Back in 2017, I was thinking about severely imbalanced gender ratios, and how that would affect a culture and a world. Given I’ll process things via story, I wrote two little snippets to work out how that would succeed and how it’d fail, then abandoned them and moved on.
Eight years later, back in November, I was in an argument on the internet. Okay, I’ve been in this conversation for, um, ten years? More? I forget. It is a friendly sort of rolling argument, the kind where there are no hard feelings and more catching up on how people are doing than remembering what we were talking about five days ago. But the argument wandered via tangents (and more than a few memes) into how reverse harem would actually work out if you played it straight, as a lasting multi-generational problem. One friend took the position that it’d actually end in polygyny, with men hoarding the very scarce women via multiple wives.
I took the position that it’d end in polyandry, as the examples tossed on the virtual table are all from old cultures gone severely awry after starting with a lopsided female-skewed birth ratio… where culture is still trying to enforce its old patterns and values even after setting up the skew the exact opposite way from its baseline. If a culture was truly adapted to this as normal, then it’d be a very different culture.
As we kicked it around, I could see that we were starting to talk past each other – so I decided to toss out an example of how I could see it working, to see if he’d understand my point, if not necessarily agree with it. (After all, if you’re not on the same page in an argument, you lose all the iron-sharpens-iron interaction and the challenge of defending your position. That’s no fun!)
So I pulled up the old snippet, frowned at it, and went “this isn’t half-bad, but I would alter as such, for the conditions we’re talking about, and have to present this challenge up front, and modify…” and ended up rewriting it significantly, in order to toss it up as a reply. Fortunately, internet arguing with a handful of friends on a text channel means that you can take hours to come back with a reply, unlike real life. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really make the full argument in less than 5,000 words, but I could at least give it in broad swatches as worldbuilding behind the story…
…That was November. By December, it had gotten moved to its own channel, titled “Thread Drift from (Channel)”.
In April, 89,066 words later, I finally finished the happy ever after, after wandering through how it’d skew the society, how you’d have the strain of space pirates raiding for women and yet the inevitable attraction to normal spacers as the exotic not-from-here men, and the resultant “stealing our women” anti-spacer mentality, the inevitable mission creep of a population-monitoring bureaucracy into a severe threat to its people, and the way that cats are not only going to make it out to space and every planet, but if you name a stray, it’s yours. There Are Rules.
On the upside, once it was done, I was able to read my way back into the Combined Ops WIP I was trying to write, um, 3 years ago, and I found where it got broken, fixed that, and am now getting a tiny bit of headway on it.
But on the downside, I lost almost 5 months of my life to an argument on the internet. On the upside, it entertained a few friends, and I got to make a couple jokes about the history of otters in art.
On the gripping hand, this means I finally emerged from my epic tangent clutching “The End” in hand, looked around, and proclaimed, “And that’s why I think this point in the argument you’ve all completely forgotten about is valid!” to get… five laughing emojis.
Eh, you can’t win ’em all.
And a few days later, when the epic rolling argument turned to the death penalty, I took a deep breath, thought about it… and then typed:
I refuse to get into this argument. Because we’ve seen how long my thread drift goes.
Back to the WIP!
Mad Genius Club 
19 responses to “Arguing on the Internet”
So, what’s the title of this 89,066 word epic, and when will it be published?
^^^This^^^
Right now it’s titled “Thread Drift from (Channel Name)” Which is hilarious in its own way, because that channel is supposed to be for geopolitics, so how we ended up arguing reverse-harem feasibility there in the first place… was already thread drift…
*sinal salute*I know, I know, I need to come up with a name, a cover, toss it to Beta readers, figure out what genre to even market it under, because it doesn’t actually hit any of the right tropes to make reverse harem readers happy…
First, I’m going to finish the WIP I was supposed to be working on. Then my cover artist can look at me when I tell her I’m going to publish an argument on the internet that didn’t change anyone’s mind.
I know that feeling. I slapped a title on A Diabolical Bargain weeks before release, and it took years to write.
Let’s see, how many books am I into “what if the colonized people really wanted the colonizers to stay? Why would they oppose ‘liberation’? What if there was a biological reason for the caste system?”
I don’t know how true it is, but I’ve read that some of Britain’s colonized nations – or more properly, groups that had done better under English rule than in the ‘good old days’ when they were being tyrannized, robbed, and murdered at will by the old rulers – literally begged them to not leave their countries as they knew they’d be murdered as soon as the English were gone.
One such case was apparently India, where the Hindus were all about democracy and “One man, one vote” – while the Muslims, Christians, Parsees, various tribal groups, etc., were all horrified at the idea. They apparently didn’t trust what a few hundred million Hindus were going to do when they had the power.
I don’t know about post-Britain precisely, but we have multiple documentaries with interviews in Zimbabwe of older people lamenting the end of Rhodesia. A common theme was “now I’m often hungry but back then I could eat meat”.
Apparently, passing laws to allow Hindu religious leaders to engage in politics and forbidding the others, and to facilitate the murder of converts from Hinduism.
Now look up what the Muslims were up to in the centuries before British rule, and you’ll see why those laws were passed.
History always has a context.
When you hit everyone, you do not get to point to the Muslims as your excuse.
Don’t look at me, i have at twice create unsympathetic supporting characters expressly to embody fandom attitudes that annoyed me. The good news is that no one will recognize them mwahaha.
A pretty good 95% female, 5% male sex ratio novel is Wen Spencer’s “A Brother’s Price.”
Males are highly valued, guarded at all times, and subject to husband-stealing.
That makes sense if males are drones, or if tribes/peoples are constantly engaged in lethal warfare.
IIRC, The women are divided up into matriarchal families. If a group of sisters and cousins don’t have a husband, they use a military crib where males are kept largely drugged and ready to go. But cribs spread disease so it’s not a good choice.
If a woman is lucky enough to bear a son, that son will when he’s 15 or so, be sold to another family as a husband. Hence the title, “A Brother’s Price.”
Our family of heroines don’t like selling their brother but they recognize the need for hard cash and connections. He’s not terribly keen on the idea, either (choice? what’s that?) but he also recognizes the necessity.
C. J. Cherryh’s Chanur books have an interesting take on it. I’m not sure the male/female ratio was that skewed but while males were nominal heads, females ran everything. The fighting over a pride/harem instinct was so strong males had to be limited and sequestered to avoid mass killing.
It’s been more than an minute so I am probably missing some big parts, but the first book was fun. Never read the others.
Thank you! I’ve never read C.J. Cherryh. I’ll have to look for her Chanur books.
From studying anthropology: polygyny is much more common than polyandry. Polyamory is, of course, an abominable mix of Greek and Latin roots.
The main thing I remember about arguing on the internet is what someone told me years ago on a forum I used to follow: “Never get down in the mud to wrestle a pig. You just get filthy, and the pig likes it.”
Madeleine And The Mists was, in part, inspired by an online dispute about sewing, where the other side seemed to think heroics and sewing were incompatible.