I have, over the course of my life, been to three universes; this is the third. The example of my predecessors suggests that I soon shall visit a fourth, and thus I write these words. It is perhaps too much to hope for that my fourth world will be the same as my first, and I will once again return home.
The second world I shall not dwell on unduly. It is identical to your Earth, except that none of the good TV shows got canceled. (Firefly season thirteen is terrible– almost as bad as the first!) The first I will call Patria, which in Latin means “homeland” (for it is my home, long though I may be in exile) and also “fatherland” (for reasons that will soon become apparent).
In Patria, it is generally agreed upon that every man a woman has sex with the month before she conceives a child is that child’s father. Of course, not all fathers are fathers to the same degree: if a woman has had sex with one man nine times in the month when the child was conceived, and another man once, then the first will be 90% the child’s father and the second 10%. We normally do not bother with such mathematics; instead, we rank the fathers by how often the mother had sex with them.
Most children have five to ten fathers. Of course, few women have five to ten lovers at any given time; it is usual, when a woman decides to try to conceive, for her to choose a small number of beloved friends to have sex with once or twice. They are selected for their handsomeness, kindness, bravery, intelligence, or other traits the mother would like to have in her offspring. It is considered a great honor to be asked to be a child’s sixthfather or seventhfather.
The firstfather is generally the mother’s committed partner. Socially, his role is similar to that of a father in Earth culture. The secondfather usually lives with the mother as well, although his role is more similar to babysitter or trusted friend. He may have his own wife, who is referred to as the secondmother, who may also help take care of the child. (I translate the terms, but they are much more euphonious in my own language.) The thirdfather and fourthfather are something like uncles: they don’t necessarily live with you, but they do come to your school plays and baseball games, play catch with you sometimes, and talk to you about boys. The fifthfathers and up tend to be more distant: they typically give presents at Christmas and your birthday, call or send cards every now and again, and sometimes engage in a bit of light nepotism.
One exception to the distance of the fifthfathers and up is in the six weeks immediately following birth. Culturally, a mother is not supposed to do much of anything for the six weeks following birth; she is supposed to sleep, breastfeed, and play with her baby. She will typically wear pajamas all day. All other duties are taken over by the fathers. The firstfather and secondfather are on-call if the mother wants anything (a footrub, a softer pillow, someone to hold the baby while she showers) and themselves often don’t get much sleep. So a lot of the cooking, cleaning, and other household maintenance gets done by the thirdfathers and up. A fifthfather who doesn’t even bring meals is considered quite neglectful. (That said, in the modern era, many fifthfathers instead pay for takeout or hire a cleaning service.)
Of course, nothing is ever the way they describe it to you in your relationship education textbook. There are several ways that modern society differs from this idealized vision.
Most importantly, of course, scientists have discovered how reproduction actually works. In fact, all children only have one father. While the commitment level of each father roughly aligns with the probability that they are the father, in fact, only one father provided the sperm that gives the infant half its genetic material. The Religious Right in my world insists on denying these scientific facts. The more fundamentalist argue that, in fact, children have more than one father; the term “epigenetics” is often used. The more liberal religious people agree that while only one father provides the children with genetic material, the other fathers compose the child’s soul. Even for children who have had their paternity tested (perhaps because of the chance that they will inherit a rare disease) and have been confirmed to be genetically related to, say, their secondfather, people will regularly comment that she has clearly inherited her firstfather’s kindness or her sixthfather’s wit.
Gay marriage was legalized about two years before I got married to my husband. In queer communities, all the mother’s lovers are considered to be parents, regardless of gender: for instance, one might have a female “thirdparent”. If the mother is a lesbian, she will typically have sex with one man, who is then by custom considered to be the fifthparent. Similarly, the surrogate mother or birth mother of a child adopted by a gay male couple is the fifthparent. Some heterosexuals refer to fifthparents instead of fifthfathers and fifthmothers in an attempt to be progressive and gender-neutral, but this is generally considered to be unbearably twee.
We do not have assisted reproductive technology, which you have developed. It was discussed in science-fictional terms, but all research along those lines was crushed by the advocacy of the Religious Right.
