fertility, or especially both - tends to be considered maimed or cursed. The usual result is pity or scorn.

It has been explained previously that females of both the takmar and the xtauh, in addition to having multiple mates, have evolved a number of strategies to make it difficult for those mates to identify which of her children were fathered by them (if any). This prevents a male from favoring his own children while neglecting others'. With the rise of sophonce, this also translated into a deep-seated disinclination, by females, to speak about the biological paternity of their children. This feeling is so pervasive that there is a serious argument to be made that it has become instinctive.

An environment in which a female is not going to reveal the paternity of her own children, and in which one cannot discuss the paternity of another female's children without severely enraging her, is one in which the entire concept of biological paternity is going to find itself in difficulties. While females almost always have some individual understanding of it - due to the role of volition in fertilization, any mature female who spends enough time associating with males will understand how it happens - the range of public acknowledgement runs anywhere from “common knowledge, but only spoken of in private” to “no one speaks of it, for any reason, ever”.

Since the best way to keep a male from getting funny ideas about identifying his children is to never let him know it's possible, most cultures - even if they allow mothers to teach their daughters about it - give males no kind of accurate information on the subject. People being what they are, this has not stopped fathers from transmitting their own theories, backed up by anecdotes, observations, religion, or “common sense” stretching back generations, to their sons. As a result, while males may very well understand how to court and have sex, they will not necessarily know that, or how, sex leads to procreation, or have only a very hazy idea if they do. Since attempting to bring the matter up with even a very close female will frequently not bring any kind of correction, the problem persists.

In short, most cultures simply have no publicly acknowledged concept of biological paternity, and the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood are usually conveyed through marriage or some kind of equivalent instead (see above). This can lead to situations in which - if a mother is divorced or widowed, or has children entirely outside of marriage - her children have no father at all.

As a side note: in the Citadel, the situation is somewhat different because of the presence of lifegivers, who among other things can identify a child's genetic relationship to a parent. As a result, the mechanisms of reproduction are much more widely understood and acknowledged there, and while the topic is still very private, a wife and her husbands will usually find it politic to work out an understanding among themselves about how to handle the matter.

Non-Citadel cultures almost always consider the revelation of paternity to be a perversion, but this does not stop it from happening, if a female trusts a male enough. Even as with humans, the idea of a perversion will always prove fascinating to at least some people, if indeed not arousing. (There is almost certainly erotic takma literature discreetly floating around somewhere based on this very topic - in Aedyihozh, if nowhere else, because Aedyihozh is exactly the kind of place where someone could get away with that.)