Teeth

[strange_aeons]

I feel much better now.

I've been having some problems with my appetite lately, i.e., it didn't exist. So I'd go for twenty-four hours — or on one memorable occasion, more like sixty — without eating, and then when I started to feel queasy I would eat something, whereupon I would become ill. If I was lucky I might at least enjoy eating it, but more often no. Anyway, yesterday lilairen pointed out to me that this is fairly standard starvation-response, which I suspected, and that one deals with starvation-response much the same way one deals with flu, which I didn't. Clear liquids, then solids when the stomach agrees to play nice. So I had some chicken soup.

In the last two weeks or so that's the only meal I've had that didn't make me sick.

And eating gave me the fortitude to delete the 879 words I had written day before yesterday, because they were all absolute crap and they didn't get any better when I reread them. The 861 words I wrote yesterday are far superior, and they fixed some problems I was having at the end of chapter three, so it's all good.

---

I ran across M.C.A. Hogarth's site a few years ago, bookmarked it, and forgot about it until shaddragon started building Hogarth's creatures in fabric. Then yesterday I spent a perfectly unseemly quantity of time wandering around her site looking at the pretty pictures — I must have found it longer ago than I think, because I recall the art being a lot cruder then — and got to thinking.

Yeah, I know. Shut up.

Hogarth has a race called the Jokka (see more of them here and here), and they're tri-sexed. She calls the sexes 'male', 'female' and 'neuter', so I assume that they aren't triploid — that when they reproduce the genetic material comes from two sources, not three.

No one ever seems to do triploid. The only such creatures I can recall encountering are those glowy things in that art book, and, somewhat more notably, Vonda McIntyre's dreamsnakes. That's what got me thinking, and now I have a species in my head.

What appears to happen is, there are — for want of a better term — males, who drop their genetic information off with members of the third sex, who juggle this information for a bit, add some of their own, and then pass the result on to — also for want — females, who carry the offspring to term. There's some culture right there: if in the Natural Order of Things, males never bump uglies with females, doing so is bound to be taboo in at least some places, if not physically complicated/nominally impossible.

I'm assuming vaguely human sexual practices here, in the sense that sex is used as social glue as well as for purposes of procreation. Which suggests that these creatures are intelligent, social and slippery (see also: dolphins). That, coupled with how they make babies, is all I know about them with any certainty; at the moment I'm, obviously, working on something else, and I'm too close to Hogarth's Jokka, which I find aesthetically pleasing, and never let it be said that my sense of aesthetics doesn't get totally in the way, so I'm trying to back off from the idea a bit for the time being.

Well, mostly. I have indulged in some vague speculation as to their genders (as distinguished from their sexes). Ordinarily one sees, basically, males and females, and then the third sex is sort of neuter and, well, de-sexed (I can't speak for Hogarth's Jokka, as I know nothing about their culture except that there are dresses and pretty fans in it). In this case I think it makes more sense for them to be regarded as sort of, you know, whores, in much the way bisexuals sometimes are in human culture — of course that's a stereotype and probably has fairly little to do with the actual reality. Looking at my list of gender stereotypes I want to inflict upon these people, I guess that would make them the emotional, artistic types, rather than the physically strong, brutish ones or, as I had initially thought they would be, the intellectuals (geek-gendered). It also raises questions of systematic oppression and Controlling the Third-Sex Sex Drive.

Hmm.

Comments

[kiya]

Oh! How about having DNA-like-normal, the ladder thing, and a subsidiary nucleus? If you want to do artificially created thingies, the nucleus could be the extra stuff they added. Perhaps DNA from the male and the janitor and the female provides the junior nucleus?

[kiya]

Like mitochondria. Female-line. Only a more significant organelle.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

That is a fucking good idea.

This is why I posted the idea to my livejournal; I don't know what I'd do without you guys.

That would mean that the janitor takes the male's DNA and creates from it a sex cell which implants itself in the female's main-nucleus-free 'egg', and I spell all this out for the purpose of noting that it's interestingly like cloning, actually. Hmm.

I've been pondering what these creatures mate-select for. I think it's the females who are Big And Strong. If the males and females select for pretty (attractively-colored and -plumed, whatever) janitors, it would enforce the painted-jezebel cultural stereotype I'm fiddling with. That means my leftover cultural stereotype is intellectuality; how does one select for a clever male? By his ability to build a pleasing bower in which to boink?