Long ago, when we developed these traditions, people rarely moved more than a day’s walk from their home village– certainly not after they’d had children. In the modern era, however, it is difficult to coordinate even as few as seven or eight adults all living in the same place, because many people have to move for work, and it is quite uncommon for people to have flexible jobs that are easily moved around.
That isn’t as bad as it could be, because families have gotten smaller. My birth family, for instance, had twelve adults in it. On the other hand, when I married, my family consisted of merely five people: me, my husband, my child’s secondfather, his wife, and her child’s secondfather, who himself had no interest in marrying or producing children. Many more people these days are interested in being a secondfather or secondmother but themselves do not want to raise children, and because of birth control it’s possible to do so. But nevertheless families often wind up fractured because people have to move.
The Religious Right disapproves of all of these changes to The Way Life Is Supposed To Be. They generally hold that gay parenting, divorce, and people moving (as well as people not knowing the names of all their children’s fathers, as happens sometimes in working-class communities) are all what happens when you start believing in the single-father theory, instead of the Godly theory of multiple fathers.
(A random, interesting bit of trivia, which occurred to me as I was writing about the Religious Right: In your universe, flirty fishing was only practiced by one small cult. In Patria, it is endemic in both evangelical and Catholic communities. The former typically use contraception when single and flirty fishing; the latter have Jesus babies, which are generally raised in convents or adopted by devout Catholic families.)
I had previously believed that the Religious Right was mistaken about the single-father theory. It’s science; how could knowing the truth harm people? But being transported into your universe has led me to realize, much to my horror, that they were absolutely correct. The single-father theory is destructive. Your universe– this universe into which I have unwillingly been dragged– is horrible and I hate it and I want to go home.
First, of course, there is the harm I face, having been rejected by my family of origin for my perfectly normal and indeed sedate sex life.
Second, there is your society’s horrifying attitude towards parenting. In Patria, most families have a stay-at-home parent (usually a mother) who cleans and cooks. The labor of being a stay-at-home parent doesn’t scale up linearly with number of people in the household: it doesn’t take that much more time to cook for six than for four. And since families are so large, even a relatively poor family can afford a stay-at-home mother.
In your society, there is this bizarre obsession with only the biological parents of the child providing care. This is perhaps most obvious in the six weeks after the birth. As far as I can tell, in your culture, new mothers are expected to do their own cleaning! Mothers talk about being sleep-deprived and depressed as if this is the normal state of affairs! Of course you’ll be sleep-deprived if you don’t have twelve or fifteen people to help take care of you, my god. My husband, in spite of the fact that I am relying on him for everything since my child will have only a firstfather, gets only six weeks of paternity leave. Many fathers don’t take paternity leave at all! Grandparents help a little bit, but you still only have four of them, and many people are disconnected from their parents. (Of course, many people are disconnected from their parents in Patria too, but at least we have more than one father to pick up the slack!)
In reading feminist texts in this world, I have heard of this appalling concept of “the second shift”. Apparently women put in a full forty hours a week at work and then come home and are expected to clean and cook and run errands and take care of children! Having a housespouse is utterly out of reach for average couples. No wonder the rise in feminism has made women so unhappy.
In our universe, feminism made women happy. Before the feminist movement, mechanization of domestic labor freed some of the women of the household from taking care of the home, and in their spare time they typically volunteered or made art or engaged in political activism. Afterward, of course, women had jobs. There’s still the problem that men tend not to be housespouses, but all in all our system is far less horrifying.
Day care is unheard of in Patria; I think there might be some social programs for teenage mothers that offer it. To be clear, I don’t object to day care at all. Children naturally thrive with more than a single caregiver, and if you don’t have multiple fathers and mothers like sensible people then hiring someone to be your child’s caregiver is fine. My primary objection is that it costs literally ten thousand dollars a year. How is a normal family supposed to afford this?
