Sevolite Sexuality

Sevolite sexual mores are governed by an overriding concern with the conservation and exploitation of genetic capital, coupled in the case of highborn Vrellish with a strong sex drive. Fertility manners govern whether is is, or is not, an insult for either gender to use birth control and under what circumstances.

The Demish Houses: Marriage, Love and Children

Demish marriages result in political connections as well as producing desirable children. Children born to highborn Demish out of wedlock are bastards, and pose the same difficulties as a Vrellish love child (see below) as well as the more usual sort.

Mutual love and fidelity is the professed ideal, and on the whole the Demish are more romantic than ordinary human beings, but the higher a man's status and the more hybrid his Demish heritage, the more likely he will also keep a mistresses.

Virgin girls of high rank are expected to be virtuous.

Long-lived Demish widows sometimes seek consolation in the company of courtesans or romantic extramarital attachments, whether sexual or platonic.

The Vrellish Houses: Sexual Relationships

The Vrellish are promiscuous. In fact, the more Sevolite a Vrellish woman, the more aggressively sexual she will be, and the harder to get pregnant. As a rule, Sevolite women have a hard time getting pregnant by less Sevolite men. This is especially true of Vrellish highborns.

The mekan'stan relationship includes everything from a marriage in all but name to a 'same time next year' fling every time one partner passes through the other's territory, so long as it is underpinned by an ongoing relationship. It is normal to have two or more mekan'stan. Each member of the relationship is a mekan'st to the other. There is a presumption of peerage in the word itself, which is seldom used in the pol, or inferior, form mekan.

Sha'stan share good ol' jungle fever lust, to which the Vrellish admit but the Demish, never. The more Sevolite partner is the sha'st. The inferior partner, male or female, is the sha - which is Gelack for, roughly speaking, 'a Sevolite person'. It occurs also in rel-sha (a fighter pilot) and sha-om (one of the living dead, relating to a bad patch in old Lorel wars). Sha'stan may never have asked each others' names, let alone remember them, and it isn't accidental that the term is based on a word (sha) often translated as 'soldier' or 'comrade'. Sha'stan encounters are most common in fleets, and other transient or melting pot situations. Highborn males will not play sha'st to inferior females unless they are using the Luverthanian birth control drug, fer'ni (which Vrellish culture disapproves of ) or among friends and interested in improving space prowess in the next generation at the expense of a rash of pregnancy leaves in the short term. If sha'stan are peers, both are called sha'st.

In Vrellish culture, the honorable thing for a highborn male to do is NOT use birth control, and women are encouraged to view any pregnancy as a house asset. Whether they do or not, most are game to give Waiting Ancestors a chance to be reborn and might even consider it bad luck to attempt to prevent a pregnancy. But although Vrellish women are harder to get pregnant than ordinary humans, they enjoy it much less and find it hard to be grounded. The resulting Russian roulette game surrounding fertility manners, fueled by high Vrellish libido, can make for dicey situations and much confusion, particularly when house traditions vary and so do people's ideas of desirable breeding vs. sexual play partners.

On the ground, at court and on accommodating stop overs, Vrellish of both genders slake their lust minus all complications with commoners employed in the sex trade.

Courtesans are trained to entertain as musicians and dancers as well as in bedroom arts. They work out of dens on the Palace Plain, Plaza or West Alcove, and can achieve a certain brief celebrity before being forced into retirement as commoner aging begins to show. Their prospects then depend upon having secured the favoritism of some Demish client who will employ them in their household, or even take them on as a Vrellish lyka.

Lyka'stan are lovers in which the lyka, whether male or female, is a commoner. The Sevolite lyka'st takes responsibility for looking after the lyka. Most lyka begin as courtesans, at court, but on settled planets the arrangement might be more like an unequal marriage.

Prostitutes, in Gelion's Underdocks, are sex-workers pure and simple. No social graces required.

The terms slaka and slaka'st are reserved for those whose sexual activities are deemed perverted or degrading. Sla, as an adjective, covers all activities which endanger the bloodline, or remove choice from the partner - homosexuality (even between consenting adults), rape, use of the sex drug called Rush (which allows rape of a man by a woman) and sadism are all considered sla, without finer distinction. In their own way Gelacks are extremely puritanical. The slaka, in a slakan'stan relationship, is the one forced, disempowered or merely passive.

Cher'stan is a Vrellish term for 'soul-lovers', which the Demish equate with 'true love': an ideal much honored in Demish poetry. The Vrellish allow that cher'stan exist, but consider them extremely rare and quasi-sacred in the sense of being powerful enough to transcend the 'forgetting' between cycles of life and death. They are hard to convince such being are among them, and apt to jeer at people who claim the bond.

The Vrellish Houses: Children

The Vrellish do not marry. They consider marriage impossibly restrictive, sexually, and politically dangerous.

Child rearing tends to be done by the mother's family, making the Vrellish matriarchal in this regard although males as are likely as females to be lieges. Women are protected once they manage to get pregnant, and child rearing is a communal family effort augmented by commoner labor.

A child may be the product of a contract, a deliberate gift or an accident.

Child contracts are negotiated arrangements indicative of positive relations between members of the same Great Oath. Famous exceptions to the 'positive relations' aspect include Ameron's post Fifth Civil War conception, and the disastrous "ten child contract" imposed on Delm and Ev'rel due to the short of Purebloods.

A child conceived between mekan'stan as a consequence of the relationship, or sired as a reward to a deserving vassal house, is a gift child.

Child gifting normally flows from males to females, with female lieges employing close male relatives as the sires, but it is not unheard of for a highborn woman to bear a child for another house in unusual circumstances, such as Vretla Vrel agrees to do for Monitum in the novel Courtesan Prince.

Pregnancy among the highborn Vrellish, in particular, is relatively hard to achieve despite their compensating promiscuity, and children are highly valued. The closest thing the Vrellish have to the concept of a bastard is the "love child".

Love children are considered potentially disruptive, since they have no explicit status and their challenge rights have not been defined.

The Vrellish Houses: Challenge Rights of Children

Challenge rights dictate who someone may challenge to a duel, and for what. Title challenges are the most dramatic sort. A child's challenge rights are agreed to by contract or presumed on the basis of prevailing tradition.

	House Nersal's inclusive policy means there are thousands of kinf'stan - those highborn Nersallians entitled by right of blood to challenge for the titleof Liege Nersal.

The Monatese have gone to the opposite extreme, to the extent that they almost run out of highborns by refusing to engage in contracts that might endanger the title of Liege Monitum.

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Page last updated: 05-Dec-2003

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