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serpentface · 10 months ago

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What does Jazaiti social structure look like, irt mothers? Or like, what role do they play

Some things to be clear on beforehand:

Child: a young Jazait is considered functionally genderless and occupies this age-gender group until puberty. A child is classified as a man when testes descend (though occupies a secondary ‘young man’ space until full completion of puberty). A child becomes a woman at completion of baseline female puberty (having a fully developed mane and having undergone a growth spurt). Man: gender assignment for adult individuals with a penis and testes. They will be wed to mothers. Woman: gender assignment for adult individuals with vaginas who do NOT have active estrus cycles. Most will remain women throughout their lives and be unwed, some will become mothers. Mother: gender assignment for individuals with vaginas who DO have active estrus cycles (considered a mother regardless of if they have actually had children or not). A woman can become a mother and all mothers were once women, but these are distinct and separate gender roles. Elder mother: not a specific gender role- a post-fertile mother who no longer has an active estrus cycle. Clanmother: not a specific gender role- the current eldest mother in any given clan, who acts as its leader.

In typical elowey development, sexually mature males + nonreproductive females are minimally dimorphic, and sexual traits apart from genitalia are usually indistinct. Average size and build is approximately the same, females tend to have larger cuspids. The most strongly dimorphic feature is in scent, with most adult males and females having distinct smells.

Reproductive females on the other hand are more strongly dimorphic- there is typically an additional growth spurt and gain of body fat/muscle, voices deepen, manes grow longer and thicker, nipples grow longer and some breast tissue is accumulated (though not as much as humans, elowey only have fully developed breasts during lactation). Their scent is also distinct from males and nonreproductive females.

All elowey undergo puberty that results in an individual becoming sexually mature and physiologically capable of reproduction, but the estrus/ovulation cycles of females are hormonally suppressed by proximity of a reproductive female. A female’s estrus cycle will initiate on its own with time in the absence of a reproductive female, and will be directly initiated through sexual activity. Non-reproductive females will typically have a sex drive equivalent to a reproductive female when not in estrus- sex may be desirable in being physically pleasurable or as an act of affection, but baseline libido levels are low. Hormonal suppression cannot completely preclude the initiation of estrus (though will typically cause it to be irregular) and would be supplemented by behavioral suppression (the socially dominant reproductive female preventing others from mating) in pre-behaviorally modern ancestors. Instinct towards behavioral suppression often translates into social control of female sexual activity in elowey cultures, but this is not universal.

(^^The baseline physiology described here is universal to elowey, not just Jazait)

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Jazait culture is mother-matriarchal, in which mothers are socially and politically dominant to men and women. All women have the potential to become mothers, but most never will, and only inherit the dominant social status upon this occurring. Being a mother is reckoned as a blessed, elevated state and one that is purely natural to occupy positions of strength and leadership, with related men and women being better suited for supporting roles and exacting her will.

Mothers have greater religious status in society and are deemed to be beings made in the sun-mother's image, who is the creator god in Jazaiti religious belief (accompanied by one other (non-creator) god, the moon-father(s), understood as one and three beings and her husband(s)). Their fertility is reckoned as being a gift from the sun-mother. This blessing extends beyond procreation and allows for mothers to work through the sun-mother to encourage needed growth and new life (in fish stocks, livestock, agriculture and forage, singing down the rains, etc). Jazaiti religion (and culture itself) is heavily decentralized, and a clanmother will be the spiritual leader of any given family group and will impart accumulated religious knowledge of generations onto her descendants.

The use of scent glands has strong applications in Jazait culture, particularly in the case of a clanmother. A clanmother will undergo a yearly ceremony in which she journeys around the limits of her clan's land and applies wrist gland secretions along the way, enforcing a protective ring that dissuades the entrance of evil spirits and forms a metaphysical boundary, a sense of 'here' and 'there'. She will also mark the faces of newborn children as means of fully initiating and accepting them into the clan. In any case where a person, place, or thing needs spiritual enforcement as belonging to a clan, this task falls to the clanmother. Any mother's scent is regarded as having properties of blessing, particularly in association with fertility.

A mother's status will generally be passed onto her eldest daughter upon completing rites of initiation, who will be wed and move out of her mothers household (thus eliminating hormonal suppression and allowing for sexual contact to more rapidly initiate estrus). The clanmother has the ultimate say in whether other daughters can become mothers, and will make this decision on a variety of factors- reading the will of the sun-mother, their own opinion on the daughter's suitability for the role, political strategy and necessity (or lack thereof) for additional marriages with another clan, and material concerns of territory and sustenance (a clan can only sustain so many families, with only the wealthiest and most powerful clans having many mothers therein).

This society has a clan system wherein the eldest mother (usually past reproductive age) has the primary and final say in the affairs of her clan. Her husbands will be considered clanfathers and have an elevated rank among other men in the clan. Clans follow a rank hierarchy of clanmother > mothers > clanfathers > husbands > women and unwed men > children.