Third, you are all so isolated. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a housing crisis, so there are group homes and I am fortunate enough to approximate a normal lifestyle. But outside of San Francisco, people generally live in nuclear families, if they don’t live alone. (You don’t even have boarding houses for single people!) I was appalled to read The Ferrett’s article about how not being lonely is hard work. No, it isn’t! If you live in a normal extended-family environment, then you have social interactions with half a dozen people without having to leave your house. And your family members will invite people over and you can spend time with them without constantly having to do the work yourself. Your culture has completely eliminated all normal means of social interaction, and then you wonder why you’re so lonely and isolated and depressed and why everyone spends so much time on social media. I’ll tell you why: because social media is a place where you can talk to people without having to put on pants. If you had a healthy family life, then you would get that in face-to-face interactions.
Fourth, your culture is appallingly incapable of responding to divorce or child abuse in a remotely functional way. Divorce is far more common in Patria than in yours, because of the number of potential breakups that are possible. In a small family of five adults, there are ten potential relationships that could go bad and result in someone wanting to leave the family; I don’t even want to think about how many potential conflicts there are in a family of twelve.
But the results of divorce are far less bad in my world. I have personal experience with this, because my children’s secondmother’s secondfather (your language does not have enough words!) left our family when my daughter was five. Of course, it broke my daughter’s heart that he left; she cried, regularly asked for him to come home, and absolutely refused to read any Greek mythology for a month, which had been his favorite thing to read to her. But her life stayed stable: she lived in the same home and did not move between houses. (When a family breaks up, children generally stay with the largest fragment of the family.) And she wasn’t poor. In your culture, after a divorce, you have to maintain two households, which is almost twice as expensive as one household. In Patria, you still only have to maintain one proper household; the person who left lives inexpensively in a boarding house, in which dinner, laundry, and cleaning is typically provided by the landlord.
And don’t get me started on child abuse. Most children in Patria have huge extended families. At the age of ten, children legally acquire the ability to switch to any guardian in their extended family who consents to have them. (“Extended family” means the family of any adult descended from any of your grandfathers and grandmothers, and can easily be one of several hundred people.) Normally, children are fine with their parents and don’t go to the bother of switching. However, if a child is being hit, neglected, or called names, they will almost always switch to a different relative who doesn’t do that. Children’s extended family members can also file for custody (which is done when the child is younger than ten or is being abused such that they don’t feel comfortable leaving), in which case the best interests of the child is decided by the judge. In your universe, a child who objects to their parents has to go into the foster care system, which is so awful that many teenagers prefer to be sex trafficking victims instead. In Patria, foster care only happens in the rare case in which a child’s entire extended family is appallingly abusive; since there are very few participants, it is actually adequately funded and can provide good foster care.
Finally, and most importantly to me: I miss my daughter Grace. I miss my secondfather’s children Sarah and Michael. I miss my family. I miss waking up snuggled between my husband and my boyfriend. I miss being able to go to parties easily because I can ask the child’s secondfather to watch the kids. I miss tutoring Michael in reading while my child’s secondmother taught them math. I miss my boyfriend’s cooking. I miss being able to talk to my family about the people I love. I miss not being a freakshow. I miss my home.
Both of the previous people who wrote these confessions left shortly afterward. I hope, yearn that I, too, shall leave soon, and be with my family again. But given what has happened in the past, I suspect I shall spend the rest of my life alone, without my children, wandering through dozens of worlds, none of which understand family at all.
Ask me anything, I guess, and I’ll talk about it in the comments.
gazeboist said:
Did Steven Universe have a consistent schedule in the second world you visited?
Also, if people in the modern era of Patria were growing disconnected from their families, how did that interact with the ability of children to change guardians? It seems like it would be less likely for a child to know the hundreds of people they might choose to live with instead of their parents. For that matter, how does all of this interact with Dunbar’s number? Do the people of Patria simply have a higher Dunbar’s number, or is/was social activity still very clan focused?
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ozymandias said:
Why, yes it did! New episodes once a week and Stevenbombs on the first Thursday of each month.
You have to consider also that the greater disconnection means there are more households for a child to choose from: for instance, if their secondfather and secondmother moved to Montana for work, the child can choose to live with their secondfather and secondmother instead. It works out.
Social activity is very clan-focused. Most of people’s “strong ties” are with their partners and their partners’ partners.
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Elizabeth said:
The lesbian thing is just how it worked in the community in which I grew up (on Earth Prime).
