Developing an Alien Culture

If a particular facet of the culture isn't all that important you can have it dependent on subculture.

For example, this particular group thinks it's perfectly fine to eat cheese on your birthday while another thinks cheese is taboo and you should have locust instead.

Good advice; admittedly I haven't managed to think of much yet since I'm currently focusing on their society as a whole, but if I do I'll try to see if I can worm it into discussions here.

Mmm if men are the onces dedicate to intelligence and espionage it could be that they kind of took control of the matter and use it in their own advantage.

Well, I didn't mean to imply that they're in charge of espionage, rather that it's one of the more dangerous careers that they are allowed to get involved in.

I'm interested in what you mean by using it to their own advantage, by the by. Can you explain further?

Well if they control the secret service I assume that will include dealing with internal menaces, like political dissidents, and having a lot of dirty issues on very important people that they can use to improve their conditions or pressure for certain changes on their benefits. But I was thinking that they were the ones mostly in charge of espionage and intelligence, in a similar way how in patriarchal societies women are the 90% of certain professions like nurses, teachers, nannies, etc. Or how in some cultures like ancient Norse it wasn’t well seen for a man to be involve in magic or religion so priesthood, healing and witchcraft was mostly of the females. But if they don’t control the espionage and intelligence, they are just aloud to participate then it makes no sense. Also, again, an Star Trek influence, there is a specie call the Cardassians whose males are on control of the military and women of science precisely for the differences between sexes.

Edit: wait, wrong thread.

On a more relevant note, I'm pretty sure that women have actually been running society for the last few thousand years.

edited 11th Dec '15 8:25:57 AM by Belisaurius

Point.

Well, it is an interesting idea, although I doubt they'd have sole control over the intelligence services; rather a 50-50 split would seem more reasonable if I ran with this idea. It could even lead to interesting cultural connotations. Perhaps as a result men could be sometimes seen as duplicitous. A woman, or so their argument might go, will generally be straightforward with you and honest in their dealings. Those tricksy men might not be entirely truthful!

Speaking of society, what sort of roles do you guys see men filling in it (or which ones do you think they'd crop up most often in)?

Probably medicine, arts, philosophy, social science, those sort of stuffs.

That would work, I think! At the very least it seems consistent with what I've come up with.

We've briefly touched upon parts of this, but I wonder how their acute sense of smell would impact upon their culture and social norms?

Probably in a lot of Rule of Funny situations like:

"Let me smell you today, sir"

"Son, smell the lady, is unpolite not to"

"You smell more than you can aspire with this projetc, don't ya"

True, it does seem like it could lead to funny things.

More seriously, here's some stuff I thought of - does it make sense? Any additions?

1. Men and women might apply special scents when looking for companionship of the opposite gender - in fact it might be seen as strange not to (or perhaps conversely they may choose not to so as to give prospective partners as accurate an impression of them as possible).

2. Perhaps certain smells are associated with certain social classes or genders?

3. Building off that, it might be possible for these guys and gals to get an idea of your social standing and job purely by getting a whiff of you; depending on context disguising or changing your scent could be seen as dishonest or ambitious.

Yes it does makes sense, especially 2 and 3, like sight it's our main sense, we use it to establish thing like ranks (uniforms) and social class (now not so much but in the old days you easily can spot an aristocrat from a peasant just for the clothing), so if smell is important for them, the same applies

Great!

Another idea I've had is that due to their relative rarity it's seen as expected for men to be treated carefully, and a woman striking a man is seen as particularly bad. Would that make sense, or have I missed something? Are there any another, more interesting ideas I could explore?

Yes it does makes sense.

How about things like education, sports and the like? probably some sports are forbitten for the males and maybe they have their own schools

So far as education goes, I did figure that males and females are segregated in education; boys probably learn stuff like home economics while girls get intensive PE courses and so on in addition to their normal studies. I imagine that female educational establishments are closer to military academies than schools as we know them. Admittedly, it does bring up the question of how higher/further education is handled, particularly with regards to men. That's something I haven't managed to figure out...

What you said about sports makes sense - it seems likely that they'd be discouraged from trying to play in certain sports (I can't imagine a young man saying that he wants to try wrestling or boxing would go down well), and sports would probably be gender segregated as well (in the sense of having male/female teams or rankings). I suppose that the question would be what do they usually play sports-wise? Swimming or a local equivalent to tennis or badminton, perhaps?