Chapters 97-100: Unmoored From Realtime
For next week — 101-104
101. PPROM
102. The Adventures of Valencia the Red
103. Contract
104. Consolation
Cakoluchiam’s stellar Character Sheet
Steven’s Predictions – Everything is a Clue
Worth the Candle can be read at AO3 or RoyalRoad.
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Apropos of nothing in particular, Steven, you should really read this very short story by Alexander Wales, unrelated to Worth the candle:
The Randi prize
https://archiveofourown.org/works/13743255
To jump on the same sex cheating thing. I think we have a “Hey, this is important!” Signal in our heads when a man and a woman kiss. When we see two girls kiss, we aren’t automatically on the lookout “What does this imply about the parentage?”
Raising someone elses child is a HUGE negative utility for genes, so it’s something our instincts try to desperately avoid, it’s something dogs and horses try to avoid.
But there’s also the intimacy of a relationship and the mutual trust. When it’s gay cheating it’s easy to ignore the instincts, but that doesn’t take into account the trust.
Now, when you look at someone ELSES girlfriend cheating, you don’t usually put yourself into their shoes, you just let the instinct trigger. And the instinct says: “If she’s intimate with another woman, then this woman might help raise the child I give her. That’s good.” So… girl on girl is hot easily trumps the intimacy and broken trust, because you’re only abstractly imagining the intimacy, you don’t actually feel it, cause it’s not about YOUR girlfriend.
Now, the poly crowd rises above the instinct that gives alarm bells when a girl kisses a guy, because it’s harmful and causes them to have less fun. Buuut. They have no incentive to raise above the other instinct. “So, there’s this animal thing that influences my behaviour and negatively impacts my empathy, but reinforces my position? Eh, who cares.” (Not to say they are callous, but rather they don’t notice.)
That other instinct, that says it’s not cheating if it’s with a same sex partner? That’s the one homosexuals and monogamy people rise above, when the gay people first feel the pain of broken intimacy and go “stop trivializing our relationships” and the monogamy people go “wait, this instinct is unfair to gay people, it’s bad.”
To present a completely alternative theory on the sex/jealousy stuff that puts more weight on culture than evopsych:
Modern media (and especially porn) has for quite a few decades presented lesbian making out and lesbian sex as something that happens specifically for the male gaze. So Western men are trained from their formative years on to see lesbian sexual interactions as “that’s hot and probably deliberately so” even when their own female partners.
As for same-sex couples being open more frequently than cis couples, I think that that is because cis couples can look at myriad examples in society when it comes to how a “normal” relationship should be. And society is currently mononormative in most of the world. Same-sex couples until recently very much had to forge their own path. The very act of them being together was already more transgressive in the eyes of society than a guy having a mistress on the side. So as the various same-sex couples had to personally evaluate which parts of gender roles and other norms to adopt into their own relationships, the excessive clinging to monogamy fell to the wayside more easily and faster within their subcultures than it did within wider society.
I feel like your guess about the evolution of Western Culture is fairly optimistic, all things considered. Not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but i feel like the idea that we’re less threatened by “lesbian interactions” for actual good reason implies way too fast of an adaptation on the part of a culture that legalized that only this decade.