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I have questions!
1. You mention that people talk of children inheriting their [N>1]fathers’ personality traits. Do people also talk that way about [N>1]parents in queer families?
2. Are the mother and the firstfather generally equally involved in the kids’ lives, or is the mother considered more central?
3. Can you further explain the parent-numbering system in queer families? Like, in a straight primary couple, you’ve got a mother and a firstfather, but in a primary couple of the same gender is one of them the firstparent and the other the secondparent (such that then everybody’s number is one higher than the equivalent person when you have a straight couple)? Or is there like, a zeroth parent? 😛
And if degree of parenthood is normally determined by the mother, then in queer couples is one parent considered the “primary” parent who does the determining? (Is “couple” even the right way to think about this?)
4. What about ace-ish or demisexual women who don’t want to have sex with all these other men but still want their kids to have more parents? For that matter, what about women who don’t like PIV (actually, does your world consider PIV to be the central example of sex like our world does, or is it believed that other types of sex can also lead to partial fatherhood)? Can they be like “let’s not and say we did”? Or do they just have to choose between having sex they don’t want and making suboptimal family decisions? Or is there a weird monogamous subculture for that?
5. Is there anything you prefer about this world?
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ozymandias said:
1. Yes, definitely, particularly in woo-woo queer communities (“she has her fourthparent’s fifth chakra, and her thirdparent’s chi, and I think she’s going to be an Indigo Child just like her seventhparent…”). In more secular and less science-denying communities, queers still do it, but sometimes it’s a little awkward and self-conscious.
2. The stay-at-home parent (or parents) probably spends the most time with the kid, even if they’re the kids’ secondparent or even more distantly connected. The mother and the firstfather are typically equally involved and both have equal default legal rights to the child. That said, we’re definitely more matriarchal than you guys are: surnames are typically inherited from the mother, far more cultures are matrilocal in Patria than at home, and a bunch of symbolic stuff that centers around fatherhood in your world centers around motherhood in mine. (For instance, mothers walk children down the aisle.)
3. In lesbian couples, the birth mother is the mother and the other primary caretaker is the firstmother. Gay male couples don’t have anything nearly so elegant, particularly since they usually both have sex with the surrogate mother (as does any other man who wants to be the kid’s parent). So the primary caregiver is usually called the “father” and his partner the “firstfather”. Trans couples work similarly, except that if you have a trans woman who’s partnered with a cis man she usually is the mother even if he plans to be the primary caregiver. “Father” and “firstmother” both sound really weird/awkward/PC in our language.
4. It really depends. In the queer/kinky community I was part of, it was commonly accepted that BDSM play with the mother in the month before conception was sufficient to make you a child’s parent (as well as, of course, anal, oral, and manual sex). This was justified either because parenthood was more about souls and energy than bodies and there was no reason to prioritize PIV (woo-woo types) or because parenthood is a social construct anyway (secular types). The more socially conservative you are, the more likely it is that you will think PIV is what makes someone a father. Of course, it’s kind of rude to inquire about someone’s sex life, so if you did want to only have PIV with one person you could.
Some children have only one or two fathers. (I had a friend who was conceived on her mother and firstfather’s monthlong European vacation when her mother missed a few pills, and wound up only having one father. Whoops.) In terms of social position, that puts you analogously to a single mother– a lot of people are going to speculate about why your mother was so irresponsible. But other than that, yeah, if you want multiple fathers you have to have sex with multiple people. Trying to conceive is an enormous scheduling headache.
Of course, even for demi-ish people, it’s not that bad: a child can get along fine with just a firstfather and a secondfather, and the mother is in committed relationships with both of them. It’s uncommon, but by no means scandalous, for a child to have only three or four fathers, all of whom have been in committed relationships with the mother for years.
I don’t think aceish people have to have more sex in my world than in your world to try to conceive. It’s just spread out across more people.
5. Assistive reproductive technology is really cool! In my world, women who delay childbearing are usually just shit out of luck– not to mention the harm to gay people, who have to force themselves into heterosexual sex in order to have kids. Day care seems really nice for people who have small families or who don’t happen to be married to anyone who wants to stay home, although like I said it’s kind of horrifying as an institution.
