tzunder said:
I agree that any society could be matriarchal, the game system doesn't militate against it.
However.. Aslan society is patriarchal, women may run everything but males are clearly in charge and set policy and aims as well as fighting. Zhodani society might be gender neutral, but it's clearly not matriarchal, and most Zho illustrations have been of men. Vargr society is neither on thing or another, it's pack and charisma based. Imperial and Solomani society is not explicitly patriarchal although there are more Emperors than Empresses so that suggests male primogeniture, and most figures in the OTU history appear to be male. Then again Admiral This and Field Marshall That could easily be female as male. There are not many Duchesses compared to Dukes, so let's assume that the Empire is patriarchal.
K'kree seem to be patriarchal from the sources, and the Droyne are happily weird caste based anyway. Hiver, as said, are effectively gender-less.
Darrians are explicitly non sexist and meritocratic.
I suspect the OTU reflects our society, or at least the 1970s people that wrote the settings.
Not a problem, as has been said, building some matriarchies isn't difficult to do. It's just struck me how much Traveller is a product of a certain strand of SF and not all. As said, easily adjusted!
If there was an insect race, that society would be matriarchal. Most members of a beehive for instance are female, the only purpose of male insects to to transfer DNA from one queen to another, their entire purpose in life is to impregnate a female and then it dies.
I've designed an Amazon sub-race of Humans for my Triplanetary planet Venus, the thing is this society is primitive, Tech Level 2, and its female members tend to be physically larger, almost 2 meters tall on average while the males are closer to Earth human males in size, also the birth ratio is 3 females to 1 male, this tends to produce a female dominated society, the females who are not pregnant go out and hunt, the males help with the child rearing and do agriculture. Want to know something else, this planet Venus doesn't spin any faster than the real planet Venus, so basically it has a short year. (Spring = Dawn, Summer = Midday, Autumn = evening, winter = night, though it really doesn't snow much except at the tops of high mountains near the polar regions) Winters are dark, the skies are mostly clear at night, so their is starlight to see by, and you get a nice blue "star" called Earth in that night sky sometimes.
There are about 120 Earth days of constant sunlight, that means the crops have effectively 240 Earth days of Sunlight, because they get twice as much sunlight as Earth crops do because Earth plants have to deal with a 24 hour day/night cycle so don't get any sunlight during night. the 120 Earth days of continuous sunlight are followed by 120 days of continuous dark, the plants go dormant during this period, also the global cloud cover only covers the day period of the planet. The clouds are artificial and are made of diamond "snowflakes" the flakes are actually nanotech devices that form during periods of full sunlight and disintegrate into smaller dust particles when natural water clouds shade them, or they get behind a mountain (a few mountains rise above this artificial cloud layer) or night falls, in which case the cloud flakes disintegrate into invisible dust particles, the stars of the night sky are visible on the night side of Venus as is Earth and the other planets on a clear night. Night last 120 Earth days, and then you have a new dawn. the Sun rises in the west very slowly an while this happens a rainbow of diamond particles form in the eastern sky, as the Sun slowly rises the nano-particles form new diamond snowflakes and the sky gets hazy once again obscuring the disk of the Sun and a new day begins and so to does another growing season on Venus. These nano-particles might have had some effect on the way humans developed on this planet, as they are artificial, they may do other things besides block sunlight. (hint hint)