I think I need to know more about their morphology before I start chewing too hard on these questions, actually. Hmm. I wonder if it's safe to do that while I'm still infatuated with the Jokka.

[tiassa]

Just a random thought, but I've heard so many people complaining about how easy it is for people to have children when they really shouldn't or don't want to - thus leading to a lot of unwanted, abused children.

Now, with three different genders and a lot of hoopla to have the children made in the first place, you wouldn't have the problems that come with having it be so easy to conceive children.

So, a society with three genders might have evolved, or been created, in order to make sure that those who procreate are only those who really want and/or deserve to. Of course, I don't know how likely it would be that one could evolve along those lines, so it might involve creation (though with the intervention of an appropriate deity/alien/mystical force it would work).

I really, really like that bit of mythology you came up with, though.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Hmm. From an evolutionary standpoint, humans don't really make too many offspring, in part because without modern-day technology we have a fairly high infant mortality rate for a species whose females generally deliver only one child at a time -- because we're singularly altricial. Nowadays we not only have modern-day technology, we have a culture in which it can be a burden to have a child and in which people capable of having children are increasingly neotenic, but in which sex is still the most popular recreational activity -- and people are just as stupid now as they've ever been, so there is irresponsible unprotected sex and then there are unwanted children.

(I imagine there's a direct corrolation between irresponsible unprotected sex and irresponsible parenting, in fact.)

I couldn't imagine a species like that evolving -- it would take some extraordinarily precognizant protists, and protists are not known for their ability to see the future -- but I could definitely see some misguided utopian creating a species like this so that they will form the Perfect Society, with no unwanted or abandoned children. Kind of raises questions about the misguided utopian in question.

As for the mythology, what happens, now that I've had a few hours to think, is this:

Creator deity-or-deities make(s) the earth and sky, and the earth and sky are friends, but they have only one another to talk to and after a while this begins to wear thin; one day they get to arguing and the sky, fed up, pulls across its face a veil of clouds and refuses to speak to the earth. The creator(s), noticing this, make(s) a janitor in the form of rain, who improves both parties' moods by knocking boots with each in turn, and as a result the earth gives birth to all her bounty and, possibly, a multitude of assorted gods.

Which is why when the sky wears its veil, one must be careful when going outside because he's grumpy and may strike one with lightning.

[kiya]

I had a tremendous shout at someone who asserted that humans are biologically driven to have lots of kids; I think she's crackpot. (Especially given the large number of humans who, now that there's technology for it to be possible, fully intend to not reproduce.)

What I do figure humans have is a selected-for tendency to protect children, with some variability as to whether that ranges from 'all children and baby bunnies too' to 'just my biological offspring'. I think this is why parents suddenly go through protectiveness shifts (I know some people who have commented that stuff they scoffed at pre-breeding sent them noticeably irrational after, and they had to catch themselves), and why "For the cheeeeeeeldrun!" is such a cry. People who Do Bad Things to children are more often seen as complete monsters than people who Do Bad Things to adults.

Aside from that, managing reproduction happening in a pre-technological civilization is easy; one doesn't need to have a drive to have kids. (Which I have.) One just needs a deep urge to fuck. (Which I don't, overmuch.)

I wouldn't be surprised by an irresponsible sex/irresponsible parenting connection myself, but in the cases I've met personally it's been irresponsible sex => grows an unexpected clue PDQ when childness happens.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

What I do figure humans have is a selected-for tendency to protect children

One just needs a deep urge to fuck.

This I agree with. The mere urge to have children is not actually biologically useful: look at the vast swathes of our history during which we didn't know where babies came from. If we just wanted to have children, we'd have spent a lot of time pining uselessly for them. Having the urge to fuck is much more effective.

in the cases I've met personally it's been irresponsible sex => grows an unexpected clue PDQ when childness happens.

That's rather heartening.

[kiya]

In ways having to do with the child, hellyeah.

In ways feeling . . . sad that these people have lost their own opportunity to be kids . . . it's really sad.

I need to find that poem. . . .

[tiassa]

in the cases I've met personally it's been irresponsible sex => grows an unexpected clue PDQ when childness happens.

In the cases I've met, it's split half-and-half between growing a clue and losing what little mind they had left. I like your way better, I'd probably have retained more faith in humanity afterwards.