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Rowan said:
Those in the manosphere like to suggest that polyamory leads to more high-status males getting to be polygynous and low-status males getting to be involuntarily celibate. Is this a problem in your world? If not, why not?
And is there something analogous to the manosphere in Patria and if so what do they usually believe?
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ozymandias said:
I mean, there’s a grain of truth to that. Some people are sixthfather to dozens of people. Mick Jagger has literally thousands of children and has hired a special personal assistant whose sole job is to keep track of all the birthdays and send his children free concert tickets when he’s in town. Other people are never sixthfather to anyone.
On the other hand, being a sixthfather is honestly not that satisfying or fulfilling. When men dream of having children, they dream of being a secondfather or a firstfather. And slots for that are naturally limited: if you’re already a firstfather and a secondfather two times more, no sane woman is going to ask you to be the firstfather of her children. You simply won’t have enough time. So firstfather and secondfather are open to most men. And conversely a lot of men whom no one would want as the firstfather of their children– perhaps they are kind but quite ugly– would be excellent choices as a fourthfather. So even if you can’t find anyone who wants to marry you, you can still have sex and children.
The manosphere believes that real manly men are seventhfathers to a bunch of children and never call them, because women are too worthless and fickle to bother being a firstfather to. A lot of men wind up being seventhfathers anyway, they argue, so you might as well be a seventhfather in the FIRST PLACE and not put up with this bullshit. They also have a big, frankly a little bit homoerotic emphasis on the manly solidarity of dudes who are both fathers of the same children.
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trentzandrewson said:
The manosphere in your world sounds pretty different to that of ours. A certain type of right-wing person in our world has finely honed the art of insulting people with a word that specifically means ‘the social father of children he does not have a genetic connection to’.
What role does genetic determinism play in your world? If every kid has $pluralnumber of fathers, and people who are really invested in kids having $pluralnumber of literal biological fathers have a surprising amount of control over scientific consensus, it’s possible that you guys never really looked into the nature:nurture ratio past just ‘what people want to believe’.
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Aapje said:
@Ozy
Imagine that we would have a word for the various places where mostly women come to talk about women issues, like womanosphere.
Would you consider it reasonable to say ‘the womanosphere believes X,’ for any value of X?
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ALKATYN said:
My apologies if this is a sensitive or rude question in your culture, but why would a man want to be a 5th+ father? (Assuming they are purely self interested of course). It seems like they get some of the responsibilities of being a father but with none of the benefits. I suppose they get to have sex with the mother, but presumably casaul sex still exists in your world, so its not the only option.
On a related point, how does sex and dating work for people who are not at teh stage where they want to have children? E.g. young adults like college students, or people who don’t want to be involved in childrearing fullstop. Are all relationships default polyamorous with a similar structure of primary and secondaries like in marraiges?
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jossedley said:
Culturally, it’s an honor to be picked for remote fatherhood, because it means you have some traits the mother admires.
Ozy’s perception was that firstfathers and secondfathers contribute in proportion to their odds, but I imagine that the more cynical parts of the Patria manospher hypothesize that in particular secondfatherhood lets lower status males have a chance at reproduction, in return for a commitment of resources. Given the first and second father status, they might refer to first second and third fathers as “alpha,” “beta,” and “gamma” males respectively. (I know very little about bonobos, but I sometimes wonder if the math works out that way).
In Patria, distantfathers don’t commit much by way of resources – again, the cynical Patrians might predict that women have an incentive to select low status males as secondfathers, but fairly high status men as fifth and beyond, so the gifts and networking opportunities for the kids were higher. From an EvBio perspective, if you want the alpha and beta fathers to raise a kid that might be yours, it might be selectively advantageous to have a hundred families where there is a 3% the kid is yours rather than 5 families with a 60% chance, even if it means you make a contribution to 100 college funds and make 100 introductions when the kids are looking for jobs and educational opportunities.
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ozymandias said:
Trent: Frankly, the whole “cuck” business is absurd. Why would anyone be upset that their child has more adults who want to take care of them?