The number of men is highly disproportionate to the number of mothers, and as such most marriages are polyandrous. One’s number of husbands is usually directly proportionate to one’s wealth, both in indicating access to resources to sustain a large family, and in practical measure, as a dowry is paid to the mother of each male spouse. Husbands will be absorbed into their wife’s clan (though this establishes ties and responsibilities with his former clan), and kinship is matrilineal and makes no distinction between children of different husbands.

A child’s biological father will often be circumstantially known, but this direct relation is not of great importance as each husband is considered a father to all associated children. Due to potential ambiguity in fatherhood and purely matrilineal descent, extramaritial affairs are not of substantial consequence and resulting children will not be considered bastards, but this this is generally frowned upon as lowly and undignified behavior.

Clans are typically very large and spread widely with clan-affiliated families occupying vast territories. Different mothers in the same clan do not directly interact on a regular basis and typically only assemble for festivities and rites, or to discuss matters of utmost importance in person. They will instead use their husbands as messengers (often one husband ends up specifically designated as a messenger, which is a loosely esteemed status as this will often indicate the greatest trust and affection).

The Jazait have no specified warrior culture (this doesn’t mean conflict is nonexistant, just that there is no strongly developed traditions surrounding it). Most women and men will have learned basic self defense and will know how to handle a spear or knife, and will fill roles of warriors in times of conflict. Mothers tend to be protected from directly engaging in combat, and will act as commanders and mediators in all but the most dire of circumstances. Mothers entering combat is a common narrative motif in Jazait storytelling and folklore, used to demonstrate the profound gravity of a conflict.

All members of a family/clan participate in childcare, with married men and mothers being the primary childrearers and the most involved in the domestic sphere and near the home (producing textiles, cooking, farm labor, etc). Women perform the majority of non-domestic labor (in traditional subsistence, this will be fishing, leviathan hunting, foraging, and some herding). This is not itself a gendered role and is partially just pragmatism- most women will go their entire lives without becoming mothers (and will thus be unmarried), while most men will be married, so there’s a greater proportion of women available for tasks away from the home.

The sexual behavior of men and especially women is strongly controlled. Men are expected to solely engage in potentially reproductive behavior with mothers, and women are expected to engage in no sexual behavior with men whatsoever (unless in the context of becoming mothers, as dictated and approved by their own). A woman who becomes pregnant without her mother's consent will technically become a mother (as this act will have been in the context of the estrus cycle self-initiating via sexual contact, and the resulting physical changes will occur), but this is deeply shameful and the theft of a great gift, and will typically result in her exile from the clan, and she and her children being clanless (conceptually close to ‘bastard’ status). This status is effectively permanent and may be socially and materially devastating, depriving the mother and child from their support network and the core unit of Jazait society. The only potential salvation occurs if the father’s clanmother makes the decision to accept the clanless child (and sometimes mother) into her own clan.

Clanless Jazait often form their own communities as means for mutual support, or may be strongly driven to turn to finding work amid other peoples as means of supporting themselves and their children. A significant proportion of Jazait who participate in Imperial Wardi society are clanless, and most established Jazait diasporic communities are at least partly Wardinized- no communities at large are fully assimilated into Wardi culture, but most participate in Wardi-esque marriage patterns as a means of sustaining their communities in this different cultural/subsistence context, and many have adopted syncretic Jazaiti-Wardi faith systems.

There is no direct stigma towards homosexual behavior, though it will be seen as more natural between women (having no other sexual outlets) than between men. While homosexual behavior itself is unstigmatized, men and mothers are fully expected to play reproductive roles in a marriage, and women tasked with becoming mothers (which will involve sexual activity with a man via their first husband) have little say in the matter.

The conceptualization of gender is a strict trinary, with no specified roles that divergence from the man - woman - mother construction. The status of intersex people depends on their variation- many intersex traits will go unnoticed or interpreted as infertility (especially due to minimal sexual dimorphism between males and non-reproductive females), and others tend to be interpreted as negative physical abnormalities.

#Kind of just became a post about gender roles as a whole but if you're still following me at this point you're here for the Paragraphs #Also should note because like. Estrus in fantasy tends to be at least a LITTLE bit of a fetishy 'I HAVE TO FUCK NOW OR I WILL DIE' thing #so like. To be clear it is NOT that wild. If you ovulate/have average libido levels and notice a higher libido While ovulating that's prett #much what it's like. Being in estrus is like your highest average day to day horniness levels while being out of estrus is like your lowest #Also might be experienced a bit like menstruation in effects on moods- one might be more irritable and prone to mood swing while #in estrus #There are some additional dimensions to it particularly in that involves perceivable physical effects- bare skin is flushed and the #anogenital region swells (this is expected to be publicly concealed in Jazaiti culture). Also one's scent changes in a way that will be #recognized as indicating fertility. All of these things will be instinctually considered Hot and someone in estrus will generally #be considered elevated in physical attractiveness.#This won't drive people into mad unbridled lust but will make the person in estrus more sexually desirable to most sensibilities.#jazait

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