The position of the single-father theory in our world is similar to the position of evolution in your world: there is an overwhelming scientific consensus and a large amount of research that uses it as a premise, even though a lot of the population thinks that there are multiple fathers. So genetics is a field that people actually research, just as evolutionary biology is in your world. The “mainstream” position is something like “sure, there’s only one GENETIC father, but other fathers make up the child’s SOUL,” which is of course not how genetics works at all, but at least it’s enough to get people to be willing to do genetic testing. (Assisted reproductive technology, unfortunately, got quashed more– if the baby is made in vitro how is its soul supposed to form?)
Aapje: In my world and yours, the “manosphere” is just a particular group of men on the Internet, in spite of their misleading name, and they do not speak for all men everywhere. Similarly, not all of humanity endorses the charity Humanity United.
Alkatyn: As jossedley said, it’s an honor to be picked as a fifthfather. I mean, people also agree to be bridesmaids, which has very little benefit.
We don’t bother with that “primary” and “secondary” stuff. Certainly some relationships are more serious than other relationships, but you can usually figure that out from context without having to put a bunch of labels on it. I mean, do you have “primary” friends and “secondary” friends? The closest thing we have to a primary status is discussing whether a relationship is potentially heading towards marriage, which of course wouldn’t be happening if you’re not marriage-minded.
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sinesalvatorem said:
I am sorry for your loss in moving to this world. Particularly, the loss of specific family members. However, if you want something approximating your family style, would you like to move to the Caribbean? (Or one of several other parts of the world, though I know less about them.)
In such a place, you could rely on there being a large number of adults in either the same house or living on the same street who all feel mutually obligated to each other for family support. My father, for example, had more than two dozen relatives living on his street, and any of them could be relied on for childcare, cooking, tutoring, or other chores.
Apart from the blood relatives, the high rates of Catholicism (in my country, at least) means that it would be entirely normal to have godparents who lived near you and provided support. It wouldn’t /only/ be blood relatives.
For these reasons, paying $10k for childcare isn’t a thing that happens. Foster care is rare, and my country has only one (rather small) orphanage. Abused children can frequently move to the home of an extended family member and stop being reliant on their birthparents. Divorces and breakups are often less impactful on the child, as the in-laws on both sides continue to cooperate to care for the child, even if the parents can’t stand each other.
I’m afraid I can’t promise polyamory, though. That isn’t really a thing in my culture of origin, even if blood relations and spiritual kin fill equivalent roles. The house-internal structure should be mostly the same, and the benefits of division of labour and the ability of each household to have a stay-at-home parent still apply, but there would be an expectation of monogamy. But it still seems preferable to staying in the USA, no?
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Neb said:
How does the timing of all this work out in your world? It sounds like you had your daughter really young. Meanwhile a lot of people your age in our world still haven’t found a primary partner they’d have kids with (and/or are dealing with long distance stuff), let alone such a large household.
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ozymandias said:
No wonder it takes so long to find a spouse in your world, you’re only allowed to evaluate one candidate at a time. I began looking for a spouse my last year of college (which was a little early, but by no means unduly early). I had three relationships where I seriously considered marriage, and all of them overlapped. It would no doubt have taken years if I had to judge that Alice was unsuitable, and then meet somebody else, and then judge that they were unsuitable, and so on and so forth, instead of having it all happen at the same time. It’s really common to have people who didn’t pan out as your spouse be your child’s secondfather or thirdfather, but that didn’t wind up working out for me. My child’s secondfather was already married when I met him.
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Chiffewar said:
Is it normal for young adults to spend some time living in boardinghouses? What about older adults — does Patria have nursing homes? What are Patria’s greatest historical sex scandals?
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ozymandias said:
A lot of people are in the boardinghouse for a couple years after they graduate, particularly if they can’t get a job near where their parents live. The traditional thing, of course, is to return back home, but not everyone is capable of that.
Older adults are usually taken care of by the households of one of their children. Part of the job of being a stay-at-home parent is taking care of your parents when they get old. (I myself was a stay-at-home parent, and I was dreading the day my parents could no longer take care of themselves.)
Well, rapes are very common sex scandals, of course, and also having sex with people who are underage, and homosexuality if you are conservative. So is failing to acknowledge your distantchildren– at least one person’s presidential campaign was fucked up by a heart-wrenching advertisement about how his distantdaughter never got presents from him on her birthday.
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Daniel said:
The social structure of that world reminds me of some anthropology-themed scifi I read called Learning to Live with Orcs, about a planet of people with a polyamorous relationship structure–men having multiple wives, women having multiple husbands. Men of the other planet take care of their sisters’ children.
http://mud.co.uk/richard/ltlwo.htm
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ALKATYN said:
Just read through the whole story on your recommendation. Interesting premise, and I like the way it was explained, but a lot of the stuff around the central mystery felt a bit flat, real cultures don’t have such an obvious shared explanation for their traits. Protagonist also seemed odddly uncrtucal about the situation they were in.
Also, I thought the whole “americans are so weird” theme for british writers died out in the 80s.
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mathemagicalschema said:
Are friendships relatively less important on Patria than in our world?
How do family structures differ across the income ladder? For instance, do poor families have less (or more) involved 3+fathers? Do rich families have more parents sharing the same residence, if they can afford massive houses? Do poor families sometimes have all parents working?
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ozymandias said:
I wouldn’t say less important– I mean, one is not having sex with everyone in one’s household. My husband and my child’s secondfather had a close friendship. But it’s true that you’re more likely to share a household with your close friends and less likely to only see them once a month for a lunch date. This seems like an improvement to me.
Poor families are less likely to have a “real” firstfather or secondfather, because in a lot of working-class black and Latino communities, there’s frankly a shortage of men who don’t have a felony conviction or a drug/alcohol addiction. So households are more multigenerational, with men tending to stay a part of their mothers’ household and even firstfathers behaving more like thirdfathers or fourthfathers– helping buy diapers and babysit sometimes, but not taking a real role in the child’s life. Instead, that role is often played by the child’s grandmother. A lot of religious conservatives disapprove, of course: having a firstfather in the home is linked to reduced rates of child poverty. But it seems to me that this is more a product of poverty than of anything else.
I don’t think that, other than that dynamic, there’s much difference in family size across income levels. The richer people are just more likely to have their own rooms and not have to put a privacy screen across a bit of the living room.
Sometimes all parents will work, yeah, but it’s relatively rare– I mean, even in a lot of working-class households, there’s someone out of work who can watch the kids.
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1angelette said:
What happens to the “tulip in a rose garden” in a large household of Patria? Suppose that a child happens to be born with interests and personality very different from those of his [1~2]parents and the other children/siblings. He is not directly abused and is healthy in the household, but his proposals for activities are typically met with muffled laughter, and he struggles to feel positive emotions during any especially long conversations with his family members. Would this child feel the malaise of the isolated modern Earthling, or is there a straightforward social solution?
What relationships are common between siblings, cousins, and others with same-generation familial relationships? For example it appears that children are typically living with their firstfather’s children and their secondfather’s children.
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ozymandias said:
Well, presumably the child would choose to move to another household if their current household were providing such an unenriching environment for them. If all of the households they can move to either aren’t interested in taking them or are just as bad on the “tulip in a rose garden” business, then they’d probably feel pretty isolated until they could leave.
Children generally live with their firstfather and their secondfather. Since, of course, secondfathers may themselves be firstfathers and have children of their own, this tends to lead to chains. The reason we don’t have INFINITE HOUSEHOLDS is that (a) some secondfathers don’t want to have children themselves and (b) it is not uncommon for a woman to choose as her child’s secondfather someone who is already in the household. But you see where it’s hard to state categorically how many adults a child lives with– it really depends on what works for the family.
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leoboiko said:
I am an Earth parent. For the sake of my poor children, how do I move to Patria?
Incidentally, have you heard of Earth’s American nation Apanyekrá (“Canela”)?
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Inty said:
You mentioned Mick Jagger existing in your universe, despite there being an obvious schism in the time line. That suggests our two universes are somehow yoked together, unless it’s just an astronomical coincidence. Do other famous figures from history exist in your universe, and if so, are they different as a result of your different family structures?
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Inty said:
As a follow-on, are there any cultures within your world with a structure similar to the two-parent system that makes up the majority of cultures in our world? For example, I remember reading about a tribe that doesn’t have a concept of ‘fathers’ in our world because they never connected sex to babies.
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ozymandias said:
There is a bizarre level of pop-cultural similarity between universes. I mean, my last universe was exactly like this one except that in this universe all the good television gets canceled in the first season. I have no idea why this happens.
If you name some famous figures, I’d be happy to tell you if we have them! I’m not totally up on this planet’s celebrities yet.
There are a couple of weird monogamous tribes. They’re mostly hunter-gatherers, I think; it is generally agreed that civilization would be impossible without the continuity of property and division of labor inherent in the multi-parent household. Some people write really exotifying books about them which show how they mean monogamy is natural, while other people argue that those books are actually inaccurate anthropologically. I haven’t fact-checked them myself, unfortunately.
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No one said:
Are there any mechanisms for enforcing these parental ties and responsibilities or it more a matter of social expectation? In the situation where a child’s designated first father had no interest in having or supporting a child, does the responsibility simply fall down the line to the next tier and so on before going to the excellently funded foster care system, or is there something else in place? Does spousal support exist, or is it largely unnecessary due to the large integrated extended family structure?
With that in mind, how are cases of disputed paternity handled in either direction? If one party denies having had sex with the mother (Or the mother denies having sex with a claimant father) within the preconception period, how is it decided? Is proof required either way, and If so, what is the typical standard? Logbooks, contracts, video?
I like the way your world seems to function. In our world, families also typically work relatively smoothly, but much of the system is designed to handle the subset of cases where participants are not acting in good faith. This does not seem to be as much of a concern in your world. So are there other noteworthy fundamental differences between our people that you find particularly striking?
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ozymandias said:
If you’re married to the child’s mother, you’re considered the de jure legal firstfather, although people can challenge this if there’s some reason to believe you aren’t (for instance, you have a documented history of erectile dysfunction or you were out of town during the month of conception). The firstfather and mother share the legal right to make decisions about the child’s health, religion, and education. The mother records the child’s other fathers on the birth certificate; this can be challenged within a year of the child’s conception, at which point the judge will decide if it’s more likely that you had sex with the mother or that you didn’t.
A major Supreme Court case led to the ruling that all the mother’s sexual partners in the month prior to conception must be listed on the birth certificate, regardless of their gender. The precedent is currently fairly mixed about whether non-PIV sex is considered sex.
All fathers, no matter how distant, have a legal right to visitation and regular contact with the child. Closefathers have more rights than distantfathers: for instance, a judge might consider a closefather’s rights to be violated if he’s not permitted to visit the child every weekend, while a distantfather’s rights would be violated if he was not allowed to call the child at least three times a year. Supervised visitation is required for fathers accused of abuse or similar crimes. It is really really hard to remove a father’s right to contact.
Unlike your culture, we don’t have child support. It is generally considered that most children have more than enough adults who want to take care of them, and there is no point in forcing reluctant fathers to help their children. Part of the advantage of the multifather system is that even if one father doesn’t want to do his duty, the other fathers might. Since it’s very rare for a divorce to result in a family losing half its income, child support is less necessary. But the state does provide welfare for indigent mothers.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Wait, how are these two things compatible? What about cis lesbian couples?
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ozymandias said:
The Supreme Court did not clarify what kinds of sex count for cis lesbian or cis gay couples, and there hasn’t been any case law about it AFAIK.
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jossedley said:
Ozy, do you think there is more sexual dimorphism in Patria, here, or the same amount, and if you observe a difference, do you have a hypothesis explaining it?
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ozymandias said:
There seems to be the same level of sexual dimorphism. My guess is that we haven’t had different sexual strategies for long enough for it to have an evolutionary effect.
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
Worth pointing out that for some people atomisation is just the ticket. I’m pretty sure my partner and I would be monogamous while trying to conceive, were we transported to Patria.
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Margaret Tang said:
that is a huge family you have!
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Vamair said:
I wonder why no one mentions grandparents when talking about raising children here.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
People tend to move away from their parents before raising kids in the US, I think.
Also parents sometimes suck